Part 8

Thus it appears that for more than eleven hundred years the Japanese have been making poems about frogs; and it is at least possible that verses on this subject, which have been preserved in the _Manyōshū_, were composed even earlier than the eighth century. From the oldest classical period to the present day, the theme has never ceased to be a favorite one with poets of all ranks. A fact noteworthy in this relation is that the first poem written in the measure called _hokku_, by the famous Bashō, was about frogs. The triumph of this extremely brief form of verse--(three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively)--is to create one complete sensation-picture; and Bashō’s original accomplishes the feat,--difficult, if not impossible, to repeat in English:--

Furu iké ya, Kawazu tobikomu, Midzu no oto.

(“Old pond--frogs jumping in--sound of water.”) An immense number of poems about frogs were subsequently written in this measure. Even at the present time professional men of letters amuse themselves by making short poems on frogs. Distinguished among these is a young poet known to the Japanese literary world by the pseudonym of “Roséki,” who lives in Ōsaka and keeps in the pond of his garden hundreds of singing frogs. At fixed intervals he invites all his poet-friends to a feast, with the proviso that each must compose, during the entertainment, one poem about the inhabitants of the pond. A collection of the verses thus obtained was privately printed in the spring of 1897, with funny pictures of frogs decorating the covers and illustrating the text.

But unfortunately it is not possible through English translation to give any fair idea of the range and character of the literature of frogs. The reason is that the greater number of compositions about frogs depend chiefly for their literary value upon the untranslatable,--upon local allusions, for example, incomprehensible outside of Japan; upon puns; and upon the use of words with double or even triple meanings. Scarcely two or three in every one hundred poems can bear translation. So I can attempt little more than a few general observations.

* * * * *

That love-poems should form a considerable proportion of this curious literature will not seem strange to the reader when he is reminded that the lovers’ trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is in full cry, and that, in Japan at least, the memory of the sound would be associated with the memory of a secret meeting in almost any solitary place. The frog referred to in such poems is not usually the kajika. But frogs are introduced into love-poetry in countless clever ways. I can give two examples of modern popular compositions of this kind. The first contains an allusion to the famous proverb,--_I no naka no kawazu daikai wo shirazu_: “The frog in the well knows not the great sea.” A person quite innocent of the ways of the world is compared to a frog in a well; and we may suppose the speaker of the following lines to be some sweet-hearted country-girl, answering an ungenerous remark with very pretty tact:--

_Laugh me to scorn if you please;--call me your “frog-in-the-well”: Flowers fall into my well; and its water mirrors the moon!_

The second poem is supposed to be the utterance of a woman having good reason to be jealous:--

_Dull as a stagnant pond you deemed the mind of your mistress; But the stagnant pond can speak: you shall hear the cry of the frog!_

Outside of love-poems there are hundreds of verses about the common frogs of ponds or ricefields. Some refer chiefly to the volume of the sound that the frogs make:--

_Hearing the frogs of the ricefields, methinks that the water sings._

_As we flush the ricefields of spring, the frog-song flows with the water._

_From ricefield to ricefield they call: unceasing the challenge and answer._

_Ever as deepens the night, louder the chorus of pond-frogs._

_So many the voices of frogs that I cannot but wonder if the pond be not wider at night than by day!_

_Even the rowing boats can scarce proceed, so thick the clamor of the frogs of Horié!_

The exaggeration of the last verse is of course intentional, and in the original not uneffective. In some parts of the world--in the marshes of Florida and of southern Louisiana, for example,--the clamor of the frogs at certain seasons resembles the roaring of a furious sea; and whoever has heard it can appreciate the fancy of sound as obstacle.

Other poems compare or associate the sound made by frogs with the sound of rain:--

_The song of the earliest frogs,--fainter than falling of rain._

_What I took for the falling of rain is only the singing of frogs._

_Now I shall dream, lulled by the patter of rain and the song of the frogs._

Other poems, again, are intended only as tiny pictures,--thumb-nail sketches,--such as this _hokku_,--

_Path between ricefields; frogs jumping away to right and left_;--

--or this, which is a thousand years old:--

_Where the flowers of the yamabuki are imaged in the still marsh-water, the voice of the kawazu is heard_;--

--or the following pretty fancy:--

_Now sings the frog, and the voice of the frog is perfumed;--for into the shining stream the cherry-petals fall._

The last two pieces refer, of course, to the true singing frog.

