OUR LANDLORD THE BUDDHIST PRIEST.
Beyond, the white wall and steps of the temple inclosure are crowned with white stone palings and a red lacquer wall behind them, and the red lacquer and bronzed-roofed gateway. Here and there gold glitters on the carvings and on the ends of its many roof-beams. Near it the great gray tree-trunks are spaced, and out of the green branches shows the corner of the stable of the Sacred Horses. Its gray walls are spotted in places with gold and color. Beyond it are the red walls ofone of the treasure houses, made of beams with slanting edges; and in the gable under its black eaves two symbolic animals, the elephant and the tapir, are carved and painted gray and white on the gilded wall. At this distance the bands of many-colored ornament make a glimmering of nameless color. Farther back in the trees spots of heavy black and shining gold mark the roofs of other buildings. The great trees near me almost hide the great pagoda, and I can see of it only a little red, and the green under its many eaves, which melts like a haze into the green of the trees.
All these effects of color and shape seem but as a decoration of the trees, and as modes of enhancing their height and their stillness. The great court becomes nothing but a basin with highly-finished edges, sunk into the mass of mountain greenery. The Torii, alone, stands lonely and mysterious. On the space between its upper stone beams is placed a great blue tablet with gold letters that designate the sacred posthumous name of Iyéyasŭ.
It is late in the year, and the place is no longer filled with pilgrims. I look down, occasionally, on a few stragglers who come up the steps below me—a few pilgrims in white dresses; peasants, sometimes with their children; Japanese tourists, who, even here, at home, seem out of place. This afternoon a couple of women, earnestly whispering, sailed across the court and turned the corner of the avenue of Iyémitsŭ—with toes turned in, as is the proper thing in this land of inversion. Their dresses of gray and brown and black had all the accentuated refinement of simplicity in color which is the character of good taste here, and which gives one the gentle thrill of new solutions of harmony. Our own absurdities were not unknown to them, for their velvet slits of eyes were partly hid under eye-glasses, in emulation of Boston or Germany. They might have been ladies: I am not sufficiently clearyet as to limits: perhaps they weregei-shas, who now, I understand, learn German and affect the intellectual look of nearsightedness. If they were, they were far above the two little creatures that posed for me yesterday—with all the impatience of girls who, knowing what it was all about, still could not put up with the slow ways of European work, when their own artists would have been as agile and rapid and sketchy as themselves.
Thegei-shasare one of the institutions of Japan,—a reminder of old, complete civilizations like that of Greece. They are, voluntarily, exiles from regular society and family, if one can speak of consent when they are usually brought up to their profession of the "gay science" from early girlhood. They cultivate singing and dancing, and often poetry, and all the accomplishments and most of the exquisite politeness of their country. They are the ideals of the elegant side of woman. To them is intrusted the entertainment of guests and the solace of idle hours. They are thehetairaiof the old Greeks—and sometimes they are all that that name implies. But no one has the right to assume it from their profession, any more than that all liberties are bordered by possible license.
The two who consented to pose for me, at the same price and no more than I should have paid them had I called them in to entertain me and my guests with singing and dancing, were, the one a town, the other a country girl; and little by little they showed the difference, at first very slight to a foreigner, by all the many little things which obtain everywhere. It was a source of quiet amusement for me to see them posture, in what they call their dances, in the very room of our landlord the priest's house, where I have so often watched him sitting while his pupil bent over his writing, an antique picture, like so many Eastern scenes of the ideal of contemplative monastic study. But our little priest is away, on service atthe temple of Iyémitsŭ, and his house is kept for him in his absence by some devout lady parishioner, who lent us the apartment more convenient than ours, and who undoubtedly shared in the amusement herself. And I asked myself if there had been a secret ceremony of purification afterwards.
I saw, too, lingering at the corner of Iyémitsŭ, the litter of a great lady, said to be the beauty of the court; but I was content to have her remain mysterious to me, and tried not to regret my indolence, when my companion twitted me with his presentation to her, and to associate her only with the clear porcelains that bear her princely name. And then, again, the priests of the temple of Iyéyasŭ came down to meet some prince, looking like great butterflies in green and yellow, and capped with their shining black hats. The youngest waved his fan at me in recognition, and gaily floated back up the high white steps and into the sunny inclosures beyond, more and more like some winged essence.
Then the temple attendants brushed with brooms the mosses of the pavement about the Torii, and the gates were closed. And I listened, until the blaze of the sun passed under the green film of the trees, to the fluting of the priests in the sanctuary on the hill. It was like a hymn to nature. The noise of the locusts had stopped for a time; and this floating wail, rising and falling in unknown and incomprehensible modulations, seemed to belong to the forest as completely as their cry. The shrill and liquid song brought back the indefinite melancholy that one has felt with the distant sound of children's voices, singing of Sundays in drowsy rhythms. But these sounds belonged to the place, to its own peculiar genius—of a lonely beauty, associated with an indefinite past, little understood; with death, and primeval nature, and final rest.
