SIGNATURE OF HOKUSAI.
I shall probably leave my letter to you unfinished. It has already become unwieldy, and I could give you only my own impressions. And then in the history of art everything is needed.
It would not be merely reproduction in words, however beautiful, of the surfaces of works that have survived time, nor of the men who made them, of their characters, the accidents of their lives, and their technical beliefs. It would be simply a history of humanity at a given place. It could not be solved by a mere account of the place and the race, according to some of our later scientific fads. I was writing to you but yesterday, and trying to make out that the work of art is often a contradiction of the period, or a step in advance; that the moods of feeling of the future are as often reflected by art as the habits of the present. But whatever personal sense of solitariness or of antagonism has inspired or oppressed the artist, he must have had partners since he has had admirers, even when he antagonizes his time. However transient certain of his forms, however much to us who come afterward they indicate theperiod, he has expressed not his time, but the needs of others who have been looking in the same ways, and yet have had no voice. And even if they havenot quite sympathized, the accumulations of like tendencies have become stronger and clearer in their descendants. To reflect fully, then, in words, the face of the work of art, one would have to melt into it in some way the gaze of those who have looked at it; to keep upon it still the gentle looks of the pitiful and the loving, the rapt contemplation of the saints, the tender or mocking smile of women, the hard or contemptuous appreciation of rulers, the toleration of the wise, all of which have been in reality a part of the very work. Their negations or sympathies have fallen on the work, and these ineffable delicacies of impression are transmitted in it to successive generations, even as the shadowing of innumerable years of incense-burning has browned the gold and blackened the azure, as concealment in the shade has sometimes paled, sometimes preserved, the edges of the outlines and the modeling of the colors, or exposure and heat and damp have cracked and channeled and dusted all surfaces. You see what I should consider a true carrying out of such a task, and how unsatisfied I should be with anything that I could accomplish, unless it were to stand to you as something fragmentary and evanescent. One thing I should like to do,—should I remain long enough, and be able to get it from the few acquaintances who may know,—and that is, to save some part of the artists themselves out of that obscurity by which the lives of great workers are almost always clouded. To me Rembrandt, and Balzac, and Delacroix, each contradictory to his surroundings, have become more intelligible through the record of their every-day struggle, the exactness of measurement which one can place upon the personal circumstances in which they carried out their work, the limitations of its exact meaning and importance in their own eyes, as we follow them in the daylight of favor, or in the gloomy endings that so often close the lives of great artists.
I hear occasionally of the wanderings of Kano Motonobu, the founder of the great school and family of artists who have lasted through four centuries to the present day, and have filled Japan and the temples here with works better or poorer, until the family name becomes a burden. I hear about Okio, the charmer, the painter of everything and of animals, who began as a little child, by sketching on the earth with bamboo sticks when he followed his parents into the fields to work. One might perhaps learn about Hokusai, who is tabooed here, and about whom I dare not inquire, but whose charming last letter, as given by Mr. Morse, comes back to my memory—it is so gay and so sad, so triumphant over circumstances, so expressive of the view of the world which explains his woodcuts. I quote from memory: "King Em-mā" (he writes to a friend)—"King Em-mā" (the ruler of the under world) "has become very old, and is thinking of retiring from business; so that he has ordered a little country house to be built, and he asks of me to come to him that I may paint him a 'kakemono'; so that in a few days I must be ready to travel and to take my sketches with me. I shall take up my residence at the corner of the Street of the Under World, where it will give me much pleasure to receive thee, when thou hast the opportunity to come over there."
Or this mocking challenge to old age, at the end of one of the volumes of his pictures of Fuji:
"Since my sixth year I have felt the impulse to represent the form of things; by the age of fifty I had published numberless drawings; but I am displeased with all I have produced before the age of seventy. It is at seventy-three that I have begun to understand the form and the true nature of birds, of fishes, of plants, and so forth. Consequently, by the time I get to eighty, I shall have made much progress; at ninety, I shall get to theessence of things; at a hundred, I shall have most certainly come to a superior, undefinable position; and at the age of a hundred and ten, every point, every line, shall be alive. And I leave it to those who shall live as I have myself, to see if I have not kept my word. Written, at the age of seventy-five, by me, formerly known as Hokusai, but now known as Gakyo Rojin (The Old Man gone Mad for Painting)."
... I had been intending to add, when I interrupted myself some way back, that I enjoyed in this art of Japan—at least in this drawing which they call painting—the strange nearness I seem to be in to the feelings of the men who did the work. There is between us only a thin veil of consummate skill. The habit and the methods resulting from it, of an old obedience to an unwritten law common to all art, have asked for the directest ways of marking an intention or an observation.
