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Title: Japan - A Record in Colour
Author: Menpes, Dorothy
Language: English
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JAPAN
OTHER BEAUTIFUL BOOKS ON JAPAN
EACH CONTAINING FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
* * * * *
ANCIENT TALES AND FOLK-LORE OF JAPAN
BY R. GORDON SMITH, F.R.G.S.
57 ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAPANESE ARTISTS
* * * * *
THE FLOWERS AND GARDENS OF JAPAN
DESCRIBED BY FLORENCE DU CANE
50 ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELLA DU CANE
* * * * *
"JAPAN"
In the "Peeps at Many Lands and Cities" Series
BY JOHN FINNEMORE
12 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
* * * * *
PEEPS AT THE HISTORY OF JAPAN
BY JOHN FINNEMORE
8 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR AND
NUMEROUS LINE DRAWINGS IN THE TEXT
PUBLISHED BY
ADAM & CHARLES BLACK, 4, 5 AND 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
[Illustration: MISS POMEGRANATE]
JAPAN · A RECORD IN
COLOUR BY MORTIMER
MENPES · TRANSCRIBED
BY DOROTHY MENPES ·
PUBLISHED BY ADAM &
CHARLES BLACK · SOHO
SQUARE · LONDON · W.
_Published December 1901
Reprinted May 1902, January 1903, January 1904
January 1905_
TO MY FRIEND
THE LADY EDWARD CECIL
TO WHOSE ENTHUSIASTIC SYMPATHY
MY WORK IN JAPAN
OWES SO MUCH OF THE SUCCESS
IT HAS ATTAINED
Note
In this book I endeavour to present, with whatever skill of penmanship I
may possess, my father's impressions of Japan. I trust that they will
not lose in force and vigour in that they are closely intermingled with
my own impressions, which were none the less vivid because they were
those of a child,--for it was as a child, keenly interested in and
enjoying all I saw, that I passed, four or five years ago, through that
lovely flower-land of the Far East, which my father has here so
charmingly memorialised in colour.
DOROTHY MENPES
_November 1901._
Contents
CHAPTER I PAGE
ART AND THE DRAMA 1
CHAPTER II
THE LIVING ART 29
CHAPTER III
PAINTERS AND THEIR METHODS 49
CHAPTER IV
PLACING 75
CHAPTER V
ART IN PRACTICAL LIFE 91
CHAPTER VI
THE GARDENS 105
CHAPTER VII
FLOWER ARRANGEMENT 113
CHAPTER VIII
THE GEISHA 123
CHAPTER IX
CHILDREN 135
CHAPTER X
WORKERS 151
CHAPTER XI
CHARACTERISTICS 199
List of Illustrations
1. Miss Pomegranate _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. An Actor 2
3. Watching the Play 4
4. The Bill of the Play 6
5. A Garden 8
6. The Road to the Temple 10
7. The Street with the Gallery 12
8. Sun and Lanterns 14
9. Summer Afternoon 16
10. Apricot-Blossom Street 18
11. Outside Kioto 20
12. A Blond Day 22
13. A Blind Beggar 24
14. The Giant Lantern 26
15. Sun and Lanterns 32
16. The Scarlet Umbrella 36
17. Leading to the Temple 38
18. By the Light of the Lanterns 40
19. "News" 42
20. A Sunny Temple 44
21. On the Great Canal, Osaka 46
22. After the Festival 52
23. The Lemon Bridge 54
24. Bearing a Burden 58
25. The End of the Day and the End of the Festival 60
26. In Front of the Stall 62
27. The Stall by the Bridge 64
28. Archers 68
29. Reflections 72
30. The Red Curtain 78
31. Flower of the Tea 80
32. A Street in Kioto 82
33. Heavy-laden 84
34. Peach-Blossom 88
35. The Tea-house of the Slender Tree 94
36. Blossom of the Glen 96
37. A Family Group 100
38. The Venice of Japan 102
39. An Iris Garden 108
40. A Sunny Garden 110
41. Iris Garden 112
42. A Wistaria Garden 116
43. Flower-placing 118
44. Wistaria 120
45. Butterflies 126
46. Daughters of the Sun 128
47. By the Light of the Lantern 130
48. A Street Scene, Kioto 132
49. Baby and Baby 138
50. A Jap in Plum-colour 140
51. Sugar-water Stall 142
52. Advance Japan 144
53. Chums 146
54. A Sunny Stroll 148
55. The Child and the Umbrella 150
56. A Little Jap 154
57. A By-canal 156
58. Swinging along in the Sun 158
59. A Metal-worker 160
60. Bronze-workers 162
61. In Theatre Street 164
62. The Carpenter 166
63. Making up Accounts 168
64. Finishing Touches 170
65. A Back Canal, Osaka 172
66. Stencil-makers 174
67. A Sign-painter's 178
68. A Cloisonné Worker 180
69. A Toy-shop 182
70. A Sweet-stuff Stall 184
71. A Canal in Osaka 188
72. Umbrellas and Commerce 190
73. Playfellows 194
74. Youth and Age 202
75. Lookers-on 204
ART AND THE DRAMA
[Illustration: AN ACTOR]
CHAPTER I
ART AND THE DRAMA
I always agree with that man who said, "Let me make the nation's songs
and I care not who frames her laws," or words to that effect, for, in my
opinion, nothing so well indicates national character or so keenly
accentuates the difference between individuals and nations as the way in
which they spend their leisure hours; and the theatres of Japan are
thoroughly typical of the people's character. It would be utterly
impossible for the Japanese to keep art out of their lives. It creeps
into everything, and is as the very air they breathe. Art with them is
not only a conscious effort to achieve the beautiful, but also an
instinctive expression of inherited taste. It beautifies their homes and
pervades their gardens; and perhaps one never realises this
all-dominating power more fully than when in a Japanese theatre, which
is, invariably, a veritable temple of art. But here with us in the West
it is different. We have no art, and our methods merely lead us to
deception, while we do not begin to understand those few great truths
which form the basis of oriental philosophy, and without which
perfection in the dramatic art is impossible. For example, the
philosophy of balance, of which the Japanese are past masters, is to us
unknown. The fact that Nature is commonplace, thereby forming a
background, as it were, for Tragedy and the spirit of life to work, has
never occurred to us; while the background of our Western play is not by
any means a plan created by a true artist upon which to display the
dramatic picture as it is in Japan, but simply a background to advertise
the stage-manager's imitative talent. The result is, of course, that the
acting and the environment are at variance instead of being in harmonic
unity. But we in the West have not time to think of vague things, such
as balance and breadth and the creating of pictures. What we want is
realism; we want a sky to look like a real sky, and the moon in it to
look like a real moon, even if it travels by clock-work, as it has been
known to do occasionally. And so real is this clock-work moon that we
are deceived into imagining that it is the moon, the actual moon. But
the deception is not pleasant; in fact, it almost gives you indigestion
to see a moon, and such a moon, careering over the whole sky in half an
hour. In Japan they would not occupy themselves with making you believe
that a moon on the stage was a real one--they would consider such false
realism as a bit of gross degradation--but they would take the greatest
possible pains as to the proper placing of that palpably pasteboard moon
of theirs, even if they had to hold it up in the sky by the aid of a
broom-stick.
[Illustration: WATCHING THE PLAY]
In Japan the scenic work of a play is handled by one man alone, and that
man is the dramatic author, who is almost invariably a great artist. To
him the stage is a huge canvas upon which he is to paint his picture,
and of which each actor forms a component part. This picture of his has
to be thought out in every detail; he has to think of his figures in
relation to his background, just as a Japanese architect when building a
house or a temple takes into consideration the surrounding scenery, and
even the trees and the hills, in order to form a complete picture,
perfect in balance and in form. When a dramatic author places his drama
upon the stage, he arranges the colour and setting of it in obedience to
his ideas of fitness, which are partly intuitive and partly traditional.
It is probably necessary that his background should be a monotone, or
arranged in broad masses of colour, in order to balance the brilliancy
of the action, and against which the moving figures are sharply defined.
And it is only in Japan that you see such brilliant luminous effects on
the stage, for the Japs alone seem to have the courage to handle very
vivid colours in a masterly way--glorious sweeps of gold and of
blue--vivid, positive colour. No low-toned plush curtains and what we
call rich, sombre colour, with overdressed, shifted-calved flunkeys,
stepping silently about on velvet carpets, shod in list slippers, and
looking for all the world like a lot of burglars, only needing a couple
of dark lanterns to complete their stealthy appearance.
Then, there are no Morris-papered anterooms and corridors in Japan, as
we have here--sad bottlegreens and browns leading to a stage that is
still sadder in colour--only a sadness lit up by a fierce glare of
electric light.
The true artistic spirit is wanting in the West. We are too timid to
deal in masses for effect, and we have such a craving for realism that
we become simply technical imitators like the counterfeiters of
banknotes. Our great and all-prevailing idea is to cram as much of what
we call realism and detail into a scene as possible; the richer the
company, and the more money they have to handle, the more hopeless the
work becomes, for the degradation of it is still more forcibly
emphasised. Consequently, we always create spotty pictures; in fact, one
rarely ever sees a well-balanced scene in a Western theatre, and simply
because we do not realise the breadth and simplicity of Nature. There
are not the violent contrasts in Nature that our artists are so
continually depicting: Nature plays well within her range, and you
seldom see her going to extremes. In a sunlit garden the deepest shadow
and the brightest light come very near together, so broad and so subtle
are her harmonies. We do not realise this, and we sacrifice breadth in
the vain endeavour to gain what we propose to call strength--strength is
sharp; but breadth is quiet and full of reserve. None understands this
simple truth so well as the Japanese. It forms the very basis of
oriental philosophy, and through the true perception of it they have
attained to those ideas of balance which are so eminent a characteristic
of Japanese art.
[Illustration: THE BILL OF THE PLAY]
When you have balanced force you have reached perfection, and this is of
course the true criterion of dramatic art. But here in the West we must
be realistic, and if a manager succeeds in producing upon the stage an
exact representation of a room in Belgrave Square he is perfectly
content, and looks upon his work as a triumph. There is to be no choice:
he does not choose his room from the decorative standpoint--such a thing
would never occur to him for a moment--but simply grabs at this
particular room that he happens to know in Belgrave Square, nicknacks
and all, and plants it upon the stage. His wife, he imagines, has a
taste for dress, and she dresses the people that are to sit about in
this room, probably playing a game of "Bridge," just as you might see it
played any day in Belgrave Square. I remember once, when a play of this
nature was being acted at one of our leading theatres, hearing a
disgusted exclamation from a man at my side--"Well! if that's all," he
growled, "we might go and see a game of Bridge played any night"; and it
occurred to me as I heard him that the managers will suffer for this
foolish realism, the public will soon tire of it, for they, almost
unconsciously, want something altogether bigger and finer--let us hope
they want art.
The Japanese are not led away by this struggle to be realistic, and this
is one of the chief reasons why the stage of Japan is so far ahead of
our stage. If a horse is introduced into a scene he will be by no means
a real horse, but a very wooden one, with wooden joints, just like a
nursery rocking-horse; yet this decorative animal will be certain to
take its proper place in the composition of the picture. But when
realism has its artistic value, the Japs will use it to the full. If a
scene is to be the interior of a house, it will be an interior, complete
in every detail down to the exquisite bowl of flowers which almost
invariably forms the chief decoration of a Japanese room. But suppose
they want a garden: they do not proceed, as we do, to take one special
garden and copy it literally; that garden has to be created and thought
out to form a perfect whole; even the lines of the tiny trees and the
shape of the hills in the distance have to be considered in relation to
the figures of the actors who are to tell their story there. This is
true art. Then, when you go to a theatre in Japan, you are made to feel
that you are actually living in the atmosphere of the play: the body of
the theatre and the stage are linked together, and the spectator feels
that he is contained in the picture itself, that he is looking on at a
scene which is taking place in real life just before his very eyes. And
it is the great aim of every ambitious dramatic author to make you feel
this. To gain this end, if the scene is situated by the seashore, he
will cause the sea, which is represented by that decorative design
called the wave pattern, to be swept right round the theatre, embracing
both audience and stage and dragging you into the very heart of his
picture.
[Illustration: A GARDEN]
For this same reason, a Japanese theatre is always built with two broad
passages, called Hanamichi (or flower-paths), leading through the
audience to the stage, up which you can watch a Daimio and his
gorgeous retinue sweep on his royal way to visit perhaps another Daimio
whose house is represented on the stage. This is very dramatic, and
greatly forwards the author's scheme of bringing you into touch with the
stage. But we in our Western theatres need not trouble ourselves with
all this, for we frame our scenes in a vulgar gilt frame; we hem them in
and cut them off from the rest of the house. When we go to a theatre
here, we go to view a picture hung up on a wall, and generally a very
foolish inartistic picture it is too. And even taking our stage from the
point of view of a picture, it is wrong, for in a work of art the frame
should never have an independent value as an achievement, but be
subordinate to, and part of, the whole. All idea of framing the stage
must be done away with; else we are in danger of going to the other
extreme, as some artists have done, and cause our picture to overlap and
spread itself upon the frame. An artist in a realistic mood has been
known, when painting a picture of the seaside, to so crave after texture
as to sprinkle sand upon the foreground, and becoming more and more
enthusiastic he has at last ended in an exuberance of realism by
clapping some real shells on to the frame and gilding them over. Thus
the picture appeared to pour out on to its frame. This is all very
terrible and inartistic; yet it is but an instance of the kind of
mistake that we let ourselves in for by the ridiculous method of
stage-setting which we practise.
Now, built as the Japanese theatres are, with their flower-paths
leading from the stage, there is no fear of such a disaster; yet
Westerners, who have never been to Japan, on hearing of the construction
of a Japanese theatre, are rather inclined to conjure up to their
fancies visions of the low comedian who springs through trap-doors, and
of the clown who leaves the ring of the circus to seat himself between
two maiden ladies in the audience; but if these people were to go to
Japan and see a really fine production at a properly conducted theatre,
such an idea would never occur to them at all.
[Illustration: THE ROAD TO THE TEMPLE]
Here and there, however, the unthinking globe-trotter, with more or less
the vulgar mind, will be inclined to laugh as he sees a richly-clothed
actor sweep majestically through the audience to the stage; he will
point out the prompter who never attempts to conceal himself, and the
little black-robed supers who career about the stage arranging dresses,
slipping stools under actors, and bearing away any little article that
they don't happen to want. "How funny and elementary it all is!" they
will remark; but there is nothing elementary about it at all; these
little supers who appear to them so amusing are perfect little artists,
and are absolutely necessary to ensure the success of a scene. Suppose
Danjuro, the greatest actor in Japan, appears upon the stage dressed in
a most gorgeous costume, and takes up a position before a screen which
he will probably have to retain for half an hour: these little people
must be there to see that the sweep of his dress is correct in relation
to the lines of the screen. The placing of this drapery is
elaborately rehearsed by the supers, and when they step back from their
work even the globe-trotter is bound to admit that the picture created
by Danjuro and the screen is a perfectly beautiful one, and a picture
which could not have been brought about by merely walking up and
stopping short, or by the backward kick that a leading lady gives to her
skirt. These little supers may go, come, and drift about on the stage;
they may slip props under the actors and illuminate their faces with
torches; yet the refined Japanese gentleman (and he is always an artist)
is utterly unconscious of their presence. They are dressed in black:
therefore it would be considered as the height of vulgarity in him to
see them. Indeed, the audience are in honour bound not to notice these
people, and it would be deemed in their eyes just as vulgar for you to
point out a super in the act of arranging a bit of drapery, as to enter
a temple and smell the incense there. No Japanese ever smells incense:
he is merely conscious of it. Incense is full of divine and beautiful
suggestion; but the moment you begin to vulgarise it by talking, or even
thinking, of its smell, all beauty and significance is destroyed.
Everything connected with the stage in Japan is reduced to a fine art:
the actor's walk--the dignity of it!--you would never see a man walk in
the street as he would on the stage. And then the tone of voice,
bearing, and attitude--everything about the man is changed. I remember
once in Tokio being introduced to the manager of a local theatre, whose
performance so much pleased me that I begged the privilege of making a
few studies before the play began, hinting at the same time that I
should very much like one or two of the actors to pose for me. Then this
little gentleman began to think and frown and pucker his brow, secretly
proud that an artist should want to paint his work, and also not
unwilling to make a little money. At last, after much deliberation, he
decided that I was to have the run of his theatre and ten actors for the
afternoon, charging three dollars and a half for the whole concern. This
seemed to me to be fairly reasonable; I did not know of any London
theatre that I could have hired for three dollars and a half, or even as
many pounds, and then the company consisted of ten actors who were all
artists, all loving their work as only true artists can. To be sure, it
was a suburban theatre, and the acting was not of the finest; probably
also there was a great deal of exaggeration in the poses; but still it
lent itself to decorative work, and answered my purpose to perfection.
They did not act, but merely posed to form a series of pictures, and
some of the expressions of the actors were extraordinarily grotesque,
just like a Japanese picture-book. But what struck me most of all was
the absolute autocracy of the little manager, or whatever he called
himself--the Czar of Russia or General Booth was not in it with him for
power! He threw his actors about on the stage just as an artist would
fling pigment on to a canvas; and his violent whisking of a bit of
vermilion and apple-green in against a wave was too dexterous and
masterly for anything, and called forth my unfeigned admiration.
[Illustration: THE STREET WITH THE GALLERY]
The greatest living actor at the present moment in Japan is Danjuro--in
fact, I should say that he is one of the greatest actors in the whole
world; and in order to give a true insight into the many beauties of the
Japanese drama, it seems to me that I cannot do better than describe a
day that I once spent with this great master.
I was taken to see him by Fukuchi, Japan's most eminent dramatist and
the greatest of living writers. We were shown into a small room with
spotless mats to await Danjuro's arrival, and my attention was at once
attracted towards an exquisite kakemono that hung on the wall, which was
the only decoration the room possessed. It was a picture, a masterpiece,
that seemed to suggest one of the early Italian masters; it impressed me
tremendously, and I told Fukuchi so. "Ah, I am glad!" he exclaimed, "for
Danjuro, the great master, when I told him you were coming and that you
were a painter, asked me many questions about you. He took much pains to
discover the quality of art that appealed to you, and the side of Nature
that you liked the best. He also wished to know your favourite flower,
and which kind of blossom you loved the most--whether you preferred, as
he did, the single cherry-blossom, or the double. This Danjuro was
unable to find out; if he had known he would have chosen a kakemono of
flowers for you. But I am glad you like the picture." I was amazed at
the kindness of this man Danjuro. There was no accident about this
picture that I admired so vastly: it had been chosen for a definite
reason--to give me pleasure. And I afterwards learnt that there is no
end to the amount of trouble a Japanese gentleman will take in the
choosing of the picture that is to hang in the room where you are being
entertained.
When you enter a house in Japan, the first and one idea is to give you
pleasure, and the people of the house will take elaborate pains, almost
the care that a detective will take in detecting a crime, to find out,
as delicately as possible, your taste in regard to this picture. They
will send their servant round to your hotel to find out what flower you
have expressly asked to have placed on your table, and that will be the
flower that you will find adorning either a kakemono or a vase when
entering the house of your friend.
[Illustration: SUN AND LANTERNS]
This room where Fukuchi and I were waiting looked out upon the garden--a
miniature garden, no bigger than an ordinary dining-room, yet perfectly
balanced, one that held infinite joys: there were the miniature bridges,
lakes, and gold-fish, the mountains, the valleys, and the ancient
turtles--all correct as to colour and marked by that exquisite taste
which only a Japanese landscape-gardener can display. It was a bright
sunlit day, and looking from this room with its perfect masterpiece to
the little jewel of a garden, you felt that you were living in another
world. And it was all so pure and so "right" that I began to feel
hopelessly "wrong." It seemed that I was the only blot in these perfect
surroundings. And at last I became so shy that I really didn't know what
to do with myself, and I felt that the only thing left for me was to
take off my clothes and dig a hole in the ground, and then be ashamed
that I had left my clothes behind me. However, I controlled my emotions
and waited on with Fukuchi until the sliding doors dividing us from the
adjoining room were quietly opened and Danjuro appeared. So unlike an
actor!--no moving of the eyebrows, no stroking of the hair, but just a
simple dignified gentleman, and an old gentleman, quite old. He was a
slim, spare man, very refined, with the look of a picture of Buddha by
Botticelli. The face was thin and narrow and keen; bright eyes glanced
at me from under heavy eyebrows; his manner was magnetic; and I felt at
once that he was a great artist. The way his servants saluted him! You
could see that they loved him, and yet by the reverence they showed him
he might have been a cardinal. I was at once offered exquisite
delicacies in little lacquer cups, and we all sat down, on the floor of
course, and Danjuro began to talk. One of the first things he said to
me, through Fukuchi, who spoke English perfectly, was, "I am told that I
have many qualities like your great actor Sir Henry Irving," and even as
he spoke I could trace a distinct facial likeness between the two men.
His voice was rich and powerful and his enunciation deliberate; he used
his hands quietly, and the expression varied very little except when he
was anxious to emphasise, and then the change was extraordinary, while
the expression and poses were so admirable that I could almost
understand what the man was saying.
I instinctively felt that the right thing to do was to first talk of the
kakemono, and Danjuro, seeing my genuine enthusiasm, smiled and said,
without a touch of false modesty, "Yes; it is a great masterpiece!" and
then he began to tell me about this picture, and I felt at once that
this dignified little gentleman was a true artist.
[Illustration: SUMMER AFTERNOON]
From the picture we drifted to the Drama, and Danjuro was very curious
to know something of our work in London, and now and then, as he plied
me with pertinent questions, I thought I detected a glimmer of fun
behind his inscrutable demeanour. At last the questions rained around me
so rapidly, and were so terribly to the point, that I felt thoroughly
ashamed and did not know how to answer him. I knew that he was an
artist, looking at his work from purely the artistic standpoint, and as
an artist I knew that it would be utterly impossible for him to
appreciate our Western methods: so I deftly turned the conversation by
returning the fire of questions. I had seen Danjuro in one or two scenes
in which I was greatly struck with the remarkable changes of his facial
expression. There was one scene in which Danjuro faced the audience, and
in a minute, by the complete alteration of his face, changed himself
into an entirely different man. This feat was really so remarkable
that I was anxious to know how it was done, and suggested that it might
have been accomplished by a clever make-up. "No, no!" he exclaimed. "It
is a rule of mine to use 'make-up' very rarely. For change of expression
we actors have to depend much on the muscles of our faces"; and Danjuro,
to illustrate this, quickly changed his face until it was totally
different, even to the face markings, and I should have defied Sherlock
Holmes himself to have known him to be the same man. Then I saw him act
the part of a drunken man. I have seen drunken men on the stage over and
over again, and there has always been a touch of vulgarity about them;
but this drunken man of Danjuro's was an exquisite triumph of art. I was
curious to know how he had perfected this rôle, and suggested that it
had perhaps been brought about through a careful study of the habits and
actions of a drunkard, using him as a model, as it were. But this
Danjuro firmly denied. "No, no, never!" he exclaimed. "I might just as
well take a drunken man and stick him on the stage, just as he is, as to
imitate any one man. That is not art: it is not a creation. I have seen
drunken men all my life, and the drunken man I represented was the
aggregate of all the drunkenness I have ever seen. Suppose by chance I
had come across a drunken man while I was developing the character, I
should perhaps have been tempted to follow that particular man too
closely, and the result would have been necessarily inartistic." And
Danjuro made it quite clear to me that when creating the character of
either a drunken man or a madman, he invariably keeps as far away from
Nature as possible. He would not proceed as some of our actors do, to
hunt about in the slums until he had found a man sufficiently drunk for
his purpose, and then copy him exactly; or, yet again, he would not have
attempted to imitate a death-bed scene by watching one particular person
die. Such a thing would appear to him as a great degradation.
