THE TIME OF THE LOTUS

FIELDS NEAR LAKE BIWA

up and examined the castle; there was not a cloud in the sky, and Lake Biwa and its mountains lay still and clear and soft in the delicate blue haze which seems to be their own peculiar property. The fields outside the town were covered with a bright pink flower like a clover, which is not used for fodder, as there are hardly any animals to feed, but is dug in to improve the land for the rice, and this blaze of color consoled me for not finding as many azaleas as I expected. I set to work at a study of it, and sent my boy Matsuba, who, with the quickness of his race, quite understood the kind of thing I was looking for, to search the neighborhood for azalea bushes. He came back early in the afternoon to tell me that he had not been successful, but that there were some races going on in the town, so we wandered up, and established ourselves in a room just over the starting-post. The course was about two hundred and fifty yards along the pebbly bed of a dry river, and all the arrangements were very unlike those of a European racecourse. Two upright posts of bamboo stood about five yards apart, with a stout pole slung between them; the vicious little ponies were brought along by two grooms, each holding a long cord fastened to the bridle, and with a good deal of shoving and hustling were wedged in, shoulder to shoulder, between this pole and another behind them at about the height of their hocks. Their heads were pulled over the front pole, and held firmly by a groom with a long running cord through the bridle rings, while the jockeys were fully occupied in preventing the little brutes from striking each other with their fore and hind legs. Meanwhile the spectators, who had kept at a respectful distance until the ponies were safely fixed, crowded up behind them, pulling their tails and whacking them with bamboos. The starter then appeared, made a few remarks, and beat a small drum, upon which the men in charge of the pulleys dropped the front pole, the grooms slipped their ropes out of the bridle rings and jumped aside, and the ponies scrambled off as best they could. The jockeys rode without saddles or stirrups, with their great toes hitched into a surcingle, and directly they were off they dropped the reins, held their left hands in the air, and plied their whips with the right until they had passed the winning-post. It was just a scurry, with no time for scientific riding, and, as far as I could see,the pony who got over the pole best always won. O Kazu San, my waitress at the Raku-raku-tei, was helping at the tea-house, and kept me supplied with tea and cakes, and I stayed watching the races and the spectators, and being watched by them, until the dusk put a stop to sport. I left too soon, for my boy told me that there was a fight afterwards about a bet; it was the only fight I heard of while I

O KAZU SAN

was in Japan, and I should have liked to see it. Two days of heavy rain turned the course into a river once more, so that the heats were never decided. Some few days after, Matsuba told me that there was a “Japanese man’s circus” in the town. It was not in the least like a circus; it was a theatrical performance in which all the members of the company, who in this troupe were women, were mounted on horseback. There was a small stage, with a set scene at the back, and in front of it, on the same level as the spectators, a space of bare earth on which the action took place. The play consisted mostly of combats; the swords and other necessary properties were brought in by attendants, and placed on a high stand where they could be easily reached by the actors, and the horses were then led into position, and held there while the fighting went on. None of the performers fell off, but beyond this there was no horsemanship; they could not even get their steeds on and off the stage without the help of a groom.

My thoughts recurred to another travelling theatre, at Stratford-on-Avon, where I saw a stirring drama calledTel-el-Kebir, or the Bombardment of Alexandria, in which Sir Beauchamp Seymour had a hand-to-hand conflict with Arabi Pasha. Mr. Lawrence, the spirited actor-manager, informed me afterwards, when I congratulated him on the performance, that it was always popular, and that he had played it twenty-three times in one day at Nottingham Goose-Fair. In reply to my objection that it took at least an hour, he said that of course they cut the dialogue, and only had the combats and the bombardment. I remembered, too, his remarks when called before the curtain at the end of his season; he enlarged on the dignity of the actor’s profession, and how essential it was that he should be a gentleman, saying, in conclusion; “‘Ow, I harsk, could a chimney-sweep (if there’s a chimney-sweep present I beg’is pardon), but ’ow could ’e act the part of a prince or a nobleman? ’E could not do it, my friends; ’e’s not ’ad the hedjucation.”