INSCRIPTION ON OLD LACQUER.
This reference to a previous tradition of meaning, of ideal arrangement by rule, this wish for synopsis, this feeling for manners of expressing one's self in the thing seen, will naturally make art out of anything. And it is not wonderful that what we call handwriting may then give full play to art, in a written language of which ideographyis the key. Given the Chinese characters, their original intentions, the associations, historical and literary, connected with them, is it anything strange in reality, however strange to our habits, to find writing a form of art in Japan? It may have all I have just referred to, and be full of the meaning of ideas, and be literature, and then it can be made conformable to the laws of beauty of form and spacing; and above all, to give character of style, and character of personality, to look more or less grave, or elegant, or weighty, according to circumstances, be elegiac, or lyric, or epic, and reflect on its face the intentions of the text. And again it will be the mark orsignof the person; so that my Japanese friends can object to Hokusai's bad writing, as betraying something not refined, for a weighty argument against his other works done with a similar implement, the brush, which is the pen of the far East.
It will then be in what we call drawing—which is an abstraction, the synopsis of the outlines of things meeting together, of their relative intensities, of their own colors, of their relations to the place they are in, that is to say, the picture—that this art of Japan, the daughter of the art of China, will attain its highest form; so that in reality those of us who think of it as appearing at its best only in color, in external charm, have not understood it. An etching of Rembrandt could fairly be said to represent, not so much in itself, but in its essence, what a great Chinaman would have liked to do in India ink—the material of all others which, even to us, is his especially. The line, the abstract line of Rembrandt, its elegance, its beautiful patterning of the surface, is concealed to us by the extraordinary richness of some of his modeling and the extreme gradations of what we call light and shade. But it is there all the same, as a geologic foundation, in the same way that inside of the Titian's splendor of surfacethere is a decorative substructure as well balanced and fixed as a Venetian brocade—just as the works of other great colorists, as we call them (to designate more complex men), imply, in their constitution and the mechanism of their technic, powers of design and drawing sufficient to furnish out armies of such draftsmen as flourish, for instance, in the Paris of to-day. It is this surplus of richness that conceals the identity. Our arts have undertaken an enormous accession of truths and ambitions upon which the arts of the extreme East have never ventured. They have attained their end, the end of all art, at an earlier mental period. They are younger, perhaps even more like children, and their work cannot involve the greater complications of greater age; but it has also all that grasp of the future that belongs to youth, and that has to be accompanied by deficiencies of knowledge; that is to say, of later acquirement and the practice of good and evil. And it is impossible to look at the expression of nature, or of any intention made by the child in full sincerity, without realizing that the aim of the artist, be he even Michael Angelo, is to return to a similar directness and unity of rendering. Not that the Eastern artist, any more than the child, could be conscious of deficiencies of which he had not thought. He has been satisfied, as we have been satisfied, but for a longer time and under a greater prestige. As the fruit painted by the Greek deceived the birds, and the curtain painted by the Greek painter deceived his fellow-artist, so the horses of Kanaoka have escaped from their "kakemonos," and the tigers sculptured in the lattices of temples have been known to descend at night and rend one another in the courtyards. O—— tells me the Chinese story of the painter forced to let go his painting of the moon for a nominal sum to repay an oppressive money-lender, and how, when the banker happened to unroll it,the whole room was illumined, and he grew into a habit of spending evenings in the mild effulgence of the painted rays. But when, after an absence, he looked at it again, the moon was gone,—where old moons go,—and he was enraged at the painter, though he might well have noticed that for many days the moon had not been so bright, and indeed had seemed to be ill drawn. O—— tells me that the artist got it back for little, and waited the necessary number of days to have its crescent reappear again; and A—— says that, though the picture is lost to-day, he hopes to find it again in China in following years.
INSCRIPTION FROM HO-RIU-JI.
These stories serve as a way of stating to you that as long as new wants were not felt, newer accuracies did not begin to exist, and these limitations are naturally seen to be more easily put up with in a civilization of uninterrupted tradition. To acquire something when one's hands are full, something has to be dropped. In the stations of our own progress in art, the advance has at every stage involved some deficiency, or failure, or weakening on another side. This is the only explanation I can make for painting in the extreme East not having taken up portraiture—that is to say, not having triumphed in it, while sculpture has reached out toward it in a splendid way. We have seen the same thing in the transition from the Middle Ages, when sculpture outreaches painting in the direction of reality. Butthen sculpture is to a certain extent easier and in a certain way inferior, because it gives a sort of duplicate of the object, not a relation of it to other things.
