Part 7

Over the sleeping sea, blue and still, beyond the watching headlands, out into the liquid sky above, where in utter majesty great Fuji rises one sheer line of beauty in the blue. The rounded curve of his snow-crest shimmers white as a sun-caught sail, and the long slope of his perfect form is a deep blue line on blue. Fuji rises as a tower, he floats in that limpid sea above a mist-clad iceberg. And the glimmer of his snow-crest is a shining crown of glory in the sky. So real, so simple, so beautiful. Just a crescent of white snow floating thirteen thousand feet above the world, and two long lines of blue sloping gently downwards, outwards to the earth. So simple, so beautiful, is it real?

A faint stir in the sleeping sea and I drop my eyes to the blue below.

Beauty, said the Greeks, was born of the waves and the foam. Once in that clear sea above, a great blue wave came leaping with a crest of foam. It was Beauty’s self, all-perfect, and they called it Fujiyama. Beauty content to be but beauty.

* * * * *

Tesshuji’s Gods look out over the sea, beyond the green headlands into the blue. They dream undisturbed. They have looked so long.

The noonday heat has spread the land with a quivering haze of blue. It sleeps. The softly breathing sea sleeps too. No prayer has roused the Gods, they too are sleeping.

The whole world, says the Scriptures, is but a dream of the great Lord Buddha. Tesshuji’s Gods are dreaming, and Fuji is.

Dream Gods for ever.

THE ART OF THE NATION

“All that is superfluous is displeasing to God and Nature; all that is displeasing to God and Nature is bad.” DANTE, “De Monarchia,” bk. i. chap. xiv.

I

GRACE BEFORE MEAT

The _kuruma_ running quickly through the narrow opening in the high bamboo fence curved into a tiny garden set with dark green shrubs, and stopped abruptly.

In front of us, where a square recess broke the long line of wooden wall, a pile of _gheta_ lay heaped on a grey stone block. At the sound of our coming the wooden wall opened, and a Japanese in _kimono_ and _hakama_ stood bowing before us. He came with pairs of soft woolly night-socks to cover English feet, and, sitting down on the narrow knee-high platform of polished black wood, we took off our boots. Two giant curb-stones at right angles made a solitary step to reach the platform, and leaving our leather boots, looking caricatures of feet among the wooden sandals, we followed the waiting _kimono_ along the three-foot-wide platform.

Round the corner of the square recess, and shut off from the tiny courtyard by a thick screen of fence and shrubs, was a white garden, sunny and still, where, under a pale blue sky, the tall shadows of the trees fell black across the pure white snow. Sliding back the paper-paned wall the waiting _kimono_ bowed us to enter.

“Come in, come in,” said our friend the professor, his familiar face looking strangely unfamiliar from out the wide-sleeved silken _kimono_ and pleated silken skirts of his _hakama_, as he laughingly bowed us a Japanese welcome.

The first sensation on coming into that low matted room, bare of all furniture, was one of intense awkwardness, all one’s limbs seemed to have swollen to ungainly proportions, and to have grown correspondingly wooden and jerky. In a flash I had slipped back to a child’s years, and was lying in my little iron bedstead in the dark, the haunting terror of the unknown upon me, as I stealthily pinched a mountainous leg with a hand twelve feet thick, and trembled to feel the bedstead giving way beneath me. That old sensation of unaccountable largeness, of bursting one’s surroundings, stayed as the unreal background to my mind until the paper-paned walls closed behind me again.

“If you would like a chair, there are just two--” began the professor.

But we had come to be really Japanese, and Japanese we intended to remain at all costs. So, getting gingerly down on our knees on the square cushions that lay on the matted floor, we tried unsuccessfully to sit on our heels with the same grace as little Miss Hayashi opposite. There she sat, demure, serene, and, above all, supremely graceful all through lunch, while we, like chestnuts on hot bricks, hopped from knee to knee, bobbed up and down, tucked our legs under us like Turks, or bunchwise like children, leaned on one arm, then on the other, enduring untold horrors of pins and needles as we became more intimately acquainted with our own anatomy than we had ever done in all the previous years of our existence. And my admiration of Miss Hayashi grew as she sat there, one line of pure grace from the curves of her slender neck, rising from the folds of mauve and white, to the thick wadded hem of her _kimono_.

As I looked I grew more and more conscious that the dress and the room were one, each the necessary complement of the other, the right frame for the right picture, and the right picture in the right frame.

“The soul of Japan,” they say, “is the sword of the _samurai_.” “Then the soul of the _uchi_,” I thought, “is the _kimono_ of the housewife.”