PREPARING THE RICE-FIELDS

The fine days at this season were perfectly glorious; hot enough to give an inkling of what it would be like in the full blaze of summer, and yet with a taste of spring’s freshness left in the air. They were interspersed with too many wet or uncertain days, but, with the garden close by, I managed to waste very little time. The first lotus leaves were just coming up in the ponds and the irises blossoming round the water’s edge, the azalea bushes were covered with flowers, and the tips of the pale green maple boughs were tinged with rosy pink. When the pouring rain had begun to drip through my sketching umbrella, and I was driven in-doors,there was no lack of society. O Kazu San, a plain little thing with brown velvet eyes, and the rest of the girls were never tired of looking at my belongings, thumbing my sketch-books, and asking me endless questions; and though I was sometimes irritable, their good-humor was unlimited. This unvaried good temper is itself annoying, when the foreigner feels that it is not the result of sympathy, but because he is regarded as a strange animal, not to be judged by the rules which govern the conduct of civilized people. At last Matsuba told me that he had found a place, “top side,” with plenty of azaleas, and rooms where I could stay. It was a small Buddhist temple called Tennenji, once very popular but now almost deserted, which stood on the hill-side beyond the rice lands, and somewhat above the swarms of mosquitoes which haunt the marshy shores and the lagoons of Lake Biwa. Ji means a Buddhist temple—at least

MY ROOMS AT TENNENJI

BUDDHA AND HIS DISCIPLES, TENNENJI

that is one of its meanings—and tennen means “produced by nature.” The name itself suggested peace and quietness and repose, and these I found in that delightful place, always seen in my mind through a rosy haze of azalea blossom.

A granite sign-post where the little temple path turns off from a track through the rice-fields tells all who can read it that the temple is dedicated to the five hundred Rakkan (disciples of Buddha), and their gilded and lacquered effigies sit in long tiers round one large building within the court-yard; beyond this is the Hondo, where the principal altars are, and where the services are performed at daybreak by the old priest who has sole charge of the establishment. My room was a little annex of the Hondo, quite apart from the living-rooms of the family, and open on two sides to the air. The angle of my veranda projected over the fish-pond, and on the right and the left stepping-stones led down from it into the garden, a small patch of level ground, with a pine-clad hill-side rising sharply beyond it. Just at the foot of this hill there was a rocky projection, covered with an undergrowth of azaleas, and spotted with statues of Buddha and his sixteen principal followers. These were rudely carved of the natural stone; with their growth of lichens and mosses they looked as old as the rocks themselves, and were hardly to be distinguished from them at a little distance. Several stony zigzagging footpaths, mere tracks through the bushes and pine-trees, led to the top of the ridge, from which one looked down on fertile valleys enclosed by more pine-clad ridges, and to the westward on the great shining plain of Lake Biwa, its lagoons, islands, and distant mountains. Many times I walked to the top of this hill, sometimes in the clear brilliant moonlight, when the delicate pinks and reds of the azaleas were hardly visible, and only their honeysuckle scent made me conscious of their presence, and when all the world would have been silent but for the incessant chorus of myriads of frogs which came up from the rice-fields below.

HIKONE AND LAKE BIWA, FROM THE HILLS BEHIND TENNENJI

In the daytime the whole of the wood was lively with cicadæ, who kept up a constant and irritating clatter, but then there was the delight of finding new flowers, or making the acquaintance of old garden friends in their own homes. A little damp gully just behind the bamboo grove was full of deutzia bushes in blossom, and under them grew a clump of pale pink lilies (Lilium krameri), which seemed to me the loveliest flowers I had ever seen. The priest at Tennenji was so anxious to have some of my work that I made a drawing of these for him; it hangs among the temple treasures, and may be a surprise to some wandering foreigner, who will little expect to find any European traces in such an out-of-the-way spot. The family, consisting of Sokin the father, O Shige San the mother, and Takaki, a son employed in the office of police at Hikone, soon