So that the Japanese have not come to the work from the "model," which has at so many periods and so long been ours. Theirs are types of types; they are not, as with us, persons, and the pursuit of beauty in the individual has not been followed apparently by the art of the far East. The personal love and preference of the artist embodied in another person their art does not show; nor have their artists given a nameless immortality to certain human beings, so that for ages their types, their images, their moods, their characters, their most transitory variations of beauty, have been proposed to us as an example. Have you ever reflected how the nameless model reigns in the memory of man with a personal fame more intimate than that of Cheops, or Helen, or Cæsar, because the artist has been obliged to build upon this person his own dream of the world—as with the Roman girl who is the Madonna of San Sisto?
... So, again, the Eastern artists have suggested, and implied, and used light and shade, and perspective, and anatomy, and the relations of light to color, and of color to light, only so much as they could take into their previous scheme.
In many cases their success is still an astonishment to us. Certainly their records of motion, their construction of plants and flowers and birds, we have all appreciated; and their scientific, easy noting of colored light in landscape made even Rousseau dream of absorbing its teaching into his pictures, which certainly represent the full Western contradictory idea, in the most complicated acceptance of every difficulty.
The artist here, then, has not made separate analytical studies of all the points that trouble us, that have cost attimes some acquirement of the past, in the anxiety for working out a new direction; as to-day, for instance, in learned France, where the very art of painting, as a mirror of the full-colored appearance of things, has for a quarter of a century been in peril, under the influence of the academy drawing-school, the model in studio light, and the vain attempt to rival the photograph. And perhaps it is needless to repeat again how we have lost the sense of natural decoration and expression of meaning by general arrangement of lines and spaces, so that again in France we are astonished at M. Puvis de Chavannes, who uses powers that have once been common to almost all our race.
Here the artist does not walk attired in all the heavy armor which we have gradually accumulated upon us. His learning in side issues is not unnecessarily obtruded upon me, so as to conceal the sensitiveness of his impressions or the refinement of his mind. As for us, we have marched on in a track parallel to science, striving now for centuries to subdue the material world—to get it into the microcosm of our paintings. Each successive great generation has taken up the task, heavier and heavier as time goes on, halting and resting when some new "find" has been made, working out a new discovery often with the risk of the loss of a greater one.
But how often the processes have covered up what is most important,—to me at least,—the value of the individual, his aspirations, and indeed the notions or beliefs that are common between us.
Sometimes this covering has been sordid and mean, pedantic or unesthetic, sometimes most splendid. But how difficult it has been always for the many to read, for instance, in our great Rubens, the evidences of a lofty nature, the devout intentions of a healthy mind!
Not that we can turn back to-day and desert. Fromthe time when the Greek first asserted in art the value of personal manhood to the date of the "impressionist" of to-day, the career has been one. And certainly in the art of painting a vaster future lies before us, whenever we are ready to carry the past. But remember that whatever has been really great once will always remain great.
Even if I were competent to make more than approaches to reflection, this place of dreams is not well chosen for effort. I feel rather as if, tired, I wished to take off my modern armor, and lie at rest, and look at these pictures of the simplicity of attitude in which we were once children. For, indeed, the meaning of our struggle is to regain that time, through toil and the fullness of learning, and to live again in the oneness of mind and feeling which is to open to us the doors of the kingdom.
Nikko san, August 12.
The enchantment of idleness is no longer to be lived in, of mere enjoyment of what I see. I have now to feel the bitterness of work, of effort of memory and analysis, and to become responsible to myself for what I see, and for the accuracy with which I see it; just as my quieting inhalation of the Buddhist air is disturbed by the intellectual necessity of giving to myself some account of formulas, and later, unfortunately, of rendering to you this same account of my impressions. And yet I feel so delightfully lazy, so much as if I were in a Newport in which all should be new. All this place has become more and more enchanting. I am sure that I shall go with the regret of not having painted whatever I shall leave untried; all so preferable, undoubtedly, to what shall have been done. Everything here exists for a painter's delight, everything composes or makes pleasant arrangements, and the little odds and ends are charming, so that I sometimes feel as if I liked the small things that I have discovered better than the greater which I am forced to recognize.
And, then, all looks wild and natural, as if undisturbed by man; but no one can tell in a place where nature is so admirable, so admired, and so adored.