The last beams of the sunset made emerald jewels of the needles in the twigs above me—made red velvet of the powdery edges of broken bark, when the distant flutes ceased, and I left my study.
As I came out from the giant trees a great wave of the funereal song of the locusts passed through the air, leaving me suddenly in a greater silence as I came home. Then I could hear the rise and fall of the sound of our little waterfall in the garden as I stretched myself at the flattest on the mats, and Kato brought the tea and put it beside me.
August 25.
This afternoon I returned to the entrance of Iyéyasŭ, and sketched under the great trees of the central avenue. The great white clouds were there again in the blue above, colored as with gold where they showed below through the trees; then they came nearer, then they melted together; then suddenly all was veiled, the rain came down in sheets, and I was glad of the refuge of the tea booths along the eastern wall. It was late, almost evening; no one there; a few pilgrims and attendants and priests scurried away through the court, disappearing with bare reddened legs and wet clogs around the corners of the avenues. And the rain persisted, hanging before me like a veil of water. I had in front, as I sat in the booths, already damp and gusty with drafts, the face of the tall red pagoda behind its stone balustrade and at right angles to the great Torii that I had been painting. The great trees were all of one green, their near and far columns flattened out with the branches into masses of equal values. Through them, below, in the few openings to the west, the sky was colored with the sunset, as if it were clear far over Nan-tai-san. The gold of the roofs' edges and of the painted carvings below was light and pale as the sky far away. Higher up the gold was bright and clear under the rain, which made it glisten; it glowed between the brackets of the lower cornices and paled like silver higher up. All the innumerable painted carvings and projections and ornamentslooked pale behind the rain, while the great red mass grew richer as it rose, and the bronze roofs, freshly washed, were blacker, and the green copper glistened, like malachite, on the edges of the vermilion rails, or on the bells which hung from the roof corners, against the sky or against the trees. The green, wet mosses spotted with light the stone flags below, or glowed like a fairy yellow flame on the adjoining red lacquer of the temple fence, so drenched now that I could see reflected in it the white divisions and still whiter lichens of the stone balustrade. Below it the great temple wall was blotched with dark purple and black lichens, and the columns of the Torii were white at the bottom with mosses. Its upper cross-arm glistened yellow with their growths as if it had caught the sun. But the heavy rain was drenching all; and now from all the roofs of the pagoda poured lines of water, the one within the other, the highest describing a great curve that encircled all the others, and the whole high tower itself, as if with a lengthened aureole of silver drops. It was as if water had poured out from the fountain basins, one above the other, which the Italian Renaissance liked to picture on tall pilasters, even as this one was profiled against the sky and distant rain. Below, a yellow torrent covered the great court with an eddying lake, and its course rushed down the great steps or made a crested, bounding line along the gutters by the walls. I watched for a time the beautiful curves dropping from the roofs of the tower, until all grew dark and my coolie arrived to carry paint box and easel, and we managed to get home, with sketching umbrellas, wet, however, through every layer of clothing.
Nikko, August 27.
Yesterday, I went out in another afternoon of blazing sunlight, up to the corner of the temple inclosure and along its outside edge, where the rocks of the mountain, covered with trees, make a great vague wall. Under the damp trees runs a path paved with small blocks of stone, slippery with moss, or, when bare, smoothed by ages of treading. This road leads to the little cascade which supplies the sacred water-tank of the temple of Iyéyasŭ, that square block of water under the gilded and painted canopy in the great courtyard.
The waterfall drops over rocks into a hollow between the hills; high trees stand along its edge near a black octagonal shrine, with great roof, green and yellow with moss. On this side of the water, a diminutive shrine, red-painted, with columns and architrave of many colors and a roof of thatch all green, out of which are growing the small stems of young trees. In front, a Torii, just tall enough to pass under, of gray stone, all capped and edged with green, velvety moss. A curved stone, cushioned with moss, in front of it, spans the water-course that gives escape to the waters of the pool. The doors of the shrine are closed, as if to make more solitary yet the quiet of the little hollow.
Higher up, past the black building and above high steps, on a platform edged by walls, stand black buildings, shrines of Buddhist divinities, whose golden bodies I can see through the grating of the unfastened doors.I feel their amiable presence, while I sit painting in the damp sunlight, and the murmur of the waters seems their whispered encouragement.
