Part 8
I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not colour but a blot. Outside the rice-paned _shōji_ lay life and colour enough. Here was but light and line.
Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese _sayonara_.
I looked back one last time--and Arabella’s nosegay vanished.
IV
GOD’S MESSENGER
The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the Iris, _Hana-shōbu_, and along the raised causeway, between the fields, the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the _kurumaya_, silhouette against the blue sky.
You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden, and they are an hour’s _’ricksha_ ride from the city, so that the _fête_ is select. In the covered court of the entrance the _kuruma_ are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while the _kurumaya_, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the slender shafts and smoke their pipes--three whiffs from the metal thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp _tink_, _tink_, as the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long _kuruma_ ride proving prohibitive; but the grey _kimono_ of the classes, Tokyo shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack of the wooden _gheta_ on the earthen pathway, as the little _musmé_ carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed summer-houses, is incessant.
We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit _on_ the cushions, with our feet on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous to see the _Ijin San_ sitting on the tables with their legs hanging uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each little white _tabi_ sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea, inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the _Ijin San’s_ legs are not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized boot could only have been invented by people without toes?
The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea, and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly doing something, not even the children.
In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes; one of them is writing a poem. And a _bourgeois_ Sabbath peace is over the land.
The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack of the _musmé’s gheta_ on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers.
Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend, Iris, _Hana-shōbu_. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving people alone know how to create--and how to read. For many generations have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to black or to the purest white.
The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read.
V
THE ART OF THE PEOPLE
It is usual in judging the art of a nation to consider solely the art of the artists and never the art of the people. The first is naturally of greater importance; it affords moreover an easy method of comparison and enables art critics to register the high-water mark of a country’s art, and this being found, the question is considered settled and the nation judged accordingly. We say the French are artistic and think promptly of Corot, Meissonier, or Puvis de Chavannes, not of the people of France. But the art of a nation, always something less, is often something very different from the art of its artists, and though the artists’ art will give you the high-water mark, it does not and it cannot give the general art level of the people. The English nation produced the greatest dramatist who ever lived, and several fine comedians, yet the level of the nation’s dramatic instinct is acknowledged to be far below that of the French. If we wish to get a true opinion of French and English dramatic feeling we must study something more and something other than the dramatists. For it is not the presence or the absence of a certain number of celebrated men, or even the greater or the lesser value of their works, which necessarily makes a whole nation dramatic or artistic, but it is the general level of the dramatic or artistic feeling in the average individual of that nation. That a truly dramatic or artistic nation has more chance of producing a greater number of dramatists or artists is certain, the conditions under which they would work being so much more favourable, but to consider no one but the artist and nothing but his art, and then to transfer the judgment on the artist’s art to the whole nation, is surely a confusion of ideas. It is a confusion to which art seems particularly susceptible. For most people, in England any way, seem to regard art as comprising only expensive objects suitable for exhibition in museums, and not as an integral part of every article used in daily life. Museum art is the product of a nation’s artists, for the enjoyment of the rich and the cultured, but the art of a people is as wide as its life, it touches everything and is for the joy and the pleasure of all men.
Artists’ art is an end in itself, its whole reason for existence is to create beauty, but the art of a people is not an end, but a means. The problem before it is very different and really more complicated, for it is to add beauty to mere utility, and by force of art to create art in objects whose _raison d’être_ is usefulness. And the greater the number of useful objects made beautiful, and the more beautiful the useful objects, and the further removed from beauty and the more sunk in mere utility the useful object is, so much greater will be the people’s art.
To add beauty to mere utility, art may be said to use three ways. It does it
(1) Directly, by moulding the shape (the material of useful objects being already determined);
(2) Indirectly, by decoration; and
(3) Extra-directly, by arrangement.
And if art be truly in a people, even the most ugly and stubborn of useful objects will, by one of these three methods, be made beautiful.