I like the old roads betweenyashikiwalls, broken up with torrents and bridges; and the small shrines and sacred trees, which have no great point but that they are pretty, and so far away—in the infancy of the world. Stones and rocks that are sacred—why and whereforeno one exactly knowing; only that it is so, and has been so for a long, long time.
Three thousand years ago Europe was so, with paganism—the peasant or earth belief—gradually lost to our comprehension except through hearsay. So we are accustomed to write of the sacred grove; and here it is, all about me, as if history were made living. The lovely scenery reminds me continually of what has been associated with it; a civilization which has been born of it, has never separated from nature, has its religion, its art, and its historic associations entangled with all natural manifestations. The great Pan might still be living here, in a state of the world which has sanctified trees and groves, and associated the spirit-world with every form of the earthly dwelling-place. I feel as if I were nearer than I can be through books to the old world we try to rebuild by collation of facts and documents.
Could a Greek come back here he would find his "soul-informed rocks," and all that he thought divine or superstitious, even to the very "impressions of Aphrodite." The sacredness that lives here in mountains would seem all natural to him, as would the stories of mountain gods who ages ago met here the advance of the Buddhist priests. For Buddhism has joined with the earthly faith in attaching religious value to solitary places and mountain heights, and many are the stories which link these two beliefs from the early times. As, for instance, when Shodo Shonin in his wanderings came here and "opened up" the mountains of Nikko. For this saintly discoverer, dwelling in early youth among sacred caves, and a devout reverer of the native and Buddhist deities, had long dreamed of wondrous things on distant mountains, of celestial or spiritual beings, visible even to the eye, and pursued his search according to holy vows and under celestial guidance.
BED OF THE DAYAGAWA, NIKKO.
Where the red lacquer bridge now goes over the Dayagawa, Shodo Shonin first crossed upon the fairy snake bridge, which, like a rainbow spanning the hills, was thrown over for him by a mysterious colossal god of the mountain. Here, a few yards off, he built the shrine in honor of his helper, the "great King of the Deep Sand." This was in the year 767 of our era; and in 782, after much previous exploration, he reached the summit of Nan-tai-san, and met the tutelary gods of Nikko, who promised to watch over the welfare of Japan and the progress of the new religion. These three gods were long worshiped thereafter at the foot of the mountain, on the bank of the lake named Chiuzenji, by him, along with the Buddhist incarnations whose temple he established there. So that these primordial divinities were looked upon by certain Buddhist eyes as what they named "temporary manifestations" of the great essences known as Amida, Buddha, and Kuwan-on.
Last evening, near the back of the rock upon which is the tomb of Iyéyasŭ, I followed some zigzag stone steps that lead up to a little shrine, dark among the trees, in which is the figure of an old man with powerful legs—the master pilgrim Enno-Sho-kaku. Why his shrine was exactly there I have not clearly made out; but certainly, as a mountain spirit, his being here is appropriate. For, born a miraculous child, he loved from infancy the solitariness of woods far up the mountains. The rain never wet him; no living things of the forest were ever hurt by him, even through chance; he lived, as they might, on nuts and berries, clothed in the tree's own dress, of the tendrils of the wistaria. Thus he passed forty years among mountains and waterfalls, under directions received in dreams, to bring the wild places beneath the dominion of Buddha. Two hill spirits served him and provided him with fuel and water. The life of naturebecame his, and he moved through water or through air as easily as his mind dwelt in the present and in the future.
Naturally, too, when he touched the world of men he was maligned and persecuted; but even then, when exiled to an island in the sea, he could fly back at night to revisit his mother, or ascend his beloved mountains, while submitting obediently in the daylight to the presence of his guards. Naturally, too, his evil days came to an end, and he was freed, and finally flitted away toward China, and has never reappeared. With him in the little shrine are his faithful imps, painted red and green, and out of the darkness his wooden image, with a long white beard, looked absolutely real in the rainy twilight. Enormous iron sandals hung on every side, offerings of pilgrims anxious to obtain legs as sturdy as those of the pilgrim patron. Had I been able to leave my own I should have done so, for never have I felt as weakened and unenergetic as I have become in this idle climate. We could just see the white stone steps of the little road as we came down the steep hill through the wood to the gate of Iyémitsŭ's tomb.
MOUNTAINS IN FOG BEFORE OUR HOUSE.
August 16.
