KIOTO AND HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE CHIEF BELLE THERE AFTER I HAD CONFERRED WITH CERTAIN CHINA MERCHANTS WHO TRAFFICKED IN TEA. SHOWS FURTHER HOW, IN A GREAT TEMPLE, I BROKE THE TENTH COMMANDMENT IN FIFTY-THREE PLACES AND BOWED DOWN BEFORE KANO AND A CARPENTER. TAKES ME TO ARASHIMA.
"Could I but write the things I see,My world would haste to gaze with me.But since the traitor Pen hath failedTo paint earth's loveliness unveiled,I can but pray my folk who read:—'For lavish Will take starveling Deed.'"
"Could I but write the things I see,My world would haste to gaze with me.But since the traitor Pen hath failedTo paint earth's loveliness unveiled,I can but pray my folk who read:—'For lavish Will take starveling Deed.'"
We are consorting with sixty of theSahib-login the quaintest hotel that ever you saw. It stands on the hillside overlooking the whole town of Kioto, and its garden is veritable Japanese. Fantastically trimmed tea trees, junipers, dwarfed pine, and cherry, are mixed up with ponds of goldfish, stone lanterns, quaint rock-work, and velvety turf all at an angle of thirty-five degrees. Behind us the pines, red and black, cover the hill and run down in a long spur to the town. But an auctioneer's catalogue cannot describe the charms of the place or deal justly with the tea-garden full of cherry trees that lies a hundred yards below thehotel. We were solemnly assured that hardly any one came to Kioto. That is why we meet every soul in the ship that had brought us to Nagasaki; and that is why our ears are constantly assailed with the clamour of people who are discussing places which must be "done." An Englishman is a very horrible person when he is on the war-path; so is an American, a Frenchman, or a German.
I had been watching the afternoon sunlight upon the trees and the town, the shift and play of colour in the crowded street of the cherry, and crooning to myself because the sky was blue and I was alive beneath it with a pair of eyes in my head.
Immediately the sun went down behind the hills the air became bitterly cold, but the people in crêpe sashes and silk coats never ceased their sober frolicking. There was to be a great service in honour of the cherry blossom the next day at the chief temple of Kioto, and they were getting ready for it. As the light died in a wash of crimson, the last thing I saw was a frieze of three little Japanese babies with fuzzy top-knots and huge sashes trying to hang head downwards from a bamboo rail. They did it, and the closing eye of day regarded them solemnly as it shut. The effect insilhouettewas immense!
A company of China tea-merchants were gathered in the smoking-room after dinner, and by consequence talked their own "shop," which was interesting. Their language is not Our language, for they know nothing of the tea-gardens, of drying and withering and rolling, of the assistant who breaks his collar-bone in the middle of the busiest season, or of the sickness that smites the coolielines at about the same time. They are happy men who get their tea by the break of a thousand chests from the interior of the country and play with it upon the London markets. None the less they have a very wholesome respect for Indian tea, which they cordially detest. Here is the sort of argument that a Foochow man, himself a very heavy buyer, flung at me across the table.
"You may talk about your Indian teas,—Assam and Kangra, or whatever you call them,—but I tellyouthat if ever they get a strong hold in England, the doctors will be down on them, Sir. They'll be medically forbidden. See if they aren't. They shatter your nerves to pieces. Unfit for human consumption—that's what they are. Though I don't deny theyareselling at Home. They don't keep, though. After three months, the sorts that I've seen in London turn to hay."
"I think you are wrong there," said a Hankow man. "My experience is that the Indian teas keep better than ours by a long way. But"—turning to me—"if we could only get the China Government to take off the duties, we could smash Indian tea and every one connected with it. We could lay down tea in Mincing Lane at threepence a pound. No, we do not adulterate our teas. That's one ofyourtricks in India. We get it as pure as yours—every chest in the break equal to sample."
"You can trust your native buyers then?" I interrupted.
"Trust 'em? Of course we can," cut in the Foochow merchant. "There are no tea-gardens in China as you understand them. The peasantry cultivate the tea, and the buyers buy from them for cash each season. You cangive a Chinaman a hundred thousand dollars and tell him to turn it into tea of your own particular chop—up to sample. Of course the man may be a thorough-paced rogue in many ways, but he knows better than to play the fool with an English house. Back comes your tea—a thousand half-chests, we'll say. You open perhaps five, and the balance go home untried. But they are all equal to sample. That's business, that is. The Chinaman's a born merchant and full of backbone. I like him for business purposes. The Jap's no use. He isn't man enough to handle a hundred thousand dollars. Very possibly he'd run off with it—or try to."
"The Jap has no business savvy. God knows I hate the Chinamen," said a bass voice behind the tobacco smoke, "but you can do business with him. The Jap's a little huckster who can't see beyond his nose."
They called for drinks and told tales, these merchants of China,—tales of money and bales and boxes,—but through all their stories there was an implied leaning upon native help which, even allowing for the peculiarities of China, was rather startling. "The compradore did this: Ho Whang did that: a syndicate of Pekin bankers did the other thing"—and so on. I wondered whether a certain lordly indifference as to details had anything to do with eccentricities in the China tea-breaks and fluctuations of quality, which do occur in spite of all the men said to the contrary. Again, the merchants spoke of China as a place where fortunes are made—a land only waiting to be opened up to pay a hundredfold. They told me of the Home Government helping private trade, in kind and unobtrusive ways, to get a firmer hold on the Public Works Department contractsthat are now flying abroad. This was pleasant hearing. But the strangest thing of all was the tone of hope and almost contentment that pervaded their speech. They were well-to-do men making money, and they liked their lives. You know how, when two or three of Us are gathered together in our own barren pauper land, we groan in chorus and are disconsolate. The civilian, the military man, and the merchant, they are all alike. The one overworked and broken by exchange, the second a highly organised beggar, and the third a nobody in particular, always at loggerheads with what he considers an academical Government. I knew in a way that We were a grim and miserable community in India, but I did not know the measure of Our fall till I heard men talking about fortunes, success, money, and the pleasure, good living, and frequent trips to England that money brings. Their friends did not seem to die with unnatural swiftness, and their wealth enabled them to endure the calamity of Exchange with calm. Yes, we of India are a wretched folk.
