Part 4

The general aspect of Japan during the summer months is a harmony in greens, the dark pines and cryptomerias striking the lowest note of a scale which culminates in the

brilliancy of the rice-fields--the most vivid green I know. There is more variety of color in those districts which are not irrigated, such as that round Kamakura, where the light sandy soil grows a great many kinds of vegetables, sweet-potatoes, melons, tomatoes, beans, and big patches of auratum and longiflorum lilies, the bulbs of which are exported. The lily is not one of the flowers which the Japanese themselves particularly admire, nor do they often use it for decoration. In this, as in most other matters, there are recognized rules of taste, and the man is considered

an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to like. I was walking one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without any leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took my pen and paper, and showed me what were the seven beautiful flowers of late summer--the convolvulus, the name of which in Japanese is “asago,” meaning the same as our “morning-glory;” wild chrysanthemum; yellow valerian; the lespedeza, a kind of bush clover; _Platycodon grandiflorum_, a purple-blue campanula; _Eulalia japonica_, the tall grass which covers so many of the hills; and shion, a rather insignificant-flowered aster. I noticed that some versions of the seven flowers differed from his; a large-flowered mallow is often substituted for the last he named. There are doubtless different schools which hold strong views on the subject, but on the morning-glory and some others they are evidently agreed. The auratum lily is a common wild flower in the hilly districts, and boiled lily bulbs are a favorite vegetable, but I could not find out which was considered the best variety for the table. O Shige San told me that it was a red lily; I looked in vain for any of that color in their gardens.

The cottages in the country round Kamakura are thickly thatched, and on the top of the thatch is laid a mass of earth held together by iris plants, which form a roof-crest of spiky green; near them in July there often were large hydrangea bushes covered with balls of blossom, the young flowers a pale yellow-green, changing as they grew older through bright blue to purple.

On the 9th of July the heat drove me from Europeanized Yokohama to the hills. I left the train at Utso-no-miya, a little town which has been financially ruined by the railway--for every one formerly stayed a night there instead of travelling straight through--and was delighted to find myself once more in thoroughly Japanese quarters. It was a wonderful moonlight night, and I wandered round the town in kimono and clogs, watched the people, and was stared at by them, climbed the steps to the big Shinto temple, and

gazed over the plains flooded with pale light, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

There is a railway now to Nikko, and most people rush up there without seeing the glorious avenue of cryptomerias--described so well in Loti’s _Japoneries d’Automne_--which line the old road for miles and miles. I sent my boy and my baggage by rail, and went myself in a kuruma with two good runners. The road is sadly out of repair in some places, but the splendid old trees remain, and young ones have been planted where winds and age have thinned their ranks. It is not like an ordinary avenue with the trees planted some yards apart; these are so close together that the trunks have often joined at the base, and I noticed one lot of seven big trees all grown together at the bottom into a mass that must have been eight or ten yards long. The road is sunk between the high banks on which the trees grow, and it must be gloomy enough on such a night as Loti experienced. Here and there it opens out into a village street, with abundance of refreshment booths for the pilgrims who still make the journey on foot.

Nikko itself is a long, steep street, leading up to a rushing mountain torrent in a rocky ravine, which is crossed by two bridges side by side. One is an ordinary wooden structure, used by all the world; the other, which is of red lacquer, with black supports and brass ornaments, is only opened for the Emperor and his family to pass over. Beyond them the hills rise, covered with cryptomerias, among which are concealed the great mortuary temples of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, founders of the great Tokugawa Shogunate that lasted for two centuries. Marvellous as these mausolea are, they make no effect in the distance; it is only when you get close to them, wander about in their successive court-yards, and examine the lovely details of wood-carving, lacquer, and gilding, that the wonder of them strikes you. The tombs themselves are plain bronze pillars, and are reached by long flights of granite steps, green and gray with mosses and lichens, which lead up under the dark masses of foliage behind the temples. After passing through all the glories of color and elaborate workmanship in the preliminary temples their final peacefulness and simplicity are very striking.

Nikko in the summer is full of foreign ladies and children; the Emperor, too, has a country-house there, where some of his large family spend the hot months. I saw the arrival of two little princesses, with a crowd of nurses, tutors, and officials. They were funny little things, about three or four years old, not as pretty as most Japanese children, but dressed in the most gorgeous colors. The red lacquer bridge was opened for them, decorated with “gohei”--the strips

of white paper which are used so largely in the Shinto religion--and in the middle of the bridge there was a little table with offerings of food on it, where the children stopped and made their obeisances to the manes of their ancestors as they passed over. All the priests of Nikko turned out in gauze vestments of many colors, Buddhist and Shinto equally anxious to do honor to the descendants of the gods.

