Chapter I: Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_) and small capitals are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

* * * * *

THE EAST I KNOW

THE EAST I KNOW

BY
PAUL CLAUDEL

“Look East, where whole new thousands are!”

BROWNING

TRANSLATED BY
TERESA FRANCES
AND
WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXIV

COPYRIGHT, 1914
First printed one thousand copies October, 1914

_Yale University Press_:

... _I should be most happy and honored if my
works could be brought to the attention of the American
public under the shelter and patronage of the
illustrious University of which you are a part._

Paul Claudel

March 28, 1914

CONTENTS

PAGE
_Paul Claudel_ vii

1895-1900

THE COCOA PALM 1

THE PAGODA 4

THE CITY AT NIGHT 12

GARDENS 17

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH 22

THOUGHTS ON THE SEA 25

CITIES 27

THE THEATER 29

TOMBS AND RUMORS 33

THE ENTRANCE TO THE EARTH 39

THE RELIGION OF LETTERS 42

THE BANYAN 47

TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN 49

THE GREAT SEA 52

THE TEMPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 54

OCTOBER 56

NOVEMBER 58

PAINTING 61

THE SOLITARY 62

DECEMBER 64

TEMPEST 66

THE PIG 68

THE SOURCE 70

DOORS 73

THE RIVER 76

THE RAIN 79

NIGHT ON THE VERANDAH 81

THE SPLENDOR OF THE MOON 83

DREAMS 85

HEAT 89

THE VISION OF A CITY 91

DESCENDING THE RIVER 93

THE BELL 95

THE TOMB 99

THE MELANCHOLY WATER 104

THE NIGHT VOYAGE 106

THE HALT ON THE CANAL 108

THE PINE-TREE 113

THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST 118

THE PEDESTRIAN 124

HERE AND THERE 127

THE SEDENTARY 138

THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA 142

SALUTATION 144

THE HANGING HOUSE 148

THE SPRING 150

THE TIDE AT NOON 153

THE PERIL OF THE SEA 156

ON LIGHT 159

HOURS IN THE GARDEN 162

THE BRAIN 167

LEAVING THE LAND 170

1900-1905

THE LAMP AND THE BELL 175

THE DELIVERANCE OF AMATERASU 178

A VISIT 187

THE RICE 189

THE PERIOD 191

THE TOAST TO A FUTURE DAY 193

THE DAY OF THE FEAST OF ALL THE RIVERS 194

THE GOLDEN HOUR 197

DISSOLUTION 198

_PAUL CLAUDEL_
_BY PIERRE CHAVANNES_

_Reprinted from “The New Statesman,” London, by the
courtesy of the Editor_

_Claudel worked for more than twenty years in silence in an almost complete obscurity. Nobody ever mentioned him save a few very independent artists--Mirbeau, Barrès, Schwob, Gide, Jammes, Mauclair--who talked about him amongst themselves and sometimes even dared to speak about him in public, without awakening an echo._

_Moreover, Claudel was usually far from France, Consul in various towns of the Far East; he published his earlier works anonymously, lest their Catholic character should damage his career, and for a long time his work was only to be seen in the small literary reviews and in special editions, of which a very small number of copies were printed; and he never attempted to advertise himself. But in time he was saddened by this great solitude. “One grows tired,” he wrote, “of speaking, as it were, in impenetrable cotton-wool.”_

_These latter days Claudel’s glory, which had so long been obscured, has suddenly blazed forth, if not to the great public, at least to the public which reads and is interested in literature. The Théâtre de l’Œuvre has played one of his dramas_--L’Annonce faite à Marie; _the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier is about to play another_--L’Échange. _The ordinary newspaper critics have begun talking about Claudel; generally speaking, they refer to him with admiration, often with astonishment and that kind of reserve which marks men who are not sure that they understand, and, fearing that they are deceiving themselves, do not wish completely to commit themselves. But in many young reviews admiration is carried to a pitch of enthusiasm and almost of worship; and today writers who are by no means young rank Claudel with the small company of the very great: Æschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe._

_Reading Claudel, one can understand this long silence, this admiration, and also this reserve. Claudel is not an easy poet: when one penetrates his work one is transported as though into a foreign country. He has a speech peculiar to himself; he has invented a form which is neither prose, nor regular verse, nor ordinary_ vers libre; _his work, created by a solitary man, is not bound up with our troubles and our daily life; to love Claudel one must be initiated._

