Part 6
Our winter here has no severity. Season dear to the philosopher, these bare trees, this yellow grass, sufficiently attest the passing of the time, without atrocious cold or unnecessary violence. In this twelfth month, cemeteries and kitchen gardens, and a country mounded everywhere with tombs, spread out in dull productivity. The clumps of blue bamboo, the somber pines above the sepulchers, the gray-green reed-grass, arrest and satisfy one’s gaze. The yellow flowers of the New Year’s Candlestick and the waxen berries of the Soot Tree give a real beauty to the somber picture. I proceed in peace across this temperate region.
Now it is night. It would be vain to wait, stationed in the bow of this junk, for the reflection of our wooden anchor to trace on the beatified water the image of that waning moon which only midnight holds for us. All is dark; but as we move on, propelled by the scull which steers our prow, we need not fear mistaking our way. These canals permit of numberless detours. Let us pursue the voyage with tranquillity, our eyes on yonder solitary star.
THE HALT ON THE CANAL
Now,--passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,--encountering waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside; by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass, the crude material of epitaphs.
With day our investigation begins. We become entangled in a maze of Chinese streets, murky and moist with domestic odors. For a long time we follow the narrow footpath in the turmoil of the market-place, in the midst of a people mixed in with their dwellings as bees are with their wax and honey. I recall a little girl winding a skein of green silk, a barber cleaning the ear of his client with a fine pincer like the antennæ of a crawfish; a little donkey turning a millstone near an oil warehouse, the dark quiet of a pharmacy within whose depths, through the gilded frame of a moon-shaped door, two red candles flame before the name of the apothecary. We traverse many courts, more than a hundred bridges.
Winding through narrow alleys bordered by great sepia-colored walls, we reach the richer quarter. If these closed doors should open to us, they would show vestibules flagged with stone, a reception hall with its large bed-table, a little peach-tree flowering in a pot, and smoky passages whose rafters are hung with hams and bundles. Hidden behind this wall, in a little court we find a monster of a wisteria plant. Its hundred creepers interlace, interweave, tie themselves in knots, and twine into a kind of manifold, tortuous cable, which, thrusting out its woody, serpentine length on all sides, spreads over the trellis, hiding its trench in a thick sky of mauve clusters. Let us traverse the ruins of this long suburb where naked men are weaving silk in the débris. We shall gain a deserted space which occupies the south side of the enclosure.
Here, they say, was formerly the imperial residence; and in fact the triple grating and quadruple framework of the consecutive doors bar, with their granite outlines, the wide flagged road on which we walk. The enclosure contains nothing but rank herbage; and,--at the place where the “Four Ways” meet, which diverge toward the four cardinal points under triumphal arches,--with an inscription like a map displayed to the whole Kingdom, the imperial stele, defaced by the fissures in its marble, slants on the decapitated tortoise which is its base.
The Chinese show everywhere representations of that inherent emptiness whose necessity they emphasize. “Let us honor,” says the _Tao teh King_, “Vacuity, which gives to the wheel its utility and to the lute its harmony!” These ruins and these fallow tracts which are found in the same enclosure close to the densest multitudes, these sterile mountains shouldering the most meticulous culture, and the wide expanse of the cemeteries, do not impress the mind with a false idea; for, in the density and mass of this coherent people, administration and justice, religion and monarchy, disclose by contrasts no less strange the same yawning vacancy of vain phantoms and ruins.
China is not, like Europe, elaborated into compartments. No boundaries, no special statutes, oppose any resistance throughout her immense area to the spread of her surging humanity. That is why, powerless as is the sea to foresee its agitations, this nation which can only be saved from destruction by its plasticity, shows everywhere, like Nature itself, an antique and provisory aspect,--unstable, full of hazards, possibilities, and deficiencies. The present always contains the influences of the past and the future. Man has not made an absolute conquest of the soil, a final and methodical arrangement. The multitude still graze upon grass.
Suddenly a lugubrious cry overwhelms us! The guardian of the enclosure, at the foot of one of the gates designed like an upright letter which frame the field, sounds on the long Chinese trumpet; and we see the horn of thin brass quiver under the force of the sound which fills it. Raucous and rumbling, if he declines the trumpet toward the earth; and strident if he lifts it; without inflection and without cadences, the dreary blaring noise culminates in the reverberance of a frightful uproar,--do fa, do fa! The harsh call of a peacock would not startle more the drowsiness of this abandoned garden. It is the horn of the shepherd, and not the bugle, which speaks and commands. This is not the singing trumpet which leads armies on,--it is the collective voice of beasts; and the herd or the flocks confusedly assemble at its sound. But we are alone; and for nothing living does the Mongol trumpet at this mysterious crossing of the Ways.