Almost imperceptibly the conversation swerved round again to English
acting, and Danjuro gave me a rather humorous, though humiliating,
description of a play he had seen in Yokohama. The language was
gibberish to him, and all he could do was to study the poses of the
players, which struck him as being extremely awkward. "They suggested to
me badly modelled statues," he explained; "they never seemed to move
gracefully, and their actions were always violent and exaggerated."
This, from a Japanese, was frank criticism, for he made it quite clear
to me that he had little or no sympathy with our methods. He felt that
he was talking to an artist and that he could afford to be natural; but
after this very candid opinion there was a slight pause, which I
hastened to break by putting a question on the subject of his own drama.
[Illustration: APRICOT-BLOSSOM STREET]
The drama of Japan, he told me, was greatly improving; the actors
nowadays have chances which in the early days they had not, and it is
easier for them to create fine scenic effects. They have the chance of
studying great masterpieces at museums; they may copy costumes there,
and, above all, they have the superb opportunity of studying colour and
form. Then, many of the great Japanese actors possess collections of
very fine pictures, while the actors of early times could only study
from badly printed woodblocks which were nearly all inaccurate. Schools
for actors have been occupying his attention, and he hopes that some day
they will be established all over Japan. Actors, in his opinion, should
be taught when they are quite young the science of deportment and of
graceful movement, to be artists as well as actors, and above all to
avoid exaggeration.
Danjuro prefers as an audience the middle classes. "They are more
sympathetic," he said; "the diplomats and politicians who have come in
touch with the West, and are dressed in European dress, seem somehow to
lose sympathy with us, and are not helpful as an audience. Perhaps it is
that they can never entirely divest themselves of the sense of their own
importance."
After considering Danjuro's views concerning the Japanese drama, I was
interested to hear the views of the dramatic author, and Fukuchi and I
spent many delightful afternoons together discussing this all-absorbing
topic. "What do you claim to be the chief advantages of Japanese as
compared with European theatres?" I asked him on one occasion. "Well,"
replied Fukuchi without a moment's hesitation, "before everything else I
should place the Hanamichi (flower-paths). This is absolutely
indispensable to the Japanese stage, and allows of endless
possibilities. With it we have far greater scope for fine work, and
dramatically it is of tremendous advantage. Then there is the revolving
stage, which is a great improvement on Western mechanism, for while one
scene is being acted, another can be prepared."
On this particular afternoon the dramatist and I were sitting in Mr.
Fukuchi's own room overlooking the river with a distant view of the sea.
Books, all Japanese, were heaped up in an alcove, while the only
furniture the room possessed was a very fine kakemono and a little
narrow table. While we were talking, one of Fukuchi's little children, a
boy of eight, entered, carrying with him his collection of butterflies,
which, he thought, might chance to interest me. He showed me a catalogue
which he was preparing for them. It was so admirably compiled that it
would have been good enough for a special work on the subject.
[Illustration: OUTSIDE KIOTO]
Fukuchi's ideal actor is Danjuro, and during the conversation he was
constantly referring to him. "Of all the actors I like Danjuro the
best," he said, "because he is an artist and understands colour, besides
having a keen appreciation for harmony in the general arrangements." He
told me that Danjuro is the one actor in Japan who can take the part of
a woman to perfection. Many actors on the stage can keep the figure of a
woman for five minutes at a time, but rarely longer, so painful are the
poses, owing to the throwing back of the shoulders and the turning in
of the knees. But Danjuro can go on and on indefinitely in this rôle,
and so remarkable is he that even a Japanese woman is unable to detect
one false move. On one occasion, when taking this part at a theatre in
Yokohama before an audience composed chiefly of women, he happened to
make a slip and by some slight error proved himself the man. In an
instant the whole audience felt it, and the effect produced on them was
simply astounding! For once they nearly laughed, an unheard-of thing
with a Japanese audience: to see a woman turn so suddenly into a man was
too much for their equanimity.
Danjuro's finest and most artistic bit of acting is in Japan's greatest
tragedy, _The Chushingura_, in the part of Goto, who, returning to his
lord intoxicated, falls asleep by the wayside. His master, finding him,
fires off a gun close to his ear. "Most actors," said Mr. Fukuchi,
"would fall asleep with their backs to the audience, and when waking
depend upon 'make-up' for an altered expression. Danjuro sleeps with his
face to the audience, and on the gun firing wakes up with an entirely
altered expression through the contraction of the facial muscles."
I was curious to know from Fukuchi what were the duties of the
stage-manager in Japan. For some time he looked thoughtful, as though
unable to grasp my meaning. "We have no managers in Japan," he said at
length: "the play has to do with the dramatic author: it is for him to
arrange everything. He must first think out every detail, and then
consult with the chief actor and proprietor. If these disagree, the play
is not produced." Mr. Fukuchi maintained that the dramatic author must
be absolute master of the situation, interfered with by none. It would
be impossible for an actor or manager to have any conception of the
picture as a whole; therefore the dramatist must be supreme. If an actor
or an actress were permitted a choice as to the colour or form of
costumes, the work would of necessity be ruined. There is no such thing
as the leading lady insisting upon wearing a puce dress, as she does in
England or anywhere on the Continent. The manager does not know what
"puce" means, nor, probably, does the lady; but he sees no reason why
she should not wear puce if it pleases her. Accordingly puce is worn,
irrespective of scene harmony, and the lady is content. In Japan such an
occurrence would be out of the question; but our Western stage is
already such a jumble that any little eccentricity on the part of the
leading lady in favour of puce or anything else she fancies would be
scarcely noticeable.
[Illustration: A BLOND DAY]
"They tell me," put in Mr. Fukuchi, "that there are dramatic authors in
England who are not artists--that they do not all understand colour
harmonies and line. Can this be true?" I had to tell him that such men
were not uncommon with us. Fukuchi looked serious, and was silent for a
long while, meditating as to how it would be possible for a dramatic
author to produce a play without a scientific knowledge of art and
drawing. "I fail to understand this," he said after some minutes'
thought; "I cannot understand. When I have finished writing my play, and
when I have talked with the chief actor, I make my drawings myself. I
must make the pictures, and I must give careful directions to the
costumiers and the carpenters. I cannot understand how your dramatic
author does this." And the little man was genuinely perturbed.
The pictorial side of a Japanese dramatist's work interested me keenly,
and I begged Fukuchi to tell me how he, as an author, prepared his
drawings for the costumier, stage-painter, and carpenter. "Well, if you
like I will show you," he said; "I am now writing a historical play, the
scenes of which will be like this," and to my great amazement Fukuchi at
once began to draw in a rapid masterly manner the scene of a gentleman's
house and garden. No detail, however trivial, was overlooked, and the
infinite pains and care with which he executed these delightful little
drawings both astonished and charmed me. I could see at once the utter
impossibility of any one attempting to interfere with this man, who had
a complete grasp of his subject not only from the literary standpoint,
but also from the pictorial.
To give any idea of the exquisite delicacy and precision with which
these sketches of Fukuchi's were carried out, I must describe one or two
of the scenes. First of all there was the garden; this was to have on
its right a bamboo fence, a pine-tree, and a grass plot. On the left was
placed a willow-tree, and stepping-stones leading from the house to the
gate. Then the gentleman's house was to be considered. Mr. Fukuchi
decided that this was to be thatched and have a projecting floor, while
in front he placed a bamboo fence, a well, and a cluster of
chrysanthemums. "Now at the back of the house I must have a range of
mountains with autumnal tints," said Fukuchi; and no sooner said than
done--in a few minutes there stood the range of mountains with their
autumnal tints, ranging from orange to brown, noted in the margin, with
directions as to the quality of cotton cloth to be used for their
construction. Every detail in this garden scene was exact, and no one
could have altered so much as a leaf without ruining the picture. Next
Fukuchi proceeded to make for the costumier a drawing of a girl. By the
dressing of her hair the girl was shown to be not over nineteen years of
age, the ornaments being one of red and the other silver. She was to
hold a fan, and Fukuchi even decided on the colour of the fan and the
way the girl should hold it. It was to have a gold ground with a silvery
moon, light and black grass growing in white water. The lady's kimono
was of dark purple at the bottom and light purple at the top; this was
arranged purely for decorative reasons in order to harmonise with the
obi, which was black. As a rule the colours in a dress graduate from the
top downwards; but the obi looked best against the light purple, and
custom was sacrificed to art. The figures on the kimono were to be all
white with silver strings, and a delicate white wave pattern.
[Illustration: A BLIND BEGGAR]
Mr. Fukuchi next proceeded to consider the handling of historical
colour. The scene was that of a lord and his wife, the lord just setting
out for the wars and the wife seeking to detain him, holding on to his
armour. The armour is red and the clothes are indigo. These colours
being fixed historically, it was for the artist to arrange backgrounds
that should harmonise with these. In the lady alone were his artistic
tastes allowed to expand. He would have her dressed in white, with large
chrysanthemums in red, yellow, and purple tones.
These exquisitely clothed figures were to be placed before a screen,
having sea-rocks and an eagle painted on it with black ink. Yet again
another screen was to be of light brown, with glittering birds
delicately traced upon it, in order that they should not interfere with
the breadth of the whole.
"Now, Mr. Fukuchi," I said, "I can quite see that you are an artist, and
that your handling of a play from the decorative standpoint is quite
perfect. But now tell me something of your literary methods."
Then Fukuchi began by telling me that in writing a novel he wrote it as
a poem, and when writing a play he thought of it as a picture. But there
are periods in writing a novel when it in a way gets the better of him,
and develops unconsciously into a drama. Then he told me of one or two
stories he had recently published, one of which began as a novel and
ended as a play. He said he could not understand the habits of some
authors of taking down scraps of conversation, and using them for their
finished works. He himself spends his whole life listening to
conversations and studying the poses of people; but to take notes of
what they were saying would be hopeless; the notes could never be used
for fine artistic work. In planning a play he sees it as a whole, as a
series of pictures, before beginning to pen a line.
[Illustration: THE GIANT LANTERN]
I was talking to Fukuchi about realism on the stage, and he told me of
the horror they have in Japan of bringing live animals into a play; such
a thing has been attempted on one or two occasions, but always with
disastrous results. One enterprising actor, he told me, spent much time
in training a horse to take part in a very fine production at one of the
principal theatres. The horse was trained to perfection, and on the
first night that it appeared, being a novelty, it was loudly applauded;
but the lights and the confusion so terrified the poor animal that it
sat down on the stage and refused to move. Yet again another actor,
determined to outdo this former performance in originality, trained a
live monkey to take the place of the decorative pasteboard monkey which
had always been used on the stage. This animal, unlike the horse, was
trained to know the stage as well as his master's room, and grew quite
accustomed to the lights and the people surrounding him. So thoroughly
at home was this monkey that on its first appearance it swept the stage
of all the actors, caused confusion and distress among the audience--in
short, it behaved abominably, and did everything but that which it had
been so carefully trained to do. After this the pasteboard monkey
reigned supreme.
Mr. Fukuchi, although he is a brilliant English scholar and has an
intense admiration for Shakspeare's works, thoroughly realises how
impossible it would be to attempt to put Hamlet on the Japanese stage:
it would suit neither the actors nor the public.
THE LIVING ART
CHAPTER II
THE LIVING ART
A Japanese authority has boasted that the only living art of to-day is
the art of Japan; and the remark is not so much exaggerated as it may
appear at first sight to the European. Art in Japan is living as art in
Greece was living. It forms part and parcel of the very life of the
people; every Jap is an artist at heart in the sense that he loves and
can understand the beautiful. If one of us could be as fortunate as the
man in the story, who came in his voyages upon an island where an
Hellenic race preserved all the traditions and all the genius of their
Attic ancestors, he would understand what living art really signifies.
What would be true of that imaginary Greek island is absolutely true of
Japan to-day. Art is in Europe cultivated in the houses of the few, and
those few scarcely know either the beauties or the value of the plant
they are cultivating. That is the privilege of a class rather than the
rightful inheritance of the many. The world is too much divided into the
artist on the one hand and the Philistine on the other. But it is not so
in Japan, as it was not so in ancient Greece. In Japan the feeling for
art is an essential condition of life. This is why I expect so much from
the interest in Japan which is now awakening in England.
The report of the Japanese Commission sent to Europe to investigate the
conditions of Western art, some years ago, startled Western minds
considerably. The Commissioners gave it as their opinion that Japanese
art was the only real living art. This surprised, perplexed, and
irritated many people, as home truths generally do. Without adopting in
integrity every word of the Commission's report, I must confess that I
found in it a great deal of truth.
The great characteristic of Japanese art is its intense and
extraordinary vitality, in the sense that it is no mere exotic
cultivation of the skilful, no mere graceful luxury of the rich, but a
part of the daily lives of the people themselves. It is all very well to
draw gloomy deductions about the decay of Japanese art from the
manufacture and the importation of curios destined for the European
market. That there is such an importation there can be no doubt, any
more than that this condition of things will continue while people fancy
that they are giving proof of their artistic taste by sticking up all
over their walls anything and everything, good, bad, and indifferent,
which professes to come from Japan or to be made on Japanese models.
[Illustration: SUN AND LANTERNS]
What an educated Jap would think of some of our so-called "Japanese
rooms" I shudder to imagine. But let me ask--and this is much more to
the purpose--what would an uneducated Jap think? And let me give my
own answer. He would be as much surprised by any bad taste or bad art as
his educated superior would be. This is the burden of my argument--that
art in Japan is universal and instructive, and therefore living; not an
artificial production of a special class, and therefore not living. Art
was certainly a living thing in the best days of Athens; art has been,
in some measure, a living thing elsewhere and in later days. For we must
remember that art does not merely consist in the production of a certain
number of works of art, or even of masterpieces. A country may produce a
great many works of art, and yet as a country be entirely lacking in
living artistic feeling. France is a land of works of art; but the works
do not appeal to the voyou--still less do they appeal to the ouvrier, to
the bourgeois, to the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. Now,
what I claim for Japan is that in its most real and most important sense
it is a living artistic country. The artistic sense is shared by the
peasant and the prince, as well as by the carpenter, the fan-maker, the
lacquer-worker, and the stateliest daimio whose line dates back to the
creation of things.
But do not run away with my contention. I do not mean to say that every
Jap is a born artist. There are Philistines in Japan, as elsewhere. What
I do maintain is that the artistic instinct is more widely diffused, is
more common to all classes of the community in Japan, than in any of our
European countries. This is no small thing to say of a country. It is
full of deep significance to all students of art. Although we are doing
our best, with our love for gimcrackeries, to cheapen and degrade the
artistic capacity of Japan, our evil influence has been but partially
felt, and so but partially successful. Having done all the harm we can
do unwittingly, let us pause, if possible, and reflect before we
wittingly do further mischief.
The problem to the lovers of art is simply this: shall we learn all we
can learn--and that is a great deal--from the living art instincts of
Japan, or shall we continue to blunt and deaden the productive power of
Japan by encouraging the barbarous demand for worthless baubles to make
ludicrous the home of the so-called aesthete? If those who are most
proud of the Japanese toys and trinkets they have amassed, which, with
semi-savage stupidity, they have nailed upon their walls and stuck upon
their shelves and tables, could but see what an artistic house in Japan
is like, they would learn some startling truths as to the real facts and
principles of Japanese decoration and the Japanese ideal of art. If they
could only know the contempt with which the truly artistic Jap looks
upon the demand for "curios," and upon the kind of "curios" which are
turned out wholesale to meet that demand, they would not feel so proud
of themselves, and of the rooms which they display to delighted friends
as "quite Japanese, you know." The artistic Jap shows nothing in a
room--absolutely nothing, except a lovely flower and a screen, and
perhaps a beautiful verse or some clever sentence indited in freehand
writing, placed beautifully in the room in just relation to its
surroundings.
There is a curious fact to be noticed in connection with such
inscriptions. In conversation a friend might happen to give forth some
brilliant and very epigrammatic utterance. The hearers are so delighted
that they get him to write down this _mot_ in large characters, and it
is mounted and placed in the room. Such a caligraphic maxim, written by
the hand of the speaker, they consider a fitting portion of the
permanent decoration of a room.
You would never know from the rooms of a Jap that he was a great
picture-collector. The wealthy collector keeps all his treasures stowed
away in what is called a "go-down"--his storehouse--and his pictures are
brought up one at a time if any visitor is present or expected.
Generally a single picture will be brought in and hung up. You enjoy
that beautiful picture by itself. It is very much like bringing a bottle
of wine from the cellar--no one would want the whole bin at a time.
The Japs have an artistic temperament altogether and the simplest
craftsman is an artist in his own way. I was especially struck with this
once when I was in want of some frames, and I employed a Jap to make
them for me. He could talk English perfectly well, and it was remarkable
to watch the development of the frames and the enthusiastic temperament
discovered by the carpenter as he proceeded. I myself designed a certain
frame, and I would by slight drawings encourage him and his fellows to
go on with the work. They all took the greatest possible interest in the
refinement of the object--they would place it down and then go off and
look at it, and talk to those friends who were looking on about the
beauties they saw in it and in its proportions; and the intelligence and
pleasure they showed were not only extraordinary but also delightful.
This frame-making was quite novel to them, as they do not frame any of
their objects; but they were interested in the design of the frame and
the placing of the picture within it. Although the matter was not in
itself of any remarkable importance, I hold that it fairly proves the
artistic temperament of a chance selection of people. Think of a common
carpenter making a simple thing and taking a just pride in doing it! The
result was that I got one of the most beautiful frames you can conceive,
and that I was encouraged in my own work by the sympathy of these
workmen.
[Illustration: THE SCARLET UMBRELLA]
Of course, in Japan there are painters who paint for the market--people
who have been destroyed by the British merchant and the American trader.
They spend their time in painting pictures of flowers and birds in vivid
colourings that appeal to our tastes, solely for exportation to England
and America. _Apropos_ of this I must mention a conversation I had with
a painter about screens, which struck me as being very curious. I wanted
to buy a gold screen, and he took me to a shop where I saw a vast number
of screens, nearly all with black grounds and golden birds and fish
on them. I told him I did not like them; and he answered, "Neither do
we. Here in Japan we would not have them in our houses; but they are
what the English and American markets demand. We ourselves never buy
them; we nearly always choose screens with light grounds, beautifully
painted"--in fact, splendid pieces of decoration. A screen painted by a
first-class artist is valued very highly, while the fact of one from the
hand of an old Japanese master being for disposal is known all over the
country at once, and everybody is prepared to bid for it as one would
bid for a Sir Joshua here. A really good screen fetches an enormous
price, for it takes the place there of pictures and frescoes with us,
and every man of taste requires one or two fine specimens in his house
beautiful. One I saw at the house of the Minister for Foreign Affairs
was painted with a blue wave--an arrangement, in fact, in blue and gold.
I never saw such a gorgeous screen, nor, I verily believe, anything more
beautiful as an arrangement of colour--the huge wave, one sweep of blue,
and the piece of gold at the top. It was, I was told, by an old master
of Japan, and worth an enormous sum. The Japanese perfectly appreciate
the value of things like that, and they very rarely let them leave the
country, so that it has become very difficult to get hold of anything
really fine.
An experience which gave me a close insight into Japanese feeling was a
meeting of some of the painters of Japan. It was arranged by a Japanese
gentleman who, though not an artist himself, is deeply interested in
art, and keenly alive to everything touching it. Knowing me personally,
he was anxious that I should come in contact with these men whose
practice he so much revered, and so he invited several of these artists
of different kinds--designers of metal work and designers for
manufactures--to his house to meet me. I talked to them with his
interpreting help, just a little about art and its principles and so
forth, in the hope that the others would be brought to speak freely, and
I expressed my readiness to give them what information I could of
European art and its practice. They asked me remarkable questions. Most
of them, it appeared, were discouraged because "the European required
such ugly things." If they made what the Europeans really enjoyed, their
productions were looked upon as unsaleable. It appeared to me that it
must be extremely difficult for the Japs to hold fast to their artistic
instincts, and in the end I expressed my conviction that it would pay
them better to adhere to their principles rather than to pander to the
foolish demands of the dull American or British merchant who had neither
idea nor concern as to the beauty of the work he buys.
[Illustration: LEADING TO THE TEMPLE]
Unfortunately, to a great extent these traders are lowering the standard
of painting in Japan. Not a few of these sixty men who came to meet me
would do work they did not care about, not being men of such
individuality and independence of character as Kiyosai. With them, as
with us, the prize of money-reward is a bait too tempting to be
resisted. Two days afterwards some of these friends were good enough
to write a long discourse in one of the Japanese papers on my address,
saying how much pleased they were to find an artist from England with my
ideas of Japanese art--one who condemned the notion so common among them
that it was necessary to pander to the tastes of a foreign market. They
were especially glad that I had condemned that, and many of the
painters, more or less on the strength of my conversation, decided to do
thenceforth what they felt to be true to their principles--to go to
nature and themselves, to choose their lovely harmony of colour, instead
of designing stereotyped screens with gold birds on black backgrounds.
Many were determined to give up that kind of art altogether, and one in
particular (whose studio I called at the day after) pointed out that he
had already quite altered his style. He was an artist by nature, and he
told me he felt that having to do this horrible work was going against
him, and he had made up his mind that in future he would insist upon
doing what he felt to be beautiful, and would be ruled by the merchant
no more. I visited the studios of a great many of the artists to whom I
had delivered my lecture, and saw their sketch-books and their method of
work. In nearly every case their method coincided with the principles
laid down by Kiyosai--each having, of course, his own method, but each
working in the same broad way of "impression picture."