The simplicity of the straight-falling lines, the perfection of the embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness of the _obi_ at the waist, there was the same severity of design with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the _tokonoma_. Within the _tokonoma_ hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the moon, a _kakemono_ of price. On the black wood of the platform, which was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords of the _samurai_, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these four objects (as in the _obi_ and the embroidery of the neck-folds) lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan--the artistic value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the _kakemono_ held the eyes; one looked, and one _saw_; their beauty filled the soul; next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon curves of Miss Hayashi’s _kimono_, white below mauve, as she glided over the matted floor.

Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums, rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round, one to each of us.

Then came a long pause, while we asked all the questions that occurred to us about _kimono_ and _hakama_, and swords and etiquette; and then our lunch, a whole lacquered trayful of bowls for each one of us, with all the courses served together, and all irretrievably and, to us, inexplicably mixed. I pass the hot soup in a lacquered bowl, and the hot rice in a china one, but the rest--a golden bream on a pale blue plate set round with oranges in jelly; slices of pink raw fish, and a design in brown seaweed and green roots; a deep bowl of pale yellow custard, its surface ruffled with silver fishes, oriental whitebait, and its depths filled with bamboo shoots and lily bulbs and other surprises; and one dish, a triumph of design and colour, where an oval slab of pounded fish, white as snow, rested against a green mound of preserved chestnuts, while in front, arranged in a curving crescent like the tail of a comet, were purple roots, brown ginger, and slices of a red radish. And all this you eat as you please, a bit here, and a bit there, now a drink of salt soup, then a mouthful of sweet chestnut; custard, vegetables, fish, sweets, with relays of rice for bread, and _saké_ for wine, paper napkins, and withal two penholders to eat with, and your Japanese dinner is complete.

Having tried everything with the greatest perseverance, and wriggled our chopsticks until our hands were as tired as our toes, we gave in and rested from our labours. The little maid, rosier than ever, removed the trays of food, and brought in bowls of oranges and dried persimmon.

At this moment there was a rustling of screens, and a dear, little old lady with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth slid into the room, and instantly went down on her knees, and putting out her hands bowed her head right down on to them.

“This is my aunt,” said the professor, “a real old-fashioned woman--there are not many left nowadays--who blackens her teeth and shaves her eyebrows.”

The little old lady laughed, and made many polite speeches, asking after our “honourable healths” and our “august appetites.” At every word she made another bow, until I felt as if I really must get down on my knees and hit my forehead against the ground as well. Luckily the professor, after a moment’s consultation, suggested we should see the house, and we all got up. The little old lady was on her feet in a twinkling, but our half-dead limbs sent pins and needles up our legs, as we stumbled on to them and awkwardly walked away.

The sliding paper wall of our room hid another absolutely bare, no _tokonoma_ here, only a poem painted on a long narrow board fastened against the door-post, and in the further wall, shut off by sliding screens, a large cupboard, full of the household linen, which means the silk-wadded quilts or _futon_, on and under which one sleeps. Sliding aside the door-panel we found ourselves on another three-foot-wide platform, looking out through more paper-paned walls into another garden. This house was just a long series of rooms with a platform and a garden on each side, and a little square bunch of rooms at one end. In one of these we cuddled down under a silk quilt thrown over a square hole in the middle of the room, and felt the heat coming up from the glowing charcoal sunk in a sort of pit beneath the floor.

Then we peeped into the bathroom, containing a high wooden wash-tub with a stove-pipe running down one end. The wash-tub is filled with cold water, and lighted charcoal put down the stove-pipe, and in a few minutes the water is hot, and you get in, and the longer you stay the hotter grows the water, until having boiled yourself in the approved Japanese way you step out and wipe yourself dry with a yard of white cotton adorned with blue storks.

Then we invaded the kitchen, bare of everything like the other rooms, and with only a two-fold brazier to cook over; one brazier has permanently fixed above it a coppered wooden tub, dedicated to rice-boiling, the other brazier cooked everything else. That was all. Wooden pots, pans and dippers were hung up inside the sliding cupboards, or were washing in the yard outside. A tiny shrine, like a mantelshelf over the sliding door, held minute gods in a dim light; a paper-framed bamboo lantern, like an afternoon-tea cake-table, with shelves between the legs for plates, stood in a corner. This is the _andon_, and inside the paper panes a floating wick in a saucer of oil burns all night.

Our advent into these regions was attended with much excitement punctuated with peals of laughter, it striking the dear old lady as irresistibly funny, that it was all funny to us.

In the midst of our hilarity came the summons of the _kurumaya_, and out we had to go, take our boots from the friendly company of the wooden _gheta_, and laden with mysterious boxes neatly tied with red and white strings, and bunches of plum-blossom, say stiff English “Good-byes,” while the little old lady, the rosy-cheeked maid, and the rest of the household bowed us graceful Japanese _sayonara_ and _mata irasshai_ (Come again).