AZALEAS ON THE ROCKS, TENNENJI

THE POEM

adopted me as a friend, and did all they could to make me comfortable. Takaki had received a modern education (they teach English in the Hikone schools, as you find out from the small boys, who shout A B C after you in the streets); but he had not got beyond the word “Yes,” beginning every sentence with it and then lapsing into Japanese. We made many excursions together, he, Matsuba, and I, strolling down to the town after dinner and looking in at the theatres and shops.[A]O Shige San was great at cooking, and took delight in providing me with new and strange forms of food every evening; for breakfast and lunch I ate what European food Matsuba could provide, and as flour and whiskey could be bought, and a cow was slaughtered in Hikone every Saturday, I did not do badly; you can get the necessary sustenance in a shorter time on foreign “chow,” but when work was over and I had taken my hot bath and exchanged my suit of flannels for a cotton kimono, it was amusing to sit on the floor and speculate on the composition of the dishes which she brought me, trying with the aid of a dictionary to find out what they really were, and to acquire a taste for “daikon.”[B]Among her successes were eels cooked in soy, broiled fish, and bean curd “à la brochette”; young bamboo shoots, chrysanthemum leaves fried in batter, and lily bulbs boiled in sugar were eatable; but a sausage made of rice and herbs, and some of the quaint vegetables, were simply nauseous. In one of my water-colors there was a large group of leaves, round ones with a dark hole where the stem goes in, commonly known as the “foreground plant,” and I noticed one afternoon to my disgust that these had been cut; the boiled stalks were given to me at dinner that evening, and I never tasted anything more unpleasant. When the various dishes had all been brought in and arranged round me by the priest or Takaki, O Shige San would appear and kneel in front of me, keeping my sake cup and rice bowl filled, and watching with intense anxiety my expression as I tasted each compound, and at the end of my dinner would remark that I had eaten nothing, and that Japan was a dirty, ugly country, to which I always replied that I had feasted, that England was dirty and ugly, but that Japan was a beautiful country. Such isOriental politeness. Then Sokin came in with his pipe and pouch and little fire-box, and, after taking a cup of sake with me, sat and smoked and conversed, or brought out the tea things of his lamented patron, Ii Kamon no Kami, and made me a bowl of powder tea with all the correct ceremonies. The Cha-no-yu is not to be confounded with ordinary tea-drinking. It is an elaborate form of entertainment which cannot be appreciated by an uneducated foreigner; every movement is regulated by laws known to the initiated, and the conversation is confined to some object of art, or poem produced by the host. The kettle, water-bowl, and other utensils should all have some historic or artistic interest, and the cup from which the mixture is drunk is usually an example of archaic pottery. The rules of the game have not been altered for about two centuries, though there are various schools which differ as

WHITE AZALEA BUSH, RAKU-RAKU-TEI, HIKONE

to minor details—whether the whisk with which the drink is stirred should afterwards be laid on the seventh or thirteenth seam of the matting, and things of that sort, which seem of infinitely small importance to the ignorant, but make a vast difference to the connoisseur. Our love of tobacco was a great bond of sympathy, although after trying each other’s pipes we both preferred our own. The old man, who knew that I did not like to be watched while painting, would sit in his little room and gaze at me as I worked in the garden or among the stone gods on the hill-side, and when he saw that my pipe was out, would fill another for me and bring it out with a box of matches, making this an excuse to look over my shoulder for a few minutes, and to have a little conversation.

As the summer came on and the weather got hotter the insects became more and more numerous; there were splendid butterflies and dragon-flies in the daytime, swarms of fire-flies over the rice-fields at night, and unfortunately many others which bit at all hours, flying things, and things which mosquito-curtains could not keep out. The Japanese house has no separate rooms for living and sleeping; when bedtime comes quilts are brought in and laid on the floor, and, if necessary, a mosquito-netting of thick green gauze is slung over them from the four corners of the apartment. The natives use a small wooden pillow, with a depression for the neck to rest in; I never could manage this, but after a time I succeeded in sleeping well with coats or another quilt rolled up for a bolster.

Certain paragraphs about me in the local papers brought a good many visitors to the temple to see what I was doing, among them a gentleman who was introduced to me as the best singer in Hikone, and a little conversation and whiskey induced him to give me some specimens of his art—songs of the Buddhist and Shinto priests, and others

THE BAMBOO GROVE, TENNENJI

which might be described as popular airs. To foreign ears they were quite devoid of melody, and his elaborate vocalization only produced sounds which were disagreeable and harsh, or else ludicrously inadequate to the efforts they cost him. My friend, who appeared to be an all-round æsthete, spent a good part of the afternoon in arranging a big bronze jar of azalea boughs and a hanging vase of irises, curling the leaves and snipping off any stray shoots which did not conform to the fish-scale arrangement (sakana no uroko no kata) which he was trying to make.