Very early in the dawn, before the nesting sparrows were awake, there was a sound in the air which frightened me out of my virtuous sleep. It was a lisping mutter—very deep and entirely strange. "That's an earthquake, and the hillside is beginning to slide," quoth I, taking measures of defence. The sound repeated itself again and again, till I argued, that if it were the precursor of an earthquake, the affair had stuck half-way. At breakfast men said: "That was the great bell of Kioto just next door to the hotel a little way up the hillside. As a bell, y'know, it's rather a failure, from an English point of view. They don'tring it properly, and the volume of sound is comparatively insignificant."
"So I fancied when I first heard it," I said casually, and went out up the hill under sunshine that filled the heart and trees, that filled the eye with joy. You know the unadulterated pleasure of that first clear morning in the Hills when a month's solid idleness lies before the loafer, and the scent of the deodars mixes with the scent of the meditative cigar. That was my portion when I stepped through the violet-studded long grass into forgotten little Japanese cemeteries—all broken pillars and lichened tablets—till I found, under a cut in the hillside, the big bell of Kioto—twenty feet of green bronze hung inside a fantastically roofed shed of wooden beams. A beam, by the way,isa beam in Japan; anything under a foot thick is a stick. These beams were the best parts of big trees, clamped with bronze and iron. A knuckle rapped lightly on the lip of the bell—it was not more than five feet from the ground—made the great monster breathe heavily, and the blow of a stick started a hundred shrill-voiced echoes round the darkness of its dome. At one side, guyed by half a dozen small hawsers, hung a battering-ram, a twelve-foot spar bound with iron, its nose pointing full-butt at a chrysanthemum in high relief on the belly of the bell. Then, by special favour of Providence, which always looks after the idle, they began to sound sixty strokes. Half a dozen men swung the ram back and forth with shoutings and outcries, till it had gathered sufficient way, and the loosened ropes let it hurl itself against the chrysanthemum. The boom of the smitten bronze was swallowed up by the earth below and the hillside behind, so that its volume wasnot proportionate to the size of the bell, exactly as the men had said. An English ringer would have made thrice as much of it. But then he would have lost the crawling jar that ran through rock-stone and pine for twenty yards round, that beat through the body of the listener and died away under his feet like the shock of a distant blasting. I endured twenty strokes and removed myself, not in the least ashamed of mistaking the sound for an earthquake. Many times since I have heard the bell speak when I was far off. It saysB-r-r-rvery deep down in its throat, but when you have once caught the noise you will never forget it. And so much for the big bell of Kioto.
From its house a staircase of cut stone takes you down to the temple of Chion-in, where I arrived on Easter Sunday just before service, and in time to see the procession of the Cherry Blossom. They had a special service at a place called St. Peter's at Rome about the same time, but the priests of Buddha excelled the priests of the Pope. Thus it happened. The main front of the temple was three hundred feet long, a hundred feet deep, and sixty feet high. One roof covered it all, and saving for the tiles there was no stone in the structure; nothing but wood three hundred years old, as hard as iron. The pillars that upheld the roof were three feet, four feet, and five feet in diameter, and guiltless of any paint. They showed the natural grain of the wood till they were lost in the rich brown darkness far overhead. The cross-beams were of grained wood of great richness; cedar-wood and camphor-wood and the hearts of gigantic pine had been put under requisition for the great work. One carpenter—theycall him only a carpenter—had designed the whole, and his name is remembered to this day. A half of the temple was railed off for the congregation by a two-foot railing, over which silks of ancient device had been thrown. Within the railing were all the religious fittings, but these I cannot describe. All I remember was row upon row of little lacquered stands each holding a rolled volume of sacred writings; an altar as tall as a cathedral organ where gold strove with colour, colour with lacquer, and lacquer with inlay, and candles such as Holy Mother Church uses only on her greatest days, shed a yellow light that softened all. Bronze incense-burners in the likeness of dragons and devils fumed under the shadow of silken banners, behind which, wood tracery, as delicate as frost on a window-pane, climbed to the ridge-pole. Only there was no visible roof to this temple. The light faded away under the monstrous beams, and we might have been in a cave a hundred fathoms below the earth but for the sunshine and blue sky at the portals where the little children squabbled and shouted.
On my word, I tried to note down soberly what lay before me, but the eye tired, and the pencil ran off into fragmentary ejaculations. But what would you have done if you had seen what I saw when I went round the temple verandah to what we must call a vestry at the back? It was a big building connected with the main one by a wooden bridge of deepest time-worn brown. Down the bridge ran a line of saffron-coloured matting, and down the matting, very slowly and solemnly, as befitted their high office, filed three and fifty priests, each one clad in at least four garments of brocade, crêpe, and silk. There were silks that do not see the light ofthe markets, and brocades that only temple wardrobes know.
There was sea-green watered silk with golden dragons; terra-cotta crêpe with ivory-white chrysanthemums clustering upon it; black-barred silk shot with yellow flames; lapis-lazuli silk and silver fishes; avanturine silk with plaques of grey-green let in; cloth of gold over dragon's blood; and saffron and brown silk stiff as a board with embroidery. We returned to the temple now filled with the gorgeous robes. The little lacquer stands were the priests' book-racks. Some lay down among them, while others moved very softly about the golden altars and the incense-burners; and the high priest disposed himself, with his back to the congregation, in a golden chair through which his robe winked like the shards of a tiger-beetle.
In solemn calm the books were unrolled, and the priests began chanting Pali texts in honour of the Apostle of Unworldliness, who had written that they were not to wear gold or mixed colours, or touch the precious metals. But for a few unimportant accessories in the way of half-seen images of great men—but these could have been called saints—the scene before me might have been unrolled in a Roman Catholic cathedral, say the rich one at Arundel. The same thought was in other minds, for in a pause of the slow chant a voice behind me whispered:—
"To hear the blessed mutter of the massAnd see God made and eaten all day long."
"To hear the blessed mutter of the massAnd see God made and eaten all day long."
It was a man from Hong-Kong, very angry that he too had not been permitted to photograph an interior. Hecalled all this splendour of ritual and paraphernalia just "an interior," and revenged himself by spitting Browning at it.
The chant quickened as the service drew to an end, and the candles burned low.