On my return I looked again toward the abrupt rocky hill to find a little monument we had passed at its foot, just off the road. Through the inevitable Torii a little path of rough flagging, all broken up and imbedded in moss, leads across the small bridge of two large stones, one of whose parapets is gone, and up high steps, half natural, to a little altar of big stones with a heavy balustrade around three sides. A little stone shrine with a roof stands upon it, and behind it a tall gray rock upon which is incised and gilded a device of five disks forming a circle. All around about the path and shrine are trees covered with moss; the rocks, the shrine, the path, are spotted with green and yellow velvet; all looks as if abandoned to nature,—all but the gilded armorial bearings in the mossy stone, which I take to be those of the divinized mortal in whose honor this little record has been built, Ten-jin Sama, known and worshiped by every schoolboy in Japan. He is the patron of learning and of penmanship, and was during his life a great scholar and minister of state under the name of Michizane. This was just before the year nine hundred. A faithful minister, a learned and just man, he naturally gave great umbrage, especially to a younger associate whose sister was Empress, and who succeeded through malicious slander in bringing about Michizane's banishment.
In his place of exile, separated from wife and children, he died two years later. There, I suppose, he rode about on the saddled bull, upon which Yosai has placed him in his drawings, as also he was seen by Motonobu in a dream, of which I have a drawing. There the great artist has represented him, faithful, I suppose, to what he really saw, as a younger man than he really could have been,galloping swiftly and bending down to avoid the branches of the trees above.
Bulls of bronze and marble adorn his temple in Kioto, recalling how the bull that drew him to the cemetery refused to go further than a certain spot, where he was buried in a grave dug hastily. Misfortune and remorse followed his enemies, with the death of the Imperial heir; so that the Emperor, revoking his banishment, reinstalled the dead man in the honors of his office, and bestowed a high rank upon his ghost. Since then his worship has grown, as I said above.
As you see, the Mikado has been the fountain of honor for this world and the next; and I cannot help being reminded of the constant relations of Chinese and Japanese thought in this unity—this constant joining of that which we separate. The forms of China may be more "bureaucratic"; no such national prejudices and feelings can belong to the idea of the sovereign there as must exist in Japan, with a dynasty of rulers as Japanese as Japan itself. But there has been here, as there, a sort of natural duty in the Government to look after all the relations of those intrusted to its care. In China, all religion or religions must depend upon the sanction of the ruling powers; nothing is too great or too small to be satisfied with; official approval may attend the worship of some local heroine, official disapproval may be shown to some exaggerations of Taoist superstitions. The source of this right and this duty is always the idea that in the ruler all is centered; he is responsible to Heaven, and is the tie between the powers above and the deities below. Hence there is nothing absurd in his following the governed after death.
In Japan, the forms of this power may be different, but its workings will be similar, and hero-worship, combined with the respect and worship of ancestors, has had a mostimportant part in the development of life here, in encouraging patriotism and lofty ideas, and in stimulating the chivalrous feeling, the ideas of honor, that seem to me the peculiar note of the Japanese. However misapplied, however mistaken, however barbarous some forms of these ideas may appear to us, I cannot make for myself a definition of the national character, nor see a clue to many of their actions unless I bear in mind the ruling power of this feeling. While we are in this place, where Iyéyasŭ's name is so important, let me cite a trifling anecdote.
It is said that on some occasion he accompanied Hideyoshi, the great Taiko Sama, each with few attendants, upon some visit, and all were afoot. Now, among the retinue of Iyéyasŭ was one Honda, a man of preternatural strength, who hinted to his master that this might be an opportunity for an attack upon his great rival. But Taiko guessed the danger, and, turning round, said to Iyéyasŭ: "My sword is heavy, for me unaccustomed to walking, so may I not ask your servant to carry it for me?" For Taiko knew that it would have been considered a disgrace to attack a man unarmed when he had intrusted his sword, not to his own servant, but to the servant of his enemy. And Iyéyasŭ understood this appeal to the idea of honor.
August 28.
Two more days and we shall be gone. As I sketch in the temples or about them, everything seems more beautiful as it grows to be more a part of my daily existence. Though I am perpetually harassed through feeling that I cannot copy everything, and through trying to force my memory to grasp so as to retain the multitudinous details of the architectural decoration, I have drawn the curve of this, and the patterns of that, and noted the colors, but I wonder, if the thread gets loosened that holds them together, whether I shall ever be able to separate one fromanother in their entanglement. And then I still do not wish to work. There are so many places that I should like to look at again without the oppression of an obligatory record.
