Chapter III: Part 3

And as the citizen of a kingdom, whose road leads to the capital, seeks to understand the plan of the immense place; so the contemplative, gazing at Jerusalem, fearing to enter it with soiled sandals, studies the interpretation of its laws, and the conditions of a sojourn there. Not a nave, not a single plan of cupola or portico, but responds to the observances of a cult; not a movement or a detail of stairs and terraces is disregarded in the development of ceremony. The moats of towers, the superimposition of walls, the basilicas, circuses, and reservoirs,--and even the tree-tops in the square gardens,--are molded of the same snow; and the violet tinge of their shadows is perhaps only such a color of mourning as irreparable distance adds.

Thus one evening a solitary city appeared for an instant before me.

DESCENDING THE RIVER

Well, let these men continue to sleep!

May the boat not yet arrive at its port! Thus shall my misery be made to hear my last word, or I at least have said it.

Emerging from a night’s sleep, I am awakened in flames.

So much beauty compels my laughter. What splendor, what brilliance! What a wealth of inextinguishable color! It is Aurora. Oh God, how much refreshment this blue has for me! How tender the green is, how cool; and, looking toward the furthest heaven, what peace to see it still so dark that the stars twinkle there!

But how well you know, my friend, where to turn and what awaits you, if, on lifting your eyes, you need not blush to behold this heavenly brightness! Oh may it indeed be this color which I am given to contemplate! Not red, and not the color of the sun, it is the fusing of blood in gold. It is life consummated in victory. It is the perpetual renewal of youth in eternity.

The thought that this is only the day arising does not diminish my exaltation in the least; but the thing that embarrasses me like a lover, that makes me tremble through my whole body, is the intention hidden in such glory. It is my admission to it, it is my progress toward meeting with this joy.

Drink, oh my heart, of these inexhaustible delights!

What do you fear? Do you not see how the current, accelerating the movement of our boat, leads us on? Why doubt that we shall arrive, and that endless day will respond to the brightness of such a promise? I foresee that the sun will rise, and that I must prepare to sustain its power. Oh light, drown all transitory things in the depth of thy abyss!

Let noon come, and it will be vouch-safed me to meditate, Summer, upon thy reign, and to include the whole day in my perfected joy, as I sit amid the peace of all the earth in the harvest solitudes.

THE BELL

While the air is rejoicing in perfect stillness, at the hour when the sun is consummating the mystery of noon, then the great bell, with its sonorous and concave expanse swung to the point of melody by the blows of its cedarn hammer, rings with the rolling earth; and soon its sound, receding and advancing, has crossed mountain and plain until a wall which one can see on the far horizon, with a series of Cyclopean doors piercing it at symmetrical intervals, hems in the volume of its resounding thunder and forms the frontier of its clamor. In one corner of this enclosure a city is built. The rest of the place is occupied by fields, woods, and tombs; and here and there, under the shadow of sycamores, the vibrations of a bronze gong far within a pagoda deflect the echoes of the monster as they die away.

I have seen, near the observatory where Kangchi went to study the stars of old age, the pavilion where the bell resides under the guard of an old _bonze_, honored by offerings and inscriptions. The outstretched arms of an average man are the measure of its width. I knock with a finger upon its surface, which sings through a six-inch thickness at the least shock. For a long time I lend an ear. And I recall the history of the molder.

That cord of silk or catgut should resound under the curve of the bow, that wood, having been instructed by the winds, should lend itself to music,--in these phenomena the artisan found nothing singular; but to attack the very element, to extort the musical scale from primitive soil, seemed to him the means of properly making Man resonant and awakening his clay. So his art was the casting of bells.

His first bell was carried up to heaven in a storm. The second, when they had loaded it on a boat, fell into the deep and muddy waters of the Kiang. The man resolved to make a third before he died, and this time he wished to gather into one deep vessel the soul and the whole voice of the nourishing and productive earth, and pack into one thunderous vibration the fulness of all sound. This was the plan that he conceived, and the day that he commenced his enterprise, a daughter was born to him.

Fifteen years he labored at this work. But it was in vain that, having conceived the idea of his bell, he planned with a subtle art the dimensions, curves, and caliber; or that, having extracted from the most secret metals whatever listens and trembles, he made sheets so sensitive that they would vibrate at the mere approach of a hand; or that, from a sonorous instrument placed among them, he deeply studied properties and harmonies. When a pure and faultless bell had issued from the mold of sand, the copper side would never respond the expected answer to his interrogation; or, if the double beat balanced itself in even intervals, it was his misery never to feel life in them,--that indefinable mellowness and moisture which is given to words formed in the human mouth.

Meanwhile the girl grew with her father’s despair; and, when she saw that the old man was consumed by his mania and no longer searched for new alloys, but threw into his crucibles blades of wheat and the sap of aloes, and milk and the blood from his own veins,--then a great pity was born in the heart of the maiden, for which women come to the bell today to venerate her image of painted wood. Having said her prayer to the subterranean god, she clothed herself in wedding garments; and, like a dedicated victim, having fastened a stalk of straw about her neck, she threw herself into the molten metal. So the bell was given a soul; and the resounding elementary forces gained this feminine, virginal grace, and the ineffable liquid note.

