An Artist's Letters from Japan

We are doing nothing in particular, hesitating very much as to what our course shall be. One thing is certain-the breaking out of the cholera will affect all our plans. Even the consequent closing of the theaters shows us how many things will be cut off from us. We spend much time in such idleness as bric-à-brac, letting ourselves go, and taking things as they come.

The Doctor's kindness is with us all the time. One feels the citizen of the world that he is when he touches little details of manners here, now as familiar to him as those of Europe.

I enjoy, myself, this drifting, though A-- is not so well pleased, and I try to feel as if the heat and the novelty of impressions justified me in idleness. Once only I was tempted to duty, however, when we went to the temples of Shiba and Uyèno, where are the tombs of the shoguns, rulers of Japan of the Tokugawa line. They are all there but the two greatest, Iyéyasu and Iyémitsu, who lie at Nikko, the sacred place, a hundred miles away. Here in Tokio are the tombs of the others, and the temples about them splendid with lacquer and carving and gold and bronze, and set among trees and gardens on these hills of the Shiba and Uyèno.

My dreams of making an analysis and memoranda of these architectural treasures of Japan were started, as many resolutions of work are, by the talk of my companion, his analysis of the theme of their architecture, and my feeling a sort of desire to rival him on a ground for fair competition. But I do not think that I could grasp a subject in such a clear and dispassionate and masterly way, with such natural reference to the past and its implied comparisons, for A--'s historic sense amounts to poetry, and his deductions and remarks always set my mind sailing into new channels.

But I must put this off-certainly for to-day-while we discuss whether we shall make our visit to ancient Kamakura and the great bronze statue and the island of Énoshima, or whether to put it off until our return from Nikko, and our seeing the other shrines of the shoguns there. The Doctor, who has just left Nikko, tells us of its beauty in the early summer, a few weeks ago, and I feel all the hotter as he talks of the cold mountain streams which run by his house and of banks of azaleas covering the high rocks. And then the Japanese proverb says, "Who has not seen Nikko cannot say beautiful."

FROM TOKIO TO NIKKO

The cholera was upon us, and we decided to go to Nikko and spend a month there, near the F--s'. The Doctor, who was anxious to get back to its coolness and its other charms, was to pilot us and instruct us by the way, and much of the miscellaneous information that I shall give you has come more or less from him. Late in the morning we rode to Tokio, and lunched in Uyèno Park, looking down on the great pond and the little temple which stands in it, and which you know, having seen them on the fans and colored prints. They were veiled in the haze of the sunlight, as if in a spring or winter mist, and through this fog of light shone the multitudinous little sparkles of the ribs and swellings of the lotus-pads lapping one over another, and reaching to far streaks of clearer water. A denser lightness here and there marked the places of the flowers, and a faint odor came up in lazy whiffs. The roof of the temple seemed to be supported by the moisture below. Above there was no cloud. All things lay alike in the blaze, enveloped in a white glimmer of heat and wet, and between the branches of the trees around us the sky was veiled in blue. The locusts hissed with a crackling sound like that of heated wood. The ugly bronze Buddha at the corner of the tea-house shone as if melting in the sun. Then came the moment of leaving for the station, where, owing to delays of trains, we waited still longer in the heat. In the cleanly waiting-room we looked at the illustrations in the Japanese newspapers, and at the last report of the weather bureau, printed in English and fastened to the wall; or we read a little in that morning's edition of the excellent Yokohama English paper; all these comforts of civilization being supplied by the Road. At length the noise of hundreds of wooden clogs, worn by men, women, and children, clattered upon the stones outside and announced an end to waiting. The tightly-closed train had been baking in the sun all day, and we leaned out of the doors on the sides and gasped for breath.

Our train skirted the great hill of Uyèno, and its dark shadow, which did not quite reach us. Monuments and gravestones, gray or mossy, blurred here and there the green wall of trees. The Doctor told us of the cooler spring-time, when the cherry-trees of Uyèno cover the ground with a snow of blossoms, and the whole world turns out to enjoy them, as we do the first snows of winter.