The _kuruma_ curved out through the tiny snow-covered garden set with dark shrubs, the paper-paned walls shut with a soft thud; the picture was gone, but the memory of it will remain with me always.

II

IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY

Nagoya is a manufacturing town with a quarter of a million of inhabitants. It is full of porcelain and fan factories, cloisonné works and cotton mills. It is the centre of the celebrated potteries of Seto, and is famous for its embroideries and its silks. It is bigger than Nottingham or Hull, and is almost as large as Dublin. Nagoya is both Staffordshire and Bradford--and yet a city clean and still. A town of sunny streets and pure fresh air, whose sky is blue and clear, whose trees are green. Its 250,000 inhabitants are mostly factory hands--and there is neither dirt nor din. The golden dolphins on its castle’s roof are three hundred years old, and they glitter in the sunshine like new-fired gold.

* * * * *

On the edge of the growing rice-fields the porcelain factory lies. Its doors are open to the sun; and in the corner of the low, white room, where the workmen sit cross-legged like Buddhas, each beside his potter’s wheel, a yellow vase of purple iris stands.

The room is still and fresh and clean. The whirr of the turning wheel is soft as the drowsing of a bee. There is no hurry as there is no idleness. And each worker, as he moulds his clay, looks towards the purple iris in the yellow vase.

The cloisonné works are built in the heart of the city, in the middle of a busy street, where blue-clad coolies continually load and unload the wide coster-barrows which are the waggons of Japan. The hum of working life is in the air, and the wide road which stretches without division of pavement across from side to side, is thronged. Business men in grey _kimono_ and foreign hats go out and in; the loaded barrows drawn by the blue-clad coolies pass up and down; fast-running _kurumaya_ steer in and out among the foot-passengers and the traffic. And the occasional collision is followed by mutual bows and polite _Gomen nasai_ (“I beg your honourable pardon”), on the part of either coolie or _kurumaya_.

Nagoya factories and cotton mills are hard at work.

The gateway of the cloisonné works leads down a wooden passage into a tiny court, a garden set round with the workshops of the factory. And such a garden. It is not larger than the front lawn of a suburban villa, but the skill of a Japanese gardener has planted a whole mountain side with forests of pine and bamboo, has spanned with an arching bridge the stone-grey stream at the mountain’s foot. From inside the tiny matted rooms, no bigger than bathing-boxes, which shut in three sides of the garden, the illusion is complete. And the shade and coolness of the real trees and water, of the imaginary forest and stream, brings a sense of calmness and repose, of quiet peace and beauty, to all the many workers of the factory. It is a living landscape growing unspoiled in the heart of a workshop in the centre of a manufacturing city.

Each on his mat in the clean, bare, matted rooms the workmen sit, the rice-paper _shōji_ pushed open to the mountain stream, and the forest of pine and bamboo. In the first room sit workers outlining the design on the bare metal vase with metal wires, silver wires on silver vases, copper wires on copper vases. And each design is different, and many of the men are old. In the second room the bare metal vases are getting a coat of coloured paste, and now the design stands out rough as a cave-man’s drawing. Here the workers are younger, while boys fill in the body of the vase. In the third and fourth rooms the matted floor at the back is replaced by a large hearthstone, and a round earthen oven; in this the vases are baked, passed back to the men and boys to recoat with the coloured paste, and then rebaked, recoated and rebaked many times, until at last the vase is handed over to the workers in the last rooms. It has lost all trace of design by now; the metal wires are no longer visible; the colours have bubbled over in all directions, the vase is an unmeaning mosaic of a thousand shades. Then the workmen, sitting on their heels on the kneeling-cushions in their clean, bare, matted rooms, tiny as bathing-boxes, polish, polish, polish, sometimes for a whole year, until the worker’s hand wears down the hard smooth surface and the design shows through clean and true once more. The workmen here are grey and old.

But the oldest of all sat by himself in a little room just opposite the arching bridge which crossed the mountain stream. He wore a pair of quaint horn spectacles, and his face was the face of an Eastern sage. He sat with his tools before him fixing silver wires on to a silver vase, with a certainty and a rapidity beyond his fellows; and all that is most beautiful and most difficult in the cloisonné works of Nagoya comes from his hands. The old man pushed back his horn spectacles as I stopped before the open _shōji_, and his eyes rested on the still picture of the garden with a smile.

I, too, turned to look at the row of tiny paper rooms stretching out like arms on either hand, at the living landscape lying in their midst, at the blue sky above, and at the old face beneath the horn spectacles. I did not wonder at the peace which lay upon it, nor at the exquisite beauty of the finished vase standing on the matting beside him. For the garden was still as a cloister, though the cloister was a workshop for cloisonné ware in the manufacturing town of Nagoya.