Then the old man, having kissed the still warm bronze, struck it powerfully with his mallet; and so lively was the invasion of joy at the perfection he heard, and the victory of its magnificence, that his heart languished within him; and, sinking upon his knees, he could not keep from dying.

Since then, and since the day when a city was born of its widespread summons, the metal has cracked and gives only a dying echo of its former self. But the wise, with a vigilant heart, still hear at the break of day, when a faint, cold wind comes from skies the color of apricots and of hop-flowers, the first bell--in the celestial spaces--and, at the somber set of sun, the second bell--in the depths of the immense and muddy Kiang.

THE TOMB

On the pediment of the funereal portal I read an order to alight. On my right are some broken statues in the reeds, and an inscription on a formidable pillar of black granite gives with wearisome detail the laws relating to sepulchers; half obliterated by moss a threat forbids the breaking of vases, loud cries, or the spoiling of ceremonial basins.

It is certainly later than two o’clock, because I see that the dim, round sun is already a third of the way down a dull and lurid sky. I can only mount straight onward, to survey the arrangement of the cemetery; and, preparing my heart, I start out on the road the funerals follow across this home of the dead, in itself lifeless. First come, one after another, two square mountains of brick. Their hollow centers open by four arches on the four points of the compass. The first of these halls is empty. In the second a giant tortoise of marble, so high that I can scarcely reach his mustached head with my hand, supports a panegyric column. “This is the porch and apprenticeship of the earth,” I thought. “Here Death halted between the double thresholds, and here the master of the world received supreme homage between the four horizons and the sky.”

But scarcely have I gone out by the Northern door (it is not vainly that I leap this rivulet!) than I see open out before me the country of the shades.

Forming an avenue of alternate couples, monstrous animals appear before me, facing each other, successively repeated kneeling and standing in pairs; rams, horses, unicorns, camels, elephants; until, at the turning where the last of the procession disappears, these enormous and ugly shapes loom out against the straggling grass. Further off are ranged civil and military mandarins. These stones are sent to ceremonial funerals in the place of animals and men; and, as the dead have crossed the threshold of life, it would not be suitable to give closer likenesses to such replicas.

Here, where this large cairn--hiding, they say, the treasures and bones of a very ancient dynasty--ceases to bar the passage, the way turns toward the East. I am walking now among soldiers and ministers. Some are intact and standing, others lie on their faces. One warrior without a head still clasps the hilt of a sword in his fist. By a triple-arched bridge the path crosses the second canal.

Now, by a series of stairs where the central hand-rail still shows the imperial dragon, I cross the ravaged site of terraces and courts. These are the walks of Memory, the fugitive traces of lives which, leaving the earth, serve only to enrich it by decay; the steps of sacrifices, the awful garden where what is destroyed attests its whilom existence in the presence of what still remains. In the center a throne supports, a baldachin still shelters, the inscription of a dynasty. All about, temples and guest-houses have become a confused rubbish among the briars.

And the tomb is before me.

Between massive projections of the square bastions which flank it, behind the deep-cut channel of the third stream, is a wall which assures us that the end of our journey must be here. A wall and nothing but a wall, a hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide. Eroded by the use of centuries, the inexorable barrier presents a blind face of masonry. A single round hole shows in the center of the base, the mouth of an oven or the oubliette of a dungeon. This wall forms the front of a sort of trapezoid formation, detached from the mountain which overhangs it. A low molding, ending beneath an overhanging cornice, stands out from the wall like a console. No corpse is so suspect as to require such a mass being placed upon him. This is the throne of Death itself, the regal exaltation of sepulture.

A straight alley, remounting the sloping plain, crosses a level plateau. At the end there is only the same mountain whose steep slope conceals in its depths the ancient Ming.

And I understand that this is the sepulcher of the Atheist. Time has scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the dead. The cortège of his vanished glory cannot retard him. He crosses the three rivers, he traverses the manifold courts filled with incense; nor is the monument that has been prepared for him sufficient to hold him. He cleaves his way further, and enters into the very body and bones of primitive earth. It is merely an animal interment, the mixing of crude flesh with inert and compact clay. The king and peasant are forever consolidated into this death without a dream or an awakening.

But the shadow of evening spreads over this cruel place. Oh ruins, the tomb has survived you! And the brutal stolidity of this bulk is a perfect symbol of death itself.

As I return among the colossal statues of stone, I see in the dried grass the decaying corpse of a horse, which a dog is tearing. The beast looks at me as he licks the blood which trickles down his chops; then, applying his paws again to the red carcass, he tears off a long strip of flesh. The mangled remains are spread about.

THE MELANCHOLY WATER

There is an intelligence in joy, I admit it. There is a vision in laughter. But that you may comprehend, my friend, this medley of blessedness and bitterness which the act of creation includes, now that the melancholy season begins I shall explain to you the sadness of water.

The same tear falls from the sky that overflows from the eyelid. Do not think to accuse the cloud of your melancholy, nor this veil of vague showers. Shut your eyes; listen! The rain falls.

