Chapter V: Part 5

Most people are agreed, I think, upon the thoroughness of workmanship, but sobriety of taste is a more disputed point. We are very fond of talking of the “gorgeous colouring of the East,” and using terms like “barbaric splendour” and “oriental luxury.” These terms may have had some truth as applied to the art of India, but because Japan is also situated in the East, they do not necessarily apply to her. We do not sufficiently realise over here that there is considerably more difference between China and Japan, let alone India and Japan, than there is between any two European countries whatsoever, be they Greeks or Dutch, or what you will; that they are not of the same race, nor do they belong to the same linguistic family. Therefore, to transfer an adjective applicable to India to Japan, just because both are Oriental, is like applying an adjective suitable to the Turks or the Laps to the English, on the ground that both are European. This is, I think, one source of error; the others are more subtle. There is first of all the climate. Now a colour, any colour, under a bright blue sky in a dazzling yellow sunshine, will always look more subdued than that same colour under a grey sky and in a cloudy atmosphere. This is simply an effect of contrast. Therefore, Japanese colouring must be judged as it is seen in Japan, not as it may look when transferred to England. And, again, a study of the actual colour itself will show that the Japanese have learnt how to make the very brightest colours soft in tone. This fact has been well rubbed into me lately, for I have tried both in Paris and in London to match certain Japanese stuffs, or at least to find something in the same note of colour which would go with them. It was quite impossible. All our soft colours, the so-called artistic shades, are too dull in tone, while none of our bright ones are soft enough; by the side of the Japanese colours they look simply crude. These are all quite material reasons, objective facts, but there is another which only those who have stood and looked at the glorious splendour of a Japanese temple such as Nikkō or Shiba, where the whole rainbow is resplendent in carved wood and gilded lacquer, and that is their matchless power of combination and of background. The temples of Nikkō or Shiba are both built in the midst of a wood; the dark, deep, sober forms of the giant pine-trees stand all around. This is the setting; then between each gorgeous gateway comes a still clear space of court, paved with quiet grey pebbles; and when the glory culminates in the temple’s interior the building is of unstained, unpainted wood, soft as the dust-brown carpet of the beech-leaves when the sun’s rays are level. But the temples, supreme in their way among all the products of Japanese art, are exceptional. The average Japanese room is colourless, luminous, but practically colourless. The floor is of the palest yellow matting, the one or two solid walls of the room are washed in the softest of bark browns, the wood of the _tokonoma_ is dark and polished, and the other walls are _shōji_, that is, composed entirely of small panes of rice-paper. Through this paper the sunlight comes luminous but colourless. To sit in that room is like living in the heart of the plum-blossom, or within the petals of a warm white rose.

In their dress the Japanese are equally subdued: the men wear mostly grey or dust-coloured silks, the women soft mauves, blues and greys. It is only the children who are dressed in bright colours and gay patterns. All the working classes, both men and women, wear a dark indigo blue. The Japanese wear no jewellery. Precious stones they have, exquisite mauve and purple amethysts, crystals of blood-red splendour or soft and milky as flushing pearl. And the rich man buys these, not to wear, but to look at, as works of art, as exquisite natural objects. He never hangs them round his own neck, or enmeshes his womankind in them. The Japanese are, I believe, the only nation on the earth who know and value precious stones, and yet wear no jewellery. Might not this be considered convincing evidence of their essential sobriety of taste? Even the landscape, though supremely beautiful and sunny, is never flaunting. There are too many sober green pine-trees, and pale, bewitching bamboos for that. I have never seen anywhere in Japan, in the poorest house, in the cheapest shop, anything that was tawdry or even “loud,” except in that part of porcelain and other factories which supply goods, mostly from “foreign” patterns, for the European market.

In this enumeration of the characteristics of Japanese art, you will perhaps wonder why I have omitted the very popular one of their love of the little, the small, the minute. I have left it out simply because I do not believe it exists as such. Many writers have exclaimed in paragraphs sprinkled with interjections on this passion for the little which they say the Japanese possess; and they have apparently seen in it nothing but a blind unreasoning prejudice for the something small as opposed to the something great. I think this opinion is mostly due to the “little knowledge” of the tourist or the restricted knowledge of the specialist. It leaves also entirely unexplained and inexplicable the _Dai Butsu_ of Kamakura, a bronze statue of Buddha, fifty feet high and of the most exquisite workmanship; the Buddhas of Kyoto and of Nara; the big bronze bell of Kyoto, the largest hanging bell in the world, besides that at Chion-in, the second largest, and at Nara, the third; the _Hongwanji_ at Kyoto, the walls of the castle at Osaka--and the battle of Mukden. A wider acquaintance with the Japanese people and the realities of their daily life will show, I think, that this so-called love of the little is really a highly cultivated and acute sense of proportion, where it is not purely ethical.