Japan might be said to be as artistic as England is inartistic. In Japan
art is not a cause, but a result--the result of the naturalness of the
people--and is closely allied with all aspects of their daily life. In
the houses, the streets, the gardens, the places of public
resort--everywhere is to be found the all-pervading element of art and
beauty. A rainy day in Japan is not, as it is in London, a day of gloom
and horror, but a day of absolute fascination. What a joy is the
spectacle of all those lovely yellow paper umbrellas unfurling
themselves beneath a shower like flowers before the sun, so different
from the dark shiny respectability of our ghastly gamps at home! John
Bunyan has written and talked of the house beautiful; but the Japanese
have given to the nation not only the house beautiful, but also (what is
even more important to the community at large) the street beautiful, and
that is where Japan differs so widely from Europe. As I walk through the
London streets at night, how prosaic is the flicker of each gas-jet,
within its sombre panes of glass, in some "long unlovely street," and
how different from the softened rays that shine from out the dainty
ricksha lanterns illuminating the streets in Japan! There a poem meets
your eye with each step you take; and how pretty is every street corner,
with its little shop, its mellow light and dainty arrangements, with the
smiling face of some little child peeping out from the dim shadow
beyond! It is a terrible thing to live in a country where art is the
luxury of the few, and where the people know as little of what
constitutes the beauty of life as a Hindoo knows of skating. What would
a Japanese gentleman say, I wonder, if he passed into a room in the
depths of winter and saw a quantity of those pretty fans, which in his
country help to modify the heat of the golden summer days, viciously
nailed, without rhyme or reason, upon a bright red wall, or those
fairy-like umbrellas, upon which he has seen the rain-drops glisten so
brightly, stuck within the gloomy recess of some lead-black hideous
grate, or (with still less sense of the fitness of things or regard for
the uses for which it was made) glued to a white-washed ceiling?
[Illustration: BY THE LIGHT OF THE LANTERN]
We sometimes talk of the deteriorating influence of European ideas upon
Japanese art; but we have failed to perceive the ghastly
inappropriateness of applying the Japs' delicate flights of fancy to our
homes of discomfort. That usefulness is the basis of all righteousness
is the moral code by which a man's position is gauged in Japan, and by
which things are made. It does not matter how beautiful an article may
be, or how trivial--whether it is a penholder, a snuff-box, or a
pipe--if it is not useful it is considered inartistic, and will not be
accepted by the Japanese public. The form of a vase or a cup, or the
shape of a handle, must all be designed with a view to its usefulness;
and every little work of art that is made, every cabinet and curio
(apart from being decorative), is designed to convey some maxim-like
idea, a lesson that will be useful and helpful in one way or another to
the beholder.
On entering a Japanese tea-house you will see a kakemono hanging on the
wall that strikes you at the first glance as being a perfect picture,
with the bold but simple Chinese characters on the white silk and the
tiny slip of vermilion which is the signature of the artist. It is
placed well in the room, and is altogether a thing of beauty; but when,
on closer inspection, you read the decorative letters, you will find
that they give you some dainty piece of advice to help you through the
day, or some pretty idea on which your eye and mind can rest.
Then, again, the games that the children play in the streets with sand
or pebbles--they are teaching them arithmetic, construction, patience,
and innumerable valuable lessons.
Usefulness is the basis of the ancient caste system of Japan, which
system exists at the present day, and upon which the relative usefulness
of a man depends. Take the Samurai. They occupy the premier position as
Japanese aristocracy, because, although they wear silk, they give up
their lives for their country--and no man can be more useful than that.
The agriculturalist ranks next in dignity; for none can do without food,
and therefore his usefulness is indisputable. Then come the workmen, and
last of all the merchants, who are considered as "no class" in Japan and
are greatly looked down upon--producing nothing, they merely turn over
articles made by other hands for a profit.
[Illustration: "NEWS"]
The most beautiful article we possess (one that is entirely our own) is
the hansom cab. It is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs that the West
has produced in the shape of a conveyance, and simply because it has
been designed with a view to its usefulness. Would that we were always
ruled by this splendid quality! Unfortunately, we are not. We are ruled
by our own tastes, which, I feel bound to admit, are not artistic. Think
of the sombre, happy-go-lucky arrangements of our London theatres. How
is it that in the best-managed of them an actress will so far forget
herself as to lie dying in the middle of a snowy street in the dead of
night, pale-faced and wretched-looking, with ten thousand pounds' worth
of jewellery on her fingers? Such a scene would drive the artistic and
consistent Japanese manager into the nearest lunatic asylum. At the same
time he would be unutterably shocked at seeing a red moon (red, let us
trust, with the blush of shame at its creator's folly) rising hurriedly
behind some stage bank of roses, swiftly and unnaturally hurrying across
a purple sky, and shamefacedly setting in the East, in the West, in the
North, in the South, within the brief hour of an English stage, as if
glad to escape the rapturous applause of an inartistic public.
But perhaps nowhere is the difference between European and Japanese art
so sharply accentuated as it is in the teaching of it in the great
schools of the West and of the East. Let us take the art schools of
Paris, which is considered by a vast portion of the artistic world to be
the very paradise of art. You enter the crowded studio of some
well-known master, and you see before you a large white statue, the
first and predominant impression of which is its exceeding whiteness;
and to your mingled amusement and amazement you discover that the
unfortunate pupils are engaged in a futile endeavour to render an
impression of exceeding whiteness by the aid of thick black chalk or
charcoal. As to how this is to be done with any degree of verisimilitude
you are no less at fault than they are, poor dears, themselves; and
therefore you will not be surprised that, dazed and wearied as they must
be from the steady contemplation of this never-ending pose, their work
at the close of a day resembles the figure from which they have been
drawing as closely as the work of Michael Angelo, or any of the great
Japanese masters.
[Illustration: A SUNNY TEMPLE]
From the antique you pass to the life room. Here another shock awaits
you. In the middle of the room stands a young girl, strapped up in the
attitude of Atalanta of classic fable running her immortal race. These
pupils are taught first of all to sketch the figure in the pose of
running as a skeleton. When the hideous skeleton has been carefully and
laboriously committed to paper, it is with equal care imbued with nerves
and muscles and flesh. When all this is done, a light Grecian drapery is
flung on her, regardless of the folds and movement that would eventually
have resulted from the fluttering of the breeze, and, mind you, she is
strapped up all the time. Then, when all is completed, the poor dear
lady is expected to run her immortal race. Of course, by this time there
is no action in the figure at all. Atalanta appears glued to the spot,
and my only wonder is that she does not indignantly chase her
unfortunate creators from the studio. On looking at these pictures the
spectator would say that he never saw anything so absolutely
unsuggestive of the breathless vigour and energy of a healthy young girl
engaged in a rapid race as is indicated by the pitiful weariness of that
poor strapped-up creature in front of them. Would it not be far better
that these students should go out into the street, after the method of
the Japs, and watch some girl as she runs and jumps in the bright
sunshine, with a soft wind blowing her hair about her head and her gown
about her limbs, and then come back, and, with a memory of the beautiful
inspiriting scene still fresh in their minds, commit their impressions
"hot and hot" upon the canvas before them?
[Illustration: ON THE GREAT CANAL, OSAKA]
Still, England has not always been so hopelessly inartistic. None would
think of denying the perfect taste of the architects who designed such
buildings as the Winchester and Durham Cathedrals, and Arundel Castle;
but those are buildings wrought in dead days by men a long time dead,
and England's days of artistic appreciation are, I fear, as dead as they
are. Commerce and so-called civilisation have ruined us, I fear, for
ever. Japan is as artistic to-day as we were five hundred years ago, and
I rejoice to think that at present there appears to be little fear of so
ghastly a fate as has overtaken us. As a nation the Japanese remain
faithful to art in all its details, and as individuals they are still a
nation of artists. Where else but in Japan would an aged gentleman
dream of rising ere the day has well begun, merely that he might bring
into harmony with all its surroundings, and present in the best light
possible, a little flower placed in a pot--bending it this way and that
way, that its attitude might conform with the cabinet in one corner of
the room, or a screen in the other? Who but a Japanese chamber-boy would
be so impressed with the artistic value of contrast merely that he would
feel constrained thereby to place the can of hot water in a different
attitude every time he brought it into the room, and thoughtfully step
aside to regard its consonance with its immediate surroundings? Art
begins, as charity begins, at home; and where the home of the individual
is absolutely artistic, it cannot fail that the whole nation should be a
nation of artists. I give way to none in my loyalty to my country and my
love for that country--I must say that I do not think that there is a
country better in the whole world;--but perfection on this earth is not
only impossible, but to my idea also absolutely undesirable--a perfect
nation would be to the full as dreadful as a perfect man. We are saved
from perfection by an almost entire lack of the artistic faculty, and,
however great we are in other respects, I am sad to say we are
thoroughly inartistic. To whom but the Englishman would the golden
dragons that play so recklessly about on black screens with their
scarlet drooping tongues, that are sold in the Japanese curio shops,
possibly appeal? Who but English-speaking people would crave for
those cherry-blossoms embroidered on white silk grounds, which they so
gleefully carry away with them? Who but my inartistic countrymen would
insist on their cabinets being smothered with endless and miscellaneous
carvings? The Japanese are too artistic to admit these things into their
own homes; but why are their dealers so inartistic as (blinded by the
desire of filthy pelf) to put forth these embroideries for the English
and American market? Such things now and then make me tremble for the
future of art in Japan. It may be (though I trust not) the thin end of
the wedge; it may be "the little rift within the lute that by and by
will make the music mute, and, ever widening, slowly silence all." What
a tragedy it would be that the music of this most perfect art should
ever be silenced in that lovely land, the resting-place and home of the
highest and only living art!
PAINTERS AND THEIR METHODS
CHAPTER III
PAINTERS AND THEIR METHODS
The methods of painters all over the world are very much alike. In fact,
the methods of great masters (no matter of what nationality, and whether
of this period or of centuries past) are often precisely similar, while
there can be no doubt but that some of the finest masterpieces ever
painted very closely resemble one another. I was once taken to see two
photographs, one a portion of a figure by Michael Angelo, and the other
a portion of a Japanese buddha by one of Japan's greatest masters; and
to my surprise I found that it was almost impossible to detect which was
which. This particular statue of Michael Angelo's I had studied and knew
well; yet here was a portion of a Japanese god that looked exactly the
same--the same broad handling, the same everything. In both there was
the same curious exaggeration of the bones and muscles, wrong from the
anatomical standpoint, yet conveying an impression of terrific strength
that is so typical of the work of Michael Angelo--indeed, one masterly
hand might have executed both pictures. Yet the little Japanese artist,
the creator of this Buddha, was but a modern, and in all probability
had never so much as seen Michael Angelo's pictures, much less had he
been in the slightest degree influenced by him.
Japanese painters have a great admiration for Michael Angelo's work, and
for Italian painters in general. If you were to show a Japanese artist,
any ordinary little minor artist, some photographs of masterpieces by
men such as Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Botticelli, you would find that he
would at once spring on to the early Italian work, peer into it, hold it
up, devour it, muttering to himself the while--nothing could tear him
away. Rembrandt does not appeal to him much; Velasquez not much; but
Botticelli--yes. Still, I have often thought that could Hokusai and
Velasquez, Kiosi and Whistler, have met and talked, they would have had
much in common with one another; for there is in the works of each,
although in many senses so widely different, that simplicity,
truthfulness, and restraint which render them all so very much alike.
[Illustration: AFTER THE FESTIVAL]
The broad principles of art are much the same all the world over; but it
is between the lesser artists of Japan and the myriads of comparatively
unknown artists of Europe that there is so great a gulf fixed. Japanese
minor artists are artists indeed. Our minor artists are, I fear,
anything but artists. The veriest Japanese craftsman is an artist first
and a tradesman afterwards. Ours is a tradesman first and last and
altogether; and even as a tradesman he is, I fear, a failure, for the
honest tradesman has at least something worth the selling, whilst our
men--the jerry builder, the plumber, the furniture maker, and the
carpenter--give in return for solid money an article which it would
break the heart of the merest artisan in Japan to put forward as the
work of his hands. But perhaps nowhere is the difference between
European and Japanese art so sharply accentuated as it is in the
teaching of it in the great schools of the East and of the West. We
Westerners are taught to draw direct from the object or model before us
on the platform, whereas the Japanese are taught to study every detail
of their model, and to store their brains with impressions of every
curve and line, afterwards to go away and draw that object from memory.
This is a splendid training for the memory and the eye, as it teaches
one both to see and to remember--two great considerations in the art of
drawing. You will often see a little child sitting in a garden in Japan
gazing attentively for perhaps a whole hour at a bowl of goldfish,
watching the tiny bright creatures as they circle round and round in the
bowl. Remarking on some particular pose, the child will retain it in its
busy brain, and, running away, will put down this impression as nearly
as it can remember. Perhaps on this first occasion he is only able to
put in a few leading lines; very soon he is at a loss--he has forgotten
the curve of the tail or the placing of the eye. He toddles back and
studies the fish again and again, until perhaps after one week's
practice that child is able to draw the fish in two or three different
poses from memory without the slightest hesitation or uncertainty.
It is this certainty of touch and their power to execute these bold,
sweeping, decided lines that form the chief attraction of Japanese works
of art. Their wrists are supple; the picture in their minds is sure;
they have learnt it line for line; it is merely the matter of a few
minutes for an artist to sketch in his picture. There are no choppy
hesitating lines such as one detects in even the finest of our Western
pictures, lines in which you can plainly see how the artist has swerved
first to the right and then to the left, correcting and erasing,
uncertain in his touch. The lines will probably be correct in the end;
but when the picture is finished his work has not that bright crisp look
so characteristic of the Japanese pictures. Then, again, when a Japanese
artist draws a bird, he begins with the point of interest--which, let us
say, is the eye. The brilliant black eye of a crow fixed upon a piece of
meat attracts his attention; he remembers it, and the first few strokes
that he portrays upon his stretched silk is the eye of the bird. The
neck, the legs, the body--everything radiates and springs from that
bright eye just as it does in the animal itself.
[Illustration: THE LEMON BRIDGE]
Then, again, let us say a Japanese artist is painting a typical Japanese
river-scene, such a one as inspired many of Mr. Whistler's graceful
Thames etchings--a quaintly formed bridge under whose dim archway a
glimpse of shipping and masses of detail can be seen in the distance. To
a Japanese artist the chief charm and interest of such a scene would lie
in that little view beneath the bridge, and he would begin by drawing
in, line for line, every little mast and funnel just as he sees it,
or rather as he remembers it. The picture slowly expands as it reaches
the margin, ending in the bridge, which forms, as it were, a frame
through which to view the dainty richness of detail of the busy scene
beyond. If you were to arrest this picture at any moment during its
career you would find that it formed a perfect whole, every line
balancing the other; whereas, according to our methods, if we were to
draw the bridge first, timidly suggesting the distance and leaving the
detail and all the fine lines to be put in afterwards, as so many
artists do, the picture until it was completed would appear spotty and
uneven. And even when finished there would be no balance, for we neither
understand nor realise the importance of that quality without which no
work of art can be perfect.
The Japanese methods of drawing and painting are entirely opposed to our
Western methods, and in order to give a slight insight into the works of
the Japanese painters I must describe these methods as minutely and as
clearly as is possible. To begin with, the size of an ordinary picture
is two feet by four and a half long, and as a rule three times as much
space is left at the top as at the bottom of the picture. The brushes
consist of a series of round ones; they are flat-ended and vary greatly
in breadth, being named after the character of work they are fitted for.
Straw brushes are sometimes used for coarse work. The silk that they
paint upon is prepared in the following manner. First the edges of the
wooden frame are pasted and the silk is rolled loosely over, great care
being taken to keep the grain of the silk level. The surface of the silk
is prepared with alum and size, the proportion of which is about an
egg-spoonful of alum to a small tea-cupful of size. The size is boiled
and strained and diluted with water, and the alum is added over the
fire; it is again strained, and is then ready for use. Finally, it is
put on to the surface while hot with a large brush. It is usual to put
on two coats, and a contrivance in the shape of a cross piece of wood at
the back of the frame is used for straining the silk more tightly after
the first coat of size. The colours that the Japanese use are mixed and
prepared in the following manner. Whitening, which is the basis of most
colours, is pounded with a pestle and mortar into a very fine powder;
then a little size which has been boiled and strained is poured in, and
the whole is beaten up and worked into a ball. This ball is thrown over
and over again into the mortar until it is well beaten. A little water
is poured over the lump, which is then heated over a fire until it
breaks and spreads. In this state, after cooling a little, it is well
worked up, with perhaps the addition of water, until a white pulpy putty
is produced; the artist is very careful all the time to avoid grit.
Other colours are principally prepared from powders, which are beaten up
in little porcelain cups with small pestles, and are mixed with a little
size and water into saucers, stirred all the while with the finger and
heated over the fire until dry, or nearly so. When required for use they
must be worked up again with the finger and water, and it is a good plan
when first mixing the colours to paste paper over the saucers, leaving
a small hole for the insertion of the brush. Gamboge and a vegetable red
resembling crimson lake are both used without size. The latter is
prepared from a woollen material which is torn up into shreds and put
into a saucer; then it is mixed with boiling water and afterwards
strained through paper. It is drawn off in small quantities into several
saucers and carefully dried over the fire. There is a colour which is
much used called Taisha, which is like burnt sienna; then there is Tan,
a sort of orange, and Shi, a vermilion red. The red is prepared in two
different ways, first by being mixed cold in a cup with a pestle, a
little size, and water. In this preparation the colour separates into a
deep red and orange, the latter floating on the top. The orange is
afterwards saved and used instead of Tan--Tan, not being permanent,
turns black and disappears; it is used sometimes to shade ladies' faces,
but fades very much. In using this preparation of orange and red, the
brush must be first dipped in yellow and then the tip of it in the red,
so as to take up both portions of the mixture.
Another way of preparing Shi is to heat a saucer until the finger can
hardly bear the touch, and then pour in some size and put the powdered
pigment in it while still on the fire. When it has dried it is taken off
and mixed with the finger very hot, a little water being added
gradually, until it is of a thickish consistency. Shi thus mixed is of a
deep red without any orange precipitate, and is used for upper washes,
for, having a great deal of orange in it, it would be too black if used
for undertones. In mixing indigo blue from a cake, the saucer is put
over the fire to dry, and a little size is added. It is then rubbed with
the finger, and water is gradually added. Taisha, when in a cake, is
also prepared in this way. Taisha is used for the face and hair. The
hair is shaded off with Indian ink, and the muscles of the face are
washed in with Taisha having no white but a little black mixed with it;
the feet and hands are handled in the same way. Then the face is washed
over again with the same colour, only a little lighter. Broad masses of
shading are introduced, and the nose, mouth, and edge of the cheek are
generally left to be shaded in. It is considered better to use a number
of light tones than one dark tone, and the washes on the face are
repeated two or three times. The hair also is washed over with a large
brush and rather dark ink; the eyebrows are put in in a single wash;
also the corners of the eyes and mouth, which are flicked in and then
washed off again. The lips are put in with vermilion and shaded off with
another brush. A mixture of red, white, and Indian ink forming a dull
purple is used for the pupils of the eyes, and the same mixture with a
greater proportion of red, and consequently a little lighter, is used
for going over the outline, and the ends of some of the lines are washed
off with another brush. The same purple colour, but lighter still, is
used as a backing to the outline in order to soften the edges, and a few
touches of purple are painted in under the eyes and ears. The lips are
touched with carmine, and the teeth and eyeballs with a little white.
The under-lip and corners of the eyes are touched with lines or dots of
light Indian ink, and the top eyelids and tops of lower eyelids are
outlined with thin lines. The outline of the pupil is very fine; but the
dot of the eye is made very black; the nostrils are painted in in light
ink, shaded off afterwards and outlined in black. The hair round the
mouth is put in in very light ink with a finely pointed brush.
[Illustration: BEARING A BURDEN]
There are many ways of painting the hair. Sometimes a fine brush is used
with single parallel lines, and sometimes it is washed in with a broad
brush with light ink below and darker above. In old silk pictures great
depth used to be obtained by painting the hair on the back of the silk
as well as on the front. For painting leaves a mixture of indigo and
gamboge is generally used with a full brush, the tip of the brush being
dipped in indigo. By this method, the dark colour on the tip of the
brush being after a time exhausted, the lighter green appears, and thus
a natural variety of gradation is given to the colour of the leaves.
Trees and rocks, etc., are often scrubbed in with a rather dry brush
worked sideways and forming broken lines.
Another method of drawing a figure is to outline in charcoal, after
which the face with its markings is outlined with a kind of Indian ink.
Then with the same Indian ink, but with broader lines and a large brush,
the drapery is boldly swept in with lines that should break in parts and
form a drag. This drag must come naturally by pressing the brush firmly
on the silk or paper; any attempt to force it would end in failure. The
hair should then be worked in with a large spread brush, care being
taken to give the hairs a radial tendency and not let them cross
confusedly. Sometimes this hair is painted with a fine brush and with
single lines. For the background two large brushes are used, one fitted
with light ink and the other with plain water to shade off the black.
The face and the breast are treated in the same way. The outlines of the
drapery are sometimes washed in with a lighter tone to project over the
edge and soften them. The face is washed with a mixture of red and ink,
leaving only the eyes. The work is finished by using a small brush and
very black ink for the markings of the mouth, centre of the eyes, under
the eyelids, nostrils, and ear-rings.
Japanese artists study a great deal from life, and in order to draw a
figure full of spirit and action they will often work in this way.
Beginning with a very full brush, they sketch in the general swing of
the figure with a few well-chosen broad black lines--as, for instance,
when drawing the legs of a horse or a lobster they will put them in with
one broad wash. Then they strain thin Japanese paper over this spirited
sketch, and begin to elaborate on it with finer work, until in the end
they produce a picture that has high finish, but possessing all the
action and spirit of a first impression.
[Illustration: THE END OF THE DAY AND THE END OF THE FESTIVAL]
The Japanese system of studying Nature in detail, but not with a view to
creating a picture, is perhaps especially noticeable in their drawings
of women. It would be considered coarse and vulgar in the extreme to
paint a woman in the glaring light of a studio, copying every feature
and wrinkle, line for line, as you would copy a man. Kiyosai explains
that it is impossible to create a beautiful face by drawing direct from
life, especially in line. The only way in which it can be achieved is by
suggesting a natural beauty on paper, and by imitating a conventional
type away from nature. The Japanese have a conventional type of beauty
just as we have, and just as the Greeks had years ago--an ideal that has
been evolved from the aggregate of myriads of beautiful women,--and this
ideal of theirs must be a woman possessing small lips, with eyelids
scarcely showing, and eyebrows far above the eyes. The forehead must be
narrow at the top and widening towards the base, looking altogether very
like a pyramid with its top cut off; the nose should be aquiline, and
the whole woman must appear to be the personification of softness and
delicacy. The conventional type of a Japanese man has always the legs
and arms placed in impossible positions to denote strength, and the
muscles are greatly exaggerated.