_He is a poet, in itself a thing rare in our time; but he is also, and some would say primarily, a thinker. He has brought his dramatic work together under the general title of_ L’Arbre, _just as Balzac assembled his immense work under the title of_ La Comédie Humaine. _By this title Claudel wants to indicate that his work has the sort of natural profound living unity of the tree, which thrusts its roots deep into the nourishing earth, and draws from it the sap which rises in the branches to feed the remotest sunlit boughs. Each of his dramas also is a drama of thought; they raise the greatest problems and often suggest solutions. Tête d’Or is the chief, the commander of men, the conqueror, who is driven to great deeds by an immense desire--as it were, a predestination. The weak, whom Cébès symbolizes, the people, give themselves to him; he carries them in his train until the day when, undertaking an enterprise beyond mortal strength, he loses his power and dies a new Prometheus on a high mountain._ La Ville _presents contemporary society and the struggles that rend it, and the great attitudes of the spirit confronting life: Isidore de Besme, the engineer, the savant, is the realist, who has a knowledge of natural forces and uses them to satisfy the needs of men. He dominates the town, but he is unaware of the mystic quality of things; he wrongly estimates the soul, and his science leads only to death. Lambert is the man who seeks the end of life in the play of ideas and the love of woman. Cœuvre, finally, is the poet who enters the inmost shrine of truth by intuition and love, but is condemned to solitude by that knowledge._ Le Repos du Septième Jour _is an ideologic drama: a Chinese Emperor goes down into hell, and the roots of the moral world are laid bare in a Dantesque vision, a kind of summary of good and evil._ L’Échange _and_ La Jeune Fille Violaine _are dramas of sentiment. In_ L’Échange _four characters are set against the brutal, realistic, material background of America. There is Louis Laine, an adventurous, but feeble, person who had stifled in the too rigid enclosure of the old European society; there is his wife, the gentle Marthe, the wife faithful through everything, who keeps close in her heart the traditional virtues of the old Christian world; there is Lechy, the violent woman who is the incarnation of disorder, and spreads it around her and death with it; and there is Sir Pollock, the man of affairs, who only lives for gold, convinced that anything can be bought with it, and demands Louis Laine’s wife from him for a fistful of money._ La Jeune Fille Violaine _is the sublime poem of a holy soul which enriches itself by stripping itself, and arrives through suffering and renunciation to peace and the joy of an angelic death. In_ L’Otage, _we have the eternal story of a conflict between that which remains and that which passes_.

_It is impossible in a brief space to analyze dramas so laden with ideas, but one can indicate the size and the unity of the work. The tree that Claudel wants to show us is the tree of life. The roots are in_ Le Repos du Septième Jour; _the sap, the desire, in_ Tête d’Or; _the double-branching--the ideas of the mind in_ La Ville, _and sentiment in_ L’Échange, La Jeune Fille Violaine, _and_ L’Otage. _Claudel himself has formulated the theory and doctrine of his art in three treatises brought together in his_ Art Poetique.

_It might be imagined that Claudel was a mere man of books, a thinker in the abstract. He is nothing of the sort. This thinker is at the same time the most concrete of poets. His thought is, as it were, swollen with essential sap. And he expresses it in a flow of images taken directly from things and exhibiting them in their reality. Claudel’s originality lies in this double aspect: the unique blend of the highest intellectuality with the richest realism. The man who meditates over the greatest problems and expounds a profound logical doctrine to justify his work is at the same time a primitive who works with his fresh and eager eyes fixed on Nature. His dramas never lose touch with the earth where men live, love, and suffer. His characters are greater than Nature, and they express themselves quite naturally with a biblical amplitude; but they never ring false and they often move us deeply. For they are powerfully real types which exist and which one often remembers. These two elements do not always mingle in a perfect harmony; Claudel’s art is powerful, but it is not easy: it is like the obscure and painful work of germination. His admirers themselves say that Claudel’s works are like symphonies that one must hear several times before grasping their meaning and their beauties, and that his plays are beyond the capacity of the present-day public._

_Claudel is, finally, one must admit, a great religious poet, and it is in that fact that the deepest unity of his work must be sought. His work, it has been said, is a long pilgrimage towards God; and the road has not been without its grievous strugglings, since the day when in his youth he was suddenly converted and flung himself towards God, but without winning light for his reason. “O my God,” he cries years after:_

_I remember the darkness where we two were face to face,
those gloomy winter afternoons in Notre-Dame._

_I, all alone below there, lit up the face of the great
bronze Christ with a twopenny-halfpenny taper._

_All men were then against us, science and reason; and I
replied nothing._

_Only the faith was in me, and I looked at You in silence
like a man who prefers his friend._

_I went down into Your sepulcher with You._

_Claudel’s whole life has been a struggle for the faith, for he is one of those men for whom there is no life save in God, and who see nothing outside faith in Him save despair, death, and annihilation. A somber sadness burdens those first dramas which tell of man’s great struggle to dispense with God and his check; but this gives way to joy in proportion as Claudel’s faith strengthens and grow bright. That pilgrimage towards God is also a pilgrimage towards joy; and that joy breaks into great song, now austere, now delirious, in Claudel’s properly lyrical work--the_ Hymnes _and the_ Cinq Grandes Odes. _Here one hears only the most distant echoes of the great struggle; here are only cries of joy and certitude._

_Blessed be Thou, my God, Who hast delivered me from death....
... He who believes not in God, believes not in Being, and he
Who hates being, hates his own existence.
Lord, I have found Thee.
Who finds Thee has no more tolerance of death._

_A strange phenomenon, this Christian poet, passionately, uncompromisingly, almost fanatically Catholic, in the country where Anatole France, the bantering and disillusioned master, holds sway, where Renan and Voltaire reigned, and with them hard reason, distrustful of the supernatural._