We went away to other parts of the temple pursued by the chorus of the devout till we were out of earshot in a paradise of screens. Two or three hundred years ago there lived a painterman of the name of Kano. Him the temple of Chion-in brought to beautify the walls of the rooms. Since a wall is a screen, and a screen is a wall, Kano, R. A., had rather a large job. But he was helped by pupils and imitators, and in the end left a few hundred screens which are all finished pictures. As you already know, the interior of a temple is very simple in its arrangements. The priests live on white mats, in little rooms, with brown ceilings, that can at pleasure be thrown into one large room. This also was the arrangement at Chion-in, though the rooms were comparatively large and gave on to sumptuous verandahs and passages. Since the Emperor occasionally visited the place there was a room set apart for him of more than ordinary splendour. Twisted silk tassels of intricate design served in lieu of catches to pull back the sliding screens, and the woodwork was lacquered. These be only feeble words, but it is not in my grip to express the restfulness of it all, or the power that knew how to secure the desired effect with a turn of the wrist. The great Kano drew numbed pheasants huddled together on the snow-covered bough of a pine; or a peacock in his pride spreading his tail to delight his womenfolk; or a riot of chrysanthemums poured out of a vase; or the figures oftoilworn countryfolk coming home from market; or a hunting scene at the foot of Fujiyama. The equally great carpenter who built the temple framed each picture with absolute precision under a ceiling that was a miracle of device, and Time, the greatest artist of the three, touched the gold so that it became amber, and the woodwork so that it grew dark honey-colour, and the shining surface of the lacquer so that it became deep and rich and semi-transparent. As in one room, so in all the others. Sometimes we slid back the screens and discovered a tiny bald-pated acolyte praying over an incense-burner, and sometimes a lean priest eating his rice; but generally the rooms were empty, swept and garnished.
Minor artists had worked with Kano the magnificent. These had been allowed to lay brush upon panels of wood in the outer verandahs, and very faithfully had they toiled. It was not till the guide called my attention to them that I discovered scores of sketches in monochrome low down on the verandah doors. An iris broken by the fall of a branch torn off by a surly ape; a bamboo spray bowed before the wind that was ruffling a lake; a warrior of the past ambushing his enemy in a thicket, hand on sword, and mouth gathered into puckers of intensest concentration, were among the many notes that met my eye. How long, think you, would a sepia-drawing stand without defacement in the midst of our civilisation were it put on the bottom panel of a door, or the scantling of a kitchen passage? Yet in this gentle country a man may stoop down and write his name in the very dust, certain that, if the writing be craftily done, his children's children will reverently let it stand.
"Of course there are no such temples made nowadays," I said, when we regained the sunshine, and the Professor was trying to find out how panel pictures and paper screens went so well with the dark dignity of massive woodwork.
"They are building a temple on the other side of the city," said Mister Yamagutchi. "Come along, and see the hair-ropes which hang there."
We came flying in our 'rickshaws across Kioto, till we saw netted in a hundred cobwebs of scaffolding a temple even larger than the great Chion-in.
"That was burned down long ago,—the old temple that was here, you know. Then the people made a penny subscription from all parts of Japan, and those who could not send money sent their hair to be made into rope. They have been ten years building this new temple. It is all wood," said the guide.
The place was alive with men who were putting the finishing touches to the great tiled roof and laying down the floors. Wooden pillars as gigantic, carving as wantonly elaborate, eaves as intricate in their mouldings, and joinery as perfect as anything in the Chion-in temple met me at every turn. But the fresh-cut wood was creamy white and lemon where, in the older building, it had been iron-hard and brown. Only the raw ends of the joists were stopped with white lacquer to prevent the incursions of insects, and the deeper tracery was protected against birds by fine wire netting. Everything else was wood—wood down to the massive clamped and bolted beams of the foundation which I investigated through gaps in the flooring.
Japan is a great people. Her masons play with stone,her carpenters with wood, her smiths with iron, and her artists with life, death, and all the eye can take in. Mercifully she has been denied the last touch of firmness in her character which would enable her to play with the whole round world. We possess that—We, the nation of the glass flower-shade, the pink worsted mat, the red and green china puppy-dog, and the poisonous Brussels carpet. It is our compensation....
"Temples!" said a man from Calcutta, some hours later as I raved about what I had seen. "Temples! I'm sick of temples. If I've seen one, I've seen fifty thousand of 'em—all exactly alike. But I tell you what is exciting. Go down the rapids at Arashima,—eight miles from here. It's better fun than any temple with a fat-faced Buddha in the middle."
But I took my friend's advice. Have I managed to convey the impression that April is fine in Japan? Then I apologise. It is generally rainy, and the rain is cold; but the sunshine when it comes is worth it all. We shouted with joy of living when our fiery, untamed 'rickshaws bounded from stone to stone of the vilely paved streets of the suburbs and brought us into what ought to have been vegetable gardens but were called fields. The face of the flat lands was cut up in every direction by bunds, and all the roads seem to run on the top of them.
"Never," said the Professor, driving his stick into the black soil, "never have I imagined irrigation so perfectly controlled as this is. Look at therajbaharsfaced with stone and fitted with sluices; look at the water-wheels and,—phew! but they manure their fields too well."
The first circle of fields round any town is alwayspretty rank, but this superfluity of scent continued throughout the country. Saving a few parts near Dacca and Patna, the face of the land was more thickly populated than Bengal and was worked five times better. There was no single patch untilled, and no cultivation that was not up to the full limit of the soil's productiveness. Onions, barley, in little ridges between the ridges of tea, beans, rice, and a half a dozen other things that we did not know the names of, crowded the eye already wearied with the glare of the golden mustard. Manure is a good thing, but manual labour is better. We saw both even to excess. When a Japanese ryot has done everything to his field that he can possibly think of, he weeds the barley stalk by stalk with his finger and thumb. This is true. I saw a man doing it.
We headed through the marvellous country straight across the plain on which Kioto stands, till we reached the range of hills on the far side, and found ourselves mixed up with half a mile of lumber-yard.
Cultivation and water-cuts were gone, and our tireless 'rickshaws were running by the side of a broad, shallow river, choked with logs of every size. I am prepared to believe anything of the Japanese, but I do not see why Nature, which they say is the same pitiless Power all the world over, should send them their logs unsplintered by rocks, neatly barked, and with a slot neatly cut at the end of each pole for the reception of a rope, I have seen timber fly down the Ravi in spate, and it was hooked out as ragged as a tooth-brush. This material comes down clean. Consequently the slot is another miracle.