The family were very busy all through this month with their crop of silk-worms, which required incessant care and feeding. I was taken to see them first in an outbuilding when they were just little black specks; as they got older the air of this shed did not suit them, and they were moved into the Hondo, where they flourished and grew with astonishing rapidity under the eye of the Buddha, and devoured the baskets of chopped mulberry leaves as fast as they could be prepared. The caterpillars were huddled together on mats hung one above another in a framework; a netting of string was spread over each mat so that the whole mass could be lifted and the débris cleared away with very little trouble. When they had ceased to grow, and began to stand on end, waving their heads in the air after the idiotic fashion of silk-worms who want to spin, they were picked off and put in little nests of straw or bundles of brush-wood, which soon became a mass of soft yellow cocoons. It was an anxious time for O Shige San, for a considerable part of her income depended on the crop of silk; the cocoons are worth about thirty yen a koku, a measure rather less than five bushels.

The pond under my veranda was full of carp and baby tortoises, which hurried up to be fed as soon as they sawme leaning over the rail; the old tortoises were more shy, and I only saw them on very hot days, sunning themselves on the stones, and they slipped into the water with a flop if I attempted to get near them. I caught one on a patch of sandy ground, after watching its struggles to cover up the hole in which it had just laid some leathery-looking white eggs. These days brought out the snakes too, some of them very big, and all unpleasant to look at, but quite harmless. There is only one venomous snake in the country, a small brown beast called “Mamushi”; the other sorts are not ill-treated, indeed, they are considered lucky, but this is always killed and skinned, and a medicine is prepared from its dried body.

It would have been easy to dream away months here, but the wise regulations of the Japanese government, foreseeing that the traveller might be tempted to neglect his duties and become a mere loafer, forced me to return to Kōbe and get a new passport, so I had to say good-bye to my friends, and the Rakkan with the lichen-covered azaleas, still gay with crimson flowers which trailed round their feet, and the terrace where every evening I had watched the sun setting over Biwa, and to descend once more to the railway and the commonplace.

The rain came down in torrents as I left the temple, and continued to do so all the day, but there was plenty that was amusing to be seen from the carriage window. The people were busy putting out their young rice plants, and the fields were full of men and women working in mud and water half-way up to their knees, and wearing their “kasa” and straw coats, oiled paper, rush mats, or other contrivances to keep off the rain. It is surely the dirtiest and most laborious form of agriculture; the work is almost entirely done by manual labor with a spade and a heavy four-pronged rake, though I occasionally saw a cow

SUNSET OVER LAKE BIWA, FROM TENNENJI

or a pony, with a little thatched roof on its back to shoot off the rain, dragging a sort of harrow through the mud. As soon as the spring crop of barley or rape-seed is garnered and hung up to dry, the ground is trenched with the spade, and water is turned over it until it has become a soft slush, which is worked level with the rake. The young rice plants, grown thick together in nursery patches, are pulled up when the fields are ready for planting, their roots are washed, and they are tied in bundles, which are thrown into the mud and water; then the men and women wade in, untie a bundle, and set the seedlings in lines by just pressing them with their fingers into the mud. They do this wonderfully quickly, and can plant eight or nine in a row without moving from their places; when the field is all planted it looks like a pond with a delicate green haze over it. The dividing banks are planted with beans or other vegetables, so that not a yard of ground is wasted. This was the 18th of June, the beginning of the “dew month,” a period full of discomforts for the traveller, and especially for the landscape-painter.

PLANTING RICE

A SPRING FLOWER—JIRO-BO

PLATYCODON GRANDIFLORUM, “KIKYO”

THE damp heat of the Japanese summer, which is so trying to human beings, encourages all vegetation to grow with surprising luxuriance and rapidity; the buds of yesterday are flowers to-day, and to-morrow nothing is left but the ruin of a past beauty, making the painter’s struggle most arduous just when he has least energy to contend with nature. The young bamboo shoots come up like giant asparagus, growing so fast that one can almost see them move; some of them are cut and eaten while young and tender, and those which are allowed to grow to large poles are used for every imaginable purpose. They are made into water-pipes and flower-vases, barrel-hoops and umbrellas, baskets and hats, scaffolding-poles and pipe-stems, fans and delicate whisks for stirring the powdered tea—more things, in fact, than I could enumerate in a page. The bamboo is surely the cause of much of the clever constructive work of the Japanese; for though it will do most things with proper treatment, it will notstand being handled like ordinary timber; its peculiar qualities have to be considered, and every way in which they use it is artistic and good. This is the large species which grows to twenty or thirty feet high; there are many dwarf kinds, which clothe the hills with green, and are used only for making fences and such like.

