Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life Part 2

"In the First Ward of Nichi-Hommachi, in far-famed Osaka-- _O the sorrow of this tale of shinju!_

"Tamayone, aged nineteen,--to see her was to love her, for Takejiro, the young workman.

"For the time of two lives they exchange mutual vows-- _O the sorrow of loving a courtesan!_

"On their arms they tattoo a Raindragon, and the character 'Bamboo'--thinking never of the troubles of life....

"But he cannot pay the fifty-five yen for her freedom-- _O the anguish of Takejiro's heart!_

"Both then vow to pa.s.s away together, since never in this world can they become husband and wife....

"Trusting to her comrades for incense and for flowers-- _O the pity of their pa.s.sing like the dew!_

"Tamayone takes the wine-cup filled with water only, in which those about to die pledge each other....

"_O the tumult of the lovers' suicide!--O the pity of their lives thrown away!_"

In short, there was nothing very unusual in the story, and nothing at all remarkable in the verse. All the wonder of the performance had been in the voice of the woman. But long after the singer had gone that voice seemed still to stay,--making within me a sense of sweetness and of sadness so strange that I could not but try to explain to myself the secret of those magical tones.

And I thought that which is hereafter set down:--

All song, all melody, all music, means only some evolution of the primitive natural utterance of feeling,--of that untaught speech of sorrow, joy, or pa.s.sion, whose words are tones. Even as other tongues vary, so varies this language of tone combinations.

Wherefore melodies which move us deeply have no significance to j.a.panese ears; and melodies that touch us not at all make powerful appeal to the emotion of a race whose soul-life differs from our own as blue differs from yellow....Still, what is the reason of the deeper feelings evoked in me--an alien--by this Oriental chant that I could never even learn,--by this common song of a blind woman of the people? Surely that in the voice of the singer there were qualities able to make appeal to something larger than the sum of the experience of one race,--to something wide as human life, and ancient as the knowledge of good and evil.

One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a girl say "Good-night" to somebody pa.s.sing by. Nothing but those two little words,--"Good-night." Who she was I do not know: I never even saw her face; and I never heard that voice again.

But still, after the pa.s.sing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her "Good-night" brings a double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain,--pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existences and dead suns.

For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten.

Certainly there never have been two voices having precisely the same quality. But in the utterance of affection there is a tenderness of timbre common to the myriad million voices of all humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar to even the newly-born the meaning of tins tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt, likewise, our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than individual being,--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows,--dim loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy brains,--to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of some voice that recalls their past.

IV

FROM A TRAVELING DIARY

I

OSAKA-KYOTO RAILWAY.

April 15, 1895.

Feeling drowsy in a public conveyance, and not being able to lie down, a j.a.panese woman will lift her long sleeve before her face era she begins to nod. In this second-cla.s.s railway-carriage there are now three women asleep in a row, all with faces screened by the left sleeve, and all swaying together with the rocking of the train, like lotos-flowers in a soft current. (This use of the left sleeve is either fortuitous or instinctive; probably instinctive, as the right hand serves best to cling to strap or seat in case of shock.) The spectacle is at once pretty and funny, but especially pretty, as exemplifying that grace with which a refined j.a.panese woman does everything,--always in the daintiest and least selfish way possible. It is pathetic, too, for the att.i.tude is also that of sorrow, and sometimes of weary prayer. All because of the trained sense of duty to show only one's happiest face to the world.

Which fact reminds me of an experience.

A male servant long in my house seemed to me the happiest of mortals. He laughed invariably when spoken to, looked always delighted while at work, appeared to know nothing of the small troubles of life. But one day I peeped at him when he thought himself quite alone, and his relaxed face startled me. It was not the face I had known. Hard lines of pain and anger appeared in it, making it seem twenty years older. I coughed gently to announce my presence. At once the face smoothed, softened, lighted up as by a miracle of rejuvenation. Miracle, indeed, of perpetual unselfish self-control.

II

Kyoto, April 16.

The wooden shutters before my little room in the hotel are pushed away; and the morning sun immediately paints upon my shoji, across squares of gold light, the perfect sharp shadow of a little peach-tree. No mortal artist--not even a j.a.panese--could surpa.s.s that silhouette! Limned in dark blue against the yellow glow, the marvelous image even shows stronger or fainter tones according to the varying distance of the unseen branches outside.

it sets me thinking about the possible influence on j.a.panese art of the use of paper for house-lighting purposes.

By night a j.a.panese house with only its shoji closed looks like a great paper-sided lantern,--a magic-lantern making moving shadows within, instead of without itself. By day the shadows on the shoji are from outside only; but they may be very wonderful at the first rising of the sun, if his beams are leveled, as in this instance, across a s.p.a.ce of quaint garden.

There is certainly nothing absurd in that old Greek story which finds the origin of art in the first untaught attempt to trace upon some wall the outline of a lover's shadow. Very possibly all sense of art, as well as all sense of the supernatural, had its simple beginnings in the study of shadows. But shadows on shoji are so remarkable as to suggest explanation of certain j.a.panese faculties of drawing by no means primitive, but developed beyond all parallel, and otherwise difficult to account for. Of course, the quality of j.a.panese paper, which takes shadows better than any frosted gla.s.s, must be considered, and also the character of the shadows themselves. Western vegetation, for example, could scarcely furnish silhouettes so gracious as those of j.a.panese garden-trees, all trained by centuries of caressing care to look as lovely as Nature allows.