"When the day is fine," said the guide, softly, "all the people of Kioto come to Arashima to have picnics."
"But they are always having picnics in the cherry-tree gardens. They picnic in the tea-houses. They—they—"
"Yes, when it is a fine day, they always go somewhere and picnic."
"But why? Man isn't made to picnic."
"But why? Because it is a fine day. Englishmen say that the money of the Japanese comes from heaven, because they always do nothing—so you think. But look now, here is a pretty place."
The river charged down a turn in the pine-grown hills, and broke in silver upon the timber and the remains of a light bridge washed away some days before. On our side, and arranged so as to face the fairest view of the young maples, stood a row of tea-houses and booths built over the stream. The sunlight that could not soften the gloom of the pines dwelt tenderly among the green of the maples and touched the reaches below where the cherry blossom broke in pink foam against the black-roofed houses of a village across the water.
There I stopped.
THE PARTY IN THE PARLOUR WHO PLAYED GAMES. A COMPLETE HISTORY OF ALL MODERN JAPANESE ART; A SURVEY OF THE PAST, AND A PROPHECY OF THE FUTURE, ARRANGED AND COMPOSED IN THE KIOTO FACTORIES.
"Oh, brave new world that has such creatures in it,How beautiful mankind is!"
"Oh, brave new world that has such creatures in it,How beautiful mankind is!"
How I got to the tea-house I cannot tell. Perhaps a pretty girl waved a bough of cherry blossom at me, and I followed the invitation. I know that I sprawled upon the mats and watched the clouds scudding across the hills and the logs flying down the rapids, and smelt the smell of the raw peeled timber, and listened to the grunts of the boatmen as they wrestled with that and the rush of the river, and was altogether happier than it is lawful for a man to be.
The lady of the tea-house insisted upon screening us off from the other pleasure-parties who were tiffining in the same verandah. She brought beautiful blue screens with storks on them and slid them into grooves. I stood it as long as I could. There were peals of laughter in the next compartment, the pattering of soft feet, the clinking of little dishes, and at the chinks of the screens the twinkle of diamond eyes. A whole family had come in from Kioto for the day's pleasuring. Mamma lookedafter grandmamma, and the young aunt looked after a guitar, and the two girls of fourteen and fifteen looked after a merry little tomboy of eight, who, when she thought of it, looked after the baby who had the air of looking after the whole party. Grandmamma was dressed in dark blue, mamma in blue and grey, the girls had gorgeous dresses of lilac, fawn, and primrose crêpe with silk sashes, the colour of apple blossom and the inside of a newly cut melon; the tomboy was in old gold and russet brown; but the baby tumbled his fat little body across the floor among the dishes in the colours of the Japanese rainbow, which owns no crude tints. They were all pretty, all except grandmamma, who was merely good-humoured and very bald, and when they had finished their dainty dinner, and the brownlanquerstands, the blue and white crockery, and the jade-green drinking-cups had been taken away, the aunt played a little piece on thesamisen, and the girls played blindman's-buff all round the tiny room.
Flesh and blood could not have stayed on the other side of the screens. I wanted to play too, but I was too big and too rough, and so could only sit in the verandah, watching these dainty bits of Dresden at their game. They shrieked and giggled and chattered and sat down on the floor with the innocent abandon of maidenhood, and broke off to kiss the baby when he showed signs of being overlooked. They played puss-in-the-corner, their feet tied with blue and white handkerchiefs because the room did not allow unfettered freedom of limb, and when they could play no more for laughing, they fanned themselves as they lay propped up against the blue screens,—each girl a picture no painter couldreproduce,—and I shrieked with the best of them till I rolled off the verandah and nearly dropped into the laughing street. Was I a fool? Then I fooled in good company, for an austere man from India—a person who puts his faith in race-horses and believes nothing except the Civil Code—was also at Arashima that day. I met him flushed and excited.
"'Had a lively time," he panted, with a hundred children at his heels. "There's a sort of roulette table here where you can gamble for cakes. I bought the owner's stock-in-trade for three dollars and ran the Monte Carlo for the benefit of the kids—about five thousand of 'em. Never had such fun in my life. It beats the Simla lotteries hollow. They were perfectly orderly till they had cleared the tables of everything except a big sugar-tortoise. Then they rushed the bank, and I ran away."
And he was a hard man who had not played with anything as innocent as sweetmeats for many years!
When we were all weak with laughing, and the Professor's camera was mixed up in a tangle of laughing maidens to the confusion of his pictures, we too ran away from the tea-house and wandered down the river bank till we found a boat of sewn planks which poled us across the swollen river, and landed us on a little rocky path overhanging the water where the iris and the violet ran riot together and jubilant waterfalls raced through the undergrowth of pine and maple. We were at the foot of the Arashima rapids, and all the pretty girls of Kioto were with us looking at the view. Up-stream a lonely black pine stood out from all its fellows to peer up the bend where the racing water randeep in oily swirls. Down-stream the river threshed across the rocks and troubled the fields of fresh logs on its bosom, while men in blue drove silver-white boats gunwale-deep into the foam of its onset and hooked the logs away. Underfoot the rich earth of the hillside sent up the breath of the turn of the year to the maples that had already caught the message from the fire-winds of April. Oh! it was good to be alive, to trample the stalks of the iris, to drag down the cherry-bloom spray in a wash of dew across the face, and to gather the violets for the mere pleasure of heaving them into the torrent and reaching out for fairer flowers.
"What a nuisance it is to be a slave to the camera," said the Professor, upon whom the dumb influences of the season were working though he knew it not.
"What a nuisance it is to be a slave to the pen," I answered, for the spring had come to the land. I had hated the spring for seven years because to me it meant discomfort.
"Let us go straight home and see the flowers come out in the Parks."
"Let us enjoy what lies to our hand, you Philistine." And we did till a cloud darkened and a wind ruffled the river reaches, and we returned to our 'rickshaws sighing with contentment.
"How many people do you suppose the land supports to the square mile?" said the Professor, at a turn in the homeward road. He had been reading statistics.
"Nine hundred," I said at a venture. "It's thicker set with humans than Sarun or Behar. Say one thousand."
"Two thousand two hundred and fifty odd. Can you believe it?"
"Looking at the landscape I can, but I don't suppose India will believe it. S'pose I write fifteen hundred?"