This evening I must take another look at the neglected graves of the followers of Iyémitsŭ who committed suicide, as my Japanese account has it, "that they might accompany him in his dark pilgrimage to the future world." At least it says this of Hotta Masemori and of three others; while the graves, as I remember them, are twenty-one in number, and about this I have never thought to ask, but I must do so. And then there may have been retainers of retainers. It is a pleasure to me anyhow to set down at least one name and to help to keep this memory clear when I think of the neglected spot in which they lie. It is not far from that part of the land where stood the residence of their master's family, now destroyed, through the days of turbulence which closed the last moments of their reign. Broken fragments of fencing still lean against the little inclosures of stone posts, balustrade, and gate that surround each memorial pillar. They stand in two rows in a little clearing, the valley sunk behind them, hidden in part by much wild growth.
O—— was telling us some little while ago of the feudal habit which gave to a chieftain the vow of certain retainers who undertook to follow him faithfully even beyond the grave. It was expected of them in war that they should be about him sharing in his struggle, and if he died in peace, near or far, they should be ready to go too.
And as death is the most important thing in life, I cannot help thinking over the condition of mind of any one who looked forward to such a limitation of its lease.
When age had changed the view of life, had createdmore ties, more duties, had made the term nearer and more capricious, while everything else became more fixed, did this bond, with its promise of payment to be met at any moment's demand, become a heavy burden of debt? I can occasionally conjure up a picture—perhaps erroneous, because my imagination of the circumstances may displace them,—of some older man settled in pleasant places, rested in secure possessions, with dependants, with friends, with affections around his life, learning at any moment of the probability that the call might come. He might be summoned from any festivity or joy as if by a knocking at the door. How curiously he must have watched the runners of the mail who might be bringing into his town the news from the court, or wheresoever this other life—which to all purposes was his own—was perhaps ebbing away. How then he would have known what to do, even to its most minute detail, and be but part of a ceremonial that he himself would direct. Vague memories come up to me of places set apart in the garden, and the screens and the hangings and the lights that belonged to the voluntary ordeal. But as I keep on thinking, I feel more certain that my fancy displaces the circumstances of former times and of a different civilization. For instance, the concentration of the feudal territory, habits of clanship, the constant attendance, must have narrowed the circle and made the individual more like a part of one great machinery, one great family, than he can ever be again. The weakness, the insufficiency of the individual, has been stiffened by the importance of the family, of the clan, as a basis of society; and I could almost say that I discern in this one main-spring of the peculiar courtesy of this nation, which seems to go along with a great feeling of a certain freedom, so that the obedience of the inferior does not seem servile. The servant who has done his duty of respectful service seems afterward ready totake any natural relation that may turn up. The youth trained in respect to his betters and elders, and silent in their presence, will give his opinion frankly when asked, with a want of diffidence quite unexpected. The coming years are certain to bring changes that cannot be arrested.
••••••
While I was being baked to-day, at my work that I could not leave, my companions have been away on a visit higher up the mountains, to the hot baths on the lake, and, at least for part of the time, have had the weather almost cold. They have much to say about the baths, and the fullness of visitors, and the difficulty of getting place, and one of them has gone to her bath in the native dress, and another cannot yet quite get over the impression made upon him by the pretty young lady near whom he stood under the eaves of the bath-house, where he had taken refuge from the rain, and whose modest manners were as charming as her youthfulness, and had no more covering.
Here everything is still hot and damp, though our nights are cooler and I am able to make out more conveniently my notes and my sketches and my memoranda of purchased acquisitions. On the lower floor boxes are being filled, and to-morrow evening horses and men will stand in our garden to be laden; we shall follow the light of their lanterns down the road, and they will seem to be carrying parts of us away from Nikko.
Near Utsunomiya, August 30.
We left Nikko this morning; a hot, moist, quiet, lovely morning. We dawdled at our friends' house and breakfasted, and said good-by to our worthy landlord. Yesterday he had found fault with my sketching him in his ordinary yellow priest's dress, while he had vestments as beautiful as any painter or clergyman could desire; in proof of which he had rushed into his house and reappeared in those lovely things and moved about the green of the garden looking as radiant as any flamingo. But I knew not of these possessions of his, and regretted quite as deeply as he could himself not having painted him in them.
It was a sad moment—that of leaving his little garden for good, and walking down the road to the enormous steps under the trees by the river, where we reversed the picture of our arrival six weeks ago. There stood the naked runners, and our hostess above us, as we sat in thekurumas, but this time the doctor was not with us, except to bid us good-by. His place was filled by the professional guide and factotum, who sat anxious for departure in his ownkuruma, and who for days had been packing and labeling and helping to make lists, and receiving instructions, and bustling about at times when he was not sleeping—and generally making life a misery. We rattled over the bridge, passed the children going to school, and the polite policeman with spectacles and sword, who looks like aGerman Rath of some kind or other, and the woman of the Eta class[7]who has sold us skins of monkeys and of badgers, as well as two baby monkeys, whom we have disrespectfully named Sesson and Sosen, after the painters who so beautifully portrayed their ancestors.