But this is a lame comparison. The Japanese sensitiveness to the beauties of the outside world is something much more delicate and complex and contemplative, and at the same time more natural, than ours has ever been. Outside of Arcadia, I know of no other land whose people hang verses on the trees in honor of their beauty; where families travel far before the dawn to see the first light touch the new buds. Where else do the newspapers announce the spring openings of the blossoms? Where else would be possible the charming absurdity of the story that W-- was telling me of having seen in cherry-blossom time some old gentleman, with capacious sakè gourd in hand and big roll of paper in his girdle, seat himself below the blossom-showers, and look, and drink, and write verses, all by himself, with no gallery to help him? If there is convention in a tradition half obligatory; and if we, Western lovers of the tree, do not quite like the Japanese refinement of growing the cherry merely for its flowers, yet how deliciously upside-down from us, and how charming is the love of nature at the foundation of the custom!

From the rustling of leaves and reëchoing of trees we passed into the open country, and into free air and heat. In the blur of hot air, trembling beneath the sun, lay plantations and rice-fields; the latter, vast sheets of water dotted with innumerable spikes of green. Little paths raised above them made a network of irregular geometry. Occasionally a crane spread a shining wing and sank again. In the outside ditches stood up the pink heads of the lotus above the crowded pads. At long intervals small groups of peasants, men and women, dressed in blue and white, knee-deep in the water, bent their backs at the task of weeding. The skirts of their dresses were caught up in their girdles, and their arms were freed from their looped-back sleeves.

The Doctor spoke to us of the supposed unhealthiness of rice-planting, which makes life in the rice-fields short, in a country where life is not long.

We are told that the manuring of the rice-fields taints all the waters for great distances, and we are warned not to drink, without inquiring, even from the clearest streams. Not even high up in the mountains shall we be safe; for there may be flat spaces and table-lands of culture which drain into the picturesque wildness below. We learn that with all these hardships the rice-growers themselves cannot always afford this staple food of the country, for cheaper than rice are millet, and buckwheat, and the plants and fungi that grow without culture.

Contrasting with the tillage we were passing, islands of close foliage stood up in the dry plain, or were reflected, with the clouds above, in the mirror of the wet rice-fields. Occasionally a shrine was visible within, and the obligatory Torii stood at the edge of the grove, or within its first limits.

Looking through a Torii one is sure to be in the direction of something sacred, whether it be temple or shrine or holy mountain. Neither closeness nor distance interferes with this ideal intention, and the sacred Fusi-yama is often seen a hundred miles away in the sky, framed by these lines, built for the purpose. This assemblage of four lines of stone or wood or bronze is to me one of the creations of art, like the obelisk or the pyramid. Most impressive, most original of symbolic entrances, whether derived from sacred India or from the ancestral innocence of Polynesia, there is something of the beginning of man, something invented while he lived with the birds, in this elementary porch, whose upper line, repeating the slope of hill and wave, first embodied the curve that curls all upper edges in the buildings of the farther East.

And if indeed, the Torii[1] be nothing but the first bird-perch, then I can imagine the father of all peacocks spreading his gigantic fan across its bars; or I may prefer to suppose it the rest for the disk of the sun-god, whose lower curve is repeated by the Torii's upper beam.

Sometimes there were traces of inclosure about these woods; sometimes they had no edgings but their own beautifully-modeled contours. Long ages, respectful care, sometimes fortunate neglect, have made of these reserved spaces types of an ideal wildness, for these are sacred groves, and they are protected by the divine contained within them.

This preservation of a recall of primeval nature, this exemption of the soil from labor, within anxious and careful tillage, is a note of Japan constantly recurring, and a source of perpetual charm.

Notwithstanding the men and women working in the fields, there was a certain desolateness in the landscape, and A-- made out its reason more easily than I, and recalled that for miles and miles we had...