"They'll say you exaggerate just the same. Better stick to the true total. Two thousand two hundred and fifty-six to the square mile, and not a sign of poverty in the houses. How do they do it?"
I should like to know the answer to that question. Japan of my limited view is inhabited almost entirely by little children whose duty is to prevent their elders from becoming too frivolous. The babies do a little work occasionally, but their parents interfere by petting them. At Yami's hotel the attendance is in the hands of ten-year-olds because everybody else has gone out picnicing among the cherry trees. The little imps find time to do a man's work and to scuffle on the staircase between whiles. My special servitor, called "The Bishop" on account of the gravity of his appearance, his blue apron, and gaiters, is the liveliest of the lot, but even his energy cannot account for the Professor's statistics of population....
I have seen one sort of work among the Japanese, but it was not the kind that makes crops. It was purely artistic. A ward of the city of Kioto is devoted to manufactures. A manufacturer in this part of the world does not hang out a sign. He may be known in Paris and New York: that is the concern of the two cities. The Englishman who wishes to find his establishment in Kioto has to hunt for him up and down slums with the aid of a guide. I have seen three manufactories. The first was of porcelain-ware, the second ofcloissonnée, and the third of lacquer, inlay, and bronzes. The first was behind black wooden palings, and for external appearance might justas well have been a tripe-shop. Inside sat the manager opposite a tiny garden four feet square in which a papery-looking palm grew out of a coarse stoneware pot and overshadowed a dwarfed pine. The rest of the room was filled with pottery waiting to be packed—modern Satsuma for the most part, the sort of thing you get at an auction.
"This made send Europe—India—America," said the manager, calmly. "You come to see?"
He took us along a verandah of polished wood to the kilns, to the clay vats, and the yards where the tiny "saggers" were awaiting their complement of pottery. There are differences many and technical between Japanese and Burslem pottery in the making, but these are of no consequence. In the moulding house, where they were making the bodies of Satsuma vases, the wheels, all worked by hand, ran true as a hair. The potter sat on a clean mat with his tea-things at his side. When he had turned out a vase-body he saw that it was good, nodded appreciatively to himself, and poured out some tea ere starting the next one. The potters lived close to the kilns and had nothing pretty to look at. It was different in the painting rooms. Here in a cabinet-like house sat the men, women, and boys who painted the designs on the vases after the first firing. That all their arrangements were scrupulously neat is only saying that they were Japanese; that their surroundings were fair and proper is only saying that they were artists. A sprig of a cherry blossom stood out defiantly against the black of the garden paling; a gnarled pine cut the blue of the sky with its spiky splinters as it lifted itself above the paling, and in a little pond the iris and the horsetailnodded to the wind. The workers when at fault had only to lift their eyes, and Nature herself would graciously supply the missing link of a design. Somewhere in dirty England men dream of craftsmen working under conditions which shall help and not stifle the half-formed thought. They even form guilds and write semi-rhythmical prayers to Time and Chance and all the other gods that they worship, to bring about the desired end. Would they have their dream realised, let them see how they make pottery in Japan, each man sitting on a snowy mat with loveliness of line and colour within arm's length of him, while with downcast eyes he—splashes in the conventional diaper of a Satsuma vase as fast as he can! The Barbarians want Satsuma and they shall have it, if it has to be made in Kioto one piece per twenty minutes. So much for the baser forms of the craft!
The owner of the second establishment lived in a blackwood cabinet—it was profanation to call it a house—alone with a bronze of priceless workmanship, a set of blackwood furniture, and all the medals that his work had won for him in England, France, Germany, and America. He was a very quiet and cat-like man, and spoke almost in a whisper. Would we be pleased to inspect the manufactory? He led us through a garden—it was nothing in his eyes, but we stopped to admire long. Stone lanterns, green with moss, peeped through clumps of papery bamboos where bronze storks were pretending to feed. A dwarfed pine, its foliage trimmed to dish-like plaques, threw its arms far across a fairy pond where the fat, lazy carp grubbed and rooted, and a couple of eared grebes squawked at us from the protection of the—waterbutt.So perfect was the silence of the place that we heard the cherry blossoms falling into the water and the lisping of the fish against the stones. We were in the very heart of the Willow-Pattern Plate and loath to move for fear of breaking it. The Japanese are born bower-birds. They collect water-worn stones, quaintly shaped rocks, and veined pebbles for the ornamentation of their homes. When they shift house they take the garden away with them—pine trees and all—and the incoming tenant has a free hand.
Half a dozen steps took us over the path of mossy stones to a house where the whole manufactory was at work. One room held the enamel powders all neatly arranged in jars of scrupulous cleanliness, a few blank copper vases ready to be operated on, an invisible bird who whistled and whooped in his cage, and a case of gaily painted butterflies ready for reference when patterns were wanted. In the next room sat the manufactory—three men, five women, and two boys—all as silent as sleep. It is one thing to read ofcloissonnéemaking, but quite another to watch it being made. I began to understand the cost of the ware when I saw a man working out a pattern of sprigs and butterflies on a plate about ten inches in diameter. With finest silver ribbon wire, set on edge, less than the sixteenth of an inch high, he followed the curves of the drawing at his side, pinching the wire into tendrils and the serrated outlines of leaves with infinite patience. A rough touch on the raw copper-plate would have sent the pattern flying into a thousand disconnected threads. When all was put down on the copper, the plate would be warmed just sufficiently to allow the wires to stick firmly to the copper,the pattern then showing in raised lines. Followed the colouring, which was done by little boys in spectacles. With a pair of tiniest steel chopsticks they filled from bowls at their sides each compartment of the pattern with its proper hue of paste. There is not much room allowed for error in filling the spots on a butterfly's wing with avanturine enamel when the said wings are less than an inch across. I watched the delicate play of wrist and hand till I was wearied, and the manager showed me his patterns—terrible dragons, clustered chrysanthemums, butterflies, and diapers as fine as frost on a window-pane—all drawn in unerring line. "Those things are our subjects. I compile from them, and when I want some new colours I go and look at those dead butterflies," said he. After the enamel has been filled in, the pot or plate goes to be fired, and the enamel bubbles all over the boundary lines of wires, and the whole comes from the furnace looking like delicate majolica. It may take a month to put a pattern on the plate in outline, another month to fill in the enamel, but the real expenditure of time does not commence till the polishing. A man sits down with the rough article, all his tea-things, a tub of water, a flannel, and two or three saucers full of assorted pebbles from the brook. He does not get a wheel with tripoli, or emery, or buff. He sits down and rubs. He rubs for a month, three months, or a year. He rubs lovingly, with his soul in his finger ends, and little by little the efflorescence of the fired enamel gives way, and he comes down to the lines of silver, and the pattern in all its glory is there waiting for him. I saw a man who had only been a month over the polishing of one little vase five inches high. He would go on fortwo months. When I am in America he will be rubbing still, and the ruby-coloured dragon that romped on a field of lazuli, each tiny scale and whisker a separate compartment of enamel, will be growing more lovely.