I suppose that any one who has ever seen a rice-field will allow that for at least some six months in the year it is one of the ugliest objects in the world. Made of liquid mud, it lies for half the year a slimy, greasy black pond shut in by low mud walls. On its oozy surface gather unwholesome growths that shine with metallic reflections, while the manure, in Japan mostly human, decomposes in the thick mud. There is nothing, I suppose, much uglier, nothing more useful, and its ugliness is the condition of its utility. The Japanese cannot change the thick black ooze, they cannot change the low mud walls which embank the slimy pools. These, with all their ugly consequences, are fixed and determined. But the art of the Japanese people has yet rendered the rice-fields beautiful. They change the shape. Those embanking walls of mud are moulded as a potter moulds his clay. A series of dead square fields I have never seen. Two, three, four, five, six, even eight-sided rice-fields can be found in Japan, and often the curves of the mud wall itself are graceful as the lines of a Greek vase.
Beneath the temple of Tesshuji, which looks towards the wonder of Fujiyama, with its two pure lines of exquisite grace, is a great fertile plain, a plain of innumerable rice-fields, one of the richest in the country. When I stood on the steps of that deserted temple and looked down, the fields were all black and naked, and yet the plain was neither ugly nor monotonous, for the peasants had curved their rice-fields into exquisite lines, and not two were alike.
A wall has certainly more possibilities than a rice-field, but our modern walls, the high brick atrocity of a prison or an embankment, is not usually beautiful. We make spasmodic attempts to beautify their monotonous ugliness with creepers or other coverings. That is, we do not beautify the wall, we take something less ugly and conceal it. Now the Japanese beautify the wall. (We are only considering here walls of mere utility, where all decoration or ornamentation is out of the question.) Except for the brick walls of the foreign buildings, walls in Japan are made of hewn stone usually shaped like pyramids and hammered base outwards into a bank of earth. In a country whose architecture, from the most glorious of its temples to the humblest of its houses, is all of wood, a clumsiness, a _gaucherie_ in its stonework might be well excused, yet Japanese walls are a wonder to all who see them, for the hard enduring granite is plastic beneath their fingers. Their walls are never dead straight. The line always curves softly outward as it touches the ground. And this not only in the strong walls of the _daimyō’s_ castle, or the long moat walls of the Mikado’s palace, but in the embankment walls of the tiniest shrine, in the modern walls of the modern temple of the modern coaling port of Moji.
To beautify a useful object indirectly by decoration is a great deal easier, at any rate the means and the possibility of doing so are more apparent; and yet, do we draw designs on our sacks, on our flour sacks, grain sacks, potato sacks, as they do in Japan?
For many months I passed regularly every day through a street of warehouses where sacks of all kinds, and containing all sorts of produce, were lying on the ground, were being carried into the _godown_ or were loading or unloading. It was some time before it really struck me that the sacks were decorated, that their blank yellow sides were made beautiful with a design; but when I had once realised it, I used to look carefully to see if I could find sacks without. They were extremely rare. The designs varied considerably. A flower, conventional or natural, a maple leaf, a broken branch of plum-or cherry-blossom, the delicate outline of the bamboo in a thousand different shapes, were the most common, but there were others, birds, geometrical patterns, rice-ears, Fujiyama. These designs were with true decorative feeling in one corner, rarely in the exact centre, and admirably proportioned to the size of the sack. They were mostly drawn in, in soft blues--the commonest colour in the Far East--sometimes in a pale but very beautiful green; colours which, on the unbleached cotton or pale yellow matting of the sack, made complete harmonies.
But a sack, whatever its business in life, is at least an article of considerable duration, it is not made to be used and thrown away the next moment like the paper wrapping of a parcel. Yet it is very few parcels in very few shops which are not wrapped up in paper whose monotonous surface is broken by just one tiny design. The papers in which piece-silks are wrapped, the equivalent to those whitey-brown covers which drapers seem perpetually doing up on our counters, are often really beautiful in both colour and design. I do not think a Japanese can see a blank surface without wanting to design something on it, something little, something beautiful, just to redeem it for art.
These designs are to be found, if one looks for them, in the most unexpected places, on the axle-heads of your _kuruma_ for instance. A casual and rather dilapidated _kuruma_ in an out-of-the-way town in Japan had such exquisite flying storks beaten on to the bronze metal of its axle-head that I had to get out and look at them. The _kurumaya_ was amused at my enthusiasm, and entered into a detailed comparison of these axle-heads with all the other axle-heads of all the other _kuruma_ of his acquaintance, explaining their respective merits and defects. If there is no actual design the metal is usually beaten in such a way as to form an irregular pattern.