The hills are alive with little tinkling streams of clear water, and the favorite walks mostly lead to waterfalls. I spent a soaking day making a sketch of one of them--Kirifuri; the path to it crossed a wide, stony river, and went over grassy hills where there were abundant wild flowers, purple iris, white and mauve funkias, yellow orchids, clusters of white roses, pink spiræas, hydrangeas, St.-John’s-wort, meadow-rue, and bocconia appearing here and there, half hidden among the rank herbage. The big buds of auratum lilies showed how fine they would be in a few days’ time. Just in front of the waterfall a little tea-house gave me shelter enough to work in; but the path, up which I had walked dry-shod, by the time I got back had been turned to a raging torrent, and I only just crossed the stony river in time, for the light bamboo bridge was washed down during the night.

Chūzenji is a little hamlet, some hours’ walk from Nikko up a mountain road, consisting of a group of tea-houses which overlook a charming lake, a very sacred temple with a large bronze torii, and long rows of sheds to accommodate the pilgrims who come in early August to make the

ascent of Nantai-zan, the mountain which rises close behind the village. During five long days of incessant rain I painted everything that was visible from my room in one of the tea-houses, the water of the lake rising each day so much higher that on the last two I was able to take a morning header from my balcony, and I hardly got a chance to explore the country round. At last a bright morning tempted me to

walk on to Yumoto, and see the sulphur springs and the wide moorland, Senjō-ga-hara, which lies surrounded by mountain-peaks at a height of nearly five thousand feet above the sea. On the moor the grasses do not grow high enough to conceal the flowers, and I found it gay with purple iris and white meadow-rue. The baths in Yumoto are open to the public; they are large wooden tanks under sheds by the road-side, and as you walk along the street you see the patients, men, women, and children, all sitting together, in a state of nature, up to their necks in the steaming malodorous soup. The clouds were gathering round the mountain-tops as I started to walk back to Chūzenji, and before I had finished a rapid sketch on the moor the rain began again in torrents; the road was a series of small ponds, and my coolie insisted on carrying me, as well as my sketching materials, through them; but he unfortunately stumbled under my weight, and dropped me in the deepest of them, and what with the wet above and below I was well soaked by the time I reached my tea-house. The hibachi seems a very inadequate means of warmth on such occasions; a hot bath and whiskey and dry clothes are more effective, and after dinner a bottle of tamago-sake, a hot compound of whipped egg and sake, soon produces a pleasing drowsiness. Since leaving Chūzenji I have recognized the place in many drawings on screens and fans; the artist always gives its main features--the lake, the cryptomerias, the huge bronze torii, and the steep wooded slope of Nantai-zan--but he combines them in one view as you never can see them in reality. The rain had played havoc with the road back to Nikko; several bridges were down, but temporary ones built of fagots made it possible to cross the streams. All the higher woods near the lake are hung with gray moss, and the flowering shrubs which grow among them are endless--azaleas, climbing and bushy hydrangeas, weigelia, seringa, and wild vine; on the ground I found orange Turk’s-cap lilies, columbines, the big _Lilium cordifolium_, and ferns of many kinds.

Notwithstanding the advantage of cooler nights, I was glad to leave the green mountains, with their constant rain and mists, and the shut-in valleys, where it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards away, and get down

again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. On the journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.

The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms. Besides this their glaucous surface, like that of a cabbage leaf, reflects every passing phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in color as clouds pass over.

Japanese drawings of flowers--and they usually draw them beautifully--are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as a marked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese art.

The Japanese treatment of landscape is not more conventional than that of Claude or David Cox, or than the shorthand of our pencil-sketches, but it records its facts in a different way. The everlasting question in art is the imitation of nature; it has never been carried further in certain directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, or in others than by Manet, Monet, and the modern French, but no one can put in everything; look at a simple bunch of leaves in sunlight against a wall, and think how long it would take to really imitate all their complexities of form, color, and light and shade; some facts can only be given by ignoring others, and the question what is the important thing which must be insisted on is the personal affair of each individual artist in every country where art is unfettered and alive. But in Japanese, as in Byzantine and other Eastern arts, this question is still decided by the practice of past generations, and it will take all the vitality of a strong man to infuse new life into it without destroying its many exquisite qualities. Perhaps when Japanese artists absorb its spirit instead of merely trying to imitate its methods, Western art may help in the direction of freedom; at present I fear that its influence has done more harm than good.

The people are so quick to recognize the meaning of a few lines, and to understand the poetic idea which they suggest, that it is a wonder the artists ever learned to draw at all; they might have been content with symbols, for a few lines like those below are enough to convey all the poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the well-known art motives.