The Japanese beer-glass, you will remember, was the size of a doll’s tumbler. “Why?” “Oh, because they have a passion for little things” is certainly the easiest and most obvious answer. But follow that glass to its home on its Japanese dinner tray, in its Japanese room, and you will see that its littleness is in exact proportion to the tray and the room. Nor are the rooms so small, but because we insist on bringing our encumbering “foreign” ideas into them. There is no furniture in a Japanese room, no furniture of any kind whatsoever. Two kneeling-cushions and a round box, a brazier, are the only possible objects which could come under that heading, therefore the whole space within the four walls of a room is space for movement. If a measurement were taken of the actual feet of free space in many a modern European drawing-room, I believe that it would be found to be something _less_ than that in the “tiny” Japanese apartment.

Another thing to be borne in mind is that life in Japan is lived, not above the floor on chairs, but on the floor itself. Try living on the floor and you will find the whole horizon of a room opening out in the most astonishing way. What we call a stool, for instance, represents the same level as a table. The actual difference in the height of the eyes sitting on one’s heels on a Japanese floor and on a chair is really between two and three feet, while it must also be remembered that Japanese eyes, belonging as they do to a body shorter on the average than our own, come still nearer to the ground.

Thus a careful examination of the things which are small in Japan, which they have deliberately chosen to make small, copied smaller than the foreign originals, will show, I think, that it is due to their acute sense of fitness and proportion. There is also another reason, which is not artistic but ethical.

The Japanese are a sober and abstemious race, a race of high culture and of ancient civilisation. When we were running about clad in the inadequate skin, gorging off half-raw oxen, and drunken with seven-day feasts of mead, they lived already under an ordered and an organised government with most, if not all, of the essentials of civilisation. And after all, is not one of the hall-marks of real civilisation the learning to take “a little” instead of “a lot,” in extracting from each atom the whole of its use, enjoyment and pleasure? Children and savages are always wasteful. We do not now try to eat whole oxen or drink mead for seven days, we have learnt to get as much if not more pleasure out of one glass of wine and one slice of beef, and the reason is that we are slowly learning _not_ to gulp. If you watch the working man drink his beer, or the working woman her tea, you will see that they usually gulp it down in big draughts, imagining, I suppose, that it is sheer quantity which produces flavour. They have not yet learnt that profound ethical truth, expressed by the old epicure when he said approvingly of some young man that he “had already learned to sip his wine and not to gulp it.” The Japanese have learnt to sip. Their wine-glasses, which are china bowls, hold perhaps two tablespoonfuls, their tea-cups three, their pipes just three fleeting whiffs. Drunkenness is exceedingly rare; it does exist, but with a glass holding two tablespoonfuls there is time for reflection. It is also more economical than the foreign variety, the actual quantity required to produce intoxication when taken in small doses being, I believe, considerably less.

There is always another side to a people’s art, a side which is frequently overlooked, and that is the art, not in the object, but in the workman. A people’s art will show itself, not only in the actual object produced, but in the life of the producer and in the conditions of production.

In the cloisonné works of Nagoya, an industrial centre of a quarter of a million of inhabitants, the workers sat in peace and solitude, not a sound of the busy streets penetrated to the long series of matted rooms where they worked. Each room and each workman looked towards a quiet garden, cool with running water, and still with the deep mystery of the pines. In the modern porcelain factory, dedicated to the production of goods for the “foreign” market, the long white room looked out through open doors upon the waving rice-fields, and each potter’s wheel was turned to see the branch of purple iris standing in its yellow vase. There is a cotton factory in Japan which is a positive addition to the beauty of the landscape.

Nor is it only the big and wealthy workmen who produce good art. Some of the most beautiful silver enamel-ware in Tokyo was made by a little man who owned the smallest and poorest of general shops, where halfpenny tooth brushes and farthing sheets of paper formed the richest portions of his stock. All this beautiful silver enamel-work was done in the back parlour, and at no time could he have had more than ten _yen_ (£1) worth of such goods in hand. Yet he was an artist to the tips of his fingers, and the sheen and colour of his enamelled silver lotus flowers were a joy to the beholder.

In Nikkō there was a carpenter who made wooden trays for the inhabitants. His stall, the merest shanty, was the littlest imaginable, yet he carved me a wooden box with a design in chrysanthemums which was skilled artistic work, and even his cheap wooden trays had the stamp of art. He did them with a penknife, and the whole surface of the tray was grooved in shallow curving lines.

And the worker himself? If there is art in the product and in the conditions of production, what of the producer? Is there art in his life and his tastes? Is there art in the life of the labourer, of the coolie and the _’ricksha_ man? Is there art in the daily life of the common people as well as in the things they use?

A man’s tastes are known by his pleasures. When the common people of Tokyo make “Bank Holiday” they go to see a handful of pink cherry-blossoms against the blue of an April sky. They walk politely, looking up at the trees, and though the crowd is thick, endless, nobody pushes or fights or swears. No special posse of policemen is turned out to keep order. Down the long two-mile avenue of cherry-trees at Mukojima the crowd wanders amiably, and the municipality of Tokyo has never thought to invent a single penalty for the destruction of young trees and shrubs. The world stares contentedly, drinks tea, and goes home again. And this is considered to be the rowdiest crowd at the most popular resort on the favourite “Bank Holiday” of the year.

The blossoming of all the other flowers, plum, peach, azalea, peony, wistaria, iris, lotus, convolvulus, maple, chrysanthemum, are equally visited, and advertised daily in the newspapers. The people of Japan take few holidays, but those they do take are almost always at the time of the flower festivals.