When we return to our boat, it is almost night. At sunset, all down the horizon the clouds seem tinted with blue, and on the dim earth the fields of _colzas_ shine like blows of light.
THE PINE-TREE
In Nature, only the tree is upright as man is, and for a symbolic reason.
A man holds himself erect by preserving his balance, and his two arms, hanging at his sides, are no part of his unity. But, though attached to the earth by the collective grasp of its roots, the tree raises itself with an effort; its multifold and divergent parts, spreading out into a fragile and sensitive tissue of leaves, by which it seeks for some support in the very air and light, constitute no mere gesture but the very essential act and condition of its growth.
The family of conifers shows a special characteristic. In them I perceive not only a ramification of the trunk into branches, but also their articulation on a stem that rises straight and single,--an articulation which gradually multiplies into threadlike leaves. The fir-tree is typical of such a class, with the symmetrical intersections of its branches, whose essential plan is simply a perpendicular crossed by a graded series of horizontal lines.
This type includes many variations in the different regions of the world. The most interesting is that of the pines I studied in Japan.
Rather than the rigidity usual to wood, the trunk appears to have a fleshy elasticity. Under the tension on the strong, cylindrical stem of compact fibers, its sheath splits and the rough bark, divided into pentagonal scales,--with deep cracks between them from which resin oozes abundantly,--expands in tough layers. And if, through the suppleness of its jointless body, the trunk yields to the exterior forces which violently assail it or seductively allure it, the tree resists by its inherent energy; and the drama of its pathetic struggle is written in the tormented twisting of its boughs.
Thus, along the tragic old road to Tokkaido, I have seen the pines sustain the onslaught of the powers of the air. In vain the wind of the ocean lays them low. Clinging with every root to the stony soil, the invincible trees writhe, twist upon themselves, and,--like a man braced on all fours, who butts with his head, kicks in all directions, and hunches himself together,--they seem to grapple with the antagonist, to re-establish themselves, and to straighten up under the Protean assaults of the monster who would overcome them. All along the solemn beach I have passed their heroic lines in review on this somber evening, and watched all the vicissitudes of the battle. One leans backward, and stretches toward the sky a monstrous panoply of halberds and shields which he brandishes in Briarean fists; another, full of wounds, mutilated as by blows of clubs, and bristling on all sides with jagged stumps, still wars and waves a few feeble boughs; another, which seems thrown upon its back, still battling against the dust, maintains itself on the powerful buttress of its gathered haunches; and finally, I saw giants and princes who, massively settling upon their muscular loins, by the reiterated efforts of their Herculean arms, continued to hold their ground on all sides against the tumultuous enemy.
I have still to speak of the foliage.
If I compare to the pines the species of trees that flourish in fertile earth, in rich and mellow soil, I discover these four characteristics in them; that the proportion of leaf to wood is greater; that the leaf is deciduous; that, flattened, it shows an obverse and reverse side; and, finally, that the foliage, growing upon the boughs, diverging from a common center, is arranged like a single bouquet.
The pine grows in dry and stony soil; therefore its absorption of the elements which nourish it is less immediate, and necessitates on its part a stronger and completer elaboration, a greater functional activity,--and, if I may so put it, more personal. As it is limited in its supply of water, it does not expand like a chalice. This one that I observe divides its foliage, spreads a handful on every side. Instead of leaves which receive the rain, these are tufts of little tubes which reach into the surrounding dampness and absorb it. And that is why,--independent of the seasons, sensitive to more continuous and subtle influences,--the pine shows a perennial foliage.
Thus I explain the aerial character of its foliage, fragmentarily suspended. As the pine lends the irregular outline of its boughs to the lines of the harmonious landscape, better to enhance the charm and the brilliancy of Nature, it also spreads everywhere the shadow of its singular tufts; over the power and the glory of Ocean, blue in the sun; over the harvest fields; and obstructing the design of the constellations or the dawn upon the sky. It sweeps its branches beneath azalea bushes flaming near the surface of lakes blue as gentian, or above the steep embankments of the imperial city, close to the silver, grass-grown waters of the canals; and the evening on which I saw Fuji like a colossus, like a virgin throned in the clarity of the Infinite, the dark tuft of a pine was silhouetted against the dove-colored mountain.
THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST
When I left Yeddo the great sun was flaming in the clear sky. Toward the end of the afternoon, arriving at the junction of Utsonomiya, I perceive that a shadow has darkened all the sunset. Composed of huge, heaped-up clouds, it presents that tumultuous and chaotic aspect that a sky sometimes shows when, like the veiled fire of footlights, a gleaming streak on the horizon throws long shadows across the dim fields, bringing out each object in clear relief. Drowsing on the wharf just now, and for a long time in the train moving westward, I have been a spectator of the decline of day and the gradual deepening of darkness. With one glance I have caught the whole plan of the country. In the background, deep forests and the folds of cumbrous mountains; in the foreground, detached footpaths which bar the way, one behind the other, like spaced and parallel barriers. Where the trenches we follow show us a cross-section of the earth, we see first a fine mold, black as coal; then yellow sand; and finally clay, red with sulphur or cinnabar. Avernus spreads out before us! Does not this scorching sun, this low sky, this surrounding harshness of volcanoes and fir-trees, correspond to that black abyss from which the visions of dreams arise? Indeed it was with a royal wisdom that the ancient shogun, Ieyasu, chose this place for his disembodied spirit to enter the kingdom of shades, and, by dissolving in silence into their shadows, transmute death into godhead as a temple is created of a tomb.
The forest of cryptomeria is truly a temple.
Often before, at this hour of somber twilight, I had crossed the double avenue of these giant trees,--which extends twenty leagues to conduct from the red bridge the annual ambassador who bears Imperial presents to this ancestral shrine,--but this morning, at the hour when the first rays of the sun turned the banks of somber verdure above me to rose color in the golden wind which swept them, I penetrated into the colossal nave, deliciously filled with a resinous odor, after the cold night.
The cryptomeria belong to the family of pines, and the Japanese have named it sengui. It is a very tall tree, whose trunk, free of twists and knots, maintains an inviolable rectitude. There are no branches, but indicated here and there, as is the way with pines, not by detail and relief but by mass and contour, the leaves float like tatters of black smoke about the mystic pillar; and the forest of these tall trunks, all of the same height, loses itself in the tangled canopy of shadowy, inextricable foliage. The place is simultaneously limitless and confined, filled and empty.
The marvelous houses are scattered among these trees that have been parked for centuries.
I shall not describe the whole plan of the shaded city, though it is marked on my fan to the minutest detail. In the middle of the dedicated forest I have followed enormous avenues that a scarlet torii bars. At a bronze basin, under a roof inlaid with the moon, I have filled my mouth with lustral waters; I have climbed the stairs; among many pilgrims I have passed indescribable opulence and space, the entrance to an enclosure that is like a dream formed of a confusion of flowers and birds; barefoot, I have penetrated to its innermost golden heart. I have seen the priests with haughty faces,--with head-dresses of horsehair, and clothed with ample trousers of green silk,--offer the morning sacrifice to the sound of flute and mouth-organ. And for me the sacred _kagura_,--his face framed in white linen, holding the tasseled bough of the pine devoutly between his hands,--has executed the dance which consists of continual advance and retreat.
As Chinese architecture has for its chief element the baldachin; stories being raised as on the poles of a pastoral tent; so, in Japan, the roofs made of tiles, or those made of a substance as powerful, strong, and light as a thick felt, show but a slight curve; they are no more, in their elegant power, than a cover; and all this construction evolves from the idea of a box.
Since the time when Jingô Tennô conquered the isles of the rising sun with his fleet, the Japanese have everywhere preserved some signs of the sea: the habit of tucking up their clothes to the waist, these low cabins which are their homes under an uncertain sun, the multitude of neat little objects and their careful stowage, the absence of furniture,--do they not all betray the confined life of the sailor on his precarious deck? And these wooden houses are themselves nothing more than the enlarged cabin of a galley, or the box of a palanquin. The extensions, intersected by carpentry; the oblique shafts, of which the figured heads jut out at four angles; still recall the quality of being portable. Among the columns of the temple, arches seem the means by which it may be lifted.
Houses? Yes. Here the very sanctuary is a house. They have relegated the bones, sealed in a cylinder of bronze, to the high mountainside; but in this room, seated on the unalterable name, the soul of the dead continues a spectral habitation in obscure and secret splendor. Reversing the procedure which employs wood and stone and makes them of value without adding any strange element to their own properties, artifice has existed here only to annihilate its material. These enclosures, the sides of these boxes, these floors and ceilings, are no longer made of beams and planks but of certain opaque images conjured forth. Color decorates and adorns the wood, lacquer drowns it under impenetrable waters, paint covers it with enchantments, sculpture deeply undermines and transfigures it. An end of timber--the least spike appearing on the magic surface--is covered with arabesques and interlacing lines; but, as on screens we see trees in flower and mountains steeped in a radiant glow, these palaces emerge entirely golden. On the roofs, on the façades, which strike the full light of day, only the ridges are burnished with scattered brightness; but the sides are brightened in vast surfaces through the shadow; and inside also, the six walls of the box are painted with the splendors of hidden treasure, flaming brilliance revealed by numerous mirrors.