_France, as Kipling has justly said, is the country most faithful to old things and most wildly enthusiastic about new ones. The present fashion for Roman Catholicism counts for something in Claudel’s sudden vogue, just as Claudel has done something to bring about the fashion. Various writers, tired of wandering far from safe harbors, have “been converted” by Claudel’s appeal; and the young men who reproached France for withering life up, and for lacking the “sense of the divine” have found in Claudel one of their masters. It is the perpetual oscillation of the human spirit from pure reason to exalted sentiment. Claudel stands head and shoulders above the little crowd which surrounds him, and he will outlast them and their ways of thought. Most of us must say to him, in the words of one of his own characters, “I cannot give you my soul.” But we love the poet in him and admire the passionate believer who compels us to question ourselves in the inner silence, the man who made for himself this prayer:_

_Make me as one who sows solitude, and may he who hears my speech
Return home troubled and heavy._

1895-1900

THE EAST I KNOW

THE COCOA PALM

Our trees stand upright like men, but motionless; thrusting their roots deep in earth, they flourish with outstretched arms. But here the sacred banyan does not rise as a single stem; for the pendent threads, through which it returns seeking the fruitful soil, make it seem a marvelous temple self-created.

Observe only the cocoa palm. It has no branches. At the apex of the trunk it raises a tuft of fronds.

Palm! The insignia of triumph. Aerial in the light, consummate bloom of the crest, it soars, expands, rejoices,--and sinks beneath the weight of its freedom.

Through the warm day and the long noon the cocoa palm expands. In an ecstasy it spreads its happy leaves. Like infant heads the cocoanuts appear, the great green fruit of the tree.

Thus does the cocoa palm gesture, revealing its heart; for the lower leaves, unfolding from out their depth, reach pendulent to the earth; and the leaves in the midst spread far on every side; and the leaves above, uplifted like the hands of an awkward man or like one who signals his complete submission, slowly wave and sign.

The trunk is nowhere rigid, but ringed; and like to the blades of the grass, it is supple and long. It is swayed by the moods of the earth, whether it strains toward the sun or bends its spreading plumes over swift and turbid rivers, or between the sea and the sky.

One night, returning along the shore of the sea assaulted with turbulent foam by the whole deep-thundering weight of the leonine Indian Ocean beneath the south-western monsoon,--as I followed the shore far-strewn with palms like the skeleton wrecks of boats and of lesser and living things, I saw them upon my left! As I walked by that forest empty beneath its dense-woven ceiling, the palms seemed enormous spiders crawling obliquely across the peaceful twilight heaven!

Venus, like a moon drowned in divinest light, flickered a wide reflection in the waters. And a palm-tree bent over the sea and the mirrored planet, and its gesture offered its heart to the heavenly fire.

I shall often remember that night when, afar, I yearn to return! I saw the leafage hanging in heavy tresses, and across the high fane of the forest, that sky where the storm, setting its feet on the sea, loomed up like a mountain; and how low on the dark horizon the pale pearl of the ocean gleamed!

Oh Ceylon, shall I ever forget thee,--thy fruits and thy flowers, and thy people with melting eyes, naked beside those highways that are hued like the mango’s flesh; and my rickshaw-man’s gift of nodding rosy flowers which he placed on my knees when, with tears in my eyes, crushed down by sorrow--but nibbling a leaf of cinnamon--I left thee at last beneath thy rainy skies.

THE PAGODA

I descend from my carriage, and the sight of a hideous beggar marks the beginning of my journey. With one bloodshot eye he leers at me, and with a leprous lip reveals to their roots teeth bone-yellow and as long as those of a rabbit. The rest of his face is eaten away.

Rows of other wretches are ranged on both sides of the highway, which is thronged at this outlet of the city with pedestrians, messengers, and wheelbarrows bearing women and their bundles. The oldest and grossest of the men is called the King of the Beggars. They say that, crazed by the death of his mother, he carries her head about with him concealed in his clothes. The last that I notice, two very old women, wrapped in swathings of rags, their faces black from the dust of the roads where they prostrate themselves at times, sing one of those plaints broken with long sighs and hiccoughs, which are the professional expressions of despair among these outcasts. I can see the pagoda afar off between thickets of bamboo; and, crossing the fields, I take a short cut toward it.

The country is a vast cemetery. Everywhere there are coffins; on hillocks covered with withered reeds, and in the dry grass, are rows of little stone posts, mitered statues, or lions of stone, marking the ancient sepulchers. Individual wealth or burial associations have built these tombs surrounded by trees and hedges. I pass between a place for animals and a pit filled with the skeletons of little girls whose parents wished to be rid of them. They have choked it to the mouth. It will soon be necessary to dig another.

The day is warm, the sky clear, I walk in the light of December.

The dogs see me, bark, and run away; I reach and pass the villages with their black roofs; I cross the fields of cotton and beans; I cross the rivulets by the old worn bridges, and, leaving on my right the great empty buildings of a deserted powder-mill, I arrive at my goal. I hear a noise of bells and a drum.

Before me is a tower of seven stories. An Indian with a golden turban, and a Parsee wearing a plum-colored one twisted like a stovepipe, are entering it. Two other figures move about on the highest balcony.

I must speak first of the pagoda itself.