Nor does the monotony of this constant sound suffice to explain it.

It is a weary mourning whose cause is within itself. It is the self-absorption of love; it is the effort in labor. The heavens weep over the fruitful earth. Not only Autumn, and the future fall of fruit whose seed she nourishes, draws these tears from the wintry cloud. Sorrow is in the Summer; in the flower of life is the blossoming of death.

At the moment when the hour before noon is ended, as I descend into the valley filled with the murmur of various fountains, I pause enchanted by the gloom. How abundant are these waters! And if tears, like blood, have their perpetual source in us, how refreshing it is, listening to this liquid choir of voices, deep or shrill, to harmonize from them all the shades of grief! There is no passion but could borrow of your tears, oh fountain! And since the brightness of this single drop, falling from on high into the basin upon the image of the moon, satisfies my particular desire, not in vain shall I have learned to love your sanctuary through many dreamy afternoons, oh sorrowful valley!

I return to the plain. On the doorsill of his hut,--where, in the inner darkness, gleams a candle lit for some rustic fête,-a man sits, holding in his hand a dusty cymbal. It rains heavily. In the midst of this damp solitude, I hear only the cry of a goose.

THE NIGHT VOYAGE

I have forgotten why I undertook this voyage, and what matter I was to negotiate, as Confucius did when he went to carry his doctrine to the Prince of Ou. Seated all day in the depths of my varnished cabin, my urgency, on these calm waters, does not outrun the swanlike progress of the little boat. Only occasionally in the evening I come out to look at the aspect of the country.

Our winter here has no severity. Season dear to the philosopher, these bare trees, this yellow grass, sufficiently attest the passing of the time, without atrocious cold or unnecessary violence. In this twelfth month, cemeteries and kitchen gardens, and a country mounded everywhere with tombs, spread out in dull productivity. The clumps of blue bamboo, the somber pines above the sepulchers, the gray-green reed-grass, arrest and satisfy one’s gaze. The yellow flowers of the New Year’s Candlestick and the waxen berries of the Soot Tree give a real beauty to the somber picture. I proceed in peace across this temperate region.

Now it is night. It would be vain to wait, stationed in the bow of this junk, for the reflection of our wooden anchor to trace on the beatified water the image of that waning moon which only midnight holds for us. All is dark; but as we move on, propelled by the scull which steers our prow, we need not fear mistaking our way. These canals permit of numberless detours. Let us pursue the voyage with tranquillity, our eyes on yonder solitary star.

THE HALT ON THE CANAL

Now,--passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,--encountering waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside; by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass, the crude material of epitaphs.

With day our investigation begins. We become entangled in a maze of Chinese streets, murky and moist with domestic odors. For a long time we follow the narrow footpath in the turmoil of the market-place, in the midst of a people mixed in with their dwellings as bees are with their wax and honey. I recall a little girl winding a skein of green silk, a barber cleaning the ear of his client with a fine pincer like the antennæ of a crawfish; a little donkey turning a millstone near an oil warehouse, the dark quiet of a pharmacy within whose depths, through the gilded frame of a moon-shaped door, two red candles flame before the name of the apothecary. We traverse many courts, more than a hundred bridges.

Winding through narrow alleys bordered by great sepia-colored walls, we reach the richer quarter. If these closed doors should open to us, they would show vestibules flagged with stone, a reception hall with its large bed-table, a little peach-tree flowering in a pot, and smoky passages whose rafters are hung with hams and bundles. Hidden behind this wall, in a little court we find a monster of a wisteria plant. Its hundred creepers interlace, interweave, tie themselves in knots, and twine into a kind of manifold, tortuous cable, which, thrusting out its woody, serpentine length on all sides, spreads over the trellis, hiding its trench in a thick sky of mauve clusters. Let us traverse the ruins of this long suburb where naked men are weaving silk in the débris. We shall gain a deserted space which occupies the south side of the enclosure.

Here, they say, was formerly the imperial residence; and in fact the triple grating and quadruple framework of the consecutive doors bar, with their granite outlines, the wide flagged road on which we walk. The enclosure contains nothing but rank herbage; and,--at the place where the “Four Ways” meet, which diverge toward the four cardinal points under triumphal arches,--with an inscription like a map displayed to the whole Kingdom, the imperial stele, defaced by the fissures in its marble, slants on the decapitated tortoise which is its base.

The Chinese show everywhere representations of that inherent emptiness whose necessity they emphasize. “Let us honor,” says the _Tao teh King_, “Vacuity, which gives to the wheel its utility and to the lute its harmony!” These ruins and these fallow tracts which are found in the same enclosure close to the densest multitudes, these sterile mountains shouldering the most meticulous culture, and the wide expanse of the cemeteries, do not impress the mind with a false idea; for, in the density and mass of this coherent people, administration and justice, religion and monarchy, disclose by contrasts no less strange the same yawning vacancy of vain phantoms and ruins.