In the old masters of Japan great importance is attached to flesh
markings, more especially in pictures of men. In a sketch of a fat man
trying to lift a heavy weight, the action would be suggested in a few
swift lines with no shading, but just two small horizontal lines at the
back of the neck. Those two little flesh markings portray the fat man to
perfection, admirably suggesting both the strain of the action and the
bulk of the man. But in talking of the art of Japan and the methods of
the Japanese painter, I feel that I cannot do better than describe a day
that I once spent with that greatest of all living artists, Kiyosai, at
the house of Captain Brinkley. This gentleman invited Kiyosai to come to
his house one morning, and I was asked to watch and follow the whole
process of his work, and as far as possible to learn from him his
theories about painting. It was a splendid chance for me as a painter,
especially as Captain Brinkley, who has resided in Japan for many years,
and is a Japanese scholar of high attainment, acted as interpreter
between Kiyosai and myself.
Kiyosai, I may say, is known all over Japan. From the highest noble to
the lowest ragged child in the streets, all know the artist and love his
work, for the pictures of a popular painter get abroad in Japan much as
they get abroad here--Kiyosai's pictures and sketches being reproduced
and published in the Japanese papers just as they would be published in
Western magazines. When any drawing by Kiyosai appears a rush is made
for the paper. These drawings of his are really superb work, and I could
not help feeling how great a privilege it was to come into contact with
such a man.
[Illustration: IN FRONT OF THE STALL]
I arrived at my host's quite early in the morning, for I was to have a
whole day with my Japanese fellow-worker. I was introduced at once to an
old man, grave and very dignified in bearing, and I found it difficult
at first to realise that this was the painter of whom I had heard so
much. He was sitting on the floor smoking, while his assistant was busy
stretching silk and preparing colours. As a rule, to see a Japanese
smoke is to get at once a clue to the nature of the people. But Kiyosai
was peculiar even in this. He was one of the few men who would take only
one draw from his pipe; in the most dignified manner possible he would
take that one whiff and then knock out the contents of his pipe,
repeating the process as long as he continued to smoke. He had the most
remarkable hands, too, ever seen, with long and slim thumbs--more
sensitive, artistic, capable hands, from the chiromancer's point of
view, could hardly be. He was enthusiastic, but prodigiously dignified,
and used his hands just a little, yet in the most impressive way. He
never rose from his sitting posture, and every time I said anything that
was at all complimentary he received it with charming ceremony, by
bowing to the very ground.
No sooner was I introduced than his face seemed to light up, his eyes
became intensely brilliant, and his conversation not less so. He was
enthusiastic in his desire to learn about English painters and English
art generally, and eager to tell me his own views of art, and all he
felt about it. To my pleased confusion, he seemed to regard me with an
interest equalling mine for him. He put many questions about English
art, and told me much that was interesting about his own. He spoke of
the effect made on him by some English pictures. "I have seen a number
of English and European pictures," he said; "but they all appear to me
very much alike. I hear that in England and all over Europe they say
the Japanese pictures look to them all alike. Why is this?" The
explanation was not immediately forthcoming, for at first sight it
seemed so extraordinary that to this man English pictures looked all
alike. But immediately the truth forced itself upon me, as it will force
itself upon the reader. European pictures are all wonderfully alike. It
struck me that when, not long before, I was on a "hanging committee,"
and had passing before me several thousand pictures, it was only here
and there that my attention was arrested by the individuality of some of
the work. For the most part they were the same pigments, the same high
lights, and the same deep shadows; and mentally seeing this procession
of pictures pass before me, I could not avoid seeing how grievously
alike European pictures were. I had in some sort, indeed, felt this
before, and was delighted on having the impression "fixed," so to speak,
by the Japanese master.
I saw a number of Japanese pictures, and I certainly found them far more
individual than our work is. We say these Japanese works are insipid,
out of perspective, and all pretty much the same. Here is a painter of
Japan who brings a similar charge against our much more complex
pictures--this, surely, is a new and a valuable lesson, full of
suggestion for the thoughtful painter!
[Illustration: THE STALL BY THE BRIDGE]
Kiyosai next began to discuss drawing, and, as he was speaking to an
Englishman, English drawing in particular. "I hear that when artists in
England are painting," he said, "if they are painting a bird, they stand
that bird up in their back garden, or in their studio, and begin to
paint it at once, then and there, never quite deciding what they are
going to paint, never thinking of the particular pose and action of the
bird that is to be represented on the canvas. Now, suppose that bird
suddenly moves one leg up--what does the English artist do then?" He
could not understand how an English painter could paint with the model
before him. I naturally told him that they copied what they saw; that
they got over the difficulty as best they could. "I do not quite
understand that," he said. "In my own practice I look at the bird; I
want to paint him as he is. He has got a pose. Good! Then he suddenly
puts down his head, and there is another pose. The bare fact of the bird
being there in an altered pose would compel me to alter my idea; and so
on, until at last I could paint nothing at all." I asked him what, then,
was his method. "I watch my bird," he replied, "and the particular pose
I wish to copy before I attempt to represent it. I observe that very
closely until he moves and the attitude is altered. Then I go away and
record as much of that particular pose as I can remember. Perhaps I may
be able to put down only three or four lines; but directly I have lost
the impression I stop. Then I go back again and study that bird until it
takes the same position as before. And then I again try and retain as
much as I can of it. In this way I began by spending a whole day in a
garden watching a bird and its particular attitude, and in the end I
have remembered the pose so well, by continually trying to represent
it, that I am able to repeat it entirely from my impression--but not
from the bird. It is a hindrance to have the model before me when I have
a mental note of the pose. What I do is a painting from memory, and it
is a true impression. I have filled hundreds of sketch-books," he
continued, "of different sorts of birds and fish and other things, and
have at last got a facility, and have trained my memory to such an
extent, that by observing the rapid action of a bird I can nearly always
retain and produce it. By a lifelong training I have made my memory so
keen that I think I may say I can reproduce anything I have once seen."
Such, then, is Kiyosai's method of work. It is purely natural, and one
that has obtained for generations, and that is the Japanese whole theory
of art. Captain Brinkley told me a story, the outcome of that
conversation. Kiyosai came one day to work at a screen which Captain
Brinkley was very anxious for him to complete; but he could not finish
it at the time, do what he would. He said nothing; but it came out that
he had a fresh impression in his mind, and he could not go on with the
old impression until he had worked off the new one--something he had
seen on his way up to the house.
The painters always live with fish, and birds, and animals of different
sorts. They have fish in bottles and in ponds in their gardens. I went
to many studios in Japan, and I found each one with its ponds and fish
in the little garden surrounding the studio, and birds as well. They
always study nature, and I believe that is the keynote of their art.
The technique of Kiyosai's work was most fascinating. I had come away
from England with all sorts of theories concerning the technical part of
an artist's work, and when I got to Japan I found there was absolutely
nothing that was not known to this man. His method of work, too,
interested me exceedingly. To begin with, the assistant brought his
stretcher of silk--a lovely piece of silk stretched across a wooden
frame--and placed it in front of him. Then, taking a long burnt twig, he
thought for a few minutes, looking all the while at his silk--thought
out his picture, indeed, before he put a single touch on his canvas. How
different is this from the man who so often, with us, puts on a lot of
hasty touches in the hope that they will suggest the picture! When this
artist saw his picture complete in his mind, he began with the little
burnt twig to trace a few sure lines. I never saw such facility in my
life. A few swift strokes indicated the outline on the silk of two black
crows; then he took up his brush and began at once with the Indian ink,
with full powerful colour; and in about seven minutes he had completed a
picture, superbly drawn and full of character--a complete impression of
two black crows, very nearly life-size, resting on the branch of a tree.
Kiyosai never amid any circumstances repeats himself: every picture he
paints is different, while for his work he asks but a small price. After
he had done his crows he painted a coloured picture, beginning with
Indian ink. First he tried all his colours, which were ready prepared
in different little blue pots and placed around him. These little
shallow pots or saucers had each its own liquid, which the assistant had
prepared to a certain extent beforehand. They contained flesh tint,
drapery colour, tones for hair, gold ornaments, and so forth. These
colours had evidently been used before, as they were in their saucers,
merely requiring dilution before immediate use. The saucers were
arranged chiefly on his right, with a great vessel of water, of which he
used a great deal. All his utensils were scrupulously clean. When he
began there was no fishing for tones as on the average palette. No
accident! All was sure--a scientific certainty from beginning to the
end. The picture was the portrait of a woman. It displayed enormous
facility and great knowledge, and his treatment of the drapery was
remarkable; but altogether it pleased me less. No attempt was there at
what is called broken colour. A black dress would be one beautiful tone
of black, and flesh one clean tone of flesh, shadows growing out of the
mass and forming a part of the whole. As this work was a very simple
impression, he finished the coloured picture in a few minutes. But on
the whole, in one sense, it was less satisfactory. It appeared as if he
had studied his subject less, for it was a little conventional. He was
less happy in it; but, of course, he did not admit this to himself.
[Illustration: ARCHERS]
He did four pictures, and each of them took from about seven to ten
minutes, these constituting the finest lesson in water-colour painting I
ever received in my life. Here is his idea of finish: once the
impression of the detail and the finish of the object is recorded you
can do nothing better; so far as the painter's impression of finish
goes, so far must the rendering go, and no farther. Artistically he had
become exhausted by doing these four pictures--in invention, I mean. You
see, the man was heart and soul in the work. He lives, poor fellow, on
almost nothing. He is a very independent man, refusing to work for
money, and declining to paint for the market.
Nearly every artist in Japan has his own favourite stick of Indian ink,
which he values as his very life. It is essential that this ink should
be of the very finest quality, for they drink so much of it. In order to
execute those fine lines ending in a broad sweep that is so
characteristic of Japanese pictures, an artist must first fill his brush
with Indian ink and then apply it to his lips until the tip becomes
pointed. The ink is of course swallowed; but if it is of a good quality,
to drink pints of it would not do a man the slightest harm. A practical
proof of this can be found in the fact that Kiyosai, who is an old man,
has been drinking Indian ink steadily with every picture he has painted
all through his lifetime. He possesses a small piece of Indian ink which
is hundreds of years old, and which all the money in the world could not
buy. It is far too precious for broad washes, and is only used here and
there for bright touches.
I noticed the tender way in which Kiyosai handled this one precious
piece of Indian ink, and that led to a very interesting conversation on
blacks, after which I realised that the variations and gradations to be
procured with black alone were enormous. Kiyosai told me that when he
was very young he was puzzled by the exceedingly rich quality of black
in one of his master's pictures. It was a deep, velvety, luminous black,
and young Kiyosai struggled for weeks and weeks to match it, but in
vain. He came to the conclusion that there must be some work going on at
the back of the picture, and at last one night he became so desperate
that, stealing into his master's room while he lay asleep, he soaked off
the picture which had been pasted on to a board, and looked at the back
of it. One glance was enough, and little Kiyosai, with a throb of
pleasure, hastily pasted the picture together again and stole away to
experiment all that night on silk and on paper, "painting black both on
the front and on the back."
I inquired of Kiyosai if he had ever painted in oils, and he assured me
that he had not; but a few days later Captain Brinkley showed me a
little picture painted in lacquer by Kiyosai which, in my opinion,
rivalled for brilliancy any oil picture that has ever been painted, or
has still to be painted. The surface was as brilliant as glass; yet the
picture had a depth which no ordinary oil pigment could hope to reach,
while its deep luminous shadows would put to shame the finest of Van
Eyck's pictures.
An English friend of mine resident in Japan once told me a story of
Kiyosai which struck me as being typical of that great master. A friend
of his had prepared four magnificent sliding panels covered with the
finest silk, and had given them to the painter with the request that he
would execute some of his masterpieces on them for him. For eight or
nine years Kiyosai had kept those panels, and they still remained bare;
but great masters are always erratic, and the would-be purchaser never
gave up hope. One day, however, he burst in upon my friend with the
terrible intelligence that Kiyosai was dead drunk and had ruined his
panels. "He's smashing away at them on the floor, and he is simply
crawling over them," he said in a towering rage. My friend agreed to go
round with him to Kiyosai's house to try if possible to stop the
outrage. When they arrived they found the master in a high state of
fever, and looking more like a wild animal than a human being, with his
tusk-like teeth and his poor pitted face, sweeping and hacking about all
over the silken panels. As they entered, Kiyosai left the room, leaving
behind him the panels scattered irregularly over the floor, but each one
smothered with work. "Look here," said my friend very generously: "it
was I that introduced Kiyosai to you, and it was I that suggested his
painting these doors; therefore it is only fair that I should relieve
you of them and find you a new set, which I will willingly do." But the
owner of the panels, shrewdly guessing that my friend had not made this
magnanimous offer without some good reason, changed his mind and said
that he could on no account receive so costly a gift. He kept them, and
wisely too, for these four panels are now universally considered as
some of Kiyosai's greatest masterpieces.
[Illustration: REFLECTIONS]
Strange to say, Kiyosai, when painting his finest work, is nearly always
drunk, and his weakness is often taken a mean advantage of by the people
around him. I remember once attending a party given by a Legation person
who had invited a dozen or so of Japan's finest artists--among them the
great Kiyosai, the master--to paint pictures on the floor for the
edification of the assembled guests--a rather vulgar proceeding. Kiyosai
resented this indignity with all the force of his passionate nature, but
out of kindness allowed himself to be over-persuaded by his host. They
made him drink and keep on drinking to build up his enthusiasm; but,
boiling over with rage and indignation, he kept on putting off his time
until the whole twelve artists had finished the sketches, although,
fearing that the effect of the drink would wear off, the guests begged
him to start at once. At last Kiyosai's time came. The silk lay prepared
on the floor, with the ink and brushes ready for him to begin. Mad with
rage and hating his unsympathetic audience, Kiyosai stood, or rather
knelt, before his silk, fiercely grasping the brush, holding it
downwards with all his fingers round it and thumb turned outwards. He
looked like a god as he knelt there, gripping his brush and staring at
the silk--he was seeing his picture. He executed a flight of crows, a
masterpiece--Kiyosai knew it was a masterpiece--and, proudly drawing
himself up to his full height, quivering in every limb, he threw down
his brush, skidded the silk along the floor towards the spectators,
and, saying "That is Kiyosai," left the house in disgust. The dignity of
the little man cowed his spectators. Every one unconsciously felt the
magnetism of the man, and realised that a master had been among them.
PLACING
CHAPTER IV
PLACING
In Japan there is no such thing as accident. A scene which in its beauty
and perfect placing appears to the visitor to be the result of Nature in
an unusually generous mood, has in reality been the object of infinite
care and thought and anxious deliberation to these little Japanese
artists, the landscape gardeners. That temple which seems to place
itself so remarkably well in relation to the big lines of Nature, its
background, has been carefully built and thought out from that
standpoint alone. The great trees by the side of the temple, with their
graceful jutting boughs that form the principal feature of the picture,
have not grown like that, for all their apparent naturalness; they have
been nursed and grafted and forced into shape with the utmost care
imaginable.
The sense of perfect placing, which is the sense of balance, is the true
secret of the Japanese art, by which they attain perfection. All
Orientals are more or less possessed of this intuitive sense of balance,
and the Japanese carry it into the most minute details of daily life.
If you enter a Japanese room you will always find that the bough of
blossom is placed in relation to the kakemono and other furniture to
form a picture. And the special note of Japanese house decoration is
this bough of blossom, with which I was immensely struck. Now, this is
an altogether artistic thing. At one party at which I was present I saw
a piece of blossom-bough put right out at a curious angle from a
beautiful blue jar. Turning to my neighbour, a young Japanese friend who
could talk English perfectly well, I said, "How beautiful that
is!--although, of course, its quaint curious form is merely accident."
"No--no accident at all," he replied. "Do you know, it has been a matter
of great care, this placing of the plant in the room in relation to
other objects?"--I was afterwards informed that in many a household in
Japan the children are trained in the method of placing a branch or a
piece of blossom, and they have books with diagrams illustrating the
proper way of disposing flowers in a pot.
[Illustration: THE RED CURTAIN]
The outsides as well as the insides of their houses are decorated in the
harmonious principle, even to the painting of signs in the street. They
are most particular about placing their richly coloured sign duly in
relation to its surroundings. In the same way--whether the subject may
be done in a string of lanterns or what not--whatever is done is done
harmoniously, and in no case is decoration the result of accident. The
sum of it all is that every shop in an ordinary street is a perfect
picture. At first you are amazed at the beauty of everything. "How in
the world is it," you ask yourself, "that by a series of apparent
accidents everything appears beautiful?" You cannot imagine until you
know that even the "common man" has acquired the scientific placing of
his things, and that the feeling permeates all classes. Perhaps,
however, one of the most curious experiences I had of the native
artistic instinct of Japan occurred in this way I had got a number of
fanholders and was busying myself one afternoon in arranging them upon
the walls. My little Japanese servant boy was in the room, and as I went
on with my work I caught an expression on his face from time to time
which showed that he was not over-pleased with my performance. After a
while, as this dissatisfied expression seemed to deepen, I asked him
what the matter was. Then he frankly confessed that he did not like the
way in which I was arranging my fanholders. "Why did you not tell me so
at once?" I asked. "You are an artist from England," he replied, "and it
was not for me to speak." However, I persuaded him to arrange the
fanholders himself after his own taste, and I must say that I received a
remarkable lesson. The task took him about two hours, placing,
arranging, adjusting; and when he had finished the result was simply
beautiful. That wall was a perfect picture; every fanholder seemed to be
exactly in its right place, and it looked as if the alteration of a
single one would affect and disintegrate the whole scheme. I accepted
the lesson with due humility, and remained more than ever convinced that
the Japanese are what they have justly claimed to be, an essentially
artistic people instinct with living art.
It is, in point of fact, almost impossible to exaggerate the importance
attached to the placing of an object by every Japanese, and it would be
no exaggeration to say that if a common coolie were given an addressed
envelope to stamp he would take great pains to place that little
coloured patch in relation to the name and address in order to form a
decorative pattern. Can you imagine a tradesman and his family, wife and
children, running across the Strand to watch the placing of a saucepan
in their window? Yet this is no unusual occurrence in Japan. You will
often see a family collected on the opposite side of the road watching
their father place a signboard in front of his shop. It might be a
grocer's shop, and all--even to the mite strapped to the back of its
sister--are eagerly watching the moving about of this board, and are
interested to see that it should place itself well in relation to the
broad masses around, such as the tea-box, etc.
[Illustration: FLOWER OF THE TEA]
Now, people who think so much of the details of balance must necessarily
approach art in a very different manner from that in which we approach
it. Would a tradesman in England hesitate before placing his stamps on a
bill? The tradesman in Japan does. Imagine an artist spending three days
in anxious thought as to where he should place his signature on his
picture! And yet this is what Kiyosai, the greatest of modern painters,
actually did before he affixed his red stamp to the hasty sketch of a
crow. I have known little Japanese painters to ponder for hours, and
sometimes weeks, over the placing of this little vermilion stamp so that
it shall form perfect balance, and in all probability the picture itself
has only taken a few minutes. Suppose, for instance, a painter has
contrived to produce a rapid sketch of a flying crow, or perhaps a fish.
That fleeting impression was so strong that he was able to produce it at
once without any hesitation; but however vivid and lifelike the picture
might be, if the balance were destroyed by the ugly placing of this one
little spot of vermilion, from the Japanese standpoint the picture would
be utterly worthless. And the proper placing of a thing is really most
important. Even the most ignorant and uneducated in matters of art are
influenced on seeing a perfect bit of placing. To live with some
beautiful thing, a flower or a bough well placed, to watch its delicious
curves or the tender buds of a purple iris just bursting, must give joy,
and it does, although one may be quite unconscious of its gentle power.
The Japanese understand these subtleties as do no other nation. If they
are entertaining a guest, their one aim and object is to make him
perfectly and deliriously happy; they strive to divine his inmost
thoughts and desires; it is their ambition to satisfy them to the best
of their ability.
[Illustration: A STREET IN KIOTO]
A friend of mine, an American, once gave me a description of a week he
had spent with a very ancient Japanese gentleman in a little country
village; it was a week of intense interest and happiness to him, one
which, when he grows to be as old as his host was then, will still
remain in his memory with a lingering sweetness as something good to be
remembered, something purer and quite apart from the regular routine of
his past life. He was a student, a naturalist; and the purity of this
Japanese household, the seclusion and dainty decoration of his study,
the freedom of it all, and the kindly attention and sympathy that was
proffered to him by every member of the family combined to make the
quiet recluse feel, for once in his life, almost boisterously happy.
Towards the end of his visit he tried to look back and discover what it
was that had brought about this unwonted feeling of joy in him, little
realising that all this time these dear people had been scheming and
planning for no other object than to give him pleasure. It was not until
the last day of his stay, however, that it all unfolded itself clearly
before his eyes, and that he learnt the reason why he had been so happy.
On this last morning he had chanced to rise early--at daybreak, in
fact--and as he passed the room that he had been using as a general
sitting-room, he saw through the partially-opened sliding doors a sight
which caught his breath with amazement, and made tears spring to his
eyes. There was his host, the dear ancient Japanese gentleman, kneeling
before a bough of pink blossom, which he was struggling to arrange in a
fine blue china pot. The naturalist stood and watched him for nearly an
hour, as he clipped a bough here, and bent a twig there, leaning back on
his heels now and then to view his handiwork through half-closed eyes.
He must see that the blossom placed itself well from the decorative
standpoint in relation to the kakemono that hung close by; he must also
see that the curves of the bough were correct; and the care taken by
this old gentleman in the bending of the bough was a lesson to my
friend. It became clear to him that every morning his aged host must
have risen at daybreak to perform this little act of kindness. Like a
flash he remembered that each day there had been some dainty new
arrangement of flowers placed in his room for him to enjoy. He had not
given it much thought, for it looked more or less like an accident,
flowers that had formed themselves naturally into that shape; yet, all
unconsciously, this little bit of perfect placing had influenced his
work and had gone far towards making the visit so joyous to him. He did
not understand placing; but it interested him and gave him an intense
amount of pleasure, in the same way that superbly fine work always does
even to the most uneducated.
The proper placing of objects is not only an exact science, but also it
forms almost a religion with the Japanese. When you just arrive in Japan
you are at once impressed with the perfect placing of everything about
you. You find yourself surrounded by a series of beautiful pictures;
every street that you see on your journey from the station to the hotel
is a picture; every shop front, the combination of the many streets, the
town in relation to the mountains round about it--everything you chance
to look at forms a picture. In fact, the whole of Japan is one perfect
bit of placing.
[Illustration: HEAVY-LADEN]
"Nature has favoured this place," says the globe-trotter. "I never found
when I lived in Surrey that great trees placed themselves against
hill-sides so as to form perfect pictures. I never saw the lines of a
bush pick up those of a fence with one broad sweep. Nature never behaved
like that in Dorking." Of course Nature didn't; nor does she in Japan.