It is composed of three courts and three temples, flanked by accessory chapels and lesser buildings. Religion here does not, as in Europe, barricade and segregate in loneliness the mystery of a faith walled about by dogma. Its function is not to defend the absolute against exterior aspects. It establishes a certain atmosphere; and, as though suspended from heaven, the structure gathers all nature into the offering that it constitutes. Multifold, all upon one level, it expresses Space by the relations of height and distance between the three arches of triumph or the temples which are consecrated to them; and Buddha, Prince of Peace, inhabits it with all the gods.

Chinese architecture, as it were, suppresses the walls. It amplifies and multiplies the roofs; and their exaggerated corners, lifting themselves with an exquisite resilience, return toward the sky in flowing curves. They remain suspended in air! The wider and heavier the fabric of the roof, the more, by that very weight, does it give an impression of lightness through every deep shadow projected below. Hence the use of black tiles, that form deep grooves and strong copings with high openings between them, makes the highest ridges detached and distinct. Clear though intricate of outline, their frieze is lifted through the lucid air. The temple is seen as a portico, a canopy, or a tent, of which the uplifted corners are attached to the clouds; and in its shade are installed the idols of the earth.

A fat, gilded fellow lives under the first portico. His right foot, drawn beneath him, indicates the third attitude of meditation, where consciousness still exists. His eyes are closed, but under his golden skin can be seen the red lips of a distended mouth whose long rounded opening stretches at the corners into the shape of an eight. He laughs, and the laugh is that of a face asleep. At what does this obese ascetic laugh? What does he see with those closed eyes?

On each side of the hall, two at the right and two at the left, the four painted and varnished colossi, with short legs and enormous torsos, are the demons who guard the four shores of Heaven. Beardless as children, one brandishes serpents, one plays the viol, and one shakes a cylindrical engine like a closed parasol or a firecracker.

I penetrate into the second court. A great brass incense-burner covered with inscriptions is in the middle. I stand before the principal pavilion. On the ridges of the roof little painted groups of figures seem as though they were passing from one side to the other, or ascending while engaged in conversation. At the angles of the coping hang two pink fish, their long feelers curving tremulously, their tails in the air; in the center two dragons are fighting for the mystic jewel. I hear songs and the beating of bells, and through the open door I see the evolutions of the bonzes.

The hall is high and spacious. Four or five colossal gilded statues dominate the background. The largest is seated on a throne in the middle. His eyes and mouth are closed, his feet drawn under him, and one hand, held in the “gesture of witness,” points to the earth. Thus, under the sacred tree, the perfect Buddha conceived himself. Escaped from the wheel of life, he participates in his own Nirvana. Others perched above him, with downcast eyes, contemplate their navels. These are the Heavenly Buddhas seated on lotus flowers. They are Avalokhita, Amitabha, the Buddha of the Light without Measure and the Buddha of the Paradise of the West. At their feet the bonzes pursue their rites. They have gray robes; large, somewhat rust-colored mantles attached to the shoulder like togas; leggings of white linen; and, some of them, a sort of mortar-board on their heads. Others bare their scalps, where the white marks of _moxas_ show the number of their vows. One by one, murmuring, they file past. The last who passes is a boy of twelve years. By a side hall I reach the third court and see a third temple.

Four priests perched on stools are ranged inside the door. Their shoes are left on the earth before them; and without the need of feet, detached, imponderable, they are seated on their own thoughts. They make no movement. Their mouths, their closed eyes, are one with the creases and wrinkles in the wasted flesh of their faces, like the scar of the navel. Consciousness of their inertia is sufficient for their ruminating intelligence. Under a niche in the middle of the hall, I distinguish the shining limbs of another Buddha. A confused company of idols is ranged in the obscurity along the walls.

Returning, I see the central temple from the rear. High on the wall of an embrasure a many-colored tympan represents some legend among olive-trees. I re-enter. The back of the repository where the colossi are exposed is a great painted sculpture: Amitofou mounting to Heaven amid flames and demons. The setting sun, passing through the trellised openings high in the wall, sweeps the somber boxlike hall with horizontal rays.

The bonzes continue the ceremony. Kneeling now before the colossi, they are intoning a chant, while the celebrant, standing before a bell shaped like a cask, leads the measured beat of drums and bells. At each verse he clashes the drum, drawing from its brazen belly a re-echoing vibration. Then, facing each other in two lines, they recite some litany.

The side buildings are the dwellings of the priests. One of them enters, carrying a pail of water. I glance into the refectory where the bowls of rice are placed two by two on the empty tables.

I am again before the tower.

Just as the pagoda expresses, by its system of courts and buildings, the extent and the dimensions of Space; so the tower symbolizes Height. Poised against the sky, it becomes the scale of it. The seven octagonal stories are a plan of the seven mystic heavens. The architect has narrowed their corners and lifted their borders with skill. Each story casts its own shadow below it. At every angle of every roof a bell is attached, and beside it hangs the clapper with which to strike it. Their metallic syllables are the mysterious voice of each Heaven, and their unuttered sound hangs suspended like a drop.

I have nothing more to say of the pagoda. I do not know its name.

THE CITY AT NIGHT

It is raining softly. The night has come. The policeman takes the lead and turns to the left, ceasing his talk of the time when, as a kitchen-boy in the invading army, he saw his Major installed in the sanctuary of the “God of Long Life.” The road that we follow is mysterious. By a series of alleys, of passages, stairs, and doorways, we come out in the court of the temple, where buildings with clawlike copings and hornlike peaks make a black frame to the night sky. A smoldering fire flickers from the dark doorway. We penetrate the blackness of the hall.