When they can afford something more expensive they go to the “Royal Academy,” which opens its doors twice in the year for the aristocratic sum of 3 _sen_ (¾_d._) _gheta_ (wooden clogs) and umbrellas left outside, 5 _rin_ (10 _rin_ make ¼_d._). The other picture exhibitions, not having the status of the Tokyo “Royal Academy,” are more moderate, averaging 1 to 2 _sen_ for admission, and _gheta_, free. The entrance to the exhibitions of bronze, lacquer, porcelain and other arts is the same. Even on the basis of Japanese incomes, where a General earns £300 a year, the Headmaster of a Public School £160 and a coolie 6_d._ a day, the charges are exceedingly moderate. And the people, the real working people, go. I should be curious to find out how many working men have paid at the turnstiles of Burlington House.

Besides art exhibitions, Japanese workmen go to the theatre, but this is a taste they share with many other nations; what is all their own is their love of pilgrimages, not only to temples of religious repute, but to places of celebrated beauty. Fujiyama is yearly ascended by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Here religion and beauty are mingled. For the great mountain is sacred. So is almost every spot in Japan that is particularly beautiful. As one journeys through the country, the traveller will always find that the most beautiful point of view, the grandest scene, the loveliest nook, has a temple, or at least a wayside shrine, set up by the common people and tended by them. There never was a nation since the days of Ancient Greece who so entirely believed that beauty is sacred, or who so entirely disbelieved that art can be divorced from ethics. They have the love of beauty innate and inalienable. A man I knew was once crossing Tokyo in a _’ricksha_; he was a prosperous, commercial being with a vast contempt for the “heathen.” It was late afternoon. His _kurumaya_, after looking round at him several times, suddenly stopped short, and waving his hand to the west said respectfully but firmly:

“Honourably please to observe the unusual glory of the sunset.”

“And I told him to jolly well get on,” was the end of the story as I heard it.

A favourite pastime of the _’ricksha_ men on the cab-stands as they wait for a fare is to draw in the dust of the roadway one against the other. If sand has been spilled from a cart anywhere within reach the whole _’ricksha_ stand migrates and has the happiest time. I have seen really good outlines of Fujiyama and of flying birds, or blossoming flowers, all on the roadways by the _’ricksha_ stands. And whatever their faults, they at least had life, for the _’ricksha_ man has knowledge, knowledge based on intelligent observation and on the inherited training of his race.

In the Japanese language there is a word, _edaburi_, which means “the formation or the arrangement of the branches of a tree.” Merely to possess such a word shows the long training in art and observation which the nation must have undergone. But this word is not a technical term used only by artists and the cultured classes; it is a living, breathing expression, part of the vocabulary of every Japanese, even the Board School educated. _Kurumaya_ discuss _edaburi_ in the streets of Tokyo. Railway porters at wayside stations argue the matter with the stationmaster. Every peasant knows, understands, and talks of the matter as though he had brought himself up on long courses of Ruskin. It has often been a subject of great regret to me that Ruskin did not know the Japanese, for in them he would have found the living proof of so much of his teaching.

But the people of Japan not only discuss _edaburi_, they write poetry. There is an exceedingly simple form of poetry called _hokku_. It consists of only three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and is written in the language of daily life. The _hokku_ was invented by a man called Bashō, for the definite ethical purpose of cultivating the taste and improving the morals of the people. He believed in the composition of poetry as an ethical force, and he wished to bring it from the home of the educated into the lives of the poor. He succeeded. Not because the _hokku_ is a so much easier form of poetry than the English couplet, but because the people have taste, and art, and civilisation in the very cells of their brains. Every one writes poetry, even the typical _jinricksha_ man, who is to the Japanese what the _charbonnier_ is to the French or the coster to us. When the _kurumaya_ and his wife go to visit their relations the whole party amuses itself by composing these tiny poems. On all occasions of joy and grief, on birth, death and marriage, at the time of each flower festival, or of any other happening, the people compose poetry. Literary composition has always been inculcated as the best medicine for sorrow, and as such is practised daily.

This is a little poem taken from the diary of a woman who died in Tokyo a year or two ago. She lived with her husband, a doorkeeper, on an income of £1 a month, and she was very delicate. She bore him three children, who all died shortly after birth; then the poor mother died herself. Her diary came into the possession of Lafcadio Hearn, who translated it under the title of “A Woman’s Tragedy.” This poem was composed on the death of the third baby and runs:

“Tanoshimi mo
Samété haka nashi.
Haru no yumé.”

“All my delight has perished, and hopeless I remain.
It was a dream, a dream of spring.”

Here is another poem which is more typically Japanese. It was composed by the same woman after the death of her second baby, and runs:

“Sami daré ya
Shimerigachi naru
Sodé no tamoto wo.”

“Oh, the month of rain; all things have become damp;
the ends of my sleeve are wet.”

Which being interpreted is: “Oh! the time of grief. All things now seem sad. The sleeves of my robe are moist with tears.”[1]

[1] The long sleeve of a Japanese _kimono_ is always held before the
face to hide emotion.