"There is also cheapcloissonnéeto be bought," said the manager, with a smile. "We cannot make that. The vase will be seventy dollars."
I respected him for saying "cannot" instead of "do not." There spoke the artist.
Our last visit was paid to the largest establishment in Kioto, where boys made gold inlay on iron, sitting in camphor-wood verandahs overlooking a garden lovelier than any that had gone before. They had been caught young, even as is the custom in India. A real grown-up man was employed on the horrible story, in iron, gold, and silver, of two priests who waked up a Rain-dragon and had to run for it, all round the edge of a big shield; but the liveliest worker of the batch was a small fat baby who had been given a tenpenny nail, a hammer, and a block of metal to play with, that he might soak in the art by which he would live, through the pores of his skin. He crowed and chuckled as he whacked. There are not many five-year-olds in England who could hammer anything without pulping their little pink fingers. The baby had learned how to hit straight. On the wall of the room hung a Japanese painting of the Apotheosis of Art. It represented with fidelity all the processes of pottery from the digging of the clay to the last firing. But all the pencilled scorn of the artist was reserved for the closing scene, where an Englishman, his arm round his wife's waist, was inspecting a shop full of curios. The Japanese are not impressed with the grace of ourclothing or the beauty of our countenances. Later we beheld the manufacture of gold lacquer, which is laid on speck by speck from an agate palette fitted on the artist's thumb; and the carving of ivory, which is exciting until you begin to realise that the graver never slips.
"A lot of their art is purely mechanical" said the Professor, when he was safe back in the hotel.
"So's a lot of ours—'specially our pictures. Only we can't be spiritedly mechanical," I answered. "Fancy a people like the Japanese solemnly going in for a constitution. Observe! The only two nations with constitution worth having are the English and the Americans. The English can only be artistic in spots and by way of the art of other nations—Sicilian tapestries, Persian saddle-bags, Khoten carpets, and the sweepings of pawn-brokers' shops. The Americans are artistic so long as a few of 'em can buy their Art to keep abreast of the times with. Spain is artistic, but she is also disturbed at intervals; France is artistic, but she must have her revolution every twenty years for the sake of fresh material; Russia is artistic, but she occasionally wishes to kill her Czar, and has no sort of Government; Germany is not artistic, because she experienced religion; and Italy is artistic, because she did very badly. India—"
"When you have finished your verdict on the world, perhaps you'll go to bed."
"Consequently," I continued, with scorn, "I am of opinion that a constitution is the worst thing in the world for a people who are blessed with souls above the average. Now the first demand of the artistic temperament is mundane uncertainty. The second is—"
"Sleep," said the Professor, and left the room.
OF THE NATURE OF THE TOKAIDO AND JAPANESE RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION. ONE TRAVELLER EXPLAINS THE LIFE OF THE SAHIB-LOG, AND ANOTHER THE ORIGIN OF DICE. OF THE BABIES IN THE BATH TUB AND THE MAN IN D. T.
"When I went to Hell I spoke to the man on the road."—Old Saw.
"When I went to Hell I spoke to the man on the road."
—Old Saw.
You know the story of the miner who borrowed a dictionary and returned it with the remark that the stories, though interesting in the main, were too various. I have the same complaint to make against Japanese scenery—twelve hours of it by train from Nagoya to Yokohama. About seven hundred years ago the king of those days built a sea-road which he called the Tokaido (or else all the sea-coast was called the Tokaido, but it's of no importance), which road endures to the present. Later on, when the English engineer appeared, he followed the Grand Trunk more or less closely, and the result has been a railway that any nation might take off their hat to. The last section of the through line from Kioto to Yokohama was only opened five days before the Professor and I honoured it with an unofficial inspection.
The accommodation of all kinds is arranged for the benefit of the Japanese; and this is distressing to the foreigner, who expects in a carriage remotely resemblingE. I. R. rolling-stock the conveniences of that pea-green and very dusty old line. But it suits the Japanese admirably: they hop out at every other station—pro re nata—and occasionally get left behind. Two days ago they managed to kill a Government official of high standing between a footboard and a platform, and to-day the Japanese papers are seriously discussing the advantages of lavatories. Far be it from me to interfere with the arrangements of an artistic empire; but for a twelve hours' run there might at least be arrangements.
We had left the close-packed cultivation at the foot of the hills and were running along the shores of a great lake, all steel-blue from one end to the other, except where it was dotted with little islands. Then the lake turned into an arm of the sea, and we ran across it on a cut-stone causeway, and the profligacy of the pines ceased, as the trees had to come down from clothing dank hills, and fight with bowed head, outstretched arms, and firmly planted feet, against the sands of the Pacific, whose breakers were spouting and blowing not a quarter of a mile away from the causeway. The Japs know all about forestry. They stake down wandering sand-torrents, which are still allowed to ruin our crops in the Hoshiarpur district, and they plug a shifting sand-dune with wattle dams and pine seedlings as cleverly as they would pin plank to plank. Were their forest officers trained at Nancy, or are they local products? The stake-binding used to hold the sand is of French pattern, and the diagonal planting out of the trees is also French.
Half a minute after the train dropped this desolate, hardly controlled beach it raced through four or fivemiles of the suburbs of Patna, but a clean and glorified Patna bowered in bamboo plantations. Then it hit a tunnel and sailed forth into a section of the London, Brighton, and South Coast, or whatever the line is that wants to make the Channel tunnel. At any rate, the embankment was on the beach, and the waves lapped the foot of it, and there was a wall of cut rock to landward. Then we disturbed many villages of fishermen, whose verandahs gave on to the track, and whose nets lay almost under our wheels. The railway was still a new thing in that particular part of the world, for mothers held up their babes to see it.