III

FLOWER ARRANGEMENT

We sat opposite each other on the matting, and she laughed. The polite, audible smile of the Japanese. All around us lay cut branches of fir; and on the long wooden footstool they call a table stood a shallow bronze dish and a wonderful cleft stick of bamboo.

She was a little bent old lady, with the courtly politeness of a thousand Grandisons refined to a subtle essence, and she gave lessons in flower arrangement. The close-cropped grey hair gathered into a slide behind told its own tale of widowhood, and the withered careworn face its story of work and want.

The _shōji_ were shut, and the light through the rice-paper panes sent a warmed white light into the room that knew no colour, a light as though one sat inside a luminous mist, or in the heart of the plum-blossoms. A passionless, lifeless light which was simply light.

And the little old lady laughed again.

“There is much to learn,” I said, stopping to watch her bending the warmed fir branches over the _hibachi_ always to the exact curve, never too near or too far, and mine snapped at the first touch.

She handed me another branch in place of the one I had broken, and watched while I wedged it into the cleft bamboo stick with little chips of wood.

“Very much,” she said. “It takes three years of learning for the pupil and seven for the teacher. And the _Ijin San_ has had four lessons.”

The fifth and last branch being successfully wedged into line, I got on to my knees to admire the effect, while Arabella, from her camp-stool in the corner--she considered it lowering to sit on the floor--bridled.

“Oh, the _Japanese_,” she said; “but any European could learn in half a dozen lessons.”

The little old lady bowed, letting her forehead almost touch the ground, as she sat on her heels on the kneeling-cushion.

“The august stranger----” she began, when I interrupted.

The contemplation of my five branches of fir, two curving to the left and three to the right, had not filled me with any satisfaction. They wobbled. All their curves were wrong, and the five stems, instead of being hidden one behind the other, so that the illusion of a single branch growing out of the bronze dish was created and kept, were all distinctly and decidedly visible.

“It doesn’t look a bit right,” I said; “but what is the matter?”

The task of sticking five branches of fir, already bent to the prescribed curves for me, into a cleft stick had not seemed difficult, especially with three lessons behind me, and I had worked hard and been very confident that morning.

With a thousand apologies the little old lady pulled the bronze dish towards her, while Arabella cleared her throat.

“In Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice adapted to a kindergarten class--her Japanese voice, “we do not learn such a simple thing, we do it naturally. Every European woman can arrange flowers, and they are flowers” (with a glance at the fir branches in the little old lady’s hand--she was busy correcting) “not trees.”

The little old lady was putting back the five fir branches into the cleft stick with the deftest of deft fingers. Arabella unclasped the brooch at her neck and pulled out what she called a “nosegay.” A bamboo vase, just a piece of the stem hollowed out, in which the fir had come from the florist that morning, lay on the floor. She picked it up.

“It should be of glass,” she said forgivingly, “but I will make it do.”

And then with her own hand she proceeded to arrange the Yokohama nosegay in the slender bamboo stem. There was a bit of spiræa, one fat red rose, and some miscellaneous leaves, which Arabella referred to grandiloquently as “green.” These she crammed tightly into the bamboo stem, and then placed it, with a “who-shall-deny-me” air, upon the table.

I looked at it. No, it was not a good specimen even of Western flower arrangement, but in how many buttonholes, on how many tables, had I seen something like it.

Flower arrangement is taught in the schools in Japan, and every Japanese girl learns. If she did not, she would not “arrange” anymore than we should paint or play.

The little old lady had finished, and she pushed the bronze dish along the table beside the bamboo vase. Then, with many compliments and much bowing, she thanked the _Ijin San_ for her “august kindness” and her “honourable condescension.” And the smooth phrases ran on and on, while I sat back on my heels and looked.

East and West, they stood there before me. At the best, what we aimed at was a scheme of colour, and at our worst no scheme at all. And what they strove after was line, whether in fir branches or lily leaves, in plum-blossom or iris flowers, line, and a coherent whole. Each branch, each twig, each flower, nay, each curve of the branch, each petal of the flower, each leaf of the twig, were parts, essential parts of the whole; for in Japan they draw with flowers and fir branches as we only draw for “design.” And line is beyond colour as sculpture is beyond painting.

The sun through the walls of rice-paned _shōji_ spread a warmed white light through the room, a limpid, liquid light in which there was no shadow.

The little old lady had been busy tidying up. The room was one clear sheet of pale yellow matting. On the low empty _tokonoma_ stood the bronze dish and its pure line drawing in fir. Arabella was offering the bamboo vase and its mixed contents “as a model,” and the little old lady bowed to the ground.

Once more I looked at the bronze vase and the pure outlines of the fir branches, at the bare room perfectly proportioned, at the rice-paned _shōji_, and the snowflake whiteness of that light which knew no colour and no shadow struck on my consciousness.