AUKATUM LILIES AND BOCCONIA ON THE HILLS NEAR NIKKO

The general aspect of Japan during the summer months is a harmony in greens, the dark pines and cryptomerias striking the lowest note of a scale which culminates in the

A FIELD OF LILIES, OFUNA, NEAR KAMAKURA

brilliancy of the rice-fields—the most vivid green I know. There is more variety of color in those districts which are not irrigated, such as that round Kamakura, where the light sandy soil grows a great many kinds of vegetables, sweet-potatoes, melons, tomatoes, beans, and big patches of auratum and longiflorum lilies, the bulbs of which are exported. The lily is not one of the flowers which the Japanese themselves particularly admire, nor do they often use it for decoration. In this, as in most other matters, there are recognized rules of taste, and the man is considered

SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER1. Susuki 2. Kikyo 3. Asago 4. Shion 5. Omnia-Meshi 6. Kiku 7. HagiDrawing by Teshoto Hario

SEVEN BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS OF LATE SUMMER

1. Susuki 2. Kikyo 3. Asago 4. Shion 5. Omnia-Meshi 6. Kiku 7. Hagi

Drawing by Teshoto Hario

an ignoramus who does not know the right thing to like. I was walking one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without any leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took mypen and paper, and showed me what were the seven beautiful flowers of late summer—the convolvulus, the name of which in Japanese is “asago,” meaning the same as our “morning-glory;” wild chrysanthemum; yellow valerian; the lespedeza, a kind of bush clover;Platycodon grandiflorum, a purple-blue campanula;Eulalia japonica, the tall grass which covers so many of the hills; and shion, a rather insignificant-flowered aster. I noticed that some versions of the seven flowers differed from his; a large-flowered mallow is often substituted for the last he named. There are doubtless different schools which hold strong views on the subject, but on the morning-glory and some others they are evidently agreed. The auratum lily is a common wild flower in the hilly districts, and boiled lily bulbs are a favorite vegetable, but I could not find out which was considered the best variety for the table. O Shige San told me that it was a red lily; I looked in vain for any of that color in their gardens.

The cottages in the country round Kamakura are thickly thatched, and on the top of the thatch is laid a mass of earth held together by iris plants, which form a roof-crest of spiky green; near them in July there often were large hydrangea bushes covered with balls of blossom, the young flowers a pale yellow-green, changing as they grew older through bright blue to purple.

On the 9th of July the heat drove me from Europeanized Yokohama to the hills. I left the train at Utso-no-miya, a little town which has been financially ruined by the railway—for every one formerly stayed a night there instead of travelling straight through—and was delighted to find myself once more in thoroughly Japanese quarters. It was a wonderful moonlight night, and I wandered round the town in kimono and clogs, watched the people, and was stared at by them, climbed the steps to the big Shinto temple, and

HYDRANGEA BUSH, TOTSUKA, NEAR YOKOHAMA

gazed over the plains flooded with pale light, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

UNDER THE CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO

There is a railway now to Nikko, and most people rush up there without seeing the glorious avenue of cryptomerias—described so well in Loti’sJaponeries d’Automne—which line the old road for miles and miles. I sent my boy and my baggage by rail, and went myself in a kuruma with two good runners. The road is sadly out of repair in some places, but the splendid old trees remain, and young ones have been planted where winds and age have thinned their ranks. It is not like an ordinary avenue with the trees planted some yards apart; these are so close together that the trunks have often joined at the base, and I noticed one lot of seven big trees all grown together at the bottom into a mass that must have been eight or ten yards long. Theroad is sunk between the high banks on which the trees grow, and it must be gloomy enough on such a night as Loti experienced. Here and there it opens out into a village street, with abundance of refreshment booths for the pilgrims who still make the journey on foot.