China is not, like Europe, elaborated into compartments. No boundaries, no special statutes, oppose any resistance throughout her immense area to the spread of her surging humanity. That is why, powerless as is the sea to foresee its agitations, this nation which can only be saved from destruction by its plasticity, shows everywhere, like Nature itself, an antique and provisory aspect,--unstable, full of hazards, possibilities, and deficiencies. The present always contains the influences of the past and the future. Man has not made an absolute conquest of the soil, a final and methodical arrangement. The multitude still graze upon grass.

Suddenly a lugubrious cry overwhelms us! The guardian of the enclosure, at the foot of one of the gates designed like an upright letter which frame the field, sounds on the long Chinese trumpet; and we see the horn of thin brass quiver under the force of the sound which fills it. Raucous and rumbling, if he declines the trumpet toward the earth; and strident if he lifts it; without inflection and without cadences, the dreary blaring noise culminates in the reverberance of a frightful uproar,--do fa, do fa! The harsh call of a peacock would not startle more the drowsiness of this abandoned garden. It is the horn of the shepherd, and not the bugle, which speaks and commands. This is not the singing trumpet which leads armies on,--it is the collective voice of beasts; and the herd or the flocks confusedly assemble at its sound. But we are alone; and for nothing living does the Mongol trumpet at this mysterious crossing of the Ways.

When we return to our boat, it is almost night. At sunset, all down the horizon the clouds seem tinted with blue, and on the dim earth the fields of _colzas_ shine like blows of light.

THE PINE-TREE

In Nature, only the tree is upright as man is, and for a symbolic reason.

A man holds himself erect by preserving his balance, and his two arms, hanging at his sides, are no part of his unity. But, though attached to the earth by the collective grasp of its roots, the tree raises itself with an effort; its multifold and divergent parts, spreading out into a fragile and sensitive tissue of leaves, by which it seeks for some support in the very air and light, constitute no mere gesture but the very essential act and condition of its growth.

The family of conifers shows a special characteristic. In them I perceive not only a ramification of the trunk into branches, but also their articulation on a stem that rises straight and single,--an articulation which gradually multiplies into threadlike leaves. The fir-tree is typical of such a class, with the symmetrical intersections of its branches, whose essential plan is simply a perpendicular crossed by a graded series of horizontal lines.

This type includes many variations in the different regions of the world. The most interesting is that of the pines I studied in Japan.

Rather than the rigidity usual to wood, the trunk appears to have a fleshy elasticity. Under the tension on the strong, cylindrical stem of compact fibers, its sheath splits and the rough bark, divided into pentagonal scales,--with deep cracks between them from which resin oozes abundantly,--expands in tough layers. And if, through the suppleness of its jointless body, the trunk yields to the exterior forces which violently assail it or seductively allure it, the tree resists by its inherent energy; and the drama of its pathetic struggle is written in the tormented twisting of its boughs.

Thus, along the tragic old road to Tokkaido, I have seen the pines sustain the onslaught of the powers of the air. In vain the wind of the ocean lays them low. Clinging with every root to the stony soil, the invincible trees writhe, twist upon themselves, and,--like a man braced on all fours, who butts with his head, kicks in all directions, and hunches himself together,--they seem to grapple with the antagonist, to re-establish themselves, and to straighten up under the Protean assaults of the monster who would overcome them. All along the solemn beach I have passed their heroic lines in review on this somber evening, and watched all the vicissitudes of the battle. One leans backward, and stretches toward the sky a monstrous panoply of halberds and shields which he brandishes in Briarean fists; another, full of wounds, mutilated as by blows of clubs, and bristling on all sides with jagged stumps, still wars and waves a few feeble boughs; another, which seems thrown upon its back, still battling against the dust, maintains itself on the powerful buttress of its gathered haunches; and finally, I saw giants and princes who, massively settling upon their muscular loins, by the reiterated efforts of their Herculean arms, continued to hold their ground on all sides against the tumultuous enemy.

I have still to speak of the foliage.

If I compare to the pines the species of trees that flourish in fertile earth, in rich and mellow soil, I discover these four characteristics in them; that the proportion of leaf to wood is greater; that the leaf is deciduous; that, flattened, it shows an obverse and reverse side; and, finally, that the foliage, growing upon the boughs, diverging from a common center, is arranged like a single bouquet.

The pine grows in dry and stony soil; therefore its absorption of the elements which nourish it is less immediate, and necessitates on its part a stronger and completer elaboration, a greater functional activity,--and, if I may so put it, more personal. As it is limited in its supply of water, it does not expand like a chalice. This one that I observe divides its foliage, spreads a handful on every side. Instead of leaves which receive the rain, these are tufts of little tubes which reach into the surrounding dampness and absorb it. And that is why,--independent of the seasons, sensitive to more continuous and subtle influences,--the pine shows a perennial foliage.

Thus I explain the aerial character of its foliage, fragmentarily suspended. As the pine lends the irregular outline of its boughs to the lines of the harmonious landscape, better to enhance the charm and the brilliancy of Nature, it also spreads everywhere the shadow of its singular tufts; over the power and the glory of Ocean, blue in the sun; over the harvest fields; and obstructing the design of the constellations or the dawn upon the sky. It sweeps its branches beneath azalea bushes flaming near the surface of lakes blue as gentian, or above the steep embankments of the imperial city, close to the silver, grass-grown waters of the canals; and the evening on which I saw Fuji like a colossus, like a virgin throned in the clarity of the Infinite, the dark tuft of a pine was silhouetted against the dove-colored mountain.

THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST

When I left Yeddo the great sun was flaming in the clear sky. Toward the end of the afternoon, arriving at the junction of Utsonomiya, I perceive that a shadow has darkened all the sunset. Composed of huge, heaped-up clouds, it presents that tumultuous and chaotic aspect that a sky sometimes shows when, like the veiled fire of footlights, a gleaming streak on the horizon throws long shadows across the dim fields, bringing out each object in clear relief. Drowsing on the wharf just now, and for a long time in the train moving westward, I have been a spectator of the decline of day and the gradual deepening of darkness. With one glance I have caught the whole plan of the country. In the background, deep forests and the folds of cumbrous mountains; in the foreground, detached footpaths which bar the way, one behind the other, like spaced and parallel barriers. Where the trenches we follow show us a cross-section of the earth, we see first a fine mold, black as coal; then yellow sand; and finally clay, red with sulphur or cinnabar. Avernus spreads out before us! Does not this scorching sun, this low sky, this surrounding harshness of volcanoes and fir-trees, correspond to that black abyss from which the visions of dreams arise? Indeed it was with a royal wisdom that the ancient shogun, Ieyasu, chose this place for his disembodied spirit to enter the kingdom of shades, and, by dissolving in silence into their shadows, transmute death into godhead as a temple is created of a tomb.

The forest of cryptomeria is truly a temple.

Often before, at this hour of somber twilight, I had crossed the double avenue of these giant trees,--which extends twenty leagues to conduct from the red bridge the annual ambassador who bears Imperial presents to this ancestral shrine,--but this morning, at the hour when the first rays of the sun turned the banks of somber verdure above me to rose color in the golden wind which swept them, I penetrated into the colossal nave, deliciously filled with a resinous odor, after the cold night.

The cryptomeria belong to the family of pines, and the Japanese have named it sengui. It is a very tall tree, whose trunk, free of twists and knots, maintains an inviolable rectitude. There are no branches, but indicated here and there, as is the way with pines, not by detail and relief but by mass and contour, the leaves float like tatters of black smoke about the mystic pillar; and the forest of these tall trunks, all of the same height, loses itself in the tangled canopy of shadowy, inextricable foliage. The place is simultaneously limitless and confined, filled and empty.

The marvelous houses are scattered among these trees that have been parked for centuries.

I shall not describe the whole plan of the shaded city, though it is marked on my fan to the minutest detail. In the middle of the dedicated forest I have followed enormous avenues that a scarlet torii bars. At a bronze basin, under a roof inlaid with the moon, I have filled my mouth with lustral waters; I have climbed the stairs; among many pilgrims I have passed indescribable opulence and space, the entrance to an enclosure that is like a dream formed of a confusion of flowers and birds; barefoot, I have penetrated to its innermost golden heart. I have seen the priests with haughty faces,--with head-dresses of horsehair, and clothed with ample trousers of green silk,--offer the morning sacrifice to the sound of flute and mouth-organ. And for me the sacred _kagura_,--his face framed in white linen, holding the tasseled bough of the pine devoutly between his hands,--has executed the dance which consists of continual advance and retreat.

As Chinese architecture has for its chief element the baldachin; stories being raised as on the poles of a pastoral tent; so, in Japan, the roofs made of tiles, or those made of a substance as powerful, strong, and light as a thick felt, show but a slight curve; they are no more, in their elegant power, than a cover; and all this construction evolves from the idea of a box.

Since the time when Jingô Tennô conquered the isles of the rising sun with his fleet, the Japanese have everywhere preserved some signs of the sea: the habit of tucking up their clothes to the waist, these low cabins which are their homes under an uncertain sun, the multitude of neat little objects and their careful stowage, the absence of furniture,--do they not all betray the confined life of the sailor on his precarious deck? And these wooden houses are themselves nothing more than the enlarged cabin of a galley, or the box of a palanquin. The extensions, intersected by carpentry; the oblique shafts, of which the figured heads jut out at four angles; still recall the quality of being portable. Among the columns of the temple, arches seem the means by which it may be lifted.

Houses? Yes. Here the very sanctuary is a house. They have relegated the bones, sealed in a cylinder of bronze, to the high mountainside; but in this room, seated on the unalterable name, the soul of the dead continues a spectral habitation in obscure and secret splendor. Reversing the procedure which employs wood and stone and makes them of value without adding any strange element to their own properties, artifice has existed here only to annihilate its material. These enclosures, the sides of these boxes, these floors and ceilings, are no longer made of beams and planks but of certain opaque images conjured forth. Color decorates and adorns the wood, lacquer drowns it under impenetrable waters, paint covers it with enchantments, sculpture deeply undermines and transfigures it. An end of timber--the least spike appearing on the magic surface--is covered with arabesques and interlacing lines; but, as on screens we see trees in flower and mountains steeped in a radiant glow, these palaces emerge entirely golden. On the roofs, on the façades, which strike the full light of day, only the ridges are burnished with scattered brightness; but the sides are brightened in vast surfaces through the shadow; and inside also, the six walls of the box are painted with the splendors of hidden treasure, flaming brilliance revealed by numerous mirrors.