The cave is filled with incense, glowing with red light. One cannot see the ceiling. A wooden grille separates the idol from his clients, and from the table of offerings, where garlands of fruit and bowls of food are deposited. The bearded face of a giant image can be vaguely distinguished. The priests are dining, seated about a round table. Against the wall is a drum as enormous as a tun, and a great gong in the form of the ace of spades. Two red tapers, like square columns, lose themselves in the smoke and the night, where vague pennants float.

Onward!

The narrow tangle of streets, where we are involved in the midst of a shadowy crowd, is lit only by the deep open booths which border it. These are the work-rooms of carpenters, engravers; the shops of tailors, shoemakers, and venders of fur. From innumerable kitchens, behind the display of bowls of noodles and soup, the sound of frying escapes. In a dark recess some woman attends a crying child. Among stacked-up coffins is the gleam of a pipe. A lamp, a sidewise flicker, shows strange medleys. At the street corners, at the bends of heavy little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood, color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate light. The door at our left is simply a round hole.

We reach a court. Here is another temple. It is a shadowy hall from which exudes an odor of earth. It is enriched with idols, which, disposed in two rows around three sides of the place, brandish swords, lutes, roses, and branches of coral. They tell us that these are the years of human life. While I try to find the twenty-seventh, I am left behind; and, before leaving, the fancy takes me to look into a niche that I find on the further side of the door. A brown demon with four pairs of arms, his face convulsed by rage, is hidden there like an assassin.

Forward! The roads become more and more miserable. We go past high palisades of bamboo; and at last, emerging from the southern gate, we turn toward the east. The road follows the base of a high crenellated wall. On the other hand sink the deep trenches of a dried river-bed. Below we see sampans lit by cooking fires. A shadowy people swarm there like the spirits of the Inferno.

And undoubtedly this lamentable river-bank marks the end planned for our exploration, because we retrace our steps. City of Lanterns, we gaze again upon the chaos of thy ten thousand faces!

Seeking an explanation, a reason why this town where we loitered is so distinct in our memories, we are struck at once with this fact: there are no horses in the streets. The city is entirely of human beings. It seems an article of faith with the Chinese not to employ an animal or a machine for work by which a man may live. This explains the narrowness of the streets, the stairs, the curved bridges, the houses without fences, the sinuous windings of the alleys and passages. The city forms a coherent whole, an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill. When the night comes, every one barricades himself. During the day there are no doors, that is to say no doors that close. The door here has no official function. It is simply an opening. Not a wall but can by some fissure give passage to an agile and slender person. The large streets necessary to general traffic, and to an ordered mechanical life, would be of no use here. Here merely collective alleys and passages are provided.

An opium den, a market of prostitutes, these last fill the framework of my memory. The smoking den is a vast nave, empty all the height of two stories which superimpose their balconies inside. The building is full of blue smoke, one breathes an odor of burning chestnuts. It is a heavy perfume, powerful, stagnant, strong as the beat of a gong. Sepulchral smoke, it establishes between our air and dreams a middle atmosphere which the seeker of these mysteries inhales. One sees across the haze the fire of little opium lamps like the souls of the smokers. Later they will arrive in greater numbers. Now it is too early.

On narrow benches, their heads helmed with flowers and pearls, clothed in wide blouses of silk and full embroidered trousers, motionless, with their hands on their knees, the prostitutes wait in the street like beasts at a fair, in the pell-mell and the dust of passers-by. Beside their mothers and dressed like them, also motionless, little girls are seated on the same bench. Behind, a flare of petrol lights the opening to the stairway.

I go. And I carry the memory of a life congested, naïve, restless; of a city at the same time open and crowded, a single house with a multifold family. I have seen the city of other days, when, free of modern influences, men swarmed in an artless disorder; in fact it is the fascination of all the past that I am leaving, when, issuing out of the double gate in the hurly-burly of wheelbarrows and litters, in the midst of lepers and epileptics, I see the electric lights of the Concession shine.

GARDENS

It is half-past three: white mourning.[A] The sky is veiled as if with white linen. The air is moist and raw. I go into the city. I am looking for gardens.

I walk in a black gravy. Along the ditch whose crumbling border I follow, the odor is so strong that it is like an explosive. There is the smell of oil, garlic, filth, ashes, opium, and offal. I walk amid a free and easy people who are shod with thick buskins or sandals of straw, wearing long hoods or skullcaps of felt, their silk or linen trousers tucked into leggings.

The wall winds and undulates, and its coping, an arrangement of bricks and open-work tiles, imitates the back and body of a crawling dragon. A sort of head terminates it, from which floats a cloud of smoke. This is the place. I knock mysteriously at a little black door which opens. Under the overhanging roofs I cross a succession of vestibules and narrow corridors. I am in a strange place.