It is this very allusiveness, this saying of something simple and commonplace, and hiding behind it a whole meaning of intense emotion, which makes this poem so typically Japanese, for Japanese art is always suggestive, it always needs the observer to bring his share of thought and mind to its interpretation.

It is interesting to speculate how much the two most universally recognised characteristics of the Japanese, politeness and cleanliness, owe to their sense of art. If one looks into the psychology of the race, one sees, of course, that this national trait of exquisite politeness was built up, or at least assisted, in many ways. There was that stern training of the _samurai_ which taught eternal, never-ending self-control. There is the whole Buddhistic teaching, which is one long gospel of unselfishness and kindness. But other nations have had training in self-control, we ourselves among the number--think for a moment of the Puritans and our public schools. And other religions preach kindness and unselfishness, our own again, and yet there is no other nation so widely recognised, even by the snappiest of tourists who ever wrote his “memoirs,” as universally polite from the Emperor to the coolie in the streets. It is a hypothesis which I put forward with some hesitation, because the origins of national psychology are not for the amateur, but I do think that a certain stress is to be laid upon this innate and instinctive, but much cultivated sense of art. Has not the politeness something to do with that love of a beautiful outline, that desire for a perfect curve in the relations between man and man as well as between man’s eye and his drawing? Is not, in fact, a rude action a something inartistic in the social whole, a blot of crude colour that jars?

The whole of the _cha-no-yu_, or tea ceremony, one of the few Japanese things of which Europeans have heard more or less vaguely, is an illustration in point. The tea ceremony, divested of its subsidiary and attendant growths, is in essence nothing more than the proper making and the proper drinking of a simple cup of tea. This, in the course of centuries, has been elaborated into an imposing and very complicated ceremonial. Nowadays the _cha-no-yu_ is regarded mainly as a useful reservoir of etiquette and politeness, and is taught as such. But the whole idea on which it rests is that for every given action there is always one, and only one, right and proper attitude, that is to say, the most graceful. So that the curve of every finger in the mere passing of a tea-cup is the result of careful thought and long experience. Everything has to be considered, the room, the person, the relation of the body to the arm, of the arm to the hand, of the hand to the tea-cup, the position of the person serving, and of the person served, the place of the tea-cups, of the teapot, and the tea-kettle; all have been taken into consideration by the tea ceremonialists, and the proper, the most graceful attitude carefully evolved.

That you may not think politeness a matter of social caste in Japan, I may say that the _kurumaya_ when they run into one another at the corners, the coolies hauling carts when they collide, bow profoundly and beg one another’s pardon.

And the exquisite cleanliness? Some one once defined dirt as “matter out of place.” Is not much of art just the putting of things in their right places, in their best and most appropriate and consequently their most beautiful place; in the putting of a thing in such a place that you feel it never could have been otherwise. As the child said when lost in admiration of his birthday cake, “It’s so beautiful I think God must have made it.” It is this cleanliness, this neatness, which the Japanese possess, a neatness which has passed beyond mere precision, passed on into its essence--grace.

All this may perhaps sound far-fetched to English ears. If we are clean and polite it is on sanitary or on ethical grounds, not for æsthetic reasons, because “it is healthy or right,” not “because it is more beautiful,” and we make a broad distinction between ethics and æsthetics. In Japan, on the contrary, there is the most intimate of relations between them. The whole modern controversy of “art for art’s sake,” all the dearly cherished views of French critics that art has nothing to do with morals, is simply unmeaning to them. You might as well say that the sun had no relation to light.

I have already mentioned how the _hokku_ form of verse arose as a moral influence, how literary composition is always recommended as the best medicine for sorrow; but what of a nation whose gardens are arranged to express an ethical abstraction such as courage, resignation, obedience, or to suggest a saying of Buddha, the Blessed One; whose dwarf trees are not merely grown to make a design, but also to express an idea and suggest a reflection; where every single tree, and flower, and bird, and beast is a moral symbol and is commonly used as such; where a simple candlestick of a stork standing on a tortoise and holding the stem of a convolvulus in its mouth is a whole philosophy: the stork, representing Life, standing upon the tortoise, Eternity, and holding in its mouth the Morning Glory, a flower whose brief life, only blooming for the few hours after dawn, is typical of mortality, and the impermanence of all things. From Life based upon Eternity springs Mortality, whose joys are fleeting. Here is the kernel of the whole Buddhistic faith. The impermanence of phenomena and the eternity of law, that is, cause and effect.

Even such an ordinary art as that of arranging flowers is deeply ethical. The whole of Chinese philosophy is bound up with it. Each stem is known by the name of some tenet in this philosophy, and at the end of the lesson on flower arrangement the teacher sits down and talks to the class of the underlying ethical ideas.

I do not think there is any art in the world into which so much thought and meaning has been poured as into that of the Japanese. Every design, even the simplest, even the most stereotyped, has behind it a whole world of symbol, of suggestion which speaks to the mind of the beholder as the outlines to his eye. And this is the reason why no design is ever unmeaning, haphazard, as it so often is with us. It is there not only because it is beautiful, but because it is appropriate to the place and the occasion, because it has some connection with the object it decorates, with the person who gives or the person who receives it, with the time and the circumstances of the giving. Their art, in fact, regarded from the ethical point of view, is often a sort of moral shorthand, a very beautiful, finely wrought shorthand, which men can take away and think upon.