Thus the magnificent shogun does not inhabit a house of mere wood, but his dwelling in the center of the forest is in the light of setting suns; and ambrosial incense abides beneath these sweeping boughs. Through the immense spaces of this region, deeply slumbering like a god amid its sea of trees, an occasional dazzling cascade plashes between the leaves, mingling with their ceaseless whisper.

THE PEDESTRIAN

In June, with a gnarled stick in my hand (like the god Bishamon), I am that mysterious passer-by who crosses the path of groups of simple, ruddy peasants; and, at six in the evening, while the storm-cloud in the sky endlessly continues its monstrous assault on the mountain, I am that lonely man one sees upon this abandoned road.

I am going nowhere in particular. My wanderings are without end and without profit. The itinerary of the soldier or the merchant, the piety of the sterile woman who, with hopeful humility, seven times makes a tour of the holy peak,--these have nothing in common with my travels. The footprint pointed in the usual direction does not allure my own far enough to lead me astray; and soon, urged by the intimacy there is in treading this moss through the heart of the woods, to pick the black leaf of a camellia by the weeping of a secret waterfall,--I flee suddenly, like an awkward deer. Then, amid the silence of growing things, poised on one foot, I await the echo. How fresh and comic the song of this little bird seems to me! And how the cry of the rooks below delights me! Each tree has its personality, each little beast his part, each voice its place in the symphony; as they say music is comprehended, so I comprehend Nature.

It is like a story of many details, where only the proper names are given. As my walk--and the day--proceeds, I advance also in the development of a philosophy. Already I have discovered with delight that all things exist in a certain accord; and, though believing this secret relationship, by which the blackness of this pine below espouses the clear green of these maples, it is my purified sight only which establishes it; so, because of this restoration of the original design, I call my visit a Revision. I am the Inspector of Creation, the Verifier of all present things. The reality of this world is the cause of my beatitude. In ordinary hours we employ things for their usefulness, forgetting their purer value: that they should exist at all. But when, after a long effort, pushing through branches and briars, I place my hand on the burning shoulder of this heavy rock in the heart of a glade, the entry of Alexander into Jerusalem is alone comparable to the sublimity of my achievement.

And I go on and on! Each one of us contains in himself the autonomous power of motion by which he moves toward his food and his work. As for me, the even motion of my legs serves to measure for me the intensity of more subtle appeals. The allurement of everything! I feel it in the silence of my soul. I understand the harmony of the world. When shall I surprise its melody?

HERE AND THERE

In the street called Nihon Bashi, near the merchants of books and lanterns, of embroideries and bronzes, miniature gardens are sold; and, as a studious idler amid this fantastic display, I mentally compare these little fragments of the world. The artists have subtly shown themselves masters of the exquisite laws by which the lines of a landscape are composed, like those of a physiognomy. Instead of drawing nature they reproduce it, constructing their counterfeits from the very elements of the original, which they borrow--as a rule is illustrated by an example. These images are usually exact and perfect replicas. All sorts and kinds of pines, for instance, are offered me to choose from; and their position in the jar, with their height as a scale, proportionately shows the dimensions of their original territory. Here is a rice-field in Springtime; in the distance is a hill fringed with trees (they are made of moss). Here is the sea, with its archipelago and its capes! By the artifice of two stones, one black, one red, and rather worn and porous, they have represented two islands that appear to be joined together, whose difference in distance is shown only by their different colors, apparently due to the light of the setting sun. And even the many-colored sunset is represented by this bed of motley pebbles covered with the contents of two carafes.

Now, to amplify my thought!

The European artist copies nature according to the sentiment that he has for it. The Japanese imitates it according to the materials with which it furnishes him. One expresses himself, the other expresses nature. One creates, the other mimics. One paints, the other constructs. One is a student; the other, in a way, a master. One reproduces in its detail the spectacle that he surveys with a searching and subtle gaze; the other disengages its law with a flash of the eye, in the freedom of his fancy; and applies it with a scriptural conciseness.

Here the first inspiration of the artist is the material on which he exercises his hand. Good-humoredly, he consults its intrinsic properties, its tints; and, appropriating the soul of the brute thing, he constitutes himself its interpreter. Of all the things that he might say, he expresses only the essential and significant characteristics; and, merely making a few shy indications here and there, leaves to the paper the task of concealing all those infinite complexities which are implied freely because they are taken for granted. It is a frolic of certitude, it is caprice with restraint; and the underlying idea, snared by such a method of argument, imposes itself upon us with an insidious conviction.