Soon we had entered the long avenue of cryptomeria and kept on through shadow and sunlight, with our runners at their fullest gait, for we had to be in time for the afternoon train at Utsunomiya, and it is twenty-two miles from Nikko. But we were more than in time, and had to wait at an inn near the station. I am absurdly stupid and fatigued, so that I have given up watching the landscape and merely make these notes. Besides, there is a missionary near us so self-contented that I feel like withdrawing into my own self and dreaming of the times he was not here. I recall a little story of Utsunomiya, connected with my associations of Nikko, which I shall try to tell you; though, at the very start, I find a difficulty in my having heard it told in several different and contradictory ways—and I can only travel one at a time. As I shall tell it, it represents a legend believed at least in the theater, which, as we know, everywhere makes a kind of history.
The story is about the shogun Iyémitsŭ, whose temple, you know, is at Nikko, and who was near missing the honor of being divinized there later, owing to a plot arranged by his enemies, the scene of which was this little town of Utsunomiya. At that time he was but a boy, the heir-apparent, and was on his way to Nikko, as was his official duty, to worship at the tombof his grandfather Iyéyasŭ, lately deceased. In this story Iyémitsŭ is not in the legitimate line of descent, but is made the heir by the decision of the great Iyéyasŭ.
His father, Hidetada, was shogun, as you know, having succeeded Iyéyasŭ, during the latter's lifetime,—the old man remaining in reality the master, though absolved from external responsibilities. Now, Hidetada's wife was of the family of Nobunaga, on her mother's side—and bore him a son, who was named during his childhood Kuni Matsu. Another son, whose boy name was Take Chiyo, was the son of Kasuga No Tsubone, a remarkable woman. Each son had tutors, people of importance, and around each boy gathered a number of ambitious interests, all the fiercer that they were dissembled and depended for success upon the choice of either heir as shogun, to succeed father and grandfather. The claim of the other son was favored by the father and more generally accepted; but the son of Kasuga was superior in looks, manners, and intelligence, and his mother hoped to influence in his favor old Iyéyasŭ, the grandfather.
Iyéyasŭ was then living in retirement at Sunpu, that is now called Shidzuoka, which is on the road called the Tokaido.
Kasuga took advantage of a pilgrimage to the shrines of Ise to stop on her road, and naturally offer homage to the head of the family, the grandfather of her son. Besides the power of her own personality, she was able to place before Iyéyasŭ very strong arguments for choosing as the heir of the line a youth as promising as her Take Chiyo.
Iyéyasŭ advised her to continue her pilgrimage, and not to go out of her woman's business, which could not be that of interfering with questions of state; and she obeyed. But Iyéyasŭ revolved the entire question in hismind, and decided that there was danger in a delay that allowed both parties to grow stronger in antagonism. So that he came at once to Yedo, which is now Tokio, and visited Hidetada, asking to see both the boys together. They came in along with their father and his wife, and took their accustomed places. Now these were on the higher floor, raised by a few inches from the floor on which kneels the visitor of lower degree, in the presence of his superior: a line of black lacquer edges the division. Thereupon Iyéyasŭ taking the boy Take Chiyo by the hand, made him sit by him, and alongside of his father, and ordered the other son, Kuni Matsu, to sit below the line, and said: "The State will come to harm if the boys are allowed to grow up in the idea of equal rank. Therefore, Take Chiyo shall be shogun, and Kuni Matsu a daimio." This decision gave to the line of the Tokugawa a brilliant and powerful continuity, for Take Chiyo, under his manhood name of Iyémitsŭ, was as an Augustus to the Cæsar Iyéyasŭ. And, indeed, Iyéyasŭ had certainly made sufficient inquiries to warrant his decision. If he consulted the abbot Tenkai, of Nikko, who was a preceptor of the boy, he must have heard favorably of him. For, according to the judgment of Tenkai, as I find it quoted elsewhere, "Iyémitsŭ was very shrewd and of great foresight," and in his presence the great abbot felt, he said, "as if thorns were pricking his back."
Not but that he was also fond of luxury and splendor; and one glimpse of him as a youth shows a quarrel with a tutor who found him dressing himself, or being dressed, for "No" performances, or "private theatricals," and who proceeded thereupon to throw away the double mirrors,—in which the youth followed his hair-dresser's arrangements,—with the usual, classical rebuke, condemning such arrangements as unworthy of a ruler of Japan.
There are many stories of Iyémitsŭ more or less to his advantage—and a little anecdote shows a young man of quick temper, as well as one who insisted upon proper attendance.