And this brings me to my last point. John Addington Symonds, in one of his wonderful essays on the Italian Renaissance, says that painting inevitably fell from its high estate among men because modern life is too complex to be expressed by it. That just in the same way as the Renaissance required something less simple than the sculpture of the Greeks to translate its thoughts and feelings into outward form, so we in this century cannot express our own more subtle and complex thought in terms of painting, and therefore never again can we hope to rival the perfection of that old Renaissance art. And he concludes by remarking that it is in music, more plastic and suggestive, that we must seek our best expression. Now Japanese art is not dead but intensely living, and it has always seemed to me that it lives, it holds its place in their life, thought and culture just because it has learnt to express those complex and subtle emotions which make up our world to-day. And it does it, not by imaging them forth defined and definite as our painting seeks to do, but just as our music would by suggestion.

To every Japanese painting a man must bring his own soul and his own thoughts, and where he has none or little, then he will turn away complacently, saying, “Here, there is nothing.” For his are not the eyes to see all the dim eternal problems, all the vistas of unwritten poetry which the artist has but shadowed forth; the artist whose part is not to portray, but infinitely to suggest.

SCENES IN RAIN AND SUNSHINE

“What it is
That dwelleth here
I know not;
Yet my heart is full of gratitude,
And the tears trickle down.”
SAIGIO.
“Japanese Literature,” by W. G. Aston.

I

THE MOAT

It is winter, and yet a summer sky of clearest blue, faint and pure. A white sun rides in the southern sky, winning me to believe it summer until the cold northern wind lifts the edge of my cloak, and I know it winter.

It is warm here in the corner of the bridge, full in the sunlight, and I linger. The dark, still waters of the moat creep stealthily along on either side of me; in the distance I can see the rounded arch of a bridge, so arched is the span and so white that I could believe the people had stolen the young crescent of the moon to span their waters.

I lean on my bamboo parapet and look. The dark still waters run between brown stone walls all overhung with the twisted limbs of the fir-trees, such big strong branches lying almost along the ground, and twisted as if in a vain endeavour to get back to the earth beneath. I watch the thick strong branches, soberly green, the masses of foliage riotously so, a green line and its shadow.

The stone banks of the moat are unhewn and uncemented, but their surface is one unbroken line of sober brown; and I look at the long wave of muddy finger-marks traced by the tide’s edge, and now high up the wall, and drop my eyes to the deep mud-brown of the waters below.

* * * * *

The bamboo parapet grows hot, hotter. I wonder who laid those stones, and who keeps them so free of grass and weeds. On the whole they are not more silent and solid than the big limbs of the trees above. Past the bridge in the distance is an unkempt space of yellow grass, then a tall red building shoots abruptly into the sky. The small brown policeman, hidden by his military cloak and sword, stands motionless as I. Am I dreaming that this is a city of a million souls?

Blue, green, brown, black; sky, trees, stones, water; a white sun, a white bridge--and suddenly the two seem to meet in a whirl of dust, my scale of colours vanishes and with it the dreamy quiet and the summer sun. A clatter of _gheta_ on the bridge, two _kuruma_ past the policeman, a boat on the moat, the voice of the _tōfu_ man following his bell along the road, the shadow of the tall house over the world--and I awake to winter and the town.

II

A RAINY DAY

Rain!

And the world lies like an impressionist picture washed in with white. Shut up in my miniature hansom, with the apron up to my eyes and the roof down to the brim of my hat, it passes before me in misty unreality. But for an occasional bob of the black mushroom hat of my _kurumaya_ as he pulls the _’ricksha_ out of a hole, I am drawn by an invisible force.

It has rained for a week, and the streets are bogs, the puddles--ponds. The wind drives the rain with a murmured “_ssssh_” against the tarpaulin sides of the _kuruma_, but in front there is no rain, only an intangible, shadowy whiteness between the world and me.

The green bank of the moat, the dark water, even the fir-trees whose green arms stretch down long fingers into the water, are uncertain and swollen as the world to sleepy eyes. Black _kuruma_ splash past me, with the large glass eye in their aprons shadowly suggestive. The coolie in his straw raincoat, just a walking sheaf finishing in two bare brown legs, plods on, a golden figure against the grey. A long string of carts pass by me, long narrow carts drawn by long thin horses; cart and horses hidden under a structure of yellow oil-paper, until they look like huge golden bats or mythical dragons. And with his back to the head of the horse, a halter in one hand, a yellow paper umbrella in the other, his bare brown legs lost in the mud, the walking sheaf moves on.

All the world to-day is four inches higher than its wont; and the stilt-like _gheta_ seem an uncertain footing for their owners. Bare to the thigh is the _kurumaya_, and his brown legs look like the statues of Greece sunned into life, so perfect are their outlines.

Down the vanishing road are two pale yellow umbrellas, gold on grey, and I marvel at the beauty of the colour. Suddenly round the bend of the street comes a third--foreign, _black_--and in a flash the beauty goes; a muddy road in the drenching rain alone is left, cold, prosaic. And I shiver in my _kuruma_.