There the whole country, every square inch of it, is thought out and
handled by great artists. There is no accident in the beautiful curves
of the trees that the globe-trotter so justly admires: these trees have
been trained and shaped and forced to form a certain decorative pattern,
and the result is--perfection. We in the West labour under the delusion
that if Nature were to be allowed to have her own sweet way, she would
always be beautiful. But the Japanese have gone much further than this:
they realise that Nature does not always do the right thing; they know
that occasionally trees will grow up to form ugly lines; and they know
exactly how to adapt and help her. She is to them like some beautiful
musical instrument, finer than any ever made by human hands, but still
an instrument, with harmonies to be coaxed out. And the Japanese play on
Nature, not only in a concentrated way as with a kakemono or a flower in
a room, but also in the biggest possible form, on landscapes; dragging
in mountains, colossal trees, rushing cataracts--nothing is too much or
too great an undertaking for these masters of decoration. Any ordinary
little baby boy that is born in Japan has almost a greater decorative
sense than the finest painter here in the West.
All this beauty and perfection that meets one on every side is the
result of centuries and centuries of habit, until it has become
intuitive to the people. I can safely say there is no point in Japan
where an artist cannot stand still and frame between his hands a picture
that will be perfect in placing and design. In a Japanese garden, every
stepping-stone, every tree, every little miniature out-house, is thought
out as a bit of placing to form perfect balance. And it is thought out
not as an isolated bit of Nature, but in relation to everything around
that you can see, whether it is a temple, a large tree, or the side of a
hill; and whatever position you happen to be in, in that garden you will
always see a perfectly balanced picture. When you have been pottering
about in the towns for some weeks, you eventually become accustomed to
the idea that everything is thought out by these brilliant students in
order to form a picture, and you begin to feel proud of the knowledge
you have gleaned and to make practical use of it. You escort your
friends, who are a trifle fresher than yourself, about the towns,
pointing out to them that there is no accident in all the beauties that
they so much admire--the shops, the signboards, the placing of the
flower by the side of the workman--all this has been carefully thought
out from the decorative standpoint, to be beautiful. But then, when one
travels from the beaten track, away out in the country, even the
resident who is by way of being artistic, and has had the fact that the
Japanese are an artistic people driven into his stupid head by sheer
force, even this poor dear is swept off his feet when he finds that
Nature is still going on doing the same thing all these miles away from
the town. He has probably come to view the cherry-blossom, and he
discovers to his amazement that these huge hill-sides of blossom place
themselves perfectly one against the other--colossal trees with jutty
boughs frame themselves against the sides of the mountains to form a
picture. One huge sweep of blossom is thought out in relation to another
sweep that is deeper in tone; near by is a curiously-shaped bare patch
of earth which is designed to give value to the brighter colour; and so
it continues indefinitely.
The whole country is thought out in huge blotches to form a picture
perfect in harmony and in design. I once had a very interesting
experience of the felling of a tree in Japan, and here again placing
formed a very prominent part of the proceedings. Of course this was
placing of a nature very different from the artistic placing that I have
just described; but as a scientific bit of work it was simply wonderful!
It was an enormous tree by the side of a temple; there were two little
men sawing away at its base, little mites of men, half hidden by the
huge gaping crowd, chiefly composed of children, that stood watching the
performance, waiting for the tree to fall. A wall stood close by with an
opening cut in it, just large enough to allow the trunk to place itself;
and away in the distance strewn about at different angles were a series
of huge stone boulders, and these, I soon found out, were to split up
the boughs for firewood when the tree fell, thus saving labour. Imagine
the science of it--the calculation and the accuracy of their judgment!
The men went on sawing, every now and then pausing in their work to look
up at the sky with their backs against the wall. At last there came a
moment when the excitement was terrific: the trunk was nearly sawed
through, and the tree seemed prepared to fall anywhere and everywhere,
more particularly in my direction. Presently it began to give slightly,
and it was one of the prettiest and most wonderful things I have ever
seen in my life, the way that tree began to bend--gently, gracefully,
ever so gently, the trunk fitting itself into the wall, and the branches
dashing on to those great boulders that were waiting for them, splitting
them up into fragments. Those little mites of Japanese handling that
giant of a tree was a sight that I shall never forget. Where we would
have had twenty men with ropes and paraphernalia, they had nothing but
their big heads and their power to place a thing mathematically in the
right position to help them. And it all looked so graceful and so easy
that it would not have surprised me in the least to have seen one of
those little men come sailing down on the branches. But what struck me
the most forcibly was the great confidence of the people. They all stood
round, almost touching the tree, but quite sure of the success of this
venture; the fact that it was possible for the wood-cutter to fail
never occurring to them for an instant.
[Illustration: PEACH-BLOSSOM]
Placing takes a prominent part in everything that the Japanese
undertake; it shows itself not only in the arrangement of the landscape
and in artistic matters where there is scope for their decorative
powers, but also in small, out-of-the-way, inartistic things, as, for
instance, photography. I have seen in the Tokio shop-windows photographs
taken by native correspondents during the Chinese war, and it was quite
extraordinary how their sense of placing showed itself even in this. You
never by any chance see a photograph by a Japanese looking in the least
like a European. If they photograph a group of men they will be sure to
place that group near a great bough that juts across the picture; they
cannot help it--it seems to be in the blood of a Japanese to be
decorative. Their taste with regard to enjoyment is widely different
from ours: a little bit of Nature which would give them intense pleasure
would probably be ignored by us altogether. We want parks and stags and
moorlands, broad expanses of country and huge avenues, while the
Japanese will be content with one exquisite little harmony. They will
gaze for whole hours in rapture at a little branch of peach-blossom,
only a cluster, just a few inches of rose-red peach-blossom, with a slim
grey twig, placing itself against a background of hills that stretch
away in the distance indefinitely.
At the same time they love expanse of view as well. It is one of their
greatest joys to look from the top of a mountain downwards, but only
at certain times of the day. A Japanese, holiday-making, will sometimes
spend one whole day waiting for an effect that will perhaps last only a
few moments, or he will toil for hours up a mountain-side to enjoy the
exquisite pleasure of a fleeting colour harmony.
ART IN PRACTICAL LIFE
CHAPTER V
ART IN PRACTICAL LIFE
Throughout this book I have talked of Japan purely from the artistic
standpoint. I have talked principally of the living art of the country
and of its exquisite productions, and I firmly believe that it is
because the Japs are a people of imagination that they will at no
distant date forge ahead of other nations (who are depending solely upon
their muscle) and become a dominating power.
At the same time, it must be clearly understood that the artistic is not
the only quality in which the Japs excel. Take them from any side, and
it will be found that they have achieved remarkable success. Yet the
average Westerner, on returning from a visit to Japan, has always the
same superficial observation to make on the Japanese people. He has
spent a few weeks in the Land of the Rising Sun; he has seen the dainty
tea-houses, the miniature bridges, the paper walls and umbrellas, their
works of art modelled in lead--everything suggesting the dainty and the
exquisite (and therefore, in his opinion, the flimsy); and he tells you
that the people over there are all dear little Noah's Ark folk living in
tissue-paper houses, very charming as dolls, but useless as men. "These
people," he says, "have no physique; they would be incapable of building
battleships, for example." For this critic one can entertain only the
faintest possible feeling of tender pity. Is he not aware that these
Noah's Ark folk are actually building battleships, that they have
already a fine army superbly equipped with the finest of swords and
guns, and that they have the power to handle these weapons far better
than we can handle ours? Every soldier in the Japanese army understands
the mechanism of his rifle, and can at any moment pull it to pieces and
put it together again, even substituting a missing portion if necessary.
Could the same be said of our beloved Tommy? The Japanese officers are
no less capable than the privates, and I would guarantee that if by some
mischance the sword of a Japanese officer, being badly tempered, should
become bent, that officer would be capable of retempering his blade--one
of the most difficult and delicate tasks imaginable.
[Illustration: THE TEA-HOUSE OF THE SLENDER TREE]
But how a certain class of equally ignorant and inconsistent Westerners
cried out when it was known to the world that Japan had actually begun
to use our rifles and to build battleships! They will lose individuality
and degenerate, they are adopting Western methods, and it will kill
their art, they complained. How foolish this is! The Japanese have
merely changed their tools--exchanged the bow and arrow for the
sword; they are just as artistic and just as intelligent as in the
bow-and-arrow days; and they have proved themselves to be equal to, if
not better than, any other soldiers in the world.
Japan is not being Westernised in the smallest degree: she is merely
picking our brains. And how quickly the Japs will adopt a Western idea,
and improve upon it! The making of matches, and the underselling us in
all our common printed cotton and woollen Manchester goods, have not
spoilt their faculty for executing that exquisite Eugene dyeing for
which the Japanese are famous all the world over; the making of bolts
and bars and battleships has not prevented the metal-workers from
producing exquisite work in bronze, so delicate as to resemble the
finest lace. The manufacture of our vulgar modern monstrosities has been
taken up by these people, and they can offer them to us at a cheaper
rate and of a better quality than we can produce ourselves, freight
included. Japan can produce European work better than the Europeans
themselves; but that work has not influenced their art one whit--they
hate it; whereas Japanese art has permeated and influenced the whole of
the West.
All these qualities seem to point one way--Japan must eventually become
a ruling power. For one thing, the struggle for life does not exist
there as in other countries. The food is simple, and men live easily.
Then, again, the Japanese are not over-anxious. They do not waste their
energies. Women do not fret because they are looking old; on the
contrary, it is their ambition to become old, for then they are more
respected.
[Illustration: BLOSSOM OF THE GLEN]
My first experience in Japan, I being a practical person and of a
practical turn of mind, was rather a surprise. I had just arrived at the
hotel in Tokio, and, observing from my window that there was a promise
of a sunset, I caught up my paint-box, anxious to secure the fleeting
effect, and rushed downstairs full-tilt, in my haste almost capsizing an
old lady with a monkey on her shoulder standing at the foot of the
stairs. Not moving from her position, she said, "Young man, I should
like to talk to you." "Delighted, I am sure," I answered hurriedly: my
haste to be off, I am afraid, was too apparent just then. Not at all
daunted, the lady called after me some directions for finding her in her
room that night after dinner, where she would tell me some things that
would interest me, and walked slowly up the stairs without once looking
round, her monkey on her shoulder. Curiously interested, despite myself,
in this strange old lady and her monkey, I did visit her that evening,
and was somewhat startled by her greeting of me. "I knew I was going to
meet you in Japan to-night. I know all about you. You are going to paint
a series of pictures. You are going to exhibit them, and you will make a
great success. Some day you will paint children--you are fond of
children. All this I knew in America before ever I came here. I saw it
all as in a dream." Paralysed, I could only utter the formal words,
"Oh, really!" "Ah, you're sceptical! But you are sympathetic too, and
after I have talked to you for two or three hours you will see that I am
right," quoth my strange new friend, while at the prospect of two or
three hours' conversation I experienced a distinctly sinking feeling.
But with the next few words she uttered, the sinking feeling vanished,
to be superseded by one of deep interest. For some years, she told me,
she had been constantly communing in the spirit with her husband and
Lord Byron--rival spirits. Her husband was jealous of the poet and of
her correspondence with him, and she showed me a series of letters
dictated by that great man in the dark--all sorts of beautiful letters
on all subjects, ranging from tennis to theology. I sat there I know not
how long listening to this wonderful woman; and also--it may seem
foolish--I felt strangely comforted and encouraged to hear her say so
convincingly that I was to make a success, for at that period I had
never painted a picture, and the whole thing was, as it were, an
experiment. It was many weeks before I could forget that old lady and
her monkey. All through my travels the memory of that monkey's
eyes--beady, blinking, never changing--followed me, and stimulated me.
With Tokio and Yokohama I was disappointed. I had the privilege of
attending the Mikado's garden party; but the pleasure of the really
beautiful grounds and the cherry-blossom was spoilt by the Western dress
of the guests and of high personages--a hideous substitute for the
Japs' own graceful garments. Yokohama I found especially unsympathetic.
The bulk of the Europeans I met there seemed to be spending half their
time in abusing Japan and everything Japanese. Strange that a colony of
such unrefined, uneducated people should presume to criticise these
artists! Tokio, with its formal dinners and conventionalities, was much
the same; and with epithets such as "Crank" and "Madman" hurled after
me, I fled to Kioto, there to lose myself in endless and undreamt-of
joys.
In Japan there are flowers blooming all the year round: the country is a
veritable paradise of flowers. When a certain flower is at its height,
whether it be the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, or the azalea, that is a
signal for a national holiday, and, dropping business and all such minor
considerations, the whole of Japan turns out and streams through the
parks and through the country to picnic in the sunshine, under the
flowers. I arrived in Japan in the spring, and the country was pink with
blossom. Infected with the delightful fever for blossom-dreaming, I
drifted aimlessly along with the crowds, drifting only too rapidly into
their own restful atmosphere, and accustoming myself to the delicious
theory that life is long with plenty of time for everything. And as I
sat in the sun among these light-hearted people, watching mountains of
pink blossom under a clear blue sky, it did seem ridiculous to think of
work and worry.
Those first few weeks in Japan come back to me as something to be
remembered. To my untravelled mind everything seemed so novel, so
quaint, so unexpected. Things were large when I expected them to be
small, and _vice versâ_; the houses were made of paper; the women were
anxious to make themselves look old. I was fascinated by the pyramids of
children gazing in at sweet-stuff shops with their brown, golden,
serious faces contrasting so oddly with their gaily-coloured dresses
painted to look like butterflies. Every child I saw I felt that I must
either pat or give it something. I was surprised to see fowls with tails
so long that they had to be wound up into brown-paper parcels; the dogs
that mewed like cats; miniature trees hundreds of years old. I was
surprised when I dined out to find the room decorated with beautiful
ladies in lieu of flowers, a delightful substitute. To be taken to the
basement and handed a net with which I was to catch my own carp was also
rather a surprise; but when I was expected to eat it as it lay quivering
on my plate, I was more than surprised--I was roused. Material for
pictures surrounded me at every step. I wanted to make pictures of every
pole and signboard that I came across; and the result of this glut of
subjects was that I never painted a stroke. Night in Japan fascinated me
almost more than anything--the festoons of lanterns crossing from one
street to another, yellow-toned with black and vermilion lettering; the
gaily-dressed little people passing by on their wooden clogs or in
rickshas with swinging paper lanterns drawn by bronze-faced coolies.
I shall never forget my first rainy day in Japan. I went out in the wet
and stood there, hatless but perfectly happy, watching the innocent
shops light up one by one, and the forest of yellow oil-paper umbrellas
with the light shining through looking like circles of gold, ever moving
and changing in the purple tones of the street.
One of the first things I did on arriving in Japan was to hire a
servant, and this little man soon became my adviser in artistic as well
as in mundane matters. He took a keen interest in my work, and spent the
greater part of his spare time in hunting up subjects for me--monograms,
suggestions for picture-frames, and what not--he, like every Jap, was an
artist. He never said that he liked anything that I ever painted (he was
far too truthful for that); but it was quite obvious that he did not,
for he could draw infinitely better himself. But he helped me a great
deal.
[Illustration: A FAMILY GROUP]
So did the policemen--and the policeman in Japan is a perfect treasure.
They are all gentlemen of family and are very small men, much below the
average in height; but they have nearly all learned the art of
scientific wrestling, and exercise an absolute and tyrannical power over
the people. Luckily for me, I never made the hopeless blunder of
attempting to tip them. Altogether I found the policeman the most
delightful person in the world. When I was painting a shop, if a
passer-by chanced to look in at a window, he would see at a glance
exactly what I wanted; and I would find that that figure would remain
there, looking in at the shop, as still as a statue, until I had
finished my painting; the policeman meanwhile strutting up and down the
street, delighted to be of help to an artist, looking everywhere but
at my work, and directing the entire traffic down another street.
Suddenly there is a fire--there is invariably a fire when one arrives in
a foreign country, I notice. Immediately the policemen begin to plant
little bamboo sticks round the burning building with twine fixed from
one stick to another. This is to act as a barrier to keep the people
off. After a time a crowd gathers, and in the swaying of the people
their chests sometimes touch the string and bow it; but the thought of
breaking through that twine never occurs to them. The bold little
firemen inside the enclosure trying to scare away the god of fire by
bright clothing, and literally sitting on the flames in their
light-coloured coats, form a scene never to be forgotten. They seem to
bear charmed lives as they dash among the flames, putting the fire out
with their hands, and in a very short time too. It reminds one of the
performance of the fire-eating gentlemen at the Aquarium.
The power of the policemen over the people in Japan is extraordinary.
Even the Westerners obey them. At the treaty ports they often have to
deal with English sailors, and, although they try their utmost to smooth
things over, they often have to run men in. It is entertaining to see a
great blundering sailor, just like a bull, plunging to right and left,
while the little policeman, always courteous and polite, constantly
gives way, stepping on one side until the time comes when the sailor,
puffed and worn out, gives a terrific lunge; the policeman gives him a
slight impetus, and the sailor sprawls in an ungainly attitude on the
ground. He is then led off triumphantly by a small piece of string
attached to his belt behind.
[Illustration: THE VENICE OF JAPAN]
It was not until I arrived in Osaka, the Venice of Japan, that I gave up
dreaming and seriously began to work. Here was scope indeed! Osaka is
the city of furnaces, factories, and commerce,--the centre of the modern
spirit of feverish activity in manufacturing and commercial enterprise.
Western ugliness has invaded certain quarters; yet the artistic feeling
predominates. The Ajikawa is still the Ajikawa of the olden time, and on
the eastern side of the city is the Kizugawa, into which--thanks to the
shallowness of the bar--no steamer ever intrudes, while the city itself
is intersected by a vast network of canals and waterways, all teeming
with junks and barges, and crossed by graceful wooden bridges which lend
themselves admirably to line. The Kizugawa fascinates the painter. Away
from the bustle of the factories and the shrieking of the whistles, the
great junks from northern Hakodate or the sunny Loochos lie sleepily
silent. They are the Leviathans of their kind. Intermingling with them
are innumerable barges and fishing-boats, stretching far up the river,
their masts and cordage seeming one vast spider's web. Not a single
vessel is painted--from the huge sea-going junk to the narrow-prowed
barge. Near the water-line the wood has taken a silvery tone; but above,
it looks in the sunlight like light gold. And the cargoes of rice in
straw bales, piled high over the bulwarks, are also golden. A
steam-launch has in tow half a dozen barges, which, with their unpainted
woodwork, rice bales, and straw-coloured connecting cable, appear
against the dark water as a knotted golden thread. In the endless
perspective of junks the golden tone predominates; but it is relieved by
the colouring of the buildings on the river banks. There is no monotony,
for no two houses are similar either in tint or in design; and there is
no stiffness of line. The builders are all artists, to whose instincts
repetition would do violence. The quaint roofs, although formed in
straight lines, seem to rise and fall in gentle undulations. There is
nothing abrupt or rugged; nothing jars. And the colours are as varied as
the roofs. In the upper reaches of the rivers the scenes never cease to
charm. Clusters of half a dozen boats forming a mass of decorative
woodwork, tea-houses with tiny gardens running down to the water's edge
and gaily-dressed geishas leaning over the trellised verandahs, light
bridges thrown in graceful outline against the purple horizon,--all
combine to complete a picture as broad as a study by Rembrandt, as
infinite in detail as a masterpiece by Hobbema.
THE GARDENS
CHAPTER VI
THE GARDENS
It is not easy to describe the fascination of a Japanese garden. Chiefly
it is due to studied neglect of geometrical design. The toy
summer-houses dotted here and there, the miniature lakes, and the tiny
bridges crossing miniature streams, give an air of indescribable
quaintness. Yet, in spite of the smallness of the dimensions, the first
impression is one of vastness. "Who discovers that nothingness is
law--such a one hath wisdom," says the old Buddhist text. That is the
wisdom the Japanese gardener seeks, for he also is an artist. There is
no one point on which the eye fastens, and the absence of any striking
feature creates a sense of immensity. It is a broad scheme, just as
broad as a picture by Velasquez would be, and of infinite detail. It is
only accidentally that one discovers the illusion--the triumph of art
over space. I saw a dog walk over one of the tiny bridges, and it seemed
of enormous height, so that I was staggered at its bulk in proportion to
the garden; yet it was but an animal of ordinary size.
[Illustration: AN IRIS GARDEN]
A Japanese gardener spends his whole life in studying his trade, and
just as earnestly and just as comprehensively as a doctor would study
medicine. I was once struck by seeing a little man sitting on a box
outside a silk-store on a bald plot of ground. For three consecutive
days I saw this little man sitting on the same little box, for ever
smiling and knocking out the ash from his miniature pipe. All day long
he sat there, never moving, never talking--he seemed to be doing nothing
but smoking and dreaming. On the third day I pointed this little man out
to the merchant who owned the store, and asked what the little man was
doing and why he sat there. "He's thinking," said the merchant. "Yes;
but why must he think on that bald plot of ground? What is he going to
do?" I asked, perplexed. The merchant gazed at me in astonishment,
mingled with pity. "Don't you know," he said, "he is one of our greatest
landscape gardeners, and for three days he has been thinking out a
garden for me?--If you care to come here in a few days," he added, "I
will show you the drawings for that garden all completed." I came in a
few days, and I was shown the most exquisite set of drawings it has ever
been my good fortune to behold. What a garden it would be! There were
full-grown trees, stepping-stones, miniature bridges, ponds of
goldfish--all presenting an appearance of vastness, yet in reality
occupying an area the size of a small room. And not only was the garden
itself planned out and designed, but it was also arranged to form a
pattern in relation to the trees and the houses and the surrounding
hills. This little old man, without stirring from his box or making a
single note, had in those three days created this garden in his mind's
eye, and on returning home had sketched out the final arrangement. The
merchant told me that his garden would be completed in a few weeks, with
full-grown trees flourishing in it, and everything planted--all but one
stone, which in all probability would be there in a few weeks, while, on
the other hand, it might not be placed there for years. On inquiring as
to the reason of this strange delay I was told that that one particular
stone, though insignificant and unnoticeable in our eyes, occupies a
very prominent position, and that upon the proper placing and quality of
it the beauty and perfection of a Japanese garden almost entirely
depend. Sometimes hundreds and even thousands of dollars are paid for a
large stone that happens to be rightly proportioned and of the correct
texture of ruggedness to occupy a certain position in a Japanese garden.
To see the cherry-blossoms of Yoshino, the plum-trees in full bloom at
Sugata, the wistaria at Uyeno, or the iris at Horikiri, the people will
travel scores of miles. Then, there is the spacious embankment of the
Sumidagawa, at the part known as Mukojima, celebrated for its avenue of
cherry-trees. Before the Restoration it was the favourite promenade for
the daimio and their retainers, and very picturesque it must have been
to see the stately nobles in their gorgeous robes, saluting one another
with all the grave ceremonial in which the courtiers delighted. The
costumes have vanished; but the ancient residences, with their private
waterway approaches to the river, remain; and the avenue is still the
fashionable promenade.