The languor that oppresses me does not disappear, and I live with alternations of exertion that reflect the weather. There has been an immense amount of sunshine and the same amount of rain, compressing into a single day as much as would suffice at home for weeks of summer and winter. Suddenly, from hot blue skies, come down the cloud and the wet. The lovely little hills or mountains opposite our house round out, all modeled and full, in glossy green, to be painted in another hour with thin washes of gray, thickened with white, as in the single-colored designs of the old Limoges enamels. Then their edges grow sharp and thin, and arestamped against further mists, like pale prints of the Japanese designs, making me see those pictures increased to life-size. And I realize how accurate these are, even to the enlarged appearance of the great trees which fringe their tops and edges, as these are seen through the broken, wet veil of moisture. And even here, again, I am puzzled as to whether art has helped nature.
August 17.
Yesterday I suffered seriously from the heat. I had gone to the little flat table-land that lies to the north behind our house, through which runs a small road, untraveled and grass-grown, connecting somewhere or other with the road of the great temples. I had intended to study there, for several reasons; one, among others, because I saw every day, as I looked through my screens, a little typical landscape-picture of Japan. Near by, a small temple shrine all vermilion in the sun, with heavy, black, oppressive roof; then a stretch of flat table-land, overgrown with trees and bushes, from which stood up a single high tree, with peaceful horizontal branches; on each side, conical hills, as if the wings of a stage-scene; far beyond, a tumble of mountains behind the great depression of the river hidden out of sight; and above, and farther yet, the great green slopes that lead to the peak of Nio-ho. It was very hot, and all the clouds seemed far away, the sun very high in the early noon, and no shade. I passed the new priests' houses of the old temple near us, where are billeted, to the inconvenience of the owners, many sailor boys sent all the way from the navy yard of Okotsuka, so that they escape the cholera, as we are doing. They are usually washing their clothes in the torrent that runs under the bridge of three carved stones, which I have to pass to get into the little path, frequented by gadflies, that takes me up tomy sketching-ground. Were it not for the amiably obtrusive curiosity of these youngsters in their leisure hours, I should pass through their courtyard into the shady spaces near the little temples and the three-storied pagoda, which the priests' houses adjoin.
I am always courteously saluted by the priests, and one of them, living there in vacation, I know. He is off duty at the temples of Iyémitsŭ, and I have seen him at the home of our friends. I send you a sketch of his face, which appears to me impressed by sincerity and a certain anxiety very sympathetic. When I sketch near the pagoda I see him occasionally ringing the hanging-bell or cymbal, with the same step and air of half-unconscious performance of habitual duty that I remember so well in Catholic priests whom I knew as a boy.
Here the memory of Shodo Shonin comes up again, with a confusion of intention in the assembled worship of Buddhist and native divinities. For the "opener of mountains" built the temple here to the same god, with the never-ending name, whom he met on the summit of Nan-tai-san. And the adjoining chapel, dedicated to Kuwan-on, means that she was in reality the essential being, behind the temporary manifestation, that assumed the name and appearance of this mountain god,—thegenius loci. And the Latin words bring back the recollection of curious stones in the mossy green shade, to which is attached the meaning of the oldest past; for they are "male" and "female"—emblems and images of earliest worship, empowered to remind, and perhaps obscurely to influence.
Seated at last under my umbrella, I could feel the hot moisture rising from the grass beneath me. The heated hills on each side wore a thin interlacing of violet in the green of their pines. The mountains across the river were frosted in the sunlight, with the thinnest veil of a glitter of wet.
Between them great walls of vapor rose from the hidden river, twisting into draperies that slowly crawled up the slopes of the great mountain. Far off, its top was capped with cloud, whose mass descended in a shower over its face and between its peaks, and kept all its nearer side in a trembling violet shadow.
PORTRAIT OF A PRIEST.
Above the peak the great mass of fog spread to the farthest mountains, letting their highest tops shine through with a pale-blue faintness like that of sky. But the great back of the long slope was distinct, and of a vivid green against the background of violet mountains. So solid and close-packed it looked under the high light that one might forget that this green was not of turf, firm underfoot, but was a trackless waste of tall grasses high as a man's head. Farther on against the northern sky the eastern slope was golden and sharp. In the highest sky of fiery blue large cumulus clouds shone above and through the fog, whose ragged edge blew like a great flag toward the south. The little temple blazed in vermilion, one side all lighted up, its black-tiled roof hot in the sun. In the shadow of its porch the columns and entablature were white and pale gold and green.
My attempt to render the light and heat lasted for two or three hours: my damp umbrella seemed penetrated by the light, my skin was scorched and blistered, and a faint dizziness kept warning me to get back to a larger shade. When I yielded, I was only just able to reach my welcome mats, saved from something worse by my very scorching. Since yesterday I have been ill; not sleeping, but dreaming uncomfortably; and visited and comforted, however, by our fair hostess and the Doctor.