Now, first of all, to speak of Color! We note that the Japanese artist has reduced his palette to a limited number of general and predetermined tones. He understands that the beauty of a color resides less in its intrinsic quality than in its implicit accord with contrasted tones. And because of the unmodified blending of two values laid on in equal quantities, he repairs the omission of the many intermediate shades by the vivacity that he gives to the juxtaposition of the essential notes; calmly indicating one repetition or two. He knows that the value of a tone results more from its position than from its intensity; master of keys, he transposes them as he will. Furthermore, as color is nothing less than the particular homage that all visible things render to the universal light, everything fitly takes its place within the frame through the power of color, in accord with the theme that the artist has chosen.

But now the roving eye remains fixed; and, instead of contemplating, it interrogates. Color is the passion of matter; it signalizes the participation of each object in the common source of glory. Design expresses the energy proper to each being; his action, his rhythm, his postures. The one makes manifest his relations to space, the other fixes his movement in time. One gives the form, the other gives the sense. And as the Japanese, careless of relief, paints only by contour and mass, the chief characteristic of his design is a schematic stroke. While the tones are in contrast, the lines are in unity; and while the painting is a harmony, the design is an idea; and if the interpretation of this idea comes in a flash of recognition, complete and instantaneous, the design has a satisfactory abstract significance and expresses the idea in all its purity, just as well as might a word made of letters. Each form, each movement, each group furnishes its hieroglyph.

I understand this when I revel among these bundles of Japanese prints. At Shidzuoka, among the ex-votos of the temple, I have seen many admirable examples of this art. A warrior leaps from the vermilion wood like a frantic exclamation. This prancing or kicking thing is no longer the picture of a horse, but the symbol of his revolt against bondage; a sort of reversed figure 6, equipped with a mane and tail, represents his repose in the grass. Embraces, battles, landscapes, crowds, fitted into a small space, resemble the designs on seals. This man bursts into laughter; and, falling, he no longer seems a man, but immediately becomes his own character in writing.

With horrible and careless crudity, the French or English construct barbarous barracks; pitiless toward the earth they disfigure, concerned only with their expansion, seizing upon all possible space with their eyes, if not with their hands. They exploit a view as they would a waterfall. The Oriental knows enough to flee from vast landscapes, where multifold aspects and divergent lines do not lend themselves to that exquisite co-ordination between the eye and the view which alone makes a sojourn possible for him. His home is not open to all the winds. Choosing a retreat in some peaceful valley, his care is to achieve a perfect location where his view composes so harmonious a landscape that it is impossible to imagine seeing it otherwise. His eyes furnish him with all the elements of happiness, and he replaces furniture with open windows. Inside, the art of the painter, ingeniously tracing his visions upon a fictitiously transparent window, multiplies the imaginary openings. In the ancient imperial palace that I visited, its magnificent and movable treasures had been carried away, and there remained only the pictorial decorations arranged in a black room,--the familiar visions of its august inhabitant.

The paper dwelling is composed of successive apartments, divided by partitions which slide on moldings. A single theme of decoration has been chosen for each of the series, and it is introduced by screens similar to the wings of a theater. I can prolong or shorten my contemplation at will. I am less the spectator of the painter than his host; each subject is expressed by a choice in harmony with the tone of the paper, a color representing the opposite end of the gamut. It is so at Gosho. An indigo and cream motif suffices for the room called “Freshness and Purity,” seeming all filled with sky and water. But at Nijo the imperial habitation is done in gold alone. Emerging from the matting-covered rafters, painted life-size, crowns of the pine-tree extend their grotesque boughs along the sunlit walls. The Prince, upon his seat, saw only great bands of tawny fire; and his sensation was of floating on the evening sky with awful sunset fires beneath him.

At Shidzuoka, at the time of Rinzainji, I saw a landscape made of colored dust. They had put it under glass, for fear that a breath would blow it away.

Before the golden Buddha in the leaves, time is measured by the burning of a little candle; and in the depth of this ravine, by the dripping of a triple fountain.

Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure, and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature; and, by means of a concrete image which symbolizes them like a syllable, still mysteriously conscious in his abasement of the superior authority of the Word, he calls upon it in his necessities. Thus, like a child who constructs the history of his doll from everything around him, humanity in its memories unites all that it discovers with all that it dreams, and so composes the romance of mythology.

Here beside me is this poor little old woman, who makes her salutation by striking her hands carefully together before a colossal female statue, in whose bosom an ancient prince, when led by a toothache and a dream to honor the skull of an ancestor, inserted the worn sphere after finding it wedged by the jawbone in the roots of a willow. At my right and at my left, all the length of the dark cavern, the three thousand golden Kwannon, each one resembling the others in the embellishment of arms that frame it, are aligned in rows of a hundred, in ranks fifteen deep. A ray of sunlight flickers over this barrier built of goddesses. Seeking the reason for uniformity in this multitude, and from what bulb all these identical stalks have sprung, I find that the worshiper here doubtless wishes a wider sounding-board for his prayers, and imagines that in multiplying the object of his entreaty he increases its efficacy.