I wish the paper of my shoji could have been, like a photographic plate, sensitive to that first delicious impression cast by a level sun. I am already regretting distortions: the beautiful silhouette has begun to lengthen.

III

Kyoto, April 16.

Of all peculiarly beautiful things in j.a.pan, the most beautiful are the approaches to high places of worship or of rest,--the Ways that go to Nowhere and the Steps that lead to Nothing.

Certainly, their special charm is the charm of the advent.i.tious, --the effect of man's handiwork in union with Nature's finest moods of light and form and color,--a charm which vanishes on rainy days; but it is none the less wonderful because fitful.

Perhaps the ascent begins with a sloping paved avenue, half a mile long, lined with giant trees. Stone monsters guard the way at regular intervals. Then you come to some great flight of steps ascending through green gloom to a terrace umbraged by older and vaster trees; and other steps from thence lead to other terraces, all in shadow. And you climb and climb and climb, till at last, beyond a gray torii, the goal appears: a small, void, colorless wooden shrine,--a Shinto miya. The shock of emptiness thus received, in the high silence and the shadows, after all the sublimity of the long approach, is very ghostliness itself.

Of similar Buddhist experiences whole mult.i.tudes wait for those who care to seek them. I might suggest, for example, a visit to the grounds of Higashi Otani, which are in the city of Kyoto. A grand avenue leads to the court of a temple, and from the court a flight of steps fully fifty feet wide--ma.s.sy, mossed, and magnificently bal.u.s.traded--leads to a walled terrace. The scene makes one think of the approach to some Italian pleasure-garden of Decameron days. But, reaching the terrace, you find only a gate, opening--into a cemetery! Did the Buddhist landscape-gardener wish to tell us that all pomp and power and beauty lead only to such silence at last?

IV

KYOTO, April 10-20.

I have pa.s.sed the greater part of three days in the national Exhibition,--time barely sufficient to discern the general character and significance of the display. It is essentially industrial, but nearly all delightful, notwithstanding, because of the wondrous application of art to all varieties of production. Foreign merchants and keener observers than I find in it other and sinister meaning,--the most formidable menace to Occidental trade and industry ever made by the Orient. "Compared with England," wrote a correspondent of the London Times, "it is farthings for pennies throughout.... The story of the j.a.panese invasion of Lancashire is older than that of the invasion of Korea and China. It has been a conquest of peace,--a painless process of depletion which is virtually achieved.... The Kyoto display is proof of a further immense development of industrial enterprise.... A country where laborers' hire is three shillings a week, with all other domestic charges in proportion, must--other things being equal--kill compet.i.tors whose expenses are quadruple the j.a.panese scale." Certainly the industrial jiujutsu promises unexpected results.

The price of admission to the Exhibition is a significant matter also. Only five sen! Yet even at this figure an immense sum is likely to be realized,--so great is the swarm of visitors.

Mult.i.tudes of peasants are pouring daily into the city,--pedestrians mostly, just as for a pilgrimage. And a pilgrimage for myriads the journey really is, because of the inauguration festival of the greatest of Shinshu temples.

The art department proper I thought much inferior to that of the Tokyo Exhibition of 1890. Fine things there were, but few.

Evidence, perhaps, of the eagerness with which the nation is turning all its energies and talents in directions where money is to be made; for in those larger departments where art is combined with industry,--such as ceramics, enamels, inlaid work, embroideries,--no finer and costlier work could ever have been shown. Indeed, the high value of certain articles on display suggested a reply to a j.a.panese friend who observed, thoughtfully, "If China adopts Western industrial methods, she will be able to underbid us in all the markets of the world."

"Perhaps in cheap production," I made answer. "But there is no reason why j.a.pan should depend wholly upon cheapness of production. I think she may rely more securely upon her superiority in art and good taste. The art-genius of a people may have a special value against which all compet.i.tion by cheap labor is vain. Among Western nations, France offers an example. Her wealth is not due to her ability to underbid her neighbors. Her goods are the dearest in the world: she deals in things of luxury and beauty. But they sell in all civilized countries because they are the best of their kind. Why should not j.a.pan become the France of the Further East?"

The weakest part of the art display is that devoted to oil-painting,--oil-painting in the European manner. No reason exists why the j.a.panese should not be able to paint wonderfully in oil by following their own particular methods of artistic expression. But their attempts to follow Western methods have even risen to mediocrity only in studies requiring very realistic treatment. Ideal work in oil, according to Western canons of art, is still out of their reach. Perhaps they may yet discover for themselves a new gateway to the beautiful, even through oil-painting, by adaptation of the method to the particular needs of the race-genius; but there is yet no sign of such a tendency.

A canvas representing a perfectly naked woman looking at herself in a very large mirror created a disagreeable impression. The j.a.panese press had been requesting the removal of the piece, and uttering comments not flattering to Western art ideas.

Nevertheless the canvas was by a j.a.panese painter. It was a daub; but it had been boldly priced at three thousand dollars.

I stood near the painting for a while to observe its effect upon the people,--peasants by a huge majority. They would stare at it, laugh scornfully, utter some contemptuous phrase, and turn away to examine the kakemono, which were really far more worthy of notice though offered at prices ranging only from ten to fifty yen. The comments were chiefly leveled at "foreign" ideas of good taste (the figure having been painted with a European head). None seemed to consider the thing as a j.a.panese work. Had it represented a j.a.panese woman, I doubt whether the crowd would have even tolerated its existence.