Murmurs of Buddhistic conversation remain in my mind: vague stories of life in Southern monasteries, of refined ascetic life, of sublimated delicate food, of gentle miraculous powers, known to the favored few that behold them at times; of ascensions and disappearances like those of the pilgrim saint of whom I was telling you yesterday—all of which talk mingles with the vague intent of my painting. For I had proposed to make my studies serve for the picture of the "Ascension"; to use the clouds and the wilderness for my background; and to be, at least for moments, in some relation to what I have to represent; that is to say, in an atmosphere not inimical, as ours is, to what we call the miraculous. Here, at least, I am not forced to consider external nature as separate and opposed, and I can fall into moods of thought,—or, if you prefer, of feeling,—in which the edges of all thingsblend, and man and the outside world pass into each other.
OLD PAGODA NEAR THE PRIESTS' HOUSES.
August 17.
And so, often, I like to think of these trees and rocks and streams, as if from them might be evolved some spiritual essence. Has not Çakyamuni said that all (living) beings possess the nature of Buddha, that is to say, the absolute nature. The sun, the moon, the earth, and the innumerable stars contain within themselves the absolute nature. So for the little flowers, the grass, the clouds that rise from the waters, the very drop of water itself; for they are begotten of nature absolute, and all form a part of it, however great, however small. Absolute nature is the essence of all things, and is the same as all things. This absolute nature will be as are the waters of the sea, if we picture it, and its modes will be as the waves, inseparable from the waters. Thus the absolute and all things will be identical, inseparable views of the same existence. This nature will be both essence and force, and appearance and manner. And so my friends here, of the sect which holds the temple, might teach me that the little plants, the great mountains, and the rushing waters can become Buddhas.
In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. These mysteries are understood of the Buddha, but evolution, cultivated by the "true word," or doctrine, will allow man, whose mysteries are like the mysteries of the Buddhas, to become like unto them.
But since the path is open for all to Buddhahood,—since these animals that pass me, this landscape about me, canbecome divine,—why, alas! are not men more easily carried to that glorious end? It is because we are living in the present; and as that present must have had a past, since nothing is lost and nothing disappears, so it will have a future; and that future depends on the present and on the past. Changes and transformations are only a "play" of cause and effect, since spirit and matter are one in absolute nature, which in its essence can neither be born nor be dissolved. Actual life is absolutely determined by the influencing action of merit and demerit in past existence, as the future will be determined by present causes; so that it is possible for the soul to pass through the six conditions of the infernal being, the phantom, the beast, the demon, the human, and the celestial, and, through painful transmigration, to reach the supreme salvation of Nirvana. Then will end the universal metamorphoses, the trials, the expiations, the unceasing whirlwind of life. Illusion will cease, and reality last, in the complete calm of absolute truth.
Have I told you my story of the word Nirvana, as used by the reporter at Omaha, who managed to interview us? The association of a reporter with any of the four states of Nirvana may seem impossible to you—but this is the way it happened.
Owing to A——'s being the brother of the president of the road, we were naturally suspected of business designs when we acknowledged that we were going to Japan, and, in my shortsighted wisdom, I thought that I should put to rout our interviewer by "allowing" that the purpose of our going was to find Nirvana. I had misjudged the mind of the true reporter, and did not expect the retort, "Are you not rather late in the season?" Whether he knew or "builded better," he had certainly pointed out the probable result. I often recur to this episode when, as now, I enjoy, in dreaming action, that Nirvana which is called conditioned; that state of the terrestrial being who understands truth by the extinction of passions, but who is yet, indeed, very much tied to the body—if I may speak so lightly of what is a contemplation of, and an absorption in, eternal truth, a rest in supreme salvation.
Of all the images that I see so often, the one that touches me most—partly, perhaps, because of the Eternal Feminine—is that of the incarnation that is called Kuwan-on, when shown absorbed in the meditations of Nirvana.