Any one can keep pace with Indian scenery, arranged as it is in reaches of five hundred miles. This blinding alternation of field, mountain, sea-beach, forest, bamboo grove, and rolling moor covered with azalea blossoms was too much for me, so I sought the society of a man who had lived in Japan for twenty years.
"Yes, Japan's an excellent country as regards climate. The rains begin in May or latter April. June, July, and August are hot months. I've known the thermometer as high as 86° at night, but I'd defy the world to produce anything more perfect than the weather between September and May. When one gets seedy, one goes to the hot springs in the Hakone mountains close to Yokohama. There are heaps of places to recruit in, but we English are a healthy lot. Of course we don't have half as much fun as you do in India. We are a small community, and all our amusements are organised by ourselves for our own benefit—concerts, races, and amateur theatricals and the like. You have heaps of 'em in India, haven't you?"
"Oh, yes!" I said, "we enjoy ourselves awfully, 'specially about this time of the year. I quite understand, though, that small communities dependent on themselves for enjoyment are apt to feel a little slow and isolated—almost bored, in fact. But you were saying—?"
"Well, living is not very dear, and house rent is. A hundred dollars a month gets you a decent house and you can get one for sixty. But house property is down just now in Yokohama. The races are on in Yokohama to-day and Monday. Are you going? No? You ought to go and see all the foreigners enjoying themselves. But I suppose you've seen much better things in India, haven't you? You haven't anything better than old Fuji—Fujiyama. There he is now to the left of the line. What do you think of him?"
I turned and beheld Fujiyama across a sea of upward-sloping fields and woods. It is about fourteen thousand feet high—not very much, according to our ideas. But fourteen thousand feet above the sea when one stands in the midst of sixteen-thousand-foot peaks, is quite another thing from the same height noted at sea-level in a comparatively flat country. The labouring eye crawls up every foot of the dead crater's smooth flank, and at the summit confesses that it has seen nothing in all the Himalayas to match the monster. I was satisfied. Fujiyama was exactly as I had seen it on fans and lacquer boxes; I would not have sold my sight of it for the crest of Kinchinjunga flushed with the morning. Fujiyama is the keynote of Japan. When you understand the one you are in a position to learn something about the other. I tried to get information from my fellow-traveller.
"Yes, the Japanese are building railways all over the island. What I mean to say is that the companies are started and financed by Japs, and they make 'em pay. I can't quite tell you where the money comes from, but it's all to be found in the country. Japan's neither rich nor poor, but just comfortable. I'm a merchant myself. Can't say that I altogether like the Jap way o' doing business. You can never be certain whether the little beggar means what he says. Give me a Chinaman to deal with. Other men have told you that, have they? You'll find that opinion at most of the treaty ports. But what I will say is, that the Japanese Government is about as enterprising a Government as you could wish, and a good one to have dealings with. When Japan has finished reconstructing herself on the new lines, she'll be quite a respectable little Power. See if she isn't. Now we are coming into the Hakone mountains. Watch the railway. It's rather a curiosity."
We came into the Hakone mountains by way of some Irish scenery, a Scotch trout-stream, a Devonshire combe, and an Indian river running masterless over half a mile of pebbles. This was only the prelude to a set of geological illustrations, including the terraces formed by ancient river-beds, denudation, and half a dozen other ations. I was so busy telling the man from Yokohama lies about the height of the Himalayas that I did not watch things closely, till we got to Yokohama, at eight in the evening, and went to the Grand Hotel, where all the clean and nicely dressed people who were just going in to dinner regarded us with scorn, and men, whom we had met on steamers aforetime, dived into photograph books and pretended not to see us. There'sa deal of human nature in a man—got up for dinner—when a woman is watching him—and you look like a brick-layer—even in Yokohama.
The Grand is the Semi or Cottage Grand really, but you had better go there unless a friend tells you of a better. A long course of good luck has spoiled me for even average hotels. They are too fine and large at the Grand, and they don't always live up to their grandeur; unlimited electric bells, but no one in particular to answer 'em; printed menu, but the first comers eat all the nice things, and so forth. None the less there are points about the Grand not to be despised. It is modelled on the American fashion, and is but an open door through which you may catch the first gust from the Pacific slope. Officially, there are twice as many English as Americans in the port. Actually, you hear no languages but French, German, or American in the street. My experience is sadly limited, but the American I have heard up to the present, is a tongue as distinct from English as Patagonian.
A gentleman from Boston was kind enough to tell me something about it. He defended the use of "I guess" as a Shakespearian expression to be found inRichard the Third. I have learned enough never to argue with a Bostonian.
"All right," I said, "I've never heard a real American say 'I guess'; but what about the balance of your extraordinary tongue? Do you mean to say that it has anything in common with ours except the auxiliary verbs, the name of the Creator, and Damn? Listen to the men at the next table."
"They are Westerners," said the man from Boston, aswho should say "observe this cassowary." "They are Westerners, and if you want to make a Westerner mad tell him he is not like an Englishman. They think they are like the English. They are awfully thin-skinned in the West. Now in Boston it's different.Wedon't care what the English people think of us."
The idea of the English people sitting down to think about Boston, while Boston on the other side of the water ostentatiously "didn't care," made me snigger. The man told me stories. He belonged to a Republic. That was why every man of his acquaintance belonged either "to one of the first families in Boston" or else "was of good Salem stock, and his fathers had come over in theMayflower." I felt as though I were moving in the midst of a novel. Fancy having to explain to the casual stranger the blood and breeding of the hero of every anecdote. I wonder whether many people in Boston are like my friend with the Salem families. I am going there to see.
"There's no romance in America—it's all hard, business facts," said a man from the Pacific slope, after I had expressed my opinion about some rather curious murder cases which might have been called miscarriages of justice. Ten minutes later, I heard him say slowly,aproposof a game called "Round the Horn" (this is a bad game. Don't play it with a stranger.) "Well, it's a good thing for this game that Omaha came up. Dice were invented in Omaha, and the man who invented 'em he made a colossal fortune."
I said nothing. I began to feel faint. The man must have noticed it. "Six-and-twenty years ago, Omaha came up," he repeated, looking me in the eye, "and thenumber of dice that have been made in Omaha since that time is incalculable."