It is a garden of stones.... Like the ancient Italian and French designers, the Chinese have understood that a garden, from the fact of its inclosure, must be complete in itself and harmonious in all its parts. Only so will nature adapt herself to our moods, and only so, by a subtle harmony, will the master feel at home wherever he looks. Just as a landscape does not consist simply of its grass and the color of its foliage, but is distinguished by its outlines and the slope of the ground, so the Chinese literally construct their gardens with stones. They are sculptors instead of painters. Because it is susceptible of elevation and depth, of contours and reliefs, through the variety of its planes and surfaces, stone seems to them a more suitable medium for creating a background for Man than are plants, which they reduce to their normal place of decoration and ornament.

Nature herself has prepared the materials. The hand of Time, the frost, the rain, wear away, work at the rock; perforating it, gashing it, probing it with a searching finger. Faces, animals, skeletons, hands, shells, bodies without heads, petrified wood like a congealed mass of broken figures, mingled with leaves and fishes; Chinese art seizes all these strange objects, imitates them, and arranges them with an ingenious industry.

This garden represents a mountain cleft by a precipice, to which steep paths give access. Its feet bathe in a little lake half covered with green scum, where a zigzag bridge completes the bias outline. Built upon a foundation of pink granite piles, the tea-house mirrors in the greenish black waters of the basin its soaring double roofs, which seem to lift it from the earth like outspread wings.

Below, driven straight into the earth like iron candlesticks, the stripped trees bar the sky, their giant stature dominating the garden. I wander among the stones by a long labyrinth whose windings and turnings, ascents and evasions, amplify and complicate the scene, simulating the mazes of a dream around the lake and the mountain. Finally I attain the kiosk on the summit. The garden seems to sink below me like a valley full of temples and pavilions, and among the trees appears the poem of the roofs.

They are high and low, detached and massed, elongated like a pediment or swelling like a bell. They are surmounted with ornamental friezes decorated with centipedes and fishes. At the intersections of their ridges the peaks display stags, storks, altars, vases, and wingèd pomegranates--all symbolic. The roofs, lifted up at the corners like arms which hold up a too ample robe, have a creamy whiteness or the blackness of soot yellowed and sodden. The air is green, as when one looks through old window-glass.

The other slope brings us before the great pavilion. The descent winds slowly toward the lake by irregular steps leading to other surprises. Coming out of an alley, I see pointing in disorder toward the sky five or six horns of a roof whose building is hidden from me. Nothing could paint the drunken toss of these fairy prows, the proud elegance of these flowering stalks, holding up a lily to the envious clouds. Bourgeoning with this flower, the strong framework lifts itself like a branch that one lets spring.

I reach the border of the pond where the stalks of dead lotus flowers lie across the still waters. The silence is as profound as the depth of a winter forest. This harmonious place was built for the pleasure of the members of a Syndicate of Commerce in beans and rice, who doubtless come here in the spring nights to drink tea and watch the shore glimmer under the moon.

The other garden is more singular.

It was almost night when, penetrating into its square enclosure, I saw it filled to its walls with a vast landscape. Picture a mass of rocks, a chaos, a confusion of overthrown blocks, heaped up together as if by the force of the sea; a vision of madness, a country as ghastly as a brain with its convolutions bared. The Chinese flay their landscapes. Inexplicable as nature, this little corner seems also as vast and as complex. Among these rocks rises a dark and twisted pine-tree. The warped trunk, the color of its bristling tufts, the violent dislocation of its limbs, the disproportion of this single tree with the artificial country which it dominates,--like a dragon issuing from the earth in smoke, combating the wind and the storms,--make this place unreal, render it grotesque and fantastic. Here and there funereal foliage, yews and arbor-vitæ, in their vigorous blackness, intensify this cataclysm. In my amazement I ponder this melancholy document. And in the middle of the enclosure one great rock stands in the dusk of twilight like a monster,--a theme of reverie and enigma.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] White is the color of Chinese mourning.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH

Ingots of paper are the money of the dead. From thin cards are cut the figures of persons, houses, and animals. The dead man must be followed by these fragile imitations, these patterns of living things; and, if burned, they will accompany him where he goes. The flute guides such souls, the beat of a gong assembles them like bees. In the shadowy darkness, the brilliance of a flame soothes and satisfies them.

Along the bank of the river the prepared barges wait for the night to come. Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously under accumulated clouds,--still the torches flare at the prow, the festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a vivid note,--as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers explode, the three boatmen lean to the long scull. The barge starts and tacks, leaving in the wide sweep of its rudder a trail of fire. Some one is strewing little lamps. Uncertain glimmers on the vast flow of the opaque waters, these flicker a moment and perish. An arm seizes the tinsel streamer, the ball of fire which sinks and flares in the smoke, and touches them to the tomb of the waters; the illusory brightness of the light, like the gleaming of fish, fascinates the cold drowned. Other illuminated barges go and come. Far off are heard detonations, and on the war-ships two bugles, answering one another, sound together the extinguishing of the fires.

The loitering stranger who, from the shore, contemplates the vast night open before him like a chart, will hear the return of the religious barge. The torches are extinguished, the shrill hautboy has died away, but, over a precipitate beating of drumsticks, dominated by a continual rolling of drums, the funereal gong continues its tumult and its dance. Who is it that beats? The sound rises and falls, ends, recommences, and presently swells to a clamor as if impatient hands beat on the metal hung between two worlds. Then solemnly, beneath the measured strokes, the gong returns a deep reverberation. The boat approaches. It passes the river-bank and the fleet of moored craft; and now, in the heavy darkness of the opium barges, it is at my feet. I can see nothing; but the funeral orchestra, which had died away for a long interval, now, after the fashion of dogs that howl, explodes again in the darkness.