Many short poems are addressed directly to the frog itself,--whether kaeru or kajika. There are poems of melancholy, of affection, of humor, of religion, and even of philosophy among these. Sometimes the frog is likened to a spirit resting on a lotos-leaf; sometimes, to a priest repeating sûtras for the sake of the dying flowers; sometimes to a pining lover; sometimes to a host receiving travellers; sometimes to a blasphemer, “always beginning” to say something against the gods, but always afraid to finish it. Most of the following examples are taken from the recent book of frog-poems published by Roséki;--each paragraph of my prose rendering, it should be remembered, represents a distinct poem:--

_Now all the guests being gone, why still thus respectfully sitting, O frog?_

_So resting your hands on the ground, do you welcome the Rain, O frog?_

_You disturb in the ancient well the light of the stars, O frog!_

_Sleepy the sound of the rain; but your voice makes me dream, O frog!_

_Always beginning to say something against the great Heaven, O frog!_

_You have learned that the world is void: you never look at it as you float, O frog!_

_Having lived in clear-rushing mountain-streams, never can your voice become stagnant, O frog!_

The last pleasing conceit shows the esteem in which the superior vocal powers of the kajika are held.

III

I thought it strange that out of hundreds of frog-poems collected for me I could not discover a single mention of the coldness and clamminess of the frog. Except a few jesting lines about the queer attitudes sometimes assumed by the creature, the only reference to its uninviting qualities that I could find was the mild remark,

_Seen in the daytime, how uninteresting you are, O frog!_

While wondering at this reticence concerning the chilly, slimy, flaccid nature of frogs, it all at once occurred to me that in other thousands of Japanese poems which I had read there was a total absence of allusions to tactual sensations. Sensations of colors, sounds, and odors were rendered with exquisite and surprising delicacy; but sensations of taste were seldom mentioned, and sensations of touch were absolutely ignored. I asked myself whether the reason for this reticence or indifference should be sought in the particular temperament or mental habit of the race; but I have not yet been able to decide the question. Remembering that the race has been living for ages upon food which seems tasteless to the Western palate, and that impulses to such action as hand-clasping, embracing, kissing, or other physical display of affectionate feeling, are really foreign to far-Eastern character, one is tempted to the theory that gustatory and tactual sensations, pleasurable and otherwise, have been less highly evolved with the Japanese than with us. But there is much evidence against such a theory; and the triumphs of Japanese handicraft assure us of an almost incomparable delicacy of touch developed in special directions. Whatever be the physiological meaning of the phenomenon, its moral meaning is of most importance. So far as I have been able to judge, Japanese poetry usually ignores the inferior qualities of sensation, while making the subtlest of appeals to those superior qualities which we call æsthetic. Even if representing nothing else, this fact represents the healthiest and happiest attitude toward Nature. Do not we Occidentals shrink from many purely natural impressions by reason of repulsion developed through a morbid tactual sensibility? The question is at least worth considering. Ignoring or mastering such repulsion,--accepting naked Nature as she is, always lovable when understood,--the Japanese discover beauty where we blindly imagine ugliness or formlessness or loathsomeness,--beauty in insects, beauty in stones, beauty in frogs. Is the fact without significance that they alone have been able to make artistic use of the form of the centipede?... You should see my Kyōtō tobacco-pouch, with centipedes of gold running over its figured leather like ripplings of fire!

FOOTNOTES:

[73] _Cettia cantans_,--the Japanese nightingale.

[74] Such, at least, is the posture prescribed by the old etiquette for _men_. But the rules were very complicated, and varied somewhat according to rank as well as to sex. Women usually turn the fingers inward instead of outward when assuming this posture.

Of Moon-Desire

I

He was two years old when--as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence--he asked me for the Moon.

Unwisely I protested,--

“The Moon I cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it.”

He answered:--

“By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down.”

I said,--

“There is no bamboo long enough.”

He suggested:--

“By standing on the ridge of the roof of the house, you probably could poke it with the bamboo.”

--Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concerning the nature and position of the Moon.