When a Japanese cannot mould the shape of an object, when he cannot redeem it by a design, when in fact he has no control over its creation at all, but it is placed in his hands as it is, finished, he will still contrive to add beauty to it merely by arrangement. I first noticed this on board the steamer going out, where the Japanese “boy” arranged the extra blanket on the berth in a new design each day. He folded it into lotus leaves and chrysanthemums, into half-opened fans and half-shut buds. He had one wonderful arrangement which, being patriotic, was more often repeated than the rest. The blankets of the steamship company had, instead of the usual stripes at top and bottom, just two thick wavy lines of deep red--the steamer’s flag was two wavy red lines on a white ground; by some wonderful twist of his fingers the “boy” would fold that blanket into the rising sun, with the four red lines coming out of it like blood-red rays. It sounds difficult, but he did it so perfectly that I recognised the flag of Japan the moment I saw it. Nor was he exceptional; the other “boys” on board were just as artistic, all the other cabins, for in the course of the voyage I entered most of them, were equally decorated, though in most cases the art had been quite lost on the occupants.
A Japanese servant, any servant, even one in a hotel, will set out your hair brushes, clothes brushes, nail scissors, collar box, tooth-powder tin on the ordinary average hotel dressing-table and make a design of them. The toilette table will somehow be a picture, an artistic whole. It was an application of art I tried hard to learn, and failed dismally. After awhile I could manage something with the brushes; but the nail scissors, and more especially the tooth-powder tin, remained, in my hands, the unbeautiful necessary articles which they intrinsically are.
We make in Europe various attempts at beautifying our food. We put parsley on white dishes round cold mutton, and paper frills on ham bones where the pins are dangerous. On special occasions, such as a Lord Mayor’s banquet or a cookery exhibition, we serve pastries as Tower Bridges, or jellies as broken lutes, but we do not consistently arrange our food so that each dish is a colour scheme and an art design of its own.
I lunched once with a professor in Tokyo; it was a modest meal in the house of a man badly off, according to our ideas, but when the red-lacquered trays came in, each lunch on its own tray, and all the courses served together, I could not restrain a cry of delight. The whole set out in its red-lacquered tray was a picture, each dish in itself was another. The golden bream lay on a pale blue dish; an oval slab of pounded fish, pure white in colour, rested against a mound of lime-green chestnuts; in front and lying in a crescent curve were purple roots, brown ginger, and tiny slices of red radish. It was simply a triumph. I have eaten pinky brown soup in which the curved peel of an orange floated like a golden dolphin; pale yellow custards, served in delicate blue bowls, whose surfaces were ruffled with silver fishes; white rice-moulds wrapped in the delicate tendrils of a vine-green seaweed; thin slices of pink raw fish, the colour of an uncooked salmon, laid out on green dishes and garnished with little heaps of olive seaweed shaven fine and eaten with a burnt-sienna sauce. The very hawkers in the streets serve their one-_rin_ (10 to a ¼_d._) sweetmeats or their snow-white _tōfu_ daintily, on plates of appropriate colour, artistically set out. The rice-paste biscuits are veritable works of art in shape and colour. You can eat almost every variety of chrysanthemum, as well as see it, and the colouring, all vegetable, is almost as beautiful.
We have, I believe, in England, a profession called “window-dressing,” and in a few cases this does truly attain to art. But with us it always ends at the windows. Enter the shop and, unless it is a showroom, you stand in the midst of undigested cargoes of goods; and whose eye has not been pained by heaped rolls of stuff where a post-office red will lie, as often as not, on the top of a crimson and underneath a magenta? That is a thing which could not happen in Japan; the eye of the young man behind the counter would forbid it.