You have seen her in pictures, seated near some waterfall, and I am continually reminded of her by the beautiful scenes about us, of which the waterfall is the note and the charm. Were it not that I hate sightseeing, I should have made pilgrimages, like the good Japanese, to all the celebrated ones which are about. Exercise, however, during the day is difficult to me, and I don't like being carried, and the miserable horses of the peasants are awfully slow and very stumbly. We go about in single file, perched on the saddles upon their humped backs, each horse led by the owner, usually a trousered peasant girl. Lately on our visits to waterfalls we have passed the wide bed of the second river, which makes an island of our mountain—a great mountain-river bed filled with stones and boulders, through which the waters, now very low, divide into rushing torrents; while in the winter this is a tremendous affair, and in flood-times the very boulders are carried away. Far down at Imaichi, some six miles off, is shown one of the long row of stone Buddhas, several hundred in number, which line the right bank of the main river, the Dayagawa, near the deep pool called Kamman-ga-fuchi.
It was there that I drew the biggest of them all, on one of my first days here, a statue of Jizo, with Nan-tai-san half veiled in the distance behind him—a great cedar shading him, and all but the little path and the bridge of a single stone overgrown with weeds and bushes. These gods along the river are all ugly and barbarous,—country gods, as it were,—alien as possible, while the nature about them, though strange, is not so far away from me.
STATUE OF OYA JIZO.
Their ugliness was accentuated by a sort of efflorescence, or moss growth, curled and ragged by weather, made of innumerable slips of paper pasted upon them by troops of pilgrims to the holy places, who make a point of thus marking off their visits to each successive sacred object.Fortunately, they are what the Japanese call "wet goods," that is to say, unprotected by roof or temple, and the rains of heaven cleanse them and leave only the black and white of the lichens. They always worried me like a bad dream when I passed them in the evening, on my way home from work, and I can sympathize with the superstition which makes it impossible to count them. But this is on the Dayagawa, the main confluent which rushes down from Lake Chiuzenji. Our path led through the other river, over causeways and bridges, up to the hills on the other side, and to a high moorland from which the immense southern plain and distant mountains appeared swimming in light. Two faint blue triangles in the air were the peaks of Tsŭkŭba; nearer on the west, the mountains of Nikko were covered with cloud, through which the sunburst poured down upon their bases.
As we rode we passed beneath plantations covered with water, so that their mirror, at the level of the eye, reflected the mountains and clouds and upper sky in a transparent picture, spotted with innumerable tufts of brilliant green. And then we dismounted at a little tea-house, and sat under a rustic arbor, while our feminine grooms, stripping to the waist, wiped and sponged their sweating arm-pits and bosoms, in unconcernedness of sex. Yet when they noticed my sketching them, as if I did not take their nakedness for granted, sleeves and gowns were rapidly pulled over the uncovered flesh. So true it is that conduct depends upon the kind of attention it calls for. Nor was the universal standard of feminine propriety unrespected by them, when, on our return, my guide, who had, in every possible way that I could imagine, expressed her adherence to the ways of nature, met with the disaster of having her back hair come down; for then, with a shriek, she dropped the rein, and retired, blushing, behind the nearest tree, where, in equal hurry,another girl guide proceeded to console her, and to re-arrange the proper structure of shining black hair and ivory pins.
Then we descended by a narrow path, over which hung tree-camellias, still spotted with their last white blossoms, whose edges were rusted by the heat.
The main fall of Urami-no-Taki drops into a deep basin, edged by rocks, from a hollow in the highest hill, over which hang great trees. On each side lesser cascades rush or tumble over the rocky faces, and under the main column small streams slide down, or drop in thin pillars to join it. There is a path, frequented by pilgrims, which passes behind and underneath the fall, so that we can stand behind and look through it, whence its name. All is wilderness; but a high relief of the protector Fudo, guardian and friend of such places, is carved on the rock behind the falls, and shows through the rumpled edges of the water. All was shade, except where the sun struck in the emerald hollow above the fall, or where a beam lighted up here and there a patch of the great and small cascades, or the trees and rocks about them. And here, again, the intense silence, broken by the rush of the waterfall, recalled the pictures of K'wan-on, whose meaning and whose images bring back to me the Buddhistic idea of compassion. The deity, or goddess, seated in abstraction by the falling waters of life, represents, I suppose, more especially an ideal of contemplation, as the original Indian name indicated, I think; but her name to-day is that of the Compassionate One.
PEASANT GIRLS AND MOUNTAIN HORSES OF NIKKO.