This set me thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general,--upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals,--and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom. I thought of the countless generations of children who have asked for the Moon, and of the generations of parents who have laughed at the asking. And then I entered into the following meditation:--

* * * * *

Have we any right to laugh at the child’s wish for the Moon? No wish could be more natural; and as for its incongruity,--do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent,--longings that if realized could only work us woe,--such as desire for the continuance after death of that very sense-life, or individuality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways?

Now foolish as may seem, to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon,--even for more than the Sun and the Morning-Star and all the Host of Heaven.

II

I remember when a boy lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing that I could melt into it,--become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible: he had tried to explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed “the folly and the wickedness of pantheism,”--with the result that I immediately became a pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky!

Now I think that in those days I was really close to a great truth,--touching it, in fact, without the faintest suspicion of its existence. I mean the truth that the wish _to become_ is reasonable in direct ratio to its largeness,--or, in other words, that the more you wish to be, the wiser you are; while the wish _to have_ is apt to be foolish in proportion to its largeness. Cosmic law permits us very few of the countless things that we wish to have, but will help us to become all that we can possibly wish to be. Finite, and in so much feeble, is the wish to have: but infinite in puissance is the wish to become; and every mortal wish to become must eventually find satisfaction. By wanting to be, the monad makes itself the elephant, the eagle, or the man. By wanting to be, the man should become a god. Perhaps on this tiny globe, lighted only by a tenth-rate yellow sun, he will not have time to become a god; but who dare assert that his wish cannot project itself to mightier systems illuminated by vaster suns, and there reshape and invest him with the forms and powers of divinity? Who dare even say that his wish may not expand him beyond the Limits of Form, and make him one with Omnipotence? And Omnipotence, without asking, can have much brighter and bigger play-things than the Moon.

Probably everything is a mere question of wishing,--providing that we wish, not to have, but to be. Most of the sorrow of life certainly exists because of the wrong kind of wishing and because of the contemptible pettiness of the wishes. Even to wish for the absolute lordship and possession of the entire earth were a pitifully small and vulgar wish. We must learn to nourish very much bigger wishes than that! My faith is that we must wish to become the total universe with its thousands of millions of worlds,--and more than the universe, or a myriad universes,--and more even than Space and Time.

III

Possibly the power for such wishing must depend upon our comprehension of the ghostliness of substance. Once men endowed with spirit all forms and motions and utterances of Nature: stone and metal, herb and tree, cloud and wind,--the lights of heaven, the murmuring of leaves and waters, the echoes of the hills, the tumultuous speech of the sea. Then becoming wiser in their own conceit, they likewise became of little faith; and they talked about “the Inanimate” and “the Inert,”--which are nonexistent,--and discoursed of Force as distinct from Matter, and of Mind as distinct from both. Yet we now discover that the primitive fancies were, after all, closer to probable truth. We cannot indeed think of Nature to-day precisely as did our forefathers; but we find ourselves obliged to think of her in very much weirder ways; and the later revelations of our science have revitalized not a little of the primitive thought, and infused it with a new and awful beauty. And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage Nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being,--always growing with our growth, strengthening with our strength, more and more unfolding with the evolution of our higher sensibilities,--would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.

* * * * *

Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings?... Have you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire?--never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting, iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable touch?--never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering of its dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost,--to scream round the peaks with it,--to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, have you felt no impulse kindred to that giant motion,--no longing to leap with that wild white tossing, and to join in that mighty shout?... And all such ancient emotional sympathies with Nature’s familiar forces--do they not prelude, with their modern æsthetic developments, the future growth of rarer sympathies with incomparably subtler forces, and of longings to be limited only by our power to know? Know ether--shivering from star to star;--comprehend its sensitivities, its penetrancies, its transmutations;--and sympathies ethereal will evolve. Know the forces that spin the suns;--and already the way has been reached of becoming one with them.

And furthermore, is there no suggestion of such evolvement in the steady widening through all the centuries of the thoughts of their world-priests and poets?--in the later sense of Life-as-Unity absorbing or transforming the ancient childish sense of life-personal?--in the tone of the new rapture in world-beauty, dominating the elder worship of beauty-human?--in the larger modern joy evoked by the blossoming of dawns, the blossoming of stars,--by all quiverings of color, all shudderings of light? And is not the thing-in-itself, the detail, the appearance, being ever less and less studied for its mere power to charm, and ever more and more studied as a single character in that Infinite Riddle of which all phenomena are but ideographs?