I once watched a whole consignment of silks being put away on shelves in a shop in Tokyo. It was the European side of the establishment, so that the shop was fitted with counters, chairs, and the usual drapers’ shelves, the silks, too, told the same tale in their width and pattern. It was only a boy who was putting them away, sixteen at the outside, yet he did it with a conscious choice, and when he had finished, the silks, which ran through the whole gamut of colour, harmonised delightfully. But the real Japanese shops are more beautiful still. To go over the Mitsui is to walk through a gallery of pictures in still life. Here are no heaps of undigested goods, no mere piles of articles, but a definite and deliberate setting forth of certain things which left the impression that the clerks of the Mitsui posed their silken goods as an artist his model. The Mitsui is one of the best shops in Tokyo; to be perfectly fair compare it with one of our “art salesmen.” But the best of our shops tie up their parcels in whitey-brown paper with tow-coloured string, thinner or thicker according to the weight of the parcel. In the Mitsui the string is all pure white or scarlet-red, and each parcel is tied with a strand of both laid side by side, the heavier the parcel the greater the number of scarlet and white strings, always laid side by side, until sometimes they make a wide white line above a wide red one, kept evenly together by a skilful knot. The ends, too, are not snapped off anyhow after tying an ugly knot, but are cut slantwise, to form a V or a point, and even the knot is beautiful because it is a coherent whole, and not a conglomeration of successive ties.
So far, all these things, rice-fields, sacks, and food, with the sole exception of the blankets and hair brushes, have been exclusively Japanese, the nation has evolved them in itself, and by itself, and consequently in comparing them with things European it has only been possible to take similar and not identical objects. But since their first contact with Europe, and more especially during the last thirty years, the Japanese have borrowed a certain number of articles directly from the West. They have borrowed beer-glasses, windows, and wall-papers. And from the Dutch, three-hundred years ago, they took pipes and tobacco pouches. A light kind of _lager_ beer is rapidly becoming a universal drink in Japan. There are several native breweries, and those places where beer has not penetrated are considered hopelessly “old-fashioned.” After the beer came the beer-glasses, and though the art of the nation has not been long at work upon them, they are already very different from their European models. It must be remembered, too, that glass was unknown to the Japanese until it was introduced from the West. The first thing which the nation did when it set to work upon beer-glasses was to reduce the size, otherwise they would have been out of all proportion to the rest of the dinner service, and so the beer-glasses of Japan are small as dolls’ tumblers in which, if you are lucky, you will find three sips of beer under the egg-white froth.
If this example illustrates the love of the little, generally supposed to be the chief characteristic of the Japanese, the case of the windows will show their dislike to unredeemed blank space, and at the same time their knowledge of the artistic value of space in design. So long as windows only existed in houses built in the style called “foreign,” they remained severely Western, just another European object like the railway or the telegraph set up in the land, but when they began to be introduced into Japanese houses, then the art of the nation set to work upon them. They are still rare, but in a few private houses and in some of the best native hotels windows exist. They do not open. They were not introduced to supply ventilation, an unnecessary consideration in a Japanese house, which is all draughts, nor really for light, the paper panes of the _shōji_ admitting light readily; but just in order that the person inside might have another picture before his eyes--the picture of what lies without. The window then is not a glass fitting to an oblong hole knocked into a wall, but a broad band of glass running round the whole length of the _shōji_ at just that distance from the ground which will allow anyone sitting on his heels on the floor to see through comfortably. A pattern on this glass window would have interfered with the view, and the window was there expressly for the view. So the glass is empty and clear, but not blank. Then it would have been merely useful, and the Japanese never stop at utility; it had to be made beautiful, and so the pure perfect curves of Fuji were traced upon the glass. The design was quite small and only occupied one end, but the area of the glass was no longer blank space, but the demanded setting to a picture.
There is no place in a Japanese house for wall-papers, but the number of foreign-built hotels and houses has created a certain demand for them. Also the Japanese are beginning to export wall-papers abroad. As the patterns are mostly supplied to them direct from European firms, or copied from models sent them on order, they have to please their market, and yet I have seen a wall-paper in a hotel bedroom where two golden dragons drawn back to back studded a white ground. It was a perfectly conventional pattern, and at first there seemed nothing remarkable about it. The tiny dragons, looking something like a _fleur de lys_, occurred at six-inch intervals. Then it dawned gradually, the intervals were not regular, they differed both lengthways and width-ways. It took indeed ten feet of wall before the pattern absolutely repeated itself.