Thus the magnificent shogun does not inhabit a house of mere wood, but his dwelling in the center of the forest is in the light of setting suns; and ambrosial incense abides beneath these sweeping boughs. Through the immense spaces of this region, deeply slumbering like a god amid its sea of trees, an occasional dazzling cascade plashes between the leaves, mingling with their ceaseless whisper.
THE PEDESTRIAN
In June, with a gnarled stick in my hand (like the god Bishamon), I am that mysterious passer-by who crosses the path of groups of simple, ruddy peasants; and, at six in the evening, while the storm-cloud in the sky endlessly continues its monstrous assault on the mountain, I am that lonely man one sees upon this abandoned road.
I am going nowhere in particular. My wanderings are without end and without profit. The itinerary of the soldier or the merchant, the piety of the sterile woman who, with hopeful humility, seven times makes a tour of the holy peak,--these have nothing in common with my travels. The footprint pointed in the usual direction does not allure my own far enough to lead me astray; and soon, urged by the intimacy there is in treading this moss through the heart of the woods, to pick the black leaf of a camellia by the weeping of a secret waterfall,--I flee suddenly, like an awkward deer. Then, amid the silence of growing things, poised on one foot, I await the echo. How fresh and comic the song of this little bird seems to me! And how the cry of the rooks below delights me! Each tree has its personality, each little beast his part, each voice its place in the symphony; as they say music is comprehended, so I comprehend Nature.
It is like a story of many details, where only the proper names are given. As my walk--and the day--proceeds, I advance also in the development of a philosophy. Already I have discovered with delight that all things exist in a certain accord; and, though believing this secret relationship, by which the blackness of this pine below espouses the clear green of these maples, it is my purified sight only which establishes it; so, because of this restoration of the original design, I call my visit a Revision. I am the Inspector of Creation, the Verifier of all present things. The reality of this world is the cause of my beatitude. In ordinary hours we employ things for their usefulness, forgetting their purer value: that they should exist at all. But when, after a long effort, pushing through branches and briars, I place my hand on the burning shoulder of this heavy rock in the heart of a glade, the entry of Alexander into Jerusalem is alone comparable to the sublimity of my achievement.
And I go on and on! Each one of us contains in himself the autonomous power of motion by which he moves toward his food and his work. As for me, the even motion of my legs serves to measure for me the intensity of more subtle appeals. The allurement of everything! I feel it in the silence of my soul. I understand the harmony of the world. When shall I surprise its melody?
HERE AND THERE
In the street called Nihon Bashi, near the merchants of books and lanterns, of embroideries and bronzes, miniature gardens are sold; and, as a studious idler amid this fantastic display, I mentally compare these little fragments of the world. The artists have subtly shown themselves masters of the exquisite laws by which the lines of a landscape are composed, like those of a physiognomy. Instead of drawing nature they reproduce it, constructing their counterfeits from the very elements of the original, which they borrow--as a rule is illustrated by an example. These images are usually exact and perfect replicas. All sorts and kinds of pines, for instance, are offered me to choose from; and their position in the jar, with their height as a scale, proportionately shows the dimensions of their original territory. Here is a rice-field in Springtime; in the distance is a hill fringed with trees (they are made of moss). Here is the sea, with its archipelago and its capes! By the artifice of two stones, one black, one red, and rather worn and porous, they have represented two islands that appear to be joined together, whose difference in distance is shown only by their different colors, apparently due to the light of the setting sun. And even the many-colored sunset is represented by this bed of motley pebbles covered with the contents of two carafes.
Now, to amplify my thought!
The European artist copies nature according to the sentiment that he has for it. The Japanese imitates it according to the materials with which it furnishes him. One expresses himself, the other expresses nature. One creates, the other mimics. One paints, the other constructs. One is a student; the other, in a way, a master. One reproduces in its detail the spectacle that he surveys with a searching and subtle gaze; the other disengages its law with a flash of the eye, in the freedom of his fancy; and applies it with a scriptural conciseness.
Here the first inspiration of the artist is the material on which he exercises his hand. Good-humoredly, he consults its intrinsic properties, its tints; and, appropriating the soul of the brute thing, he constitutes himself its interpreter. Of all the things that he might say, he expresses only the essential and significant characteristics; and, merely making a few shy indications here and there, leaves to the paper the task of concealing all those infinite complexities which are implied freely because they are taken for granted. It is a frolic of certitude, it is caprice with restraint; and the underlying idea, snared by such a method of argument, imposes itself upon us with an insidious conviction.