* * * * *

Nay!--surely the time must come when we shall desire to be all that is, all that ever has been known,--the past and the present and the future in one,--all feeling, striving, thinking, joying, sorrowing,--and everywhere the Part,--and everywhere the Whole. And before us, with the waxing of the wish, perpetually the Infinities shall widen.

And I--even I!--by virtue of that wish, shall become all forms, all forces, all conditions: Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth,--all motion visible or viewless,--all vibration named of light, of color, of sonority, of torrefaction,--all thrillings piercing substance,--all oscillations picturing in blackness, like the goblin-vision of the X-rays. By virtue of that wish I shall become the Source of all becoming and of all ceasing,--the Power that shapes, the Power that dissolves,--creating, with the shadows of my sleep, the life that shall vanish with my wakening. And even as phosphor-lampings in currents of midnight sea, so shall shimmer and pulse and pass, in mine Ocean of Death and Birth, the burning of billions of suns, the whirling of trillions of worlds....

IV

--“Well,” said the friend to whom I read this revery, “there is some Buddhism in your fancies--though you seem to have purposely avoided several important points of doctrine. For instance, you must know that Nirvana is never to be reached by wishing, but by _not_ wishing. What you call the ‘wish-to-become’ can only help us, like a lantern, along the darker portions of the Way. As for wanting the Moon--I think that you must have seen many old Japanese pictures of apes clutching at the reflection of the Moon in water. The subject is a Buddhist parable: the water is the phantom-flux of sensations and ideas; the Moon--not its distorted image--is the sole Truth. And your Western philosopher was really teaching a Buddhist parable when he proclaimed man but a higher kind of ape. For in this world of illusion, man is truly still the ape, trying to seize on water the shadow of the Moon.”

--“Ape indeed,” I made answer,--“but an ape of gods,--even that divine Ape of the Ramayana who may clutch the Sun!”

Retrospectives

“Murmurs and scents of the Infinite Sea.”

--MATTHEW ARNOLD.

First Impressions

I

I wonder why the emblematical significance of the Composite Photograph has been so little considered by the philosophers of evolution. In the blending and coalescing of the shadows that make it, is there no suggestion of that bioplasmic chemistry which, out of the intermingling of innumerable lives, crystallizes the composite of personality? Has the superimposition of images upon the sensitized plate no likeness to those endless superimpositions of heredity out of which every individuality must shape itself?... Surely it is a very weird thing, this Composite Photograph,--and hints of things weirder.

* * * * *

Every human face is a living composite of countless faces,--generations and generations of faces superimposed upon the sensitive film of Life for the great cosmic developing process. And any living face, well watched by love or by hate, will reveal the fact. The face of friend or sweetheart has a hundred different aspects; and you know that you want, when his or her “likeness” is taken, to insist upon the reflection of the dearest of these. The face of your enemy,--no matter what antipathy it may excite,--is not invariably hateful in itself: you must acknowledge, to yourself at least, having observed in it moments of an expression the reverse of unworthy.

Probably the ancestral types that try to reproduce themselves in the modulations of facial expression, are nearly always the more recent;--the very ancient having become metamorphosed, under weight of superimposition, into a blank underlying vagueness,--a mere protoplasmic background out of which, except in rare and monstrous cases, no outline can detach itself. But in every normal face whole generations of types do certainly, by turns of mood, make flitting apparition. Any mother knows this. Studying day by day the features of her child, she finds in them variations not to be explained by simple growth. Sometimes there is a likeness to one parent or grandparent; sometimes a likeness to another, or to remoter kindred; and at rarer intervals may appear peculiarities of expression that no member of the family can account for. (Thus, in darker centuries, the ghastly superstition of the “changeling,” was not only possible, but in a certain sense quite natural.) Through youth and manhood and far into old age these mutations continue,--though always more slowly and faintly,--even while the general characteristics steadily accentuate; and death itself may bring into the countenance some strange expression never noticed during life.

II