Nikko itself is a long, steep street, leading up to a rushing mountain torrent in a rocky ravine, which is crossed by two bridges side by side. One is an ordinary wooden structure, used by all the world; the other, which is of red lacquer, with black supports and brass ornaments, is only opened for the Emperor and his family to pass over. Beyond them the hills rise, covered with cryptomerias, among which are concealed the great mortuary temples of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, founders of the great Tokugawa Shogunate that lasted for two centuries. Marvellous as these mausolea are, they make no effect in the distance; it is only when you get close to them, wander about in their successive court-yards, and examine the lovely details of wood-carving, lacquer, and gilding, that the wonder of them strikes you. The tombs themselves are plain bronze pillars, and are reached by long flights of granite steps, green and gray with mosses and lichens, which lead up under the dark masses of foliage behind the temples. After passing through all the glories of color and elaborate workmanship in the preliminary temples their final peacefulness and simplicity are very striking.

Nikko in the summer is full of foreign ladies and children; the Emperor, too, has a country-house there, where some of his large family spend the hot months. I saw the arrival of two little princesses, with a crowd of nurses, tutors, and officials. They were funny little things, about three or four years old, not as pretty as most Japanese children, but dressed in the most gorgeous colors. The red lacquer bridge was opened for them, decorated with “gohei”—the strips

A LITTLE TEMPLE AT NIKKO

of white paper which are used so largely in the Shinto religion—and in the middle of the bridge there was a little table with offerings of food on it, where the children stopped and made their obeisances to the manes of their ancestors as they passed over. All the priests of Nikko turned out in gauze vestments of many colors, Buddhist and Shinto equally anxious to do honor to the descendants of the gods.

KIKIFURI, NEAR NIKKO

The hills are alive with little tinkling streams of clear water, and the favorite walks mostly lead to waterfalls. Ispent a soaking day making a sketch of one of them—Kirifuri; the path to it crossed a wide, stony river, and went over grassy hills where there were abundant wild flowers, purple iris, white and mauve funkias, yellow orchids, clusters of white roses, pink spiræas, hydrangeas, St.-John’s-wort, meadow-rue, and bocconia appearing here and there, half hidden among the rank herbage. The big buds of auratum lilies showed how fine they would be in a few days’ time. Just in front of the waterfall a little tea-house gave me shelter enough to work in; but the path, up which I had walked dry-shod, by the time I got back had been turned to a raging torrent, and I only just crossed the stony river in time, for the light bamboo bridge was washed down during the night.

THE MOOR NEAR YUMOTO

Chūzenji is a little hamlet, some hours’ walk from Nikko up a mountain road, consisting of a group of tea-houses which overlook a charming lake, a very sacred temple with a large bronze torii, and long rows of sheds to accommodate the pilgrims who come in early August to make the

A WET DAY AT CHŪZENJI

ascent of Nantai-zan, the mountain which rises close behind the village. During five long days of incessant rain I painted everything that was visible from my room in one of the tea-houses, the water of the lake rising each day so much higher that on the last two I was able to take a morning header from my balcony, and I hardly got a chance to explore the country round. At last a bright morning tempted me to

THE FOOT OF NANTAI-ZAN

walk on to Yumoto, and see the sulphur springs and the wide moorland, Senjō-ga-hara, which lies surrounded by mountain-peaks at a height of nearly five thousand feet above the sea. On the moor the grasses do not grow high enough to conceal the flowers, and I found it gay with purple iris and white meadow-rue. The baths in Yumoto are open to the public; they are large wooden tanks undersheds by the road-side, and as you walk along the street you see the patients, men, women, and children, all sitting together, in a state of nature, up to their necks in the steaming malodorous soup. The clouds were gathering round the mountain-tops as I started to walk back to Chūzenji, and before I had finished a rapid sketch on the moor the rain began again in torrents; the road was a series of small ponds, and my coolie insisted on carrying me, as well as my sketching materials, through them; but he unfortunately stumbled under my weight, and dropped me in the deepest of them, and what with the wet above and below I was well soaked by the time I reached my tea-house. The hibachi seems a very inadequate means of warmth on such occasions; a hot bath and whiskey and dry clothes are more effective, and after dinner a bottle of tamago-sake, a hot compound of whipped egg and sake, soon produces a pleasing drowsiness. Since leaving Chūzenji I have recognized the place in many drawings on screens and fans; the artist always gives its main features—the lake, the cryptomerias, the huge bronze torii, and the steep wooded slope of Nantai-zan—but he combines them in one view as you never can see them in reality. The rain had played havoc with the road back to Nikko; several bridges were down, but temporary ones built of fagots made it possible to cross the streams. All the higher woods near the lake are hung with gray moss, and the flowering shrubs which grow among them are endless—azaleas, climbing and bushy hydrangeas, weigelia, seringa, and wild vine; on the ground I found orange Turk’s-cap lilies, columbines, the bigLilium cordifolium, and ferns of many kinds.