This is the feast of the seventh month when the earth enters into its repose. Along the road the rickshaw-runners have stuck in the earth between their feet sticks of incense and little red candle-ends. I must return. Tomorrow I shall come to sit in the same place. It is all over; and still, like the sightless dead sunk beneath an infinity of waves, I hear the tone of the sepulchral sistrum, the clamor of iron drums beaten with terrible blows in the close darkness.

THOUGHTS ON THE SEA

The boat makes her way between the islands; the sea is so calm that it scarcely seems to exist. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and it is hard to tell whether or not it is raining.

The thoughts of the voyager turn to the past year. He sees again his trip across the ocean in the stormy night; the ports, the stations, the arrival on Shrove Sunday, the trip to the house when, with a cold eye, he scanned the sordid festivities of the crowd through the mud-spattered windows of his carriage. His thoughts show him again his parents, his friends, old scenes,--and then the new departure. Unhappy retrospect! As if it were possible for anyone to retrieve his past.

It is this that makes the return sadder than the departure. The voyager re-enters his home as a guest. He is a stranger to all, and all is strange to him. (Servant, hang up the traveling cloak and do not carry it away! Soon it will be necessary to depart once more.) Seated at the family table he is a suspected guest, ill at ease. No, parents, it is never the same! This is a passer-by whom you have received, his ears filled with the fracas of trains and the clamor of the sea, like a man who imagines that he still feels beneath his feet the profound movement that lures him away. He is not the same man whom you conducted to the fateful wharf. The separation has taken place and he has entered upon the exile that follows it!

CITIES

As there are books on beehives, on colonies of birds’ nests, or on the constitution of coral islands, why should we not study thus the cities of humanity?

Paris, the capital of the Kingdom, uniform and concentric in its development, expands, as it grows, into a larger likeness of the island to which it was once confined. London is a juxtaposition of stores, warehouses, and factories. New York is a railway terminal, built of houses between tracks. It is a pier for landing, a great jetty flanked by wharves and warehouses. Like the tongue, which receives and divides its food, like the uvula at the back of the throat placed between two channels, New York, between her two rivers, the North and the East, has set her docks and her storehouses on one side, Long Island; on the other, by Jersey City and the dozen railway lines which range their depots on the embankment of the Hudson, she receives and sends out the merchandise of all the Western continent. The active part of the city, composed entirely of banks, exchanges, and offices, is on the tip of this tongue, which--not to push this figure too far--moves incessantly from one end to the other.

Boston is composed of two parts: the new city, pedantic and miserly, like a man who, displaying his riches and his virtue, yet guards them for himself,--where the streets, open on all sides to avenues, seem to become more silent and longer in the cold, and to listen with more spite to the step of the passer-by who follows them, grinding his teeth in the blast; and the hill where the old city, like a snail-shell, contains all the windings of traffic, debauchery, and hypocrisy.

The streets of Chinese cities are made for a people accustomed to walking in single file; each individual takes his place in an interminable, endless line. Between the houses resembling boxes with one side knocked out, where the inhabitants sleep pell-mell among the merchandise, these narrow fissures are insinuated.

Are there not special points for study? The geometry of streets, the measurement of turnings, the calculus of crowded thoroughfares, the disposition of avenues? Is not all movement parallel to these, and all rest or pleasure perpendicular?

A book indeed!

THE THEATER

The palace of the Corporation of Canton has a niche for its golden god,--an inner hall where great seats, placed solemnly about the center, indicate rather than invite repose. And, as European clubs would place a library, they have established a theater, with parade and pomp, on the far side of the court which is in front of the whole building. It is a terrace of stone deep in between two buildings. Consisting only of a difference in level, the stage between the wings and the crowd is simply a wide, flat space above their heads. A square canopy like that of a dais shades and consecrates it. Another portico in the foreground, framing it in four pillars of granite, confers on it solemnity and distance. Here comedy develops, legends are told, the vision of the things which are to be reveals itself in rolling thunder.

The curtain, comparable to that veil which divides us from the world of dreams, does not exist here. But as if each soul, in discarding its disguises, were held in an impenetrable tissue, whose colors and elusive brightness are like the livery of night; each actor in his silken draperies shows nothing of himself but the movement when he stirs. Beneath the plumage of his part the golden headdress, the face hidden under rouge and mask, he is no more than a gesture and a voice. The emperor mourns over his lost kingdom, the unjustly accused princess flees from monsters and savages, armies defile, combats take place, a gesture effaces years and distances, debates proceed before the elders, the gods descend, the genie arises from the jar. But never does any one of the persons engaged in the execution of a chant or of a complicated dance deviate from the rhythm and the harmonies which time the measure and rule the evolutions, any more than he would throw off his clothes.