"There is no romance in America," I moaned like a stricken ring-dove, in the Professor's ear. "Nothing but hard business facts, and the first families of Boston, Massachusetts, invented dice at Omaha when it first came up, twenty-six years ago, and that's the solid truth. What am I to do with a people like this?"
"Are you describing Japan or America? For goodness' sake, stick to one or the other," said the Professor.
"It wasn't my fault. There's a bit of America in the bar-room, and on my word it's rather more interesting than Japan. Let's go across to 'Frisco and hear some more lies."
"Let's go and look at photographs, and refrain from mixing our countries or our drinks."
By the way, wherever you go in the Further East be humble to the white trader. Recollect that you are only a poor beast of a buyer with a few dirty dollars in your pockets, and you can't expect a man to demean himself by taking them. And observe humility not only in the shops, but elsewhere. I was anxious to know how I should cross the Pacific to 'Frisco, and very foolishly went to an office where they might, under certain circumstances, be supposed to attend to these things. But no anxiety troubled the sprightly soul who happened to be in the office-chair. "There's heaps of time for finding out later on," he said, "and anyhow, I'm going to the races this afternoon. Come later on." I put my head in the spittoon, and crawled out under the door.
When I am left behind by the steamer it will console me to know that that young man had a good time, andwon heavily. Everybody keeps horses in Yokohama, and the horses are nice little fat little tubs, of the circus persuasion. I didn't go to the races, but a Calcutta man did, and returned saying that "they ran 13-2 cart-horses, and even time for a mile was four minutes and twenty-seven seconds." Perhaps he had lost heavily, but I can vouch for the riding of the few gentlemen I saw outside the animals. It is very impartial and remarkably all round.
Just when the man from Boston was beginning to tell me some more stories about first families, the Professor developed an unholy taste for hot springs, and bore me off to a place called Myanoshita to wash myself. "We'll come back and look at Yokohama later on, but we must go to this because it's so beautiful."
"I'm getting tired of scenery. It's all beautiful and it can't be described, but these men here tell you stories about America. Did you ever hear how the people of Carmel lynched Edward M. Petree for preaching the gospel without making a collection at the end of the service? There's no romance in America—it's all hard business facts. Edward M. Petree was—"
"Areyou going to see Japan or are you not?"
I went to see. First in a train for one hour in the company of a carriageful of howling Globe-trotters, then in a 'rickshaw for four. You cannot appreciate scenery unless you sit in a 'rickshaw. We struck after seven miles of modified flat—the flattery of Nature that lures you to her more rugged heart—a mountain river all black pools and boiling foam. Him we followed into the hills along a road cut into the crumbling volcanic rock and entirely unmetalled. It was as hard as the Simlacartroad, but those far hills behind Kalka have no such pine and maple, ash and willow. It was a land of green-clothed cliff and silver waterfall, lovely beyond the defilement of the pen. At every turn in the road whence a view could be commanded, stood a little tea-house full of admiring Japanese. The Jap dresses in blue because he knows that it contrasts well with the colour of the pines. When he dies he goes to a heaven of his own because the colouring of ours is too crude to suit him.
We kept the valley of the glorified stream till the waters sank out of sight down the cliff side and we could but hear them calling to one another through the tangle of the trees. Where the woodlands were lovelier, the gorge deepest, and the colours of the young hornbeam most tender, they had clapped down two vile hostelries of wood and glass, and a village that lived by selling turned wood and glass inlay things to the tourist.
Australians, Anglo-Indians, dwellers in London and the parts beyond the Channel were running up and down the slopes of the hotel garden, and by their strange dresses doing all they knew to deface the landscape. The Professor and I slid down the cliff at the back and found ourselves back in Japan once more. Rough steps took us five or six hundred feet down through dense jungle to the bed of that stream we had followed all the day. The air vibrated with the rush of a hundred torrents, and whenever the eye could pierce the undergrowth it saw a headlong stream breaking itself on a boulder. Up at the hotel we had left the gray chill of a November day and cold that numbed the fingers; down in the gorge we found the climate of Bengal with real steam thrown in. Green bamboo pipes led the hot waterto a score of bathing-houses in whose verandahs Japanese in blue and white dressing-gowns lounged and smoked. From unseen thickets came the shouts of those who bathed, and—oh shame! round the corner strolled a venerable old lady chastely robed in a white bathing towel, and not too much of that. Then we went up the gorge, mopping our brows, and staring to the sky through arches of rampant foliage.
Japanese maids of fourteen or fifteen are not altogether displeasing to behold. I have not seen more than twenty or thirty of them. Of these none were in the least disconcerted at the sight of the stranger. After all, 'twas but Brighton beach without the bathing-gowns. At the head of the gorge the heat became greater, and the hot water more abundant. The joints of the water-pipes on the ground gave off jets of steam; there was vapour rising from boulders on the river-bed, and the stab of a stick into the warm, moist soil was followed by a little pool of warm water. The existing supply was not enough for the inhabitants. They were mining for more in a casual and disconnected fashion. I tried to crawl down a shaft eighteen inches by two feet in the hillside, but the steam, which had no effect on the Japanese hide, drove me out. What happens, I wonder, when the pick strikes the liquid, and the miner has to run or be parboiled?
In the twilight, when we had reached upper earth once more and were passing through the one street of Myanoshita, we saw two small fat cherubs about three years old taking their evening tub in a barrel sunk under the eaves of a shop. They feigned great fear, peeping at us behind outspread fingers, attempting futile dives,and trying to hide one behind the other in a hundred poses of spankable chubbiness, while their father urged them to splash us. It was the prettiest picture of the day, and one worth coming even to the sticky, paint-reeking hotel to see.
He was dressed in a black frock-coat, and at first I took him for a missionary as he mooned up and down the empty corridor.
"I have been under a ban for three days," he whispered in a husky voice, "through no fault of mine—no fault of mine. They told me to take the third watch, but they didn't give me a printed notification which I always require, and the manager of this place says that whisky would hurt me. Through no fault of mine, God knows, no fault of mine!"
I do not like being shut up in an echoing wooden hotel next door to a gentleman of the marine persuasion, who is just recovering from D. T., and who talks to himself all through the dark hours.
CONCERNING A HOT-WATER TAP, AND SOME GENERAL CONVERSATION.