Notwithstanding the advantage of cooler nights, I was glad to leave the green mountains, with their constant rain and mists, and the shut-in valleys, where it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards away, and get down

THE MOAT OF BENTEN-SHIBA

again to the broader horizons and bigger skies of the plains. On the journey to Tōkyō I saw my first lotus flowers in a lake near the railway, and I hurried off at once to the pond which surrounds the little temple of Benten at Shiba, where I found them in full glory.

The lotus is one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on the second day its petals drop. The leaves are so large and so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms. Besides this their glaucous surface, like that of a cabbage leaf, reflects every passing phase of the sky, and is constantly changing in color as clouds pass over.

Japanese drawings of flowers—and they usually draw them beautifully—are often influenced in some way by a tradition. The man who invented the method was a true impressionist; he seized what appeared to him characteristic of the plant, and insisted on that to the exclusion of other truths, thus founding a mannerism which all following artists imitated. In time, what he saw as characteristic became exaggerated by his disciples, who looked at nature only through his eyes and not with their own, and I have observed that the flowers which are most frequently drawn are not depicted so naturally as those less popular ones, in books of botany and such like, for drawing which there is no recognized method, and where the draughtsman had to rely entirely on his own observation for his facts. Take, for example, the spots on the lotus stems; if you look very closely you can see that there are spots, but certainly they could not strike every artist as amarked feature of the plant, for they are not visible three yards away. But some master noticed them many years ago and spotted his stems, and now they all spot them, and the spots get bigger and bigger; and so it will be until some original genius arises who will not be content with other people’s eyes, but will dare to look for himself, and he may perhaps, without abandoning Japanese methods, get nearer to nature, and start a renaissance in Japanese art.

The Japanese treatment of landscape is not more conventional than that of Claude or David Cox, or than the shorthand of our pencil-sketches, but it records its facts in a different way. The everlasting question in art is the imitation of nature; it has never been carried further in certain directions than by Millais and his pre-Raphaelite brethren, or in others than by Manet, Monet, and the modern French, but no one can put in everything; look at a simple bunch of leaves in sunlight against a wall, and think how long it would take to really imitate all their complexities of form, color, and light and shade; some facts can only be given by ignoring others, and the question what is the important thing which must be insisted on is the personal affair of each individual artist in every country where art is unfettered and alive. But in Japanese, as in Byzantine and other Eastern arts, this question is still decided by the practice of past generations, and it will take all the vitality of a strong man to infuse new life into it without destroying its many exquisite qualities. Perhaps when Japanese artists absorb its spirit instead of merely trying to imitate its methods, Western art may help in the direction of freedom; at present I fear that its influence has done more harm than good.

The people are so quick to recognize the meaning of a few lines, and to understand the poetic idea which theysuggest, that it is a wonder the artists ever learned to draw at all; they might have been content with symbols, for a few lines like those below are enough to convey all the poetry that is associated in their minds with any of the well-known art motives.

The little island of Benten is a frequented spot, and my easel was surrounded from morning till night with a crowd of spectators; they dispersed at the command of the policeman on his hourly round, but after he had gazed his fill and left me, a new lot instantly assembled. They were mostly children; and a crowd of Japanese children is twice as many as any other crowd of its size, for every child has another smaller one tied to its back. I suppose they are not born in pairs this way, but they contract the habit of carrying a little one at a very early age, and often tie on a doll when a sufficiently small human being cannot be found. The spectators are almost always polite, and take care not to put themselves between you and your subject; but they squeeze up very close to your elbow, and trample on your nerves, if not on your materials. They usually remarked that my work was a photograph; some more educated ones said that it was an oil-painting, that being the medium which is associated with foreign art; and one man said that it was enamel, which I took as a compliment to the brilliancy of my color. The keeper of a little tea-shed hard by, where I took my lunch, noticed that I was worried by thepeople standing so close to me, and when I arrived next morning I found that he had put up a fence round the place where I worked; it was only a few slender bamboo sticks, with a thin string twisted from one to another, but not a soul attempted to come inside it. They are such an

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