Of the divinity's many incarnations one has interested me as typical, and will amuse you. It is when—in the year 696B. C., though the precise date is not exactly material—this power is born as a girl, daughter to one of the many kings of China. Then follows a legend likethat of Saint Barbara. She is in no hurry to follow her princess's duty of getting married, and pleasing her parents thereby. She is satisfied with a virgin life, and makes delays by persuading her father to build palaces for her bridal to come; and when all this has been done, and there is no final escape, she ends by an absolute refusal of marriage. At which, evidently from a long experience of the uselessness of argument with her sex, her father cuts her head off, and I regret to say that she thereupon goes to Hell. I suppose that she goes there, because, however laudable and high her ideal of life might have been, it should have been confined within the views of her country, that is to say, of obedience to parents first and foremost. However, she went there, and put up with it, and that so admirably that the divinity who rules the place was obliged to dismiss her, for her contentment with her lot was spreading as an example to the damned, and threatened the very existence of Hell. Since then her appearances again in this world have been on errands of compassion and of help. Nor is this constant willingness to act on behalf of others, and thereby to leave the realm of absolute peace, incompatible with that continual contemplation of which her pictures or images offer an ideal, enchanting to me.
For, indeed, the fourth Nirvana is that state of truth in which supreme salvation is not distinct from sorrowful transmigration, and for these blessed beings this is Nirvana; that, possessing the fullness of wisdom, they cannot desire to delay in transmigration, nor do they reënter Nirvana, because they feel the extreme of compassion for other beings.
For, in the Buddhist doctrine, compassion is the first of all virtues, and leads and is the essence of the five cardinal virtues, which are—note the sequence—pity, justice, urbanity, sincerity,andwise behavior. To theBuddhist, the pitiless are the ungodly. Hence the teaching of kindliness to all living beings, which is one of the "pure precepts" of the "greater vehicle," and through which all beings can obtain salvation.
For the happiness, which is the aim of Buddhism, is not limited to the individual, but is to be useful, to be of profit, to all mankind—a happiness which can only be moral, but which must act on the body as intimately as the soul is united with it.
These are the aspirations of higher Buddhism—its supreme end, to achieve the happiness of this life and of the future one—of the individual and of humanity, but differently, according to times and circumstances and human powers. In its full ideal here below civil and religious society would be the same; the continual rest of Nirvana becoming finally inseparable from our transmigrations—our passions living together with complete wisdom, and our further existence not demanding, then, another world. And if civilization shall have finally perfected the world of mind and the world of matter, we shall have here below Nirvana, and we shall dwell in it as Buddhas.
August 24.
In the afternoon I go through the little road toward the west, whose walls are spotted with mosses and creepers, and where the gutters are filled with clear, noisy torrents, echoing in answer to the general sound of waters. Rarely do I meet any one—perhaps some trousered peasant girls, drowsily leading pack-horses; or naked peasants, with muscles of yellow bronze, carrying brushwood on their backs. The sun is at its hottest. Above the beat of the waters rises the perpetual strident, interminable cry of the locusts, like the shrill voice of mourners in this abode of tombs—the voice of dust and aridity. I turn a corner of high wall and tall trees and enter, through a dilapidated gateway and up some high steps in the wall, an open space, whose unknown borders are concealed behind the enormous trunks of cryptomeria. For weeks carpenters have been slowly repairing a temple building in this court, the big beams and planks of freshly-cut wood perfuming the place with the smell of cedar. In the grass and on the broken pavement lie moldering fragments of the older work, still with a waxy covering of the red lacquer which holds together the dark, dusty fibers.
A little bell-tower, lacquered red, stands near the other entrance, to which I pass. That one has its wall and high fence all lacquered red, and a gateway also red and spotted with yellow and gray mosses. Down its big steps I go, seeing just before me, through the gigantictrees and their gray and red trunks, the face of the tall pagoda, which flanks one side of the court before Iyéyasŭ, and whose other side turns toward the avenue of Iyémitsŭ. The road upon which I come is the avenue of Iyéyasŭ. Three different slopes lead within it to the paved court, where stands the high Torii of stone, through which one goes by the middle path to the high steps and the wall, the boundary of the temple. Two great banks, blocked with great dressed stones, separate the three paths—the central path being cut into wide steps which lead up to the Torii. On each of these masses of earth and masonry grow great cryptomeria trees, each of their trunks almost filling, from side to side, the entire width of the surface. They are planted irregularly. As the further ends of the banks are less high from the ground, I climb up, and sit to sketch against one of the ragged and splintered trunks. For all these late afternoons but one all has been the same. Far above me, through the needle branches of bright or shadowy green, large white clouds roll and spread in a brilliant, blotty, wet, blue sky. The court is framed in dark green, all above dazzling in light. The great Torii stands in the half shade—the edge of its upper stone shining as if gilded with yellow moss, and stains of black and white and rusty red contrasting with the delicate gilded inscriptions incised on the lower part of the two supporting columns.