The orchestra at the back,--which throughout the piece continues its evocatory tumult, as if, like swarms of bees that reassemble at the beating of a caldron, the scenic phantoms would dissipate if there were silence,--has less a musical rôle than the service of sustaining the whole, playing (if we may call this prompting music) and answering for a chorus of the populace. It is the music which accelerates or moderates the movement, which heightens with an accent more acute the discourse of the actor, or which, surging up behind him, brings to his ears clamor and rumor. There are guitars, bits of wood that are beaten like tympans, that are clashed like castanets; a sort of monochord violin which, like a fountain in a solitary court, by the thread of its plaintive melody, carries the development of the elegy; and finally, in the heroic movements, the trumpet. It is a sort of bugle of brass, of which the sound, charged with harmonies, has an incredible brilliance and a terrible stridence. It is like the braying of an ass, like a shout in the desert, a flourish to the sun, the clamor volleyed from the diaphragm of an elephant. But the gongs and cymbals hold the principal place. Their discordant racket excites and stimulates the emotions, deafening thought, which in a sort of dream sees only the spectacle before it. Meanwhile at one side of the scene, hung in a cage of woven rushes, are two birds like turtledoves. These it seems are _pelitze_ brought from Tientsin. Competing innocently with the uproar in which they bathe, they jet a song of celestial sweetness.

The hall under the second portico, and the entire court, is stuffed as full as a pie with living heads. Among them emerge the pillars, and two lions of sandstone with froglike jaws whose heads are bonneted with children. It is a pavement of skulls and round yellow faces, so closely packed that the limbs and bodies cannot be seen. Pressed together, the hearts of the crowd beat one against the other. It oscillates with but one movement. Sometimes, stretching a row of arms, it surges against the stone wall of the stage; sometimes, withdrawing, is hidden by the sides. In the upper galleries, the wealthy and the mandarins smoke their pipes and drink tea in cups with brass saucers, surveying like gods both spectacle and spectators. As the actors themselves are hidden in their robes, so, as it enters each bosom, does the drama stir under the living stuff of the crowd.

TOMBS AND RUMORS

We climb and then descend; we pass by the great banyan which, like Atlas, settling himself powerfully on his contorted haunches, seems awaiting with knee and shoulder the burden of the sky. At his feet there is a little edifice where are burned all papers marked with black characters, as if a sacrifice of writing was offered to the god of the tree.

We turn and turn again, and by a sinuous road we enter into a country of tombs. Not, indeed, that they were not everywhere, because our steps since our departure have been accompanied by them. The evening star, like a saint praying in solitude, sees the sun disappear beneath her under the deep and diaphanous waters. The funereal region that we scan in the pallid light of a dreary, waning day, is covered with a rude and yellow growth like the pelt of a tiger. From the base to the ridge are hillocks between which our road winds; and, on the opposite side of the valley, as far as the eye can reach, are mountains burrowed like a rabbit-warren with tombs.

In China death holds as great a place as life. As soon as they have gone the dead become more important and more to be suspected, enduring as morose and malevolent powers whom it is well to conciliate. The bonds between the living and the dead are broken with difficulty. The rites continue and are perpetuated. The living must go frequently to the family tomb. They burn incense, fire off crackers, and offer rice and pork. In the shape of a scrap of paper they leave a visiting-card held in place with a pebble. The dead in their thick coffins rest a long time inside the house. Then they are carried out of doors and piled up in low sheds, until the geomancer has found the proper site and location. Then the final resting-place is determined on with great particularity, for fear that the dissatisfied spirits should wander elsewhere. They cut the tombs in the sides of mountains, in the solid and primordial earth; and, while the living, in unhappy multitudes, are crowded in valley-bottoms, in low and malarial plains, the dead open their dwellings to sun and space in high and airy places.

The form of an Omega is chosen, placed flat against the hill-slope; and the semi-circle of stone, completed by the brace, surrounds the dead person, who makes a mount in the center like a sleeper under his coverings. It is thus that the earth, opening her arms, makes him her own and consecrates him to herself. In front is placed the tablet inscribed with the titles and names; because the Chinese believe that certain portions of the soul, that stop to read the name, linger above the tomb. This tablet forms the reredos of a stone altar on which are deposited the symmetrically arranged offerings. In front of this the tomb, by the formal arrangement of its terraces and balustrades, welcomes and receives the living family who go there on solemn days to honor the remains of the deceased ancestor. Primordial and testamentary hieroglyph! Facing it, the hemi-cycle reverberates the invocation. All earth which is above the level of mud is occupied by these vast low tombs, like the openings of pits crammed full. There are little ones, simple ones and elaborate, some new and others which seem as old as the rocks where they lean. The most important are high on the mountain, as if in the folds of its neck. A thousand men together could kneel in this tomb.

I myself live in this country of sepulchers, and by a different road I regain my house on the summit of the hill.

The town is below on the other side of the wide yellow river Min, which precipitates its deep and violent waters between the arches of the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages. During the day one can see, like the copings of the tombs, the rampart of jagged mountains that enclose the city. The flying pigeons and the tower in the middle of a pagoda make one feel the immensity of this distance. And I can see the two-horned roofs, two wooded hills rising between the houses, and on the river a confusion of wooden rafts and junks whose poops are painted with pictures. But now it is too dark. Scarcely a fire pricks the dusk and the mist beneath me, and by a road I know, slipping into the funereal darkness of the pines, I gain my habitual post, this great triple tomb blackened with moss and age, oxidized like armor, which thrusts its frowning parapet obliquely into space.

I come here to listen.