Iyémitsŭ had been hawking in a strong wind, and with no success. Tired and hungry, he went with some lord-in-waiting to a neighboring temple, where lunch was prepared for them by his cook,—a man of rank. Iyémitsŭ, while taking his soup in a hurry, crushed a little stone between his teeth; whereupon he immediately insisted upon the cook's committing suicide. The cook being a gentleman, a man of affairs, not a mere artist like poor Vatel, hesitated, and then said: "No soup made by me ever had stones or pebbles in it; otherwise I should gladly kill myself: you gentlemen have begun dinner at once without washing hands or changing dress, and some pebble has dropped into the soup from your hair or clothes. If after having washed your hands and changed your dress, you find any stones in the soup, I shall kill myself." Whereupon Iyémitsŭ did as was suggested by the cook, repented of his own severity, and increased the cook's pay. But the tutor and guardians of Iyémitsŭ watched over him carefully, and the story I had begun to tell shows that they had no sinecure.
The tutors and guardians of the brother, whom Iyéyasŭ had decided to put aside in favor of Iyémitsŭ, were naturally deeply aggrieved and sought for chances to regain their ward's future power and their own.
As my story began, Iyémitsŭ, representing the hereditary shogunate, was called upon to travel to Nikko and worship officially at his grandfather's tomb. On his way it was natural that he should rest as we did, at Utsunomiya, and in the castle of his vassal, Honda, who was one of the tutors of his brother. This was the sonof the great Honda Masanobu, of whom I spoke above as a champion of Iyéyasŭ.
Here was an opportunity; and a scheme of getting rid of the young shogun was devised by his enemies that seemed to them sufficiently obscure to shield them in case of success or failure, at least for a time. This was, to have a movable ceiling made to the bath-room weighted in such a way as to fall upon any one in the bath and crush him. Whether it was to be lifted again, and leave him drowned in his bath, or to remain as an accident from faulty construction, I do not know.
To build this machine, ten carpenters were set to work within the castle and kept jealously secluded,—even when the work was done, for the young shogun delayed his coming. The confinement fretted the men, among whom was a young lover, anxious to get back to his sweetheart, and not to be satisfied with the good food and drink provided to appease him. He told of his longings to the gatekeeper, whose duty it was to keep him imprisoned, bribed him with his own handsome pay and promise of a punctual return, and at last managed to get out and be happy for a few moments. The girl of his love was inquisitive, but reassured by explanation that the work was done, and that he should soon be out again; yet not before the shogun should have come and gone on his way to Nikko. And so he returned to the gatekeeper at the time appointed. Meanwhile, during that very night, the officers of the castle had gone their rounds and found one man absent. In the morning the roll-call was full. This was reported to the lord of the castle, who decided that if he could not know who it was that had been absent it was wise to silence them all. Therefore, each was called to be paid and dismissed, and, as he stepped out, was beheaded. The gatekeeper, getting wind of what was happening andfearing punishment, ran away, and being asked by the girl about her lover, told her what he knew and that he believed all the carpenters to have been killed.
Since her lover was dead, she determined to die also, having been the cause of his death and of the death of his companions. She wrote out all this, together with what her lover had told her of his belief and suspicions, and left the letter for her father and mother, who received it along with the tidings of her suicide. The father, in an agony of distress and fear, for there was danger to the whole family from every side, made up his mind to stop the shogun at all hazards, and in the depth of the night made his way to Ishibashi, where one of the princes had preceded Iyémitsŭ, who was to pass the night still further back on the road.
Here there was difficulty about getting a private interview with so great a man as this prince, whose name you will remember as being the title of the former owner of our friend's house in Nikko: Ii, Kammon no Kami.
The letter was shown to Ii, who despatched two messengers, gentlemen of his own, one back to Yedo, to see to the safety of the castle there; the other one to Iyémitsŭ, but by a circuitous route, so that he might appear to have come the other way. The letter was to the effect that the young shogun's father was very ill and desired his son's immediate return. By the time that Iyémitsŭ could get into his litter, Ii had arrived and shown him the girl's letter. Then the occupants of the litters were changed, Matsudaira taking Iyémitsŭ'snorimonoand Iyémitsŭ Matsudaira's. This, of course, was to give another chance of escape in case of sudden attack by a larger force, for they were now in enemy's country and did not know what traps might be laid for them. The bearers of the palanquin pressed through the night, so that, leaving at midnight, they arrived at Yedo the followingevening; but the strain had been so great that they could go no further. There was still the fear of attack, and among the retinue one very strong man, Matsudaira Ishikawa, carried the litter of the prince himself. But the gates were closed, and the guards refused to recognize the unknown litter as that of the shogun; nor would they, fearing treachery, open when told that Iyémitsŭ had returned. Delays ensued, but at last admission was obtained for Iyémitsŭ through a wicket gate—and he was safe. Later, after cautious delays, the guilty were punished, and I hope the family of the carpenter's love escaped. When I first read the story, years ago, the version was different, and there was some arrangement of it, more romantic—with some circumstances through which the young carpenter and his sweetheart escaped, and alone the father, innocent of harm, committed suicide. The story sounded sufficiently Japanese and upside down and was pretty, but I have forgotten its convolutions, so that I give you this one, which I think has a pleasant local color. It has local color, and that charm of action which belongs to such histories as those of the great Dumas—not to mention Mr. Froude.