But not for long did the sages rest their eyes on the eyes of these crude likenesses. Having perceived the unity of all things, they found the basis of their philosophy in that fact. Though each individual were transitory and capricious, the richness of the common fund remained inexhaustible. No need that Man should apply his hatchet to the tree, or his cleaver to the rock; in the grain of millet and the egg, alike in the immobility and the convulsions of sun and sea, he found the same principle of plastic energy; and the earth sufficed for the construction of its own idols. Further, admitting that the whole is formed of homogeneous parts; if, to better pursue their analysis, the Sages turned it back upon themselves, they discovered that the fugitive, blameworthy, unjustifiable thing in them was the fact of their presence in the world,--and that the element in them which was free of space and limitless of duration was the very conception they had formed of this contingent character.

If a diabolical fraud had not led them astray at that point, they might have recognized in the harmony of this principle of independent existence (with its main idea common to all and its expression so varied) a faith similar to that in the Word, which implies a vow--the voluntary restitution of breath to its divine Source. For every creature, born of the impression of Divine Unity upon indeterminate matter, is the very acknowledgment that he makes to his Creator, and the expression of the nothingness from which he has been drawn. This is the living, breathing rhythm of the world; where Man, dowered with consciousness and language, has been instituted their priest, to make dedication and offering of them,--and, of his own nothingness united to essential grace, to make a filial gift of himself, through love’s most intimate choice.

But these blind eyes refused to recognize unconditional being; and to him whom they call Buddha was it given to perfect the Pagan blasphemy. To return to this comparison of the Word; from the moment that they ignored the object of the discourse, its order and sequence escaped them entirely, and nothing remained but the ravings of delirium. But a horror of that which is not the Absolute is essential to man; and to escape the frightful circle of your vanity, Buddha, you have not hesitated to embrace Nothingness! For instead of explaining all things by their final end, he searched in himself for their intrinsic principle; and, finding there only nothingness, his doctrine teaches this monstrous communion.

This is the method; that the Sage,--having banished successively from his mind the ideas of form and of space, and the very idea of an idea,--arrives finally at Nothingness, and so enters into Nirvana. And people are awed by this revelation! As for me, I find that to the idea of Nothingness they have added that of Enjoyment. This seems to me the last and most Satanic mystery; the silence of a creature intrenched in its final refusal, the incestuous quietude of a soul seated on its integral difference!

THE SEDENTARY

I live in a corner of the highest story of a square and spacious building. I have placed my bed in the embrasure of the window; and when the evening, like the bride of a god, silently mounts her couch, I lie at full length with my face turned toward the night. From time to time, lifting an eyelid heavy as if in death, my sight has swum in a rose-colored glow. But at this hour, emerging with a long sigh from a sleep as heavy as Adam’s, I awaken to a vision of gold. The light tissue of the mosquito netting waves under an ineffable breeze. Here is light purged of heat; and I twist slowly in the delicious coolness. If I put out my bare arm, it seems to me fitting to plunge it to the shoulder in the consistency of this glory, to sink my hand searchingly into the fountain of eternity, as tremulous as its source. I see the magnificent lake of light spread with an irresistible intensity in a sky that is like a concave and liquid basin the color of mulberry leaves. Only the face of the sun, and its insupportable fires, only the mortal thrust of its rays, can drive me from my bed. I foresee that I shall have to pass the day in fasting and detachment. What water will be pure enough to quench my thirst, to satisfy my heart? From what manner of fruit shall I strip the skin with a golden knife?

But when the sun has reached the zenith, followed by the sea as is a shepherd, and by the races of mankind arising in successive multitudes,--it is noon, and everything that occupies a dimension in space is enveloped by the soul of a fire whiter than lightning. The world is effaced and the seals of the furnace broken; all things have vanished in the heart of this new deluge. I have closed all the windows. Prisoner of the light, I take up the journal of my captivity. And now, with my hand on the paper, I write by the same impulse that moves the silkworm, who spins its thread of the leaf that it devours. Sometimes I stroll through the darkened room, through the dining-room or the parlor; or for a moment I rest my hand on the cover of the organ, in this bare space whose center the work-table fills, standing intrepid and alone. Surrounded by these white streaks that mark the fissures in my prison, I develop the thought of holocaust. Ah, if it is enviable to dissolve in a flaming embrace, swept away upon a whirlwind with vehement breath,--how much more beautiful the torture of a spirit devoured by light!

And, when the afternoon is filled with this burning softness, by which the evening is preceded, like the sentiment of paternal love; having purified my body and my mind, I remount to the highest room. Seizing an inexhaustible book, I pursue there the study of Being, the definition of person and substance, of qualities and possibilities.

Between two rows of houses, the glimpse of a river terminates my street; the enormous silver current smokes, and great ships with white sails move across the splendid gap with a smooth and superb grace. I see before me the very River of Life whose image I borrowed when a child, to discourse of Morality. But today, stubborn swimmer though I am, I no longer cherish any hope of landing flat on my face among the reeds in the slime of the other bank, under the salutation of the palms, in a silence interrupted only by the cry of a parrot. Although the shrill cascade invites me, drumming upon the gravel behind the fleshy foliage of the magnolia; although the fabulous boughs are bending beneath their weight of myrobalans and of pomegranates; I will think of them no more--turning my glance to a more angelic science, to this mystic garden which is offered for my enjoyment and my recreation!

THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA