HERE AND THERE
In the street called Nihon Bashi, near the merchants of books and lanterns, of embroideries and bronzes, miniature gardens are sold; and, as a studious idler amid this fantastic display, I mentally compare these little fragments of the world. The artists have subtly shown themselves masters of the exquisite laws by which the lines of a landscape are composed, like those of a physiognomy. Instead of drawing nature they reproduce it, constructing their counterfeits from the very elements of the original, which they borrow—as a rule is illustrated by an example. These images are usually exact and perfect replicas. All sorts and kinds of pines, for instance, are offered me to choose from; and their position in the jar, with their height as a scale, proportionately shows the dimensions of their original territory. Here is a rice-field in Springtime; in the distance is a hill fringed with trees (they are made of moss). Here is the sea, with its archipelago and its capes! By the artifice of two stones, one black, one red, and rather worn and porous,they have represented two islands that appear to be joined together, whose difference in distance is shown only by their different colors, apparently due to the light of the setting sun. And even the many-colored sunset is represented by this bed of motley pebbles covered with the contents of two carafes.
Now, to amplify my thought!
The European artist copies nature according to the sentiment that he has for it. The Japanese imitates it according to the materials with which it furnishes him. One expresses himself, the other expresses nature. One creates, the other mimics. One paints, the other constructs. One is a student; the other, in a way, a master. One reproduces in its detail the spectacle that he surveys with a searching and subtle gaze; the other disengages its law with a flash of the eye, in the freedom of his fancy; and applies it with a scriptural conciseness.
Here the first inspiration of the artist is the material on which he exercises his hand. Good-humoredly, he consults its intrinsic properties, its tints; and, appropriating the soul of the brute thing, he constitutes himself its interpreter. Of all the things that he might say, he expresses only the essentialand significant characteristics; and, merely making a few shy indications here and there, leaves to the paper the task of concealing all those infinite complexities which are implied freely because they are taken for granted. It is a frolic of certitude, it is caprice with restraint; and the underlying idea, snared by such a method of argument, imposes itself upon us with an insidious conviction.
Now, first of all, to speak of Color! We note that the Japanese artist has reduced his palette to a limited number of general and predetermined tones. He understands that the beauty of a color resides less in its intrinsic quality than in its implicit accord with contrasted tones. And because of the unmodified blending of two values laid on in equal quantities, he repairs the omission of the many intermediate shades by the vivacity that he gives to the juxtaposition of the essential notes; calmly indicating one repetition or two. He knows that the value of a tone results more from its position than from its intensity; master of keys, he transposes them as he will. Furthermore, as color is nothing less than the particular homage that all visible things render to the universal light, everything fitly takes its place within theframe through the power of color, in accord with the theme that the artist has chosen.
But now the roving eye remains fixed; and, instead of contemplating, it interrogates. Color is the passion of matter; it signalizes the participation of each object in the common source of glory. Design expresses the energy proper to each being; his action, his rhythm, his postures. The one makes manifest his relations to space, the other fixes his movement in time. One gives the form, the other gives the sense. And as the Japanese, careless of relief, paints only by contour and mass, the chief characteristic of his design is a schematic stroke. While the tones are in contrast, the lines are in unity; and while the painting is a harmony, the design is an idea; and if the interpretation of this idea comes in a flash of recognition, complete and instantaneous, the design has a satisfactory abstract significance and expresses the idea in all its purity, just as well as might a word made of letters. Each form, each movement, each group furnishes its hieroglyph.
I understand this when I revel among these bundles of Japanese prints. At Shidzuoka, among the ex-votos of the temple, I have seen many admirable examples ofthis art. A warrior leaps from the vermilion wood like a frantic exclamation. This prancing or kicking thing is no longer the picture of a horse, but the symbol of his revolt against bondage; a sort of reversed figure 6, equipped with a mane and tail, represents his repose in the grass. Embraces, battles, landscapes, crowds, fitted into a small space, resemble the designs on seals. This man bursts into laughter; and, falling, he no longer seems a man, but immediately becomes his own character in writing.
With horrible and careless crudity, the French or English construct barbarous barracks; pitiless toward the earth they disfigure, concerned only with their expansion, seizing upon all possible space with their eyes, if not with their hands. They exploit a view as they would a waterfall. The Oriental knows enough to flee from vast landscapes, where multifold aspects and divergent lines do not lend themselves to that exquisite co-ordination between the eye and the view which alone makes a sojourn possible for him. His home is not open to all the winds. Choosing a retreat in some peaceful valley, his care is to achieve a perfect location where his viewcomposes so harmonious a landscape that it is impossible to imagine seeing it otherwise. His eyes furnish him with all the elements of happiness, and he replaces furniture with open windows. Inside, the art of the painter, ingeniously tracing his visions upon a fictitiously transparent window, multiplies the imaginary openings. In the ancient imperial palace that I visited, its magnificent and movable treasures had been carried away, and there remained only the pictorial decorations arranged in a black room,—the familiar visions of its august inhabitant.
The paper dwelling is composed of successive apartments, divided by partitions which slide on moldings. A single theme of decoration has been chosen for each of the series, and it is introduced by screens similar to the wings of a theater. I can prolong or shorten my contemplation at will. I am less the spectator of the painter than his host; each subject is expressed by a choice in harmony with the tone of the paper, a color representing the opposite end of the gamut. It is so at Gosho. An indigo and cream motif suffices for the room called “Freshness and Purity,” seeming all filled with sky and water. But at Nijo the imperial habitation is done in goldalone. Emerging from the matting-covered rafters, painted life-size, crowns of the pine-tree extend their grotesque boughs along the sunlit walls. The Prince, upon his seat, saw only great bands of tawny fire; and his sensation was of floating on the evening sky with awful sunset fires beneath him.
At Shidzuoka, at the time of Rinzainji, I saw a landscape made of colored dust. They had put it under glass, for fear that a breath would blow it away.
Before the golden Buddha in the leaves, time is measured by the burning of a little candle; and in the depth of this ravine, by the dripping of a triple fountain.
Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure, and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature; and, by means of a concrete image which symbolizesthem like a syllable, still mysteriously conscious in his abasement of the superior authority of the Word, he calls upon it in his necessities. Thus, like a child who constructs the history of his doll from everything around him, humanity in its memories unites all that it discovers with all that it dreams, and so composes the romance of mythology.
Here beside me is this poor little old woman, who makes her salutation by striking her hands carefully together before a colossal female statue, in whose bosom an ancient prince, when led by a toothache and a dream to honor the skull of an ancestor, inserted the worn sphere after finding it wedged by the jawbone in the roots of a willow. At my right and at my left, all the length of the dark cavern, the three thousand golden Kwannon, each one resembling the others in the embellishment of arms that frame it, are aligned in rows of a hundred, in ranks fifteen deep. A ray of sunlight flickers over this barrier built of goddesses. Seeking the reason for uniformity in this multitude, and from what bulb all these identical stalks have sprung, I find that the worshiper here doubtless wishes a wider sounding-board for his prayers, and imagines that in multiplyingthe object of his entreaty he increases its efficacy.
But not for long did the sages rest their eyes on the eyes of these crude likenesses. Having perceived the unity of all things, they found the basis of their philosophy in that fact. Though each individual were transitory and capricious, the richness of the common fund remained inexhaustible. No need that Man should apply his hatchet to the tree, or his cleaver to the rock; in the grain of millet and the egg, alike in the immobility and the convulsions of sun and sea, he found the same principle of plastic energy; and the earth sufficed for the construction of its own idols. Further, admitting that the whole is formed of homogeneous parts; if, to better pursue their analysis, the Sages turned it back upon themselves, they discovered that the fugitive, blameworthy, unjustifiable thing in them was the fact of their presence in the world,—and that the element in them which was free of space and limitless of duration was the very conception they had formed of this contingent character.
If a diabolical fraud had not led them astray at that point, they might have recognized in the harmony of this principle of independent existence (with its mainidea common to all and its expression so varied) a faith similar to that in the Word, which implies a vow—the voluntary restitution of breath to its divine Source. For every creature, born of the impression of Divine Unity upon indeterminate matter, is the very acknowledgment that he makes to his Creator, and the expression of the nothingness from which he has been drawn. This is the living, breathing rhythm of the world; where Man, dowered with consciousness and language, has been instituted their priest, to make dedication and offering of them,—and, of his own nothingness united to essential grace, to make a filial gift of himself, through love’s most intimate choice.
But these blind eyes refused to recognize unconditional being; and to him whom they call Buddha was it given to perfect the Pagan blasphemy. To return to this comparison of the Word; from the moment that they ignored the object of the discourse, its order and sequence escaped them entirely, and nothing remained but the ravings of delirium. But a horror of that which is not the Absolute is essential to man; and to escape the frightful circle of your vanity, Buddha, you have not hesitated to embrace Nothingness! For instead of explaining all things by their final end,he searched in himself for their intrinsic principle; and, finding there only nothingness, his doctrine teaches this monstrous communion.
This is the method; that the Sage,—having banished successively from his mind the ideas of form and of space, and the very idea of an idea,—arrives finally at Nothingness, and so enters into Nirvana. And people are awed by this revelation! As for me, I find that to the idea of Nothingness they have added that of Enjoyment. This seems to me the last and most Satanic mystery; the silence of a creature intrenched in its final refusal, the incestuous quietude of a soul seated on its integral difference!