But it is the iris gardens at Horikiri seen by night that have left an
impression which will never fade from my mind. We visited the gardens
frequently; but it is one particular visit that I remember above all the
others. Leaving the Hotel Metropole late in the afternoon, the ricksha
men took us at a rattling pace through the city. After an hour's run we
found ourselves far away from the river in the midst of uninviting
rice-fields, with a glimpse of the gardens in the distance--a blue and
white oasis in a waste of green. If one visits the gardens in the
afternoon the changes that the flowers undergo are marvellous. In the
full warm rays of the sun, the great petals, turning back towards their
stems, are rich and glowing in every shade. Then, as evening comes on
and the sunlight fades, the deeper purple blooms lose their richness and
grow shadowy, while the white ones take on an icy purity that seems
unearthly in its transparency, and they shine as with an internal light.
Still a little later, and with the last rays of daylight, all the darker
flowers have disappeared, and where a short time ago stood a proud bed
of royal colour one can see only the ghastly heads of the pure white
petals looming like phantom flowers in the purple night.
[Illustration: A SUNNY GARDEN]
The effect of the picture was heightened by the atmospheric colouring.
As the silver evening gradually changed to purple night--a purple
only seen in Japan--the festoons of lanterns which illuminated the
summer-houses became of one colour with the landscape, and then, as the
night darkened to a deeper purple, the lights changed to bright orange.
It would be impossible to put such colours on canvas: the only way to
represent them would be by precious stones. We dined in one of the
summer-houses off dainty plates served us by little musmés while seated
on the white mats. The blooms of the iris appeared softly luminous,
emitting a ghostly light. It is this spiritual beauty which makes the
flowers such a favourite in temple gardens, and inspires the Japanese to
poetry. On the edge of a tiny lake, approached by a winding walk,
through an avenue of bamboo trellis-work, was a small shed with a quaint
roof. In the shed the model of a junk was placed. Near it were ink and
small strips of paper. The junk was designed to receive poems on the
beauty of the iris and of the garden.
Nothing disturbs in a Japanese landscape. It is the harmonic combination
of untouched naturalness and high artistic cultivation. The tea-houses owe
much of their charm to the absence of paint. The benches, lintels, the
posts, are uncoloured, except by age. The white mats and the paper screens
act as a foil to the bright flashes of the musmés--waiting-girls--who move
noiselessly through the rooms like gigantic butterflies flitting to and
fro. The iris blooms are a rich mass of colour of blue and white, and the
gardener has exhausted his art in pruning all the unnecessary growths
without leaving a trace of his handiwork. The ride back was delightful.
Tokio at night is seen at its best; the river is then more fascinating.
Huge junks, with a solitary light at the masthead, glide by--fantastic
shadows in the purple haze. The tea-houses, with their festoons of
lanterns and orange interiors, in which one caught glimpses of singing
girls in their brilliant dresses, gleamed like golden patches in the cool
purple. The bridges sparkled with lights; the shops were bright with
colour; and all through the city, to enjoy the coolness of the night air,
groups of citizens were seated in the streets chattering as gaily and as
light-heartedly as only the Japs can.
[Illustration: IRIS GARDEN]
FLOWER ARRANGEMENT
CHAPTER VII
FLOWER ARRANGEMENT
One of the chief characteristics of the Japanese, which especially
distinguishes them from Europeans, is their intense fondness for
flowers--not the fondness which many English people affect, but an
instinctive love of the beautiful, and a poetical appreciation of
symbolism. The Japanese nature is artistic in essence, and in no more
delightful manner is the art of the people expressed than in the
cultivation of flowers. Flowers to them are a source of infinite and
unending joy, of which the chief pleasure lies in their proper placing
and arrangement. Every common Japanese workman, every fan-worker or
metal-worker, has some little flower carefully placed beside him at his
work; he loves and prunes and cares for it.
If you dine out with a friend you will be seated, not on the right-hand
side of the past-middle-age lady of the house, but near some beautiful
flower. The "honoured interior" would never have the presumption to seat
you next herself. You are her guest, and must be made happy by being
placed in the near neighbourhood of the principal and most beautiful
object in the room, which is invariably the arrangement of flowers. And
a vase of flowers in a Japanese house is at once a picture and a poem,
being always in perfect harmony with the surroundings. The art of
arranging flowers is an exact science, in the study of which seven years
of constant hard work finds a man but fairly proficient. In fact, to
create a really fine arrangement is just as difficult as to paint an
equally fine picture. Every leaf and every flower has to be drawn and
practically modelled into form, while even so simple a thing as the
bending of a twig requires much care and knowledge. To become a master
in the art of flower-arrangement a man must study for at least fourteen
years, devoting the remainder of his life to perfecting and improving
it.
[Illustration: A WISTARIA GARDEN]
There are scores of different arrangements that one must learn, and
volumes upon volumes of designs, showing all the most delicate and
subtle forms of placing which a master, in order to create perfect
balance, must have at his fingers' ends. These ancient designs are so
perfect that it is almost impossible to change them or to insert any
original work into them. Here and there, indeed, some great master will
make a slight variation in the arrangement of a particular flower, and
in a very short time that variation is trumpeted throughout the country
and known in all art sections. To a Westerner this seems incredible. He
affirms that if he jumbles a bunch of flowers together in a vase he can
create a different effect every time. Very probably, and he can also
strew roses and cut flowers all over his dining-table if he likes;
but he will still be creating nothing more than a jumble. If he were to
think out the arrangement of his table from an artistic point of view as
a bit of decoration, he would find it impossible to produce such a
wealth of inartistic variety. "But," argues the uninitiated Westerner,
"these roses strewn carelessly over our tables, and bunches of flowers
stuck loosely into vases, are far more natural than the single stiff
bough of blossom of Japanese decoration. Flowers grow in Nature
carelessly and wildly, and therefore they must be arranged to look like
that." Now, it is always difficult to answer these people, for the
dining-table of the West begins by being utterly hopeless in decoration
and in colour. One cannot possibly compare this meaningless attire, this
independent mass of colour forming no pattern, and probably placed upon
the table by a servant without care or thought, and with an utter
disregard to form and order,--one cannot compare such decoration with
the beautiful, scientifically-thought-out flower arrangements of Japan.
All that one can say is that one is art and the other is not. Nature
grabbed at in this crude Western fashion and stuck into a vase is no
longer Nature.
Consummate naturalness is brought about only by consummate art, and is
not the result of accident. If a bough of blossom growing in the midst
of other trees is taken from Nature and placed in a vase, however
beautiful it might originally have been, it must necessarily appear
awkward and out of place. One of the chief characteristics of Japanese
flower arrangement is its resemblance to the flowers in a state of
nature. A bough or a tree in a Japanese room looks exactly like a real
bit of Nature lifted bodily out of the sunshine and its own particular
surroundings, and placed there. Nature appears to be almost commonplace
as compared with the work of a great Japanese master in the art of
flower arrangement, and almost less natural. A master, after having
received a clear impression of the way a certain bough appears in the
midst of its background of Nature, is capable of taking that single
bough and of twisting it into broad beautiful lines, one picking up with
the other in such a way as to convey the same impression to you as it
did when growing in its own sunny garden.
[Illustration: FLOWER-PLACING]
"But why are there so few flowers in this Japanese method of flower
decoration?" complains the Westerner. "Why only one branch of blossom in
a pot?--why only one?" Because you can see that one and enjoy it,
provided that you have the capacity to see at all, which the majority of
people have not. One beautiful bough or one beautiful picture should be
ample food for enjoyment to last an artist for one whole day. If there
were twenty beautiful boughs, or twenty beautiful pictures, you would
look from one to the other and would necessarily become confused. You
would leave that room feeling thoroughly unhappy, and with the same sort
of headache that one gets after spending an afternoon in a
picture-gallery. To enjoy one of these pictures or flowers, and to
concentrate one's thoughts upon it alone, you would have to frame it
between your hands, cutting it off and isolating it from the rest.
This the Japanese do for you. They know that you cannot appreciate more
than one beautiful object at a time, and they see that that one object
is perfectly placed in relation to its surroundings, so as to give rest
and enjoyment to the eye. Almost every one in Japan, either young or
old, is capable of appreciating a fine arrangement of flowers, and
nearly every Japanese woman can practise the art.
So many minute descriptions have already been written of the methods of
the masters of flower decoration that there is little else to say on
that point. However, since decoration by flowers has so much to do with
the art of the country, and is so closely connected with the character
of the people, I feel that I must give a slight description of some of
the marvellous creations in purple irises, lilies, and pines that the
greatest master in Tokio once arranged for me at my hotel. He arrived
early one morning, and in great good-humour, evidently feeling that, I
being an artist, his work would be appreciated and understood. He
carried with him his flowers, tenderly wrapped in a damp cloth under one
arm, and his vases under another. One of his most promising pupils, a
girl of nineteen, accompanied him, acting almost as a servant and
evidently worshipping him as her master. He began at once to show us a
decoration of lilies and reeds. With the utmost rapidity he took out a
bunch of slim reeds, pulled them to different lengths, the large ones
at the back, the small ones in front, and caressed the whole into a
wooden prong looking like a clothes-peg, and arranged it in a kind of
vase made out of a circular section of bamboo. An immense amount of care
was taken with the handling of these reeds, the master drawing back now
and then in a stooping position with his hands on his knees and his eyes
bolting out to view his handiwork critically. Next he took some lilies
with their leaves, and arranged them in a metal stand composed of a
number of divisions looking like cartridge-cases cut off. Every leaf was
twisted and bent and cut to improve its form. The half-open lilies were
made to look as though they were growing, and were a great favourite
with this master because of the scope for beautiful curves and lines
that they allowed. Time after time he would take out a leaf or a flower,
putting another in its place, thereby showing that he had absolute
command over his subject, and a fixed picture in his mind that he was
determined to produce at any cost. The ultimate result of the decoration
was perfect naturalness. I never saw lilies growing on the hillside look
more natural than they did here; yet each had been twisted and bent into
a set design laid down by the artist. Both reeds and lilies were placed
in a wooden tray partially lacquered, the unlacquered portion
representing old worm-eaten wood; pebbles were placed in the bottom of
the tray, and the whole was flooded with water. Then he began his
decoration of irises. He took a bundle of iris leaves, cut and trimmed
them, washing and drying each leaf separately, and sticking them
together in groups of twos and threes. With his finger and thumb he
gently pressed each one down the centre, rendering it as pliable as
wire. The leaves were cut to a point at the base and placed in a metal
stand with consecutive circles. Then an iris bud, with the purple just
bursting, was placed in position and caressed into bloom. The whole was
syringed with water and carefully placed in a corner of the room.
[Illustration: WISTARIA]
I have described these few flower arrangements in detail in order to
show the exactitude of the work and the immense amount of care taken by
professors in flower arrangement. On this particular occasion I had
invited some friends to enjoy the professor's masterpieces with me, and
he had just completed a most exquisite production, by far the best and
finest he had achieved that day. It was an arrangement of pine with one
great jutting bough, perfectly balanced--in fact, a veritable work of
art. The professor was a true artist; he loved his work, and it was all
the world to him.
For once he was content, and had just leant back to view his work
through half-closed eyes when in a flash an Oxford straw hat was clapped
down right on top of it. It was the husband of one of my friends just
returned from a walk, full of spirits and boisterously happy. It was a
cruel thing to do; but he did not realise the horror of his act. He saw
a bough sticking right out of a pot, and it seemed to him a suitable
place to hang his hat on: so he hung it there--that was all. The little
assistant gave one frightened look at her master, and began to pack up
the utensils at once; the professor drew himself up in a very dignified
way, bowed profoundly, and left the hotel. I never saw him again, and I
knew that I never should--for he went away crushed.
THE GEISHA
CHAPTER VIII
THE GEISHA
With all their practical gifts--which, as one of themselves has
remarked, will enable them to beat the world with the tips of their
fingers--and all the power of assimilating and adapting to their own
purposes the best that other nations have to offer them,--the Japanese
are essentially and beyond all a nation of artists. It is not only in
the work-shop and the studio, but also in the simplest act and detail of
daily life, that this sense of the decorative oozes unconsciously forth,
and most of all, and most unconsciously, in the Japanese woman--the
geisha.
The _raison d'être_ of the geisha is to be decorative. She delights in
her own delightsomeness; she wants frankly to be as charming as nature
and art will allow; she wants to be beautiful; and she honestly and
assuredly wants me and you and the stranger artists to think her
beautiful. She wants to please you, and she openly sets about pleasing,
taking you into her confidence (so to speak) as to her methods. She does
it with the simple joy and sincerity of a child dressing up. There is
no mock shyness, no fan put up, no screen drawn, no pathetic struggle to
deceive you into belief in the reality of an all-too-artificial
peach-bloom; there is nothing of the British scheme--no powder-puff
hidden in a pocket-handkerchief, no little ivory box with a
looking-glass in the lid, no rouge-tablet concealed in a muff to be
supplied surreptitiously at some propitious moment. The Japanese woman
has the courage to look upon her face purely as so much surface for
decoration, a canvas upon which to paint a picture; and she decorates it
as one might decorate a bit of bare wall. The white is simple vegetable
white; the red is pure vermilion toning with her kimono. The white makes
no effort to blend with the natural tone of her neck: it announces
itself in a clear-cut, knife-edge pattern above the folds of the kimono.
[Illustration: BUTTERFLIES]
I remember a little story that I once heard (it was told me by the
designer of the waterworks in Tokio)--only a trifling incident; but it
struck me as being thoroughly typical of the naïve, almost childish
simplicity of the Japanese woman. It was on the day that the waterworks
were completed, and the high officials and their wives were being
escorted over the works in trucks, in order that they might see and
admire this great engineering feat, of which my friend, the architect,
was very justly proud. There were two trucks--one for the men and one
for their wives. The truck containing the men was wheeled up under a
shaft where the light came down from above, and enabled the officials
to look up and admire this great work. The men looked up and were duly
impressed, and altogether the experiment passed off successfully. Then
the idea was that they should move aside so as to allow the women also
to enjoy the spectacle. No sooner was the truck-load of women drawn up
beneath the shaft than their faces lit up with pleased surprise, and
every woman whipped out a looking-glass and a rouge-pot and began to
decorate her face. Not one of them looked up, or even attempted to take
the slightest notice of the waterworks: all they knew was that it
afforded them just sufficient light by which to decorate themselves, and
they promptly made use of it.
The geisha is the educated woman of Japan. She is the entertainer, the
hostess; she is highly educated, and has a great appreciation of art;
she is also proficient in the art of conversation. The geisha begins her
career at a very early age. When only two or three years old she is
taught to sing and dance and talk, and above all to be able to listen
sympathetically, which is the greatest art of all. The career of this
tiny mite is carved out thus early because her mother foresees that she
has the qualities that will develop, and the little butterfly child, so
gay and so brilliant, will become a still more gorgeous butterfly woman.
Nothing can be too brilliant for the geisha; she is the life and soul of
Japan, the merry sparkling side of Japanese life; she must be always
gay, always laughing and always young, even to the end of her life. But
for the girl who is to become the ordinary domesticated wife it is
different. Starting life as a bright, light-hearted little child, she
becomes sadder and sadder in colour and in spirits with every passing
year. Directly she becomes a wife her one ambition is to become old--in
fact, it is almost a craze with her. She shows it in every possible
way--in the way she ties her obi, the fashion in which she dresses her
hair; everything that suggests the advance of the sere and yellow leaf
she will eagerly adopt. When her husband gives a party he calls in the
geisha; she herself, poor dear, sits upstairs on a mat and is not
allowed to be seen. She is called the "honoured interior," and is far
too precious and refined to figure in public life. But, mind you, this
little married lady, the "honoured interior," does not ignore her
personal appearance altogether: she too will never miss an opportunity
to whip out the rouge-pot and mirror that always form part of every
Japanese woman's attire in order to decorate her face. And although to
our eyes she appears a nonentity as compared with the geisha, her
position is in reality a very happy one and greatly to be envied. What
if the geisha entertain her husband's guests? Hers is the greater
privilege of attending upon him when he returns, tired out from the
festivities; she is as a rare jewel set in the background of her home,
and the "honoured interior" is perfectly content.
[Illustration: DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN]
But the idiotic idea so general in the West, that the geisha is a silly
giggling little girl with a fan, must really be corrected, although I
can quite understand how this opinion has been formed. The geisha in
reality is a little genius, perfectly brilliant as a talker, and
mistress of the art of dancing. But she knows that the Westerner does
not appreciate or understand her fine classical dancing and singing, and
she is so refined and so charming that she will not allow you to feel
that you are ignorant and more or less vulgar, but will instantly begin
to amuse you in some way that she thinks you will enjoy and understand.
She will perhaps unfold paper and draw rapid character-sketches of birds
and fish, or dance a sort of spirited dance that she feels will
entertain you. It is very seldom that they will show you their fine
classical dances; but if by good fortune you can over-persuade them, as
I have done, the sight is one that you will never forget--the slow,
dignified movements, the placing of the foot and the hand, the exquisite
curves and poses of the body, forming a different picture every
time,--all is a joy and a perfect intellectual treat to the artist and
to the lover of beautiful things. There is no rushing about, no
accordion skirt and high kick, nothing that in any way resembles the
Western dance.
Sometimes, if she finds that you appreciate the fine work, the geisha
will give you imitations of the dancing on our stage at home, and
although it is very funny, the coarseness of it strikes you forcibly.
One never dines out or is entertained in Japan without the geisha
forming a prominent part of the entertainment; in fact, she herself
decorates the room where you are dining, just as a flower or a picture
would decorate our dining-rooms at home, only better. And there is
nothing more typical of the decorative sense innate in the Japanese than
the little garden of geisha girls, which almost invariably forms the
background of every tea-house dinner. The dinner itself, with its pretty
doll-tables, its curious assortment of dainty viands set in red lacquer
bowls, its quaint formalities, and the magnificent ceremonial costumes
of its hosts, is an artistic scheme, elaborately thought out and
prepared. But when, at the close, the troupe of geishas and maïkos
appears, forming (as it were) a pattern of gorgeous tropical flowers,
the scene becomes a bit of decoration as daring, original, and
whimsically beautiful as any to be seen in the land of natural "placing"
and artistic design and effect. The colours of kimonos, obis, fans, and
head-ornaments blend, contrast, and produce a carefully-arranged
harmony, the whole converging to a centre of attraction, a grotesque,
fascinating, exotic figure, the geisha of geishas--that
vermilion-and-gold girl who especially seizes me. She is a bewildering
symphony in vermilion, orange, and gold. Her kimono is vermilion
embroidered in great dragons; her obi is cloth of gold; her long hanging
sleeves are lined with orange. Just one little slim slip of apple-green
appears above the golden fold of the obi and accentuates the harmony; it
is the crape cord of the knapsack which bulges the loops at the back and
gives the Japanese curve of grace. The little apple-green cord keeps the
obi in its place, and is the discord which makes the melody.
[Illustration: BY THE LIGHT OF THE LANTERNS]
My vermilion girl's hair is brilliant black with blue lights, and
shining where it is stiffened and gummed in loops and bands till they
seem to reflect the gold lacquer and coral-tipped pins that bristle
round her head. Yes, she is like some wonderful fantastical tropical
blossom, that vermilion geisha-girl, or like some hitherto unknown and
gorgeous dragon-fly. And she is charming; so sweetly, simply, candidly
alluring. Every movement and gesture, each rippling laugh, each
fan-flutter, each wave of her rice-powdered arms from out of their
wing-like sleeves, is a joyous and naïve appeal for admiration and
sympathy. How impossible to withhold either! The geisha-girl is an
artist: I am an artist: we understand each other.
My geisha-girl brings out her dainty lacquer-box, and under the gaze of
all sits down to decorate herself with a frank joy in the pleasure she
knows she is going to give. And she knows too what she is about. She
knows the value of a tone in a lip. Something suggests to her that you,
an artist, may have found the vermilion lip not quite in harmony with
the plan, and she changes it to bronze. Three times this evening does my
geisha-girl change her lip; she frankly takes it off with a little bit
of rice-paper, which she rolls up and tucks into the folds of her
kimono, to be thrown away later, and the bronze lip is substituted. By
and by it seems to occur to her that the bronze lip has become
monotonous, and she will change it again to vermilion. No doubt before
the evening is over there will be a series of little bits of rice-paper
folded away ready to be got rid of when the bill is paid, the supper
eaten, and the festival at an end.
It is through the geisha-girls that there is still a living art in Japan
at the present day in the designs of the silk dresses that they wear.
They are so modern, so up-to-date, and yet so characteristic of Japan.
The women are very extravagant in their dress, and some of the leading
geisha-girls will often go to the length of having stencils, with
elaborate designs and an immense amount of hand-work, specially cut for
them, the stencils and designs being destroyed when sufficient material
for one dress has been supplied. For such a unique and costly gown the
geisha will of course have to pay a fabulous sum, and a sum that would
astound the average English woman of fashion. But then when a geisha
orders a costume she thinks it out carefully; she does not go, as we do,
to a dressmaker, but to an artist. It may be that she has a fancy for
apple-blossom at sunset, and this idea she talks out with the artist who
is to draw the designs.
[Illustration: A STREET SCENE, KIOTO]
A Japanese woman chooses her costumes, not according to fashion but to
some sentiment or other--apple-blossom because it is spring-time,
peach-blossom for a later season,--and many beautiful ideas are thus
expressed in the gowns of the women of Japan. But although the geisha
has plenty of latitude in which to display her artistic feeling, there
are some little details of etiquette and fashion that she must adhere
to, which show themselves in a few details of the Japanese women's
attire, as, for example, in the thongs of her little wooden shoes and
the decoration of her jet-black hair. Not only is the kimono of the
geisha, its colour and design, thought out by the artist, but all the
accessories of her toilette, such as the obi, the fan, and the ornaments
for her hair. It is the artist's ambition that she should be a picture,
perfect in every detail, and the geisha is always a picture, beautiful
beyond description.
How different she is from the geisha of fiction, of operettas, and of
story-books, which is the only geisha that the stay-at-home Englishman
can know! That she is beautiful to look at all the world agrees; but
quite apart from her beauty, or the social position that she happens to
occupy in Japan, take her as a woman, a real woman, stripped of all
outward appearances and of her own particular nationality--take her as a
woman, and she will be found as dainty in mind as in appearance, highly
educated, and with a great sense of honour, while her moral code would
compare favourably with others of her sex all the world over.