III

MMÉ (PLUM-BLOSSOMS)

They lay in fleece-white purity down the hillside, and the brooding stillness of that garden was as a sheltering wing above the world.

Beneath one’s feet the six-sided tiles set in the brown earth were clean with a Dutch cleanliness, and the soil all around had been raked with the same quaint precision. Not a fallen leaf, nor the foot-mark of a bird, marred the soft brown surface--only the narrow line of glazed tiles ran on and on under the trees.

On every side the curve of the hill sloped upwards, outwards, drawing the white garden nearer as a mother draws her child close within her arms.

A hot sweet scent is in the air, delicate as honeysuckle, fragrant as the pine, half-soft, half-spiced--the scent of the blossoming plum, _mmé_, the emblem of chastity, of womanly purity and strength.

The pale grey stems of the trees are bent and old; some are covered with a grey-green moss, and between their silvered stems I walk as in the cloistered calm of ruined abbeys.

Up through the white fleece of blossom overhead bright stars of blue shine down. The sun-warmed presence of the living earth draws her children near. In all the world there is no sound....

“Like as a hen gathereth her chickens.” ...

Is not that the white wing of the eternal mother overhead? And the warm, sweet fragrance of herself is all around.

IV

WET LEAVES

It had rained all night and all day; big, solid drops of rain that fell as compactly through the air as battalions of small shot, but at twilight the raindrops dwindled, slackened, dwindled, ceased.

The clear, colourless sky, which the whole day long had shot down its drops of rain, drew together in grey clouds, growing momentarily greyer, thicker and more grey, and shining with a pale light as though far away behind those thick coverings a great white light was burning.

The stones on the pathway were all wet and shining and crunched down into little pools of water under one’s heels. The trees were dripping raindrops at each leaf, the trunks of all the pines were a dark brown with wet.

In the garden there was peace, a peace of plants weighed down with raindrops, and very tired. Up on the damp hillside the note of a solitary bird sounded forlornly. _Uguisu_, the Japanese nightingale was calling. One sweet short song, and then a greater silence.

Above the little grey shrine to Inari, the Fox God, two golden oranges swayed out against the dark green bush. The raindrops on their under sides trickled slowly over the little temple, and down the miniature steps, while those on the upper sides stood out in little clusters growing larger and larger until an imperceptible stir of the heavy fruit sent them chasing their fellows down the temple’s roof.

And the sky above grew greyer. The golden oranges, larger for the raindrops, swayed mysteriously out, bright yellow against dark green, in a damp, dark world.

At the path’s edge another pathway of clear water encircled the temple and the orange trees; a water so clear that it hardly seemed to exist, while the brown banks and the brown stones showed wet and dark as the pathway under foot. And round the temple and the orange trees in ever silent motion along the brown pathway swam strange fishes; bright blue carp with black sides and designs in creamy white, large orange carp with tracings in silver, golden carp with six or seven waving tails, and solitary in their midst one white patriarch whom age had turned to driven snow.

And the damp, dark world turned slowly darker. The wet hillside grew a black, blurred line; the light behind the cloud was going out; the trees had lost their colour.

All silently the blue carp moved along the dark pathway, and the golden orange globes dripped above the little temple. Bright blue, orange; the light behind the clouds was out.

V

ASAMAYAMA

We were to climb Asamayama. The plan seemed simple and delightful; to take horses in the cool of the evening and ride by moonlight to the last green frill of trees upon the mountain side: to climb the nine thousand feet to the very edge of the crater; and then in those blackest hours before the dawn to look into the volcano’s mysterious depths, all red and glowing, where flame and smoke strive ever for the mastery, where the long orange tongues leap up through rolling purple masses of the smoke; and all around and all below, as far as eye can pierce, is lurid glowing red. And still on the crater’s treacherous sides which hold smoke and flame unsteadily as a drunkard holds his cup, to look down fascinated until they crumble beneath one’s feet, and the thrill of terror bites in the memory of the mighty force indelible. Then to breakfast under the sheltering walls of the old crater; to watch the darkness melt before the coming day, to see the sun rise swiftly in his strength, and the long circle of the hills stand clear and blue and liquid on the upland plain; to see the giant ridges of the mountains stretching from sea to sea with the faint white cone of Fuji a dream upon the distant sky; to look in the freshness of the morning upon the beauty of the land, and standing on the cinder slopes of Asama to trace the tortured lava beds stretching like long grey snakes among the green till the trees grow over and the forest engulfs them. And still in the first hours of the dawn to ride back slowly with the memory of the crater and the sunrise making pictures in one’s mind, tired but contented.

The programme was delightful, perfect, it only remained to carry it out. So we started, on the sorry horses of the upland regions of Japan, and the full moon fitful behind thick clouds shone sadly. It was distinctly chilly, for the table land of Karuizawa is 3000 feet above sea level, and in the air was the damp shiver of coming rain. Still we started, out of the village and along the wide still plain where the dark shadow of a hill showed round as a basin on our right. This was Asama’s satellite, born of her fires, made of her ashes, a round, smooth, green hill, cruelly deceitful.