Do not forget that these details are given for your amusement, and not for your instruction. I am quite uncertain as to the historical value of my information as soon as I come down to close particulars. What little I really know comes down from early reading of the missionaries and of the Dutch, and that is mostly outside impression, though thereby valuable, because not based on theory or principle.
I do not know that critical history has yet begun here. But in the historical place where we have spent our summer, talk about the past was but natural and all to be listened to without much chance for us to distinguishwhat was of record and what was of legend. What I have been writing about is legend, and I am warned of its complicated incorrectness. That has not prevented my setting it down. You would like the pretty murderous story whose details reflect a peculiar past. It would be nothing to you if it were not at all Iyémitsŭ, but his father Hidetada, for whose destruction the famous plot of the Hanging Ceiling was hatched. Nor would you care if the ceiling and bath-room had never existed. What is worth having is that many people thought that they saw themselves in the mirror of a period.
Now see how re-arranging the atoms of which the previous story is constituted will give you quite another picture that I would spare you, though it is a correct historical one, but it has the advantage of being quite as strange in certain ways, though not so fitted for the theater, and of giving you again a picture of feudal Japan.
As I said before, the story as I have just told it has been kept in memory, if not invented on purpose, through a book written in honor of a Japanese opposed to Honda, the master of the castle, the author of the plot of the Hanging Ceiling. There may have been such a story afloat at that time among people of low degree kept out from the many secrets of the court, but knowing that things were being done; at the same time, there is nothing that would account for a sufficient reason; and, worse than all, the date is impossible. Young Iyémitsŭ was not in any position at that possible date (eighth year of the Genwa) to represent the shogunate. His father Hidetada would have been the proposed victim, which is again impossible because of the devotion of Honda, the lord of the castle, to Hidetada. That there was such an accusation I believe is understood. It was met at the time and at once disproved to thesatisfaction of the shogun. It was the Lady Kano who had denounced Honda, and apparently invented the plot. She was a daughter of Iyéyasŭ, and had, perhaps, some of the fierce strain said to have shown in her mother and sister. Her baby grandson had only just been deprived of this very fief for the advantage of Honda, so that she had at least this grievance. And she was united in intention with the wife of the shogun Hidetada. This was a beautiful and wilful woman,—known to us by her after-death name of Sogenin, whose preference for Iyémitsŭ's brother, her son also, had met Honda's resistance. You can realize that I am not capable of even discussing the question, and that I am only doing it to amuse you and to bring in more pictures.
As the shogun was to be received by the lord of Utsunomiya, new additions were ordered for his castle, the bridges and roads were repaired, which works required all the laborers, skilled or otherwise, of his domains, and even obliged him to draw upon his retainers and soldiers. Such enormous preparations were, of course, noised abroad. Now, it so happened that at one time Honda's father had been concerned in an insurrection, or levy of arms, of certain members of the Buddhist sect to which he belonged, and had fought the great Iyéyasŭ, whom afterwards he served so faithfully. Among the upholders of the faith were fighting monks, a variety of the militant church well known in the annals of Japan. At the close of this rebellion a band of these monks—something like a hundred—and a hundred other warriors were intrusted—Japanese-way—to the wardship of their former fellow partisan, and there they were handy for use. But they had retained something of both the clergyman and the warrior, keeping their priestly names and wearing their hair unshorn, and they refused to work, which in their eyes wouldhave assimilated them to common soldiers and laborers. Thereupon,—and this was thought to be queer even in those days,—the lord of the castle invited them to go about the country and report upon certain matters in various places, at which places they were met by bodies of armed men, who put an end to them. I suppose that, according to strict views of the country and time, this was justifiable, though excessive, and this is one of the little pictures that I wish to frame. You see how the unpleasantness of the occasion might help the later stories of assassination.
And now, in correcting another error, I can give you another picture of feudal Japan, a Japan now broken up, against whose last rulers, the Tokugawa, I hear daily so much. That lady in the story just given you, where she is the mother of Iyémitsŭ and the concubine of his father, the shogun, was a very different person.
Little Iyémitsŭ was the legitimate son; moreover, the one who by date of birth was the probable heir, notwithstanding the preference shown by his father and his mother, Sogenin, for his younger brother. So that the succession was decided abruptly by the stern head of the family, Iyéyasŭ.