CHILDREN
CHAPTER IX
CHILDREN
A cluster of little Japanese children at play somehow suggests to me a
grand picture-gallery, a picture-gallery of a nation. Every picture is a
child upon which has been expended the subtle decorative sense of its
family or neighbours, as expressed in the tint of its dress and sash and
in the decoration of its little head. It is in the children that the
national artistic and poetic nature of the Japanese people most
assuredly finds expression. Each little one expresses in its tiny dress
some conception, some idea or thought, dear to the mother, some
particular aspect of the national ideals. And just as in the West the
character of a man can be gauged by the set and crease of his trousers,
so in Japan are the sentiments and ideals of a mother expressed in the
design and colouring of her baby's little kimono. Thus, when watching a
group of children, maybe on a fête day, one instinctively compares them
with a gallery of pictures, each of which is a masterpiece, painted by
an artist whose individuality is clearly expressed therein. Each little
picture in this gallery of children is perfect in itself; yet on closer
study it will be found that the children are more than mere pictures.
They tell us of the truths of Japan.
One child, in the clearness and freshness of its dress, seems to embody
an expression of that unselfish cheerfulness so characteristic of the
Japanese, among whose children you can go for days without seeing one
cry. Another, in the graceful dignity and rich yet severe colouring of
its costume, tells of that faithful spirit of loyalty and pride that has
always marked the lives of the Japanese. One tiny baby, in the dainty
sombreness of colour and quiet arrangement of the folds of its little
kimono, suggests the thoughtful consideration and sweet seriousness of
the women of Japan; and another child, dressed in a wonderful
combination of red and bronze relieved by glimpses of white, expresses
in its rich glowing colour, and the purity of the white within, the fire
of Japanese patriotism.
[Illustration: BABY AND BABY]
But come with me for a walk on any day, in sun or in rain, whether on a
gala day or on an ordinary day, and we shall meet little units in the
decorative whole, every one of them a colour picture bringing to the
mind some characteristic of the people. We shall find one little one
who, to the eye of the artist, flashes like a gem, her white kimono,
decorated, or rather made vivid, as by the hand of a master, with only
three or four great black crosses, each formed of the crisp dexterous
drags across the surface of the cloth. Again the black is repeated in
the carefully-arranged hair, and the white in the little wooden shoes;
but all is toned and touched by just a little old rose in the ribbon
that ties her head-dress and the fastening of the thongs at her feet.
Such an art in a people is living; it has its root in national spirit
and national character, and must continue to foster and strengthen the
national ideals.
The clothing of her children is a matter of great and serious
consideration to the Japanese mother. When a baby is born she gathers
together all her friends, and they discuss a scheme of decoration for
the set of miniature dresses that the little one is to wear. More care
is taken with these baby dresses than with those of any grown person,
and if the parents are rich the sums that are spent on silk crepe are
sometimes such as would shock any English mother. So much has to be
taken into consideration with regard to the design of a child's dress:
it might be cherry-blossom or a landscape, according to the month and
the circumstances amid which the infant was born. The colouring of the
costume is generally suggestive of the ideas and sentiments of the
mother. She does not say, "I will take this bough of apple-blossom, and
it shall be the dress of my child," or "I will take Fuji at sunset, and
the colouring of my baby's dress shall be of old rose and white snow."
She does not grab at nature in this crude way; but the artistic and
poetical feelings innate in her unconsciously find expression in the
little frock. When the mother and her neighbours have finally decided
upon a scheme of decoration, the designs are placed in the hands of some
great artist, who carries them out in water-colour drawings on silk,
which the friends gather together again to examine and generally enjoy.
Then the designs are handed over to some expert stencil-cutter, go
through the regular elaborate course, and are finally retouched, by the
artist himself, directly on to the silk. If the parents are rich enough
the stencils are destroyed, and the dress consequently becomes unique.
Such a dress will doubtless be an exquisite work of art, and very
costly. Indeed, a dress for a Japanese baby can cost quite as much as a
picture by a leading Academician, and is of far greater artistic value.
But no price can be too great, no colouring too gorgeous, for the
dresses of these little butterflies, the children of Japan. The poorest
mother will scrape together sufficient money, and the father sacrifice
one half of his daily portion of rice, in order that a child may attend
a festival in the bright hues befitting its age. The younger the child,
the more brilliant is its dress. You will see a mite, a little baby girl
that cannot walk or talk, clothed in silk crepe of the most brilliant
colour possible--rainbow colour, almost prismatic in its brilliancy. As
the child grows older the colours fade, and become duller, until by the
time she is a full-grown woman they have sobered down almost to Quaker
hues--except here and there, where some tiny edging of colour shows
itself.
[Illustration: A JAP IN PLUM-COLOUR]
The science of deportment occupies quite half the time of the Japanese
children's lives, and so early are they trained that even the baby of
three, strapped to the back of its sister aged five, will in that
awkward position bow to you and behave with perfect propriety and
grace. This Japanese baby has already gone through a course of severe
training in the science of deportment. It has been taught how to walk,
how to kneel down, and how to get up again without disarranging a single
fold of its kimono. After this it is necessary that it should learn the
correct way to wait upon people--how to carry a tray, and how to present
it gracefully; while the dainty handing of a cup to a guest is of the
greatest importance imaginable. A gentleman can always tell the
character of a girl and the class to which she belongs by the way she
offers him a cup of Sake. And then the children are taught that they
must always control their feelings--if they are sad, never to cry; if
they are happy, to laugh quietly, never in a boisterous manner, for that
would be considered vulgar in the extreme.
Modesty and reserve are insisted upon in the youth of Japan. A girl is
taught that she must talk very little, but listen sympathetically to the
conversation of her superiors. If she has a brother, she must look up to
him as her master, even although he be younger than herself. She must
give way to him in every detail. The baby boy places his tiny foot upon
his sister's neck, and she is thenceforth his slave. If he is sad, her
one care must be to make him happy. Her ambition is to imitate as nearly
as possible the behaviour of her mother towards her own lord and master.
Many attempts have been made by enterprising Westerners to "broaden" the
minds of the Japanese girls, and to make them more independent, by
establishing schools for them, where they can be educated on purely
Western principles; but these attempts have always failed. The women
turned out from such establishments are always unhappy, and continue to
suffer for the rest of their lives, because they are disliked and
resented by all their people, and no man will marry any of them. The
beautiful side of life seems to have been taken from them; imagination
is crushed and spoilt; they are unfitted for the life that every
Japanese woman must lead. Naturally they are hated by the men, for the
womanly qualities that are most valuable in a Japanese girl are
destroyed by this Western "broadening" of their minds: they wear
high-heeled shoes, put nosegays on the table, and are altogether
demoralised. Sad to say, Western influence is keenly felt within the
schools which belong to all classes and conditions of Japanese children,
and one trembles lest gradually the simplicity and quaint formality of
their bringing-up should become hardened and roughened into the system
which has done so much to spoil the child-life of the West. Their own
artistic training is perfect; and although Japan is the land of
ceremony, and the children are brought up with a certain strictness of
propriety unknown in the less ceremonious West, their utter naturalness
and absolute freedom from seeking after effects present in them a
simplicity of character which helps to make them the most delightful of
their kind. A little boy flying a kite is like no other boy you have
ever seen in England. There is a curious formality and staidness
about him and his companions which never degenerates into shyness.
[Illustration: SUGAR-WATER STALL]
Once I drifted into a country village in search of subjects for
pictures, and I found to my astonishment that every living soul there
was flying a kite, from old men down to babies. It was evidently a fête
day, dedicated to kites; all business seemed abandoned, and every one
either stood or ran about, gazing up in the air at the respective toys.
There were kites of every variety--red kites, yellow kites, kites in the
shape of fish, teams of fighting kites, and sometimes whole battalions
of them at war with kites of a different colour, attempting to chafe
each other's strings. It rather surprised me at first to see staid old
men keenly interested in so childish an amusement; but in a very short
time I too found myself running about with the rest, grasping a string
and watching with the greatest joy imaginable the career of a floating
thing gorgeously painted, softly rising higher and higher in the air,
until it mingled among the canopy of other kites above my head, becoming
entangled for a moment, then leaving them and soaring up above the
common herd, and side by side with a monstrous butterfly kite; then came
the chase, the fight, and the downfall of one or the other. They were
all children there, every one of them, from the old men downwards; all
care and worry was for the time forgotten in the simple joy of flying
kites; and I too, in sympathy with the gaiety about me, felt bubbling
over with pure joy. To see these lovely flower-like child faces
mingling with the yellow wrinkled visages of very old men, all equally
happy in a game in which age played no part, was an experience never to
be forgotten. None was too old or too young, and you would see mites
strapped to the backs of their mothers, holding a bit of soiled knotted
string in their baby fingers, and gazing with their black slit eyes at
some tiny bit of a crumpled kite floating only a few inches away.
[Illustration: ADVANCE JAPAN]
Another game in which both the youth and the age of Japan play equal
parts is the game of painting sand-pictures on the roadside. These
sand-pictures are often executed by very clever artists; but I have seen
little children drawing exquisite pictures in coloured sands. Japanese
children seem to have an instinctive knowledge of drawing and a facility
in the handling of a paint-brush that is simply extraordinary. They will
begin quite as babies to practise the art of painting and drawing, and
more especially the art of painting sand-pictures. You will see groups
of little children sitting in the playground of some ancient temple,
each child with three bags of coloured sand and one of white, competing
with one another as to who shall draw the quaintest and most rapid
picture. The white sand they will first proceed to spread upon the
ground in the form of a square, cleaning the edges until it resembles a
sheet of white paper. Then, with a handful of black sand held in the
chubby fingers, they will draw with the utmost rapidity the outline of
some grotesque figure of a man or an animal, formed out of their own
baby imaginations. Then come the coloured sands, filling in the spaces
with red, yellow, or blue, according to the taste and fancy of the
particular child artist. But the most extraordinary and most fascinating
thing of all is to watch the performance of a master in sand-pictures.
So dexterous and masterly is he that he will dip his hand first into a
bag of blue sand, and then into one of yellow, allowing the separate
streams to trickle out unmixed; and then with a slight tremble of the
hand these streams will be quickly converted into one thin stream of
bright green, relapsing again into the streams of blue and yellow at a
moment's notice. A Japanese mother will take infinite pains to cultivate
the artistic propensities of her child, and almost the first lesson she
teaches it is to appreciate the beauties of nature. She will never miss
the opportunity of teaching the infant to enjoy the cherry-blossom on a
sunny day in Uyeno Park. Hundreds of such little parties are to be seen
under the trees enjoying the blossom, while the mother, seated in the
middle of the group, points out the many beauties of the scene. She will
tell them dainty fairy stories--to the boys, brave deeds of valour, to
strengthen their courage; to the girls, tales of unselfish and
honourable wives and mothers. Every story has a moral attached to it,
and is intended to educate and improve the children in one direction or
another. There is one fairy story which is a universal favourite with
both mothers and children, and that is the story of Momotaro. When
seeing a mother talking earnestly to her children, I have always
discovered that it was the same old story, old yet ever fresh. It is a
curiously simple tale about an old woman who goes every day to the river
to wash clothes, and an old man who goes to the mountain to fetch wood.
The old woman is always unhappy because she has no children, and one
day, when she is washing clothes in the river, a large peach comes
floating down towards her. On carrying it home, she hears the cry of a
child, which appears to come from the inside of the peach. She rapidly
cuts it in two, and finds to her amazement a fine baby sitting in the
middle of it, which, since it was born in a peach, she afterwards called
Momotaro. The story then goes on to tell how the baby grows up to be a
fine healthy lad, who, on reaching the age of seventeen, plans an
expedition to subjugate an island of the devil. A minute description is
given of the food he takes with him--of the corn and rice wrapped in a
bamboo leaf--and how on his journey he meets with a wasp, a crab, a
chestnut, and a millstone, who all promise to help him if he will give
them half of his food. The lad complies, and a beautiful description is
given of their journey to the island of the devil, on which journey a
very skilful plan is thought out by which to kill him. On arriving at
the island, they find that the chief of the devils is not in his own
room. They soon take advantage of his absence. The chestnut hops into
the ash; the millstone mounts on to the roof; the crab hides in the
washing-pan; the wasp settles in a corner; and the lad waits outside.
The poor devil comes back, and has a terrible time between them all. He
goes to the fireplace to warm his hands; the chestnut cracks in the fire
and burns them; he rushes to the water-pan to cool himself, and the crab
bites his hand; he flies to a safe place, and is tormented by the wasp;
in an agony of pain he tries to leave the room, but the remorseless
millstone descends with a crash upon his head, and mortally wounds him.
This story is told to the Japanese children over and over again, but is
always received with wide-eyed delight and excitement.
[Illustration: CHUMS]
I have never seen a child in Japan cry; nor have I ever seen one
smacked, for what mother can have the heart to touch so dainty a blossom
as the child flower of this land of flowers? A group of Japanese
children is perhaps the prettiest sight on earth, and they themselves
are works of art, the beauty of which can scarcely be imagined. Each
head and each piquant face is but a field where the ever-present artist
can exercise his ingenuity and his skill in colour and design.
Deliberately the child's head and face are treated as subjects fit for
the most decorative of design, and the result, though quaint and formal
to the last degree, is invariably as pleasing as it is undoubtedly
startling and original. And the children themselves are no less full of
interest than their heads and faces are full of paint. I once saw a
pyramid of children gazing in at a sweet-stuff shop. They looked like
three children; but on closer inspection I discovered that one was a
doll looking about the age of a child of two, with its great head
lolling on the back of its mother, aged three. The three-year-old was a
boy, strapped to the back of his sister aged five. The doll and the
sister looked very sleepy and tired as they gazed vacantly at the rows
of tempting pink sugar-water bottles in the sweet-stuff shop; but what
arrested my attention was the alert and intelligent expression of the
three-year-old child in the middle, who, just as I took out my notebook
to sketch the group, put a lighted cigarette between his lips, holding
it between two chubby fingers, eyeing me with the peculiar introspective
look of the old hand as he both tests the excellence of the tobacco and
gives himself up to its enjoyment. As I sketched him he looked
composedly at me out of his big eyes, and posed twice without a particle
of artificiality--once with the cigarette in his mouth, and again as if
he had just taken it from his lips for a moment while he paid attention
to me.
[Illustration: A SUNNY STROLL]
I remember once passing a temple, an ancient Shinto temple called
"Kamogamo"; it was a sacred temple and very popular, being much
frequented for picnics. On this particular day there was going on one of
the two important picnics or festivals of the year; the great ground of
the temple and the playground were enclosed about with straw ropes on
bamboo poles, to separate one from another. It was a festival for girls
under ten, and there were hundreds of children, all with their kimonos
tucked up, showing their scarlet petticoats, and looking for all the
world like a mass of poppies. The scarlet in the petticoats was
universally repeated in neck and hair; but their kimonos varied much,
and were of almost every shade and texture of Japanese cloth and silk
crepe imaginable. There were luminous greens, fawns, stripes, golden
browns shading into lemon-yellows, harmonies in brown and violet, and
dresses striped and chequered in tones of almost every conceivable
value. Two rows or armies of these girls were placed several yards
distant from each other in this long emerald-green field; and in the
space between them stood two servants, each holding a long bamboo pole,
fresh and green, being evidently just cut down for the fair, and
suspending from its top a flat shallow drum covered with tissue paper.
Presently two young men teachers appeared on the scene carrying two
baskets of small many-coloured balls, which they threw down on the grass
between the children and the drums. Then a signal was given, and all the
girls started running down the field at full tilt towards one another,
pouncing on the balls as they ran, and throwing them with all their
force up at the paper drums. The great majority of them missed their aim
altogether, and flew either above or below the drums, some of the mites
getting so excited that they threw the balls forty or fifty yards in mid
air. After a time, when a perfect shower of balls had passed through the
tissue drums, quite demolishing them, a shower of coloured papers,
miniature lanterns, paper umbrellas, and flags came slowly fluttering
down among the children on to their jet-black bobbing heads, and into
their eager outstretched hands. Never have I seen anything more
beautiful than these gay, brightly-clad people, packed closely together
like a cluster of flowers in the brilliant sparkling sunshine, with
their pretty upturned faces watching the softly falling rain of coloured
toys. I strolled through the temple grounds, passed this brilliant
stream of colour and lovely laughing children, passed the cherry-trees
and dainty tea-houses, and in a few minutes found myself in a cool
grey-green forest of bamboo, an academic bamboo grove looking like a
pillared temple, sunless and silent. It was here that the philosophers
of old taught and meditated, and it seemed a place to meditate in--so
quiet, so sombre, shut off from the world with its endless lofty pillars
of grey luminous green--silent, a world apart.
[Illustration: THE CHILD AND THE UMBRELLA]
WORKERS
CHAPTER X
WORKERS
It was with a view to decorating my newly-built London house that I paid
a second visit to Japan, being convinced that it was possible to handle
the labour there at a cheaper rate and with finer results than in
Europe. My experience proved that I was right. Before leaving England,
however, I was carefully informed by all my friends of the exceedingly
bad reputation that the Japanese have gained commercially. I was told
that they were treacherous and unscrupulous in their dealings, and that
I was, above all, to beware of the Japanese merchant. As it happened, it
was through making a friend of one particular little Japanese
merchant--through concentrating my attention upon him, and studying him
continually--that I was enabled to gain a real insight into the life of
the people, and to tear away that impenetrable veil which, to the
Westerner's eyes, always hangs before them.
When you get to know a Japanese merchant well, a man who has studied our
methods, you will find that he talks openly and frankly about his
dealings with the European globe-trotter. He will tell you that he
cheats you and charges you high prices because the average Westerner has
got no eye. The Westerner does not appreciate the really fine and
beautiful articles that the Japanese soul worships; therefore the
merchant gives him what he thinks the Westerner wants, and asks the
price that he thinks the traveller will give. When we first came into
touch with the Japanese we began by cheating them and foisting
deceptions upon them, and now they simply turn the tables upon us and
cheat us to the best of their ability. The only difference is that the
Japanese have more intelligence about wrong done them, and their motive
for cheating is thus resentingly greater. I have had many dealings with
the Japanese myself, and have always found them just. To be sure, I have
never come into touch with the treaty-port merchants, who have been more
or less tainted by the Westerner; but I have come into touch with, and
studied, the genuine workers of Japan.
[Illustration: A LITTLE JAP]
My first object on arriving in Tokio was to find some Japanese who would
be capable of gathering together a series of splendid craftsmen to work
for me. As luck would have it, I found my man--a perfect little genius
of a fellow--on the evening of my first day in Japan, and in a most
unexpected manner. I was sitting in the reading-room of the hotel, with
my plans spread out before me, dreaming of the Japanese glories that
were to decorate my London house, when my attention was attracted by
seeing a little creature, looking like a monkey with a great box on his
back, bound suddenly into the room, evidently by aid of the manager's
foot in the adjoining hall. Not in the least perturbed, he began to
unstrap the box from his back, from which he took out curios, and
drifted about the room trying to sell them to the different
globe-trotters assembled there. Nothing was too small or too trivial for
him: he would sell anything. He was chivied about, insulted, and abused
by every one; yet he received it all with a smiling face. Nothing seemed
to affect him. He was a typical Japanese, with bright slit-like eyes set
as close together as any monkey's--blinking eyes they were, but so
intelligent. I could see that he was a keen observer, and that he looked
upon these wayfarers as so much material of prey, by the quiet way in
which he selected a man with a big pocket, sidling up to him and
allowing himself to be insulted, yet always getting the best of the
bargain in the end. He tried to sell me some very bad cloisonné, and he
was so clever about it, handling his wares in so dexterous a
manner,--making his twopenny-halfpenny pots appear of priceless
value--that it occurred to me that this little monkey resemblance might
have ideas of his own, and be in some small way able to help me. He
spoke English a little, and I told him to come up to my room that night,
when I should have something to say to him. Glancing at me in a
searching way, without asking a single question or showing the
slightest surprise, he only said, "I come!"
[Illustration: A BY-CANAL]
And he came. When I went up to my room after dinner, I found him sitting
there, or rather squatting on a chair, waiting for me, blinking his
beady little eyes and looking as solemn as an owl. I told him all my
schemes. I explained that I was a painter, thoroughly in sympathy with
the Japanese, and that I wanted his help to gather together a company of
workers--fan-workers, metal-workers, and screen-workers--in order to
furnish a house that I had built in London. He grasped my idea in an
instant, and very soon entered into the spirit of the plan, taking an
enthusiastic interest in all my schemes. Whenever there was anything
that needed measuring exactly, this little man would run his finger and
thumb over it in the most dexterous manner possible, murmuring to
himself, "One inchie, two inchie, three inchie, seven-and-a-half
inchie," etc. I talked on and on, expounding and arranging, until it
must have been nearly three o'clock in the morning. Japanese people are
in the habit of going to bed very early, and soon my little ally became
obviously sleepy, although he was far too polite to admit it. Only when
midnight struck did he beg that he might be allowed to smoke a pipe, in
order, as he said, "to keep himself awake." I gave him permission, and
he immediately jumped into the fireplace, crouching right down in the
fender, close up against the red-hot coals, and smoked his miniature
pipe there. I talked on, and he listened, really interested in
everything I said, and gazing at me with his little beady eyes, bright
with interest, yet blinking so rapidly that there was almost a mist over
them. Then, for the first time, I noticed that the little soul was
tired, and, feeling that it would be cruel to keep him up any longer, I
bade him good-night and shut the door.
For almost an hour after he had gone, I sat on dreaming and brooding.
Then I was suddenly aroused by hearing a fumbling noise outside my room,
as though some one were tapping at the hall door. I went out to see who
the intruder might be, and there I found my little Japanese friend,
practically asleep, but running his fingers all over the bolted door,
trying to measure it, and murmuring, "one inchie, two inchie, three
inchie." From that moment I christened him "Inchie," and now all over
Japan at the present time this little man is known as Mr. Inchie.
After that night Inchie became my constant companion and friend.
Wherever I went he came. Whether it was to theatres, neighbouring towns,
metal-workers or fan-workers, Inchie always accompanied me, until in the
end it became a daily habit for him to drift about with me in the
sunshine, neglecting his business entirely. For Inchie was an artist
first and a merchant after. We visited the temples, where Inchie taught
me to appreciate the difference between a degenerate Buddha and a
perfect Buddha, a difference so subtle as to be quite indistinguishable
to the alien. Gradually, bit by bit, as I grew to know him better, this
little merchant's true nature revealed itself to me. I began to see the
man apart from the merchant, and he proved himself to be a great artist.
Here in England we should call him a distinguished genius, and
undoubtedly there are scores of equally brilliant men in Japan.
I have indeed no reason to believe that there are any men in Japan who
are not brilliant, considering that here, the first man I had met, an
ordinary little merchant in a hotel for Europeans, was an artist. Every
day we wandered about the streets trying to discover the best operators
in metal, wood, and bronze to work for me; and in a very short time we
had gathered together a bevy of excellent associates, each thoroughly
proficient in his own particular direction.