The empty plain stretched dark to the edge of the misty clouds and diffused through it was a pale grey light that shimmered, trembling. Over the plain and the mountain, through the air and the shadows, the light filtered mistily, swaying and rounding the outlines till they looked like solid bodies seen through a vast perspective of clear water. As we plodded on, the paper lanterns held by each boy at the horses’ heads turned all the wet black path to shining silver pools which gleamed as the light fell on them, quivered like spreading veins of ore, and disappeared into the blackness. The limpid flowing air that swayed above the plain, all luminous and clear, grew darker, shrank as it were together, lost its liquid light, turned slowly into rain, and came down steadily.

We passed through a second village, and went on, over a rutty road, between high banks, persistently upwards. All the sounds of the world had died away, and the life of the woods, the rustle of leaves and of grasses, the long thick hum of the insects was dead. Nothing moved. Even the rain made no sound as it fell in great wet clouds upon the ground.

High up on the rutty road we halted, while the two boys plunging downward through the bushes in the darkness drank of a silent stream which flowed below, the last water we should pass that night. The leaves of the bushes cut sharp green silhouettes upon the blackness, stiff and metallic as tinfoil, as the boys, lantern in hand, plunged downward. But we did not go, for the soft cloud of rain was falling thicker, wetter, and we were cold. When each had drunk his fill, and the metal green leaves of the bushes had flashed back into darkness again, we plodded on, over the common, under the trees, along another piece of road, looser, more rutty than the last, and definitely among the dripping trees we climbed upward.

The moon was gone now, hidden deep behind the falling layers of cloud. And there was a hush, a stagnancy upon all things as though an unseen, unknown force were terrorising life to stillness. Not a tree had leave to stir. The branches huddled dumbly, and all the seething insect life which makes the woods so full of sound lay stricken, lay dumb, paralysed; and among the damp trees we journeyed on.

* * * * *

At midnight the horses stopped, in a fold of the hills on the edge of the trees, where the blackness lay solid, and we slid down. One boy tied the horses together and sat down patiently to await our return next morning. The other snuffed the candle in his paper lantern and prepared to lead the way. By this time it was raining hard, in distinct material drops, which splashed sharply on face and hands, and it was pitch dark. The boy, lantern in hand, went first, and all the light of the lantern so carefully trimmed was cut off from us by his stout round body. We knew by the crunch there were cinders under foot, by the cold wet dabs that ghost-like pressed our hands that there were bushes, and that we climbed.

From time to time the boy would sway his lantern to one side or the other, and stunted shrubs like London laurel trees would start into being, and disappear. With each swing of the lantern the stunted shrubs grew scarcer and more stunted, till they dwindled to bushes, to mere green weeds like dandelions, to nothingness. Then the light fell on cinder, piled up, half-burnt cinder with ends of broken brickbats, and all the rubbish of a dust-heap. And at each step the wind came up and up; colder, stronger, wetter it tore down the bare steep slopes driving us backwards. Then we would sit down upon the cinders, our backs to the mountain, our feet on the brickbats, and pant. It was distinctly exhausting. Each footstep was a launch into the unknown, and a searching for a foothold, each pause an adding to the weight of cinders that drifted down boots and clothing. And it rained with fierce splashes when the wind blew, with dull persistency when it died away, but still unceasingly. And that sense of an unseen, unknown force, paralysing all things, grew with each footstep. The chill of a dumb terror lay upon the world, and the utter desolation struck colder than the wind.

We rested again while the icy wind rushed screeching through the cinders; and, as it died away, the chirp of a Japanese grasshopper came into the stillness. We were far above the weeds now, in the region of perpetual cinder, and still that grasshopper chirped weakly. But the spell was too real, the terror too deathly; the unseen, unknown force took a step nearer in the darkness, and the weak wee chirp seemed only the voice of the horror, the breath of the dumbness giving it life.

The cinders grew looser and looser as we climbed, more difficult to tread, and the stagnant silence was filled and filled with sulphur. It did not come in breaths or gusts, or driving before the wind, it was there in the silence, part of it, and it wrapped us round. If dead silence can grow more deathly, then did that stillness die again. The dumb terror tightened on the world, and the unknown force came nearer.

From far below the sound of pouring heavy stones drove up and up. The mountain rumbled in its depths, rumbled and was still. The presence of that unseen force was manifest. Before it terror crouched still as a bird beneath the swooping shadow of the hawk.

We climbed up heavily, up through the thick sulphur and the loose steep cinders, up till we turned, and the full force of the wind came sweeping round the side of the mountain. We were walking on the edge, the real edge over which you could fall, and it was all of lava, sticky as clay and crossed with deep black cracks that had no bottom. The wind swept down here undisturbed, the gusts of rain broke sharply on the paper lantern as it swayed from side to side to peer out a way. The sticky lava softened rapidly until it sucked around our feet, drawing them down. Then a long fierce gust blew out the lantern and we stood still.

“Honourably please stand very still,” called the boy quickly.

And we stayed dead still.