The little island of Benten is a frequented spot, and my easel was surrounded from morning till night with a crowd of spectators; they dispersed at the command of the policeman on his hourly round, but after he had gazed his fill and left me, a new lot instantly assembled. They were mostly children; and a crowd of Japanese children is twice as many as any other crowd of its size, for every child has another smaller one tied to its back. I suppose they are not born in pairs this way, but they contract the habit of carrying a little one at a very early age, and often tie on a doll when a sufficiently small human being cannot be found. The spectators are almost always polite, and take care not to put themselves between you and your subject; but they squeeze up very close to your elbow, and trample on your nerves, if not on your materials. They usually remarked that my work was a photograph; some more educated ones said that it was an oil-painting, that being the medium which is associated with foreign art; and one man said that it was enamel, which I took as a compliment to the brilliancy of my color. The keeper of a little tea-shed hard by, where I took my lunch, noticed that I was worried by the people standing so close to me, and when I arrived next morning I found that he had put up a fence round the place where I worked; it was only a few slender bamboo sticks, with a thin string twisted from one to another, but not a soul attempted to come inside it. They are such an

obedient and docile race that a little string stretched across a road is quite enough to close the thoroughfare. It is difficult to reconcile the character of this peaceable and pleasure-loving race which the modern traveller sees with that which is ascribed to their forefathers--those heroes of the desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries of Tokugawa rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed qualities of unreasoning obedience, and perhaps all the struggles of the past were merely dynastic, or affairs between the warriors of different clans; perhaps the people themselves have always been as gentle as they are now, cultivating their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little affected by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all times and countries, they were called on to supply the sinews of war.

The lotus is intimately connected with Buddhism; most personifications of the Buddha are represented as seated or standing on its flower, or holding an unexpanded bud in their hands; it is largely used in temple decorations, and vases with imitations in metal of the flowers, leaves, buds, and seed-pods, often very exquisite in workmanship, stand on all the altars. It is typical to the Buddhist mind of the qualities of the ideal man: as it grows in the mud, yet produces a lovely flower, it is a symbol of purity in a naughty world; as its odor sweetens the air around, so his good deeds influence those about him; it opens in the morning sunshine, and his mind is expanded by the light of knowledge; its branchless stalks, rising without a break to the leaf or flower, are a type of his single-mindedness and directness of purpose; and its edible root shows that the basis of his life must be usefulness to others. To this I may add that, like the very good, the flower always dies young. It is lovely enough in itself without all this halo of virtue. Hardy says of Tess, “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”; this is unavoidable with most of us, and the suggestion of feelings and memories of our own does not necessarily obscure our visual sense; but a fixed and recognized suggestion is the result of mental laziness, and may lead to the ignoring of intrinsic beauty; as our lovely primrose is to some eyes a political badge, admired only because of its association with a name and a faction, or rejected for the same cause. To quote Mr. Punch,

“A primrose by the river’s brim A party emblem was to him, And it was nothing more.”

But the lotus has not sunk so low as this; though it has been adopted by the Buddhists, it excites no animosity in Shinto breasts; and where temples under the present _régime_ have been handed over from the one religion to the other, though the pagoda and other distinctively Buddhist

structures are pulled down, the lotus-ponds are left in their beauty. The largest I saw were those connected with the great Hachiman temple at Kamakura, which has been turned over to the state religion; they cover several acres, and the flowers in them are of three colors--either white, bright rose, or a delicate shell-like pink. All three varieties seem to grow equally freely, and one is as lovely as the other. The white one has been specially adopted by

the followers of Nichiren, a noisy sect which beats a drum during the long hours of prayer, and it is this variety, too, which is usually grown in patches here and there among the rice-fields for the sake of its roots. They have not much flavor, except that of the sugar with which they are boiled, but they are crisp in texture and pleasant to munch. The children are very fond of the nutlike seeds which are embedded in the fleshy seed-pod; it looks very like the rose of a watering-pot. In the tea-booths round the temple of Benten they use a dried slice of this pod for a mat on which to stand the cup or bowl.

Kamakura was for a long time the capital of Japan; in the twelfth century it was selected for his headquarters by Yoritomo, the great warrior whose victories enabled him to take the reins into his own hands, and to establish that system of military government which only ended with the deposition of the last Shogun in 1868. But when a rival family defeated his successors they removed the seat of government, and Kamakura rapidly declined from a great city of more than a million inhabitants to the insignificant fishing-village which it now is, with nothing to show of its former greatness but this temple of Hachiman, and the Daibutsu, an enormous bronze Buddha, not only remarkable for its size, but also for being the finest and most dignified production which the art of Japan can show. The temple buildings which once sheltered it were destroyed ages ago, and the image is now in the open air, in one of the little valleys which branch out from the plain and run back among the pine-clad hills. Centuries of exposure to rain and sun have given varied colors to the great bronze god. He is seated cross-legged on a lotus-flower, his hands folded in his lap; the head is bent slightly forward, and his face gazes down with an expression of calm superiority which can only come from perfected wisdom and subjugated passions. A new shrine to Yoritomo’s memory, all of black and gold, stands near one of the lotus-ponds; in front of it are some splendid old willow-trees, which he is said to have planted, and under which he sat and composed poetry when he was not engaged more actively in fighting. It is hardly possible that these willows can have lived to such a great age; they are probably descendants of the original trees. Behind the shrine is a large modern barrack, and I saw bands of white-clad recruits, with side-arms and repeating rifles, trousers,