Great attention was paid by the grandfather, the great Iyéyasŭ, to the education of this grandson. As a Japanese friend remarked, he believed that the important place in the generation was that of the third man. So that three distinguished noblemen were appointed his governors: Sakai, to teach benevolence; Doi, to teach wisdom; Awoyama, to teach valor. Besides these great professors for the future, the little boy needed an immediate training by a governess good in every way. Kasuga, a married woman, the daughter of a well-known warrior of imperial descent who had lost his life in some conspiracy of the previous generation, was chosen bythe government for the position. This was, perhaps, as great an honor as could be offered to any lady. Besides, there was an opportunity to clear the memory of her father. And she begged her husband to divorce her that she might be free to give all her life to this task. So devoted was she that the boy being at one time at the point of death, she offered herself to the gods for his recovery, vowing never to take any remedy. In her last illness she refused all medicine, and even when Iyémitsŭ—now ruler—begged her to take a commended draught from his hand, she merely, out of politeness, allowed it to moisten her lips, saying that her work was done, that she was ready to die, and that her life had long ago been offered for the master. Nor would she allow the master to indulge her with regard to her own son. He was in exile, deservedly, and the shogun asked her permission to pardon him, in the belief of possible amendment. She refused, bidding Iyémitsŭ to remember his lesson: that the law of the country was above all things, and that she had never expected such words from him. Moreover, that had he revoked the law for her, she could not die in peace. There is a Spartan politeness in all this, for which I think the stories worth saving to you.
And they will help to give Iyémitsŭ existence for you. He seems too vague in the temple dedicated to him at Nikko, even when we look at his bronze tomb and are told that he lies there packed in vermilion: our minds have become so far removed from the ways of thinking of Japan that a divinized mortal is an empty phrase for us.
The details of such stories as I have told would not have seemed very antiquated across the seas, at their date, to those who remembered the days of Queen Elizabeth. The change has been as great in Europe as inJapan, but here it has been sudden, like the shifting of the scene of the theater; so that I can realize that when I was a boy such things as I am telling you would not have seemed very old-fashioned hereabouts.
And now I make my notes in this little railroad coach, with the telegraph wires running in and out of the picture that I see through my window; and, indeed, it is this implied contrast which I think has urged me most to tell you these more or less accurate anecdotes.
If you wished to learn more about Iyémitsŭ from the Japanese biography that I have with me, you might be puzzled. One has felt so distinctly the all-powerfulness of the men whose names and stories are the outer history of Japan. So full is the impression forced upon one by the outside of the life of such a ruler as Iyémitsŭ, bounded between the worship of his grandfather in golden temples and his own worship in almost equal splendors, and filled in by despotic use of power, that it leaves little place for the theory of all this power coming from the Mikado, who practically lived upon a narrow income apportioned to him by his lieutenant, the shogun. But in my little biography, written evidently to keep to present views and theories, I learn that toward the emperor our impatient hero was "faithful and humble"—and part of his story consists of visits to the emperor and of his receiving honors from this source of all honor. Thus, upon his coming of age, and having his hair trimmed, cut, and shaved in a manner to indicate this important event, the emperor sends a great court officer to compliment him, gives him the name of Iyémitsŭ, honors him with the rank ofJunii, and appoints him a Go Dainagon. Also, later he appoints him to be the commander of the right wing of the imperial guard, and also superintendent of the Right Imperial Stable. Thereupon Iyémitsŭ calls upon hismajesty at Kioto to pay his homage, and is made commander-in-chief of the army and navy, and moreover Naidaizin, with the rank of Shonii; and he is also permitted to ride in an ox-carriage and to have armed body-guards; the latter privilege one that he had been obliged to enjoy perforce from early days, as we have seen. Whereupon, says my chronicler, Iyémitsŭ had the honor of presenting to his majesty a yearly income of twenty thousand bags of rice; and this goes on until after his death, when the emperor gives him these titles for the future, the name of Daiken-In, the rank of Shoichi, and the premier office of Daijo-Daizin. "The favor of Five Imperial poems was also extended to the deceased."
Iyémitsŭ was fond of painting, and studied under the instruction of Kano Tanyu. He liked to paint the sacred mountain Fuji, and the same courteous chronicler tells me that some of his work was better than Tanyu's. But I should prefer seeing, before deciding; though Tanyu's imperturbable security makes one not a little bored.
It is dark; we are approaching Iyémitsŭ's city, Tokio, formerly Yedo, the city of the Tokugawa, now finally returned to the emperor, to whom they gave the thousands of bags of rice for income. We shall sleep at No. 22 Yokohama,[8]and look out on the water again.