The gust of wind rushed by us, rushed on. Then another blew till we cowered on the sinking lava. It was so long in passing that the moments seemed as hours. We stood like statues. Insidiously the lava crept above our feet, crept stealthily, and motionless we waited.

The gust died down but the wind still blew, still blew. A light quivered for a moment in the darkness and went out. The boy had lit a match. He struck another. It flickered in little yellow leaps that showed the lantern and his face and went abruptly out. Again the tiny mandorla of light shot up, the boy was holding the lantern in his hand all ready. We could see the flame double as the candle caught, then both went swiftly out, for again the wind came rushing down. It blew and blew. Then it blew so fiercely that to blow again it stopped to take its breath. Quickly in the second’s pause the match flared up, the lantern lit, and we could move.

As we drew out our feet the wicked sticking lava sucked, and the boy held the lantern low to peer out the cracks. Then he turned sharply to the left, and the wind was gone.

We stood in a narrow roofless cave whose sides were overhanging rock, whose floor was lava ash, wet with big rain pools. This was the old crater. Asama has three craters, and two are at present in disuse. We were sheltering in one of these. It was a still haven of refuge after the fury of the wind outside, and a sure. There were no cracks, no sticky sucking lava here. With relief as from a heavy burden we sat down upon the wet ash to rest and eat, the lantern in our midst.

It was now 3 o’clock. Since midnight we had been climbing, our clothes were soaked and heavy with rain and cinders, and we were very tired. The boy prosaically unpacked the hamper, and by the flickering light he set out plates and food. But before we could take one mouthful, the wind rushed down the roofless cave, upset the hamper, swept the lantern along the ash before it, tore like a whirlwind from end to end, and left us in an unearthly livid darkness that lighted nothing.

For a moment we all stayed numbed, then the boy sought the remnants of his lantern and we the remnants of our meal. They were both embedded in thick lava dust.

We could not go on up the crater now, for every minute the wind blew fiercer, and the paper lantern was torn in several places. We must wait for the dawn to show us the way. So we huddled under the shelter of the overhanging rock and waited.

The livid darkness that lay upon the mountain grew more livid and less dark to our watching eyes, till we could distinguish the faint outlines of things, though not the things themselves. It was, oh! so cold, and that sense of stagnant terror, dispersed for a little by the wind and the food, crept back and back, intenser, dumber than before.

* * * * *

Then the mountain rumbled in its depths, and the sound of pouring heavy stones came up again. This time it did not die away, it stopped abruptly, as though by force of will. And we waited.

It was so cold that I could sit still no longer, and, wrapping my cloak around me, tired as I was, walked up and down, up and down.

The overhanging rocks, whose outlines showed so ghostly against the livid darkness, rose high above our heads. From time to time the sulphur thickened in the air, making us cough.

And the deathness of that silence, the dumb horror of that stillness spread and spread and spread. It was all afraid.

* * * * *

The boy, curled under his rock, slept peacefully. We walked and waited.

Then, in an instant, two great tongues of flame shot into the darkness, leapt high toward the sky, and two reports, as of the heaviest thunder, shook the mountain. The boy, awakened, jumped up quickly, looked at the flames as they sprang into the darkness, and the thunder of the second report shook the ground beneath his feet, turned to speak, when a sudden sharp clatter came like a hiss past all our ears, calling “Stones, stones,” he threw himself flat on his face and rolled right under the rock.

We, too, rushed to the overhanging rocks and crouched down quickly, and the sharp clatter of stone on stone went on all around us.

Asama had rumbled to some purpose, and she was resting.

Then the utter silence, the dead, dumb horror came back, came back again. Fear breathed beside us in the darkness.

Slowly the little stars above the rocks dropped out of the sky, the livid darkness changed to livid light, and it was dawn, a cold, grey dawn, but little lighter than the night had been. Still we could see, see the lava and the ash, so, rolling out from under our rock, we shook ourselves together, chattering with cold.

The ground at our feet was sprinkled with pinky-grey stones, daubed with bright yellow sulphur, and glowing hot. They were as large as a clenched fist, with edges sharp and jagged. We stooped to pick up one--the least hot--and carry it wrapt in handkerchiefs, which it burnt, and mackintoshes which it singed, back to Karuizawa.

The boy looked at the stones, looked at us, looked towards the crater, and asked with many warnings if we were to go on. We, too, looked at the stones, and thoughtfully towards the crater, and, as we looked, the mountain rumbled slowly in its depths.

Seizing the basket, the boy fled, our one and only guide. We followed him, over the cracks and the spongy soft lava, too occupied with wondering how we had ever passed over it safely the night before to be afraid now--too busy, too, watching the boy fleeing in front of us, too occupied marking his path to think even of eruptions. And somehow we got over safely, back on to the solid cinder slope of Asama again, the slope that went down straight as a shoot, and fell away as abruptly on each side as a bridge. It was ground, and after the cracks and the sucking lava, solid, though the cinders did shift beneath our feet. We had leisure to look round us, and found the mountain wrapped in a thick white mist. By this time the boy had disappeared entirely, but we did not trouble now. There seemed no choice of paths down. Our cinder bridge went on, sloping steeply downwards into the hidden world below, and we followed it.

* * * * *