Inchie and I talked out our plans during our many walks through Uyeno
Park and down the theatre streets, and we came to the conclusion that
this Japanese house of mine should be a house of flowers. Each room
should be some individual and beautiful flower--such as the peony, the
camelia, the cherry-blossom, the chrysanthemum,--and, just as a flower
begins simply at the base, expanding as it reaches the top into a
full-blown bloom, so my rooms should begin with simple one-coloured
walls and carpets, becoming richer and richer as they mounted up, ending
as they reached the ceiling in a perfect blaze of detail.
[Illustration: SWINGING ALONG IN THE SUN]
That was my dream; but, unlike most dreams, it was realised to the full
and far beyond my widest expectations. I first of all turned my
attention towards the wood-carvers; and, discovering that each man
had his favourite flower, which he manipulated more skilfully than any
other, I arranged that he should work solely on that particular species.
Having found three or four men who had a special fancy for the peony, I
allowed them to occupy themselves entirely in the peony room. I gave
them the exact measurement of the ceiling, squaring it out into a
certain number of panels, with complete measurements of the doors, the
frieze, and every portion of the room, allowing them to give bent to
their own artistic instincts as to colour and design. These drawings
were then handed over to the wood-carvers, to be pasted on to wood
panels and carved. In a very short time every workman in Inchie's store,
and every artist too, became enthusiastically interested in this work
that they were undertaking. In fact, it was not work to them at all, but
one long artistic joy. So much rubbishy bric-a-brac has to be made for
the European market that when a Japanese is allowed to go his own way
and create self-imagined beautiful things, it is an untold personal
pleasure to him.
I never saw a body of men work together so unselfishly as these. The
metal-workers in the peony room went on in sympathy with the
wood-carvers from the cherry-blossom hall; the screen-makers were
interested in the proceedings of the fan-makers; and the designers were
interested in them all. Each individual operative was zealously
interested in the success of the results as a whole; and the end is that
my house now looks like the product of one man, or rather of one
master. It was a revelation to me, after my experience of British
workmen, to see the way these little Jap fellows toiled. How they would
talk and plan out schemes of decoration for me among themselves,
studying peony flowers, for instance, in some celebrated temple garden
in order to introduce a new and more natural feeling into their wooden
ones; and then the joy with which they would think out every little
detail, flying round to my hotel at all times of the day to inform me of
some new departure, surprised and pleased me greatly.
These men were all brilliant craftsmen and designers, creating work that
could not be surpassed in Italy or anywhere else for beauty. Yet the
bulk of them were poorly fed, receiving only sevenpence or eightpence a
day. Too poor to buy meat, they lived on rice and on the heads and tails
of fish twice a week, being unable to afford that which was between.
[Illustration: A METAL-WORKER]
But although the Japanese workman is very poorly paid, it must also be
remembered that his necessities are few and simple. This is roughly the
way a workman in Japan lives. He has one meal of rice per day, of the
poorest quality, which costs him two sen eight rin. A sen is a tenth
part of a penny, and a rin a tenth part of a sen. For a mat to sleep on
at night he pays one sen five rin. Three sen he pays for fish or the
insides of fowls. Drinking-water costs him two rin, while two rin per
day pays for the priest. The total cost of his daily living thus sums up
into about five sen three rin. Then, as to be buried at the public
expense is considered a deep disgrace, forty sen is always put on one
side for the purchase of a coffin, seventy-five sen if the gentleman
wishes to be cremated, twenty sen for refreshments for mourners, five
rin for flowers, three sen for the fees of the two priests, while, to
economise, a Japanese of the lower grade will generally make use of
friends as bearers.
Apropos of the absurdly small price at which a man can live in Japan, I
am reminded of an experience in Kioto. I was walking down the theatre
streets one day with a Japanese friend, and we stopped in front of a
little stall full of very dainty toys. There were thousands of
toys--miniature kitchen utensils exquisitely carved in wood, small pots
and pans and dishes, all bound with lacquer and beautifully finished,
such as would delight the heart of every housewife of my acquaintance. I
asked the stall-holder, a little stolid old man, through the
interpretation of my friend, how much he would sell his entire stock
for. His excitement was intense, and my friend told me that my simple
question had had the effect of an avalanche upon this stolid little
toy-seller, and that he was quite unable to grasp my meaning, so
startling and gigantic did the transaction seem to him. After a great
deal of gesticulation, and much flicking of the beads on his counting
machine, the little man came to the conclusion that his entire stock
would be worth two yen thirty sen. This ridiculous price quite took my
breath away, and I immediately said that I would buy the lot. Then
there was another commotion: the little man was thoroughly upset, and
could not understand what I meant. In the end I made him carry away his
stall bodily and follow me with it to my hotel. I paid him the money,
and he quickly disappeared. "You won't see that little gentleman in
theatre street again in a hurry," my friend said: "he will be living in
luxury now for a week or more on that two dollar thirty sen, and he
certainly won't dream of doing any more work until he has spent the
lot." Sure enough, I never saw the stolid toy-seller again during the
whole of my stay in Kioto, which stretched over more than a month. But
although the coolie and the workman in Japan live on next to nothing,
the rich man spends very lavishly. If he entertains you, he gives you a
dinner which, although you seldom appreciate its splendid qualities (for
it does not appeal to the Western palate), is, from the Japanese
standpoint, truly regal. There will be four or five different kinds of
fish, some of which will be specimens of great value; and a dinner given
at a Japanese tea-house by a merchant to a European friend would cost
more than the most expensive dinner it is possible to procure at the
Carlton or at the Savoy.
[Illustration: BRONZE-WORKERS]
My men flourished on the heads and tails of fish, and did splendid
service. Day by day the decorations for my house grew, as one worker
after another was added to the little band. One man recommended another,
and gradually the number increased, until at last there were as many as
seventy working for me Inchie was my help, my interpreter, my
foreman. At first there were many difficulties in the way, for Inchie's
knowledge of English was limited, and my knowledge of Japanese was none
at all. It thus arose that the only method of making him understand me
was pantomime. One day, while discussing a certain measurement, we
became so involved that I was determined to demonstrate my meaning. So I
borrowed the carpenter's tools and constructed a little model of the
house, with its different rooms, showing how the carved ceilings and
friezes should be placed. Inchie was astounded that I should have so
great a knowledge of his own particular work of carpentry, and respected
me the more accordingly.
My one great obstacle with the men was in persuading them to make
several things alike. They were all artists and hated repeating
themselves, and without rhyme or reason I would suddenly find that they
had made a red lacquer door twice the size of its fellow by way of
variety. When I first employed them I made the grave mistake with my
workers of ordering large quantities at a time of required materials. I
actually ordered a hundred electric-light fittings--fairy-like lamps
daintily wrought in bronze, of which they had made me a model--but they
refused me point-blank, and the only way to get them at all was by
asking a dozen at a time, and by arranging that each dozen should be
varied in some slight respect. It was the same with my picture frames.
They were to be a combination of wood and silk, and when I told the
master bronze-worker to make me two hundred of them for my next
exhibition in London, his face clouded over; he was thoroughly
displeased. "No can make," he said decisively: "there is berry much
difficulty. Much it cost to make; I must get big shops to do that; I no
likee." The little man was quite discouraged, and I was only able to
procure my frames by degrees.
Now, in England it would be quite the reverse--the larger the order, the
more contented the merchant; but in Japan everything is made by hand.
The men take an artistic interest in the work. They hate repeating
themselves; and in all the panels designed for my carved ceilings there
were not two alike, although the entire design formed a complete whole.
Why in the world we do not use Oriental labour in Europe is a marvel to
me.
[Illustration: IN THEATRE STREET]
Nothing that these Japanese workmen made for me at the rate of
sevenpence or eightpence a day can be approached in London for love or
money. I had some gold screens made for me in Japan. They were very
beautiful, and were made of gold on silk varnished over and lacquered,
with apple-green and vermilion silk borders made from the linings of old
dancing dresses. These screens were so brilliant that they were like
gold mirrors in which a lady might see her reflection just as accurately
as in any Parisian cheval glass. In the passage to England one of the
screens became slightly damaged. I was greatly distressed, and took it
to a celebrated firm of house-decorators to have it repaired. They
undertook the task very confidently; but directly they attempted to
match the gold they found that it was impossible to approach to anything
like the brilliancy of its surface, although every conceivable method
was attempted. They tried putting on gold and then burnishing and
varnishing it over to imitate the surface of the lacquer. The result was
that, to the present day, that screen stands in my hall with the same
dull, sullied patch in the middle of it, a silent testimony to the
inferiority of the British house-decorator as compared with his Japanese
contemporary.
Little Inchie and I, as I have said, soon became great friends. He
followed me about wherever I went, and I often lingered in his store,
watching him sell curios to English people and British merchants from
Kobe. It was often a revelation to observe the subtlety of the man and
the masterly way in which he handled these inquiring visitors. He seemed
to divine their inner-most thoughts, and to know at a glance exactly
what they wanted, and the prices that they would be likely to pay. After
a time I learnt the price of nearly every curio in his store. There was
never a fixed value for anything: Inchie was always led by his customer.
Perhaps an American and his wife would come in, the man saying nothing,
the wife remarking on everything. It was, they said, all "beautiful." I
noticed that little Inchie was not at all enthusiastic, merely answering
their questions, but not attempting to sell. He would not waste an ounce
of energy on them, and after a time they would sweep out of the place,
the lady gushing to the last moment and saying how beautiful and
exquisite everything was. Directly they had gone I would ask Inchie why
he had not worked harder to try and sell them something. "Gentleman and
lady not got big pocket," he would say. How in the world he knew that
they had but little money puzzled me. "Lady berry much talk--American
lady always berry much talk. She say 'This curio number one,' but never
buy. English daimio lady come to my store no berry much talk; English
gentleman no big pocket. When she leave my store I say, 'Me presentie
you.'" What little Inchie means by this is that he feels that this
English lady is refined and really admires his beautiful things, but
cannot afford to buy them. He appreciates her delicacy, and, in his
quaint pidgin English, begs to be allowed the privilege of giving her
this little inexpensive trifle to take away.
[Illustration: THE CARPENTER]
Very often, when I was spending a morning in Inchie's little curio
store, a Kobe merchant would drop in to buy--a pompous fellow and burly,
asking the price of everything he saw. "How much is this? and how much
is that?" he would say, and "What do you suppose you'd charge for that?"
Inchie would look up at the merchant and blink with almost a scared
expression, so meek was it. The merchant, like the great bully that he
was, feeling satisfied that he was cowing the little man, would pick up
a piece of ivory and say, "How much?" "Four dollars," answers Inchie.
"Very dear," replies the merchant sternly. Then Inchie would pick up
another piece of ivory, putting away the former, and say with a
scared expression, as though the merchant had frightened him down, "I
charge two dollars for this." "I will give you one and a half dollar,"
urges the merchant. And little Inchie, puckering his brow and in a
melancholy voice, says, "I takee," the merchant going off highly
delighted, convinced that he has been robbing all round.
Immediately after he had left the store, the change in Inchie was
extraordinary. He was no longer meek and melancholy, but gleeful and
triumphant, and longing to tell me what had happened. "The merchant from
Kobe he berry much cheat, that man," he said, with a chuckle. "I show
him number one curio, I ask him number one cheap price, and he say,
'Berry de-ar.' Then I show him no number one curio and ask him more
double price. He say, 'I no pay that; I give half that.' He take away
curio at half that price, and that very good for me. I make more money
like that than when I sell good curio." Then Inchie explained how very
easy it is to deceive the average traveller. He does not stand a chance
against the Japanese merchant, and half the collections of curios
ticketed and placed in museums in England as fine and unique specimens
are in reality worthless imitations.
The really fine productions never leave the country at all. Westerners
visiting Japan expect to secure fine works of art by paying a small sum
for them; but it cannot possibly be done. In that country they know the
value of productions, and will not easily part with them. Inchie,
becoming very serious and natural, would give me a little lecture on
the absurdity of Westerners coming to Japan expecting to buy really fine
old curios and pictures at a small price, when no Japanese would part
with them for any consideration. "A man," he said, "will come from your
country who thinks he understands Japan because he has read some books
about it, and has seen some examples of bad art in England. That man has
no eyes--he can't see the really beautiful things. He comes to buy the
old kakemono. He won't buy the new kakemono by the good man that lives
now. He no understand if it good or bad; but it must be old. Well, we
make him the old one;" and here Inchie gave me an exact description of
how they make the old kakemonos. They first begin by making the paper
look old, and every producer has his several methods of bringing about
age. This is how Inchie does it. He has eight various stains in eight
separate baths, in which he puts his paper, holding the two opposite
corners and dashing it from one bath to another in one quick, dexterous
sweep. Then the paper is left to dry, and out of about one hundred
sheets stained in this way, in all probability only a dozen will be
found sufficiently perfect to deceive the buyer. That is the beginning
of the manufacture of an imitation old kakemono to be sold to the
European connoisseur for hundreds of dollars, afterwards to find its
resting-place in some celebrated museum.
[Illustration: MAKING UP ACCOUNTS]
What chance has a European against a genius like this? and how can he
detect deception in objects that have been the result of such minute
care and consideration? The Japanese can imitate postage stamps so
accurately that the only hope of discovering a fraud lies in analysing
the gum at the back of a stamp. When we stain paper in coffee or beer to
give it the effect of age, we consider that we have gone far in the art
of imposition; but in this direction, as in many others, we are mere
babies compared with the Japanese.
"But then, Inchie," I said, in reply to his statement that it was
child's play to deceive the Westerner, "you too are sometimes deceived
by us. I know of a gentleman in England who brought over to Japan a
large collection of modern porcelain of English manufacture, and by
clever handling he imposed the whole lot on an artist at Osaka in
exchange for some rare old Satsuma." Then I enlarged on the hardship of
the story. I explained how the Englishman had persuaded the Osaka
painter to give up all the rare old Satsuma that he had collected during
the course of a lifetime in exchange for this valueless English
porcelain, remarking that it was wrong and almost cruel to take such a
mean advantage of the poor Osaka merchant. "And what do you say to that
for a clever fraud, Inchie?" I asked. Inchie only held his sides and
laughed. At last he said, "Oh, he berry number one clever man, that at
Osaka"; for, it seemed, he knew all about the Englishman and his
porcelain, and also about the Satsuma. The painter, indeed, was known
all over Japan by his clever imitations of old Satsuma, and it was also
generally known that he had given this English gentleman a collection of
imitations that he had painted himself in exchange for the English
porcelain, which was interesting to him to study. The person to be
pitied in Inchie's estimation was the biter bit; and he was "number one
sorry for that Englishman."
Whenever any one fresh arrived in Tokio--young, old, pretty, or plain--I
always sent him or her to Inchie's store to buy curios. Such streams of
people besieged him, all so different and some so quaint, that, although
they were good for trade, Inchie was very uncertain as to whether they
were good for me, and was anxious to have the matter cleared up. "You
have many friends," he would say, eyeing me suspiciously.
[Illustration: FINISHING TOUCHES]
At length the crisis was reached which broke down the barriers of
Inchie's reserve and thoroughly upset him, in the shape of a fair
bulbous woman, who was a terror! I was sitting in the reading-room of
the hotel one day, believing that I was alone, when a twangy voice broke
in upon the silence. "Just fancy, he shot himself for love of me,"
mentioning a name in Yokohama. "Really," I observed, feeling embarrassed
(he must have been mad, I thought). "Yes; he blew his brains out. Have a
drink?" she went on, in an exuberance of generosity. I said, "I think
not." She replied that if I would not she would, and she did. She wanted
to buy curios. I at once suggested Inchie, which was a happy
inspiration. Inchie came round, and I left them in the reading-room
together discussing cloisonné umbrella handles. My companion was lost
to me for three full days, being wholly occupied with the fair visitant.
He turned up at last, but in a state of fever, his eyes sparkling and
blinking indignantly. He handed me a letter that he had just written to
his latest customer, my friend the bulbous fair, who had left for
Shanghai that day. "You order me much porcelain; you order me many
curios; I no can send. I think you better go porcelain Yokohama. Much
cheaper you get Yokohama, more number one," Inchie's letter ran. "Yes;
but, Inchie," I remonstrated, "why won't you serve her? She's a good
customer for you." He was violent with rage. "I no like the lady," he
said; "she no daimio lady. Tea-house lady, I think, with tea-coloured
hair. She received me with not a proper dress on; she smoke and drink. I
no want to serve lady like that. She no friend of yours?" he added,
eagerly looking into my face with his piercing little eyes. "No, no,
Inchie! of course not," I replied, for I wasn't going to claim her. "Ah,
I thought she no friend of yours," and Inchie smiled, while I felt that
I was respected once more and entered into his good graces--it turned
out for ever.
"Now, Inchie," I said to him one day, "I want to get a good porcelain
man, the best in Tokio. Can you manage it?" There was nothing, so far as
I knew, that Inchie could not manage, so that in a very short time he
had found a little man, a pupil of the most eminent porcelain maker in
Tokio, also celebrated for his remarkable glazes, who had just started a
business of his own. We drove round to his store to ask him if he would
undertake the painting of a dinner-service, and do other things for me.
He was a young man, this particular painter, but with the face of a very
old one, careworn and haggard, quite an enthusiast, full of interest in
his art, and a craftsman of the highest order. When he found that I too
was in the same ranks, his sympathies were aroused, and he devoted a
whole month solely to the firing and painting of my porcelain. After a
time I began to understand the man and his processes. He brought out
little bits of choice Chinese-blue porcelain to show me. Whenever there
was to be a three-days' firing he would come round to my hotel and
inform me of it. Altogether he developed into quite a friend, almost to
the dethronement of Inchie. He allowed me to sit among the men while
they worked, and, seeing how interested I was, they gave me some clay to
model and paint. I ended by painting a whole dinner-service in blue and
white. It took me a week to do; but it was perhaps one of the most
delightful experiences I have ever had, and I can safely say that I have
never worked in a more congenial atmosphere than when sitting on a mat
in that little porcelain shop surrounded by those twelve little artists.
I shall never forget the anxious moments when my products were being
fired. Sometimes I have gone on for twelve or fourteen hours, eating and
resting with the men, taking my turn at keeping the furnace alight, and
hanging about after the kilns had cooled to see my valuable porcelain
dug out.
[Illustration: A BACK CANAL, OSAKA]
Nothing can be more exciting than the first peep at porcelain after
it has been fired. A mass of dead heavy-looking clay is put into the
furnace and fired; you peep at it after some hours, and find, to your
surprise, a rare paradise of glazed white and blue, so brilliant and
sparkling that it seems almost impossible to have been made by mortal
hands. But then, of course, it is not always so delightful; there are
sometimes vexing surprises awaiting you as you open the oven door.
Occasionally you will peep in and see a group of vases looking like
drunken men lolling against one another in a disreputable manner, and
lurching over at all angles. Surrounded by a series of failures such as
these, the finest work is almost invariably found. Although the vases
have all been painted by the same hand and fired in the same kiln, only
one will be perfect, while the rest are worthless. This is probably
brought about by some subtle influence to be found in the placing of the
vase in the kiln. There is, however, a great deal of uncertainty in such
operations, and it is almost impossible to foretell the fate of any
piece of ware after it has been set in the firing kiln.
Inchie and I spent much of our time with the bronze-workers, and it
amused me to see these artists carrying out designs for the European
market, while to hear their comments upon the crude productions of
Englishmen was sometimes very funny indeed.
The men who were thus engaged were at the same time carrying out
exquisite work for me. They complained that the European market insisted
upon everything being over-elaborated and very showy, and at the same
time very old. This combination is quite impossible. The old Japanese
bronze work was always very simple in design, depending for its beauty,
not upon the flowery decorations surrounding it, but upon the exquisite
proportions of the piece itself. To create the aged appearance necessary
in the eyes of the faddy European, the bronzes have to be buried in the
earth--in a special kind of earth--for a few days; after which they are
dug up and sold to connoisseurs and English people, who are by way of
understanding works of art, for fabulous sums.
[Illustration: STENCIL-MAKERS]
I had occasion to employ many embroiderers; and here, as in every other
branch of Japanese art work, I received a series of "eye-openers."
Hitherto I had been envious of the many fine old bits of embroidery and
temple hangings shown me by the different globe-trotters staying at the
hotel. They had all come upon their treasures in some lucky and
unexpected manner. By much good fortune every man had secured his own
special piece of embroidery, and each by clever manipulation had
outwitted the dealer from whom he had managed to wrest this one old
temple hanging. But when I went to headquarters, and began to employ the
men who actually made the fabric, my envy vanished. I soon found that
none of these coveted treasures was old at all. Such large pieces of
embroidery are not used in temples, nor have they ever been; they are
quite modern introductions, and have been brought about simply to
attract and make money out of the credulous strangers. I have spent
hour after hour with the embroiderers, watching them manipulate old
temple hangings, and have seen them when the task was over wash on gold
stains with base metal. Here and there a few little touches would be of
real gold, and it was all done so cleverly that none but a Jap could
possibly detect that they were modern.
It is almost a depressing sight to watch these embroiderers at work--so
different are they from the happy boisterous metal-workers talking and
laughing amid the clanging of their little hammers. They are sad and
silent. You will be in a roomful of these people for perhaps a whole
morning, and not one of them will utter a word. They work on and on,
with heads bent down, picking up thread after thread of the one piece of
embroidery that they have been constantly working on for months, or
perhaps for years. Never a word nor a smile; each peering into his own
special work with painful red eyes, on which are large bone-rimmed
spectacles. They all, as a rule, lose their sight early in thus poring
incessantly over this difficult and dainty work.
I ordered several pieces of cotton crêpe of a certain design that I had
drawn myself, and it was during the execution of this commission that I
was brought into touch with the stencil-workers and dyers of the
country. Stencil-cutting is one of the most beautiful arts imaginable.
To see the stencil-workers cutting fantastic designs from the hard
polished cardboard beneath their instruments--so delicate that it is
like the tracery of a spider's web in its tenuity--is a sight that one
never forgets. Some of the designs are so cobweb-like that single human
hairs are used in parts to keep them from breaking to pieces.
Dyeing is also an art that is brought to a high degree of perfection in
Japan. Sometimes an elaborate design will need such a large number of
plates and colours, as well as finishing touches by the hand of the
operator, that in the end it looks almost like a water-colour, so
closely do the colours mingle one with another.
Then there were the carpenters, and here a whole series of surprises
awaited me. For example, I found that the teeth of their saws were set
in what may be called the opposite direction, and that therefore, when a
man pulled his instrument towards him, it cut the wood, rather than when
he pushed. In this, as in everything else, the Japanese are perfectly
right. One always has more strength to pull than to push, and with this
method you are enabled to use saws made of such thin metal that if their
teeth were set in the opposite direction they must needs cockle and
break. When a carpenter wants to plane some tiny piece of wood, perhaps
a portion of a miniature doll's house, he does not run a small plane
over it, as we do, but uses a large heavy one, very sharp, and turned
upside-down. In this way very delicate work can be achieved.
All the Japanese tools are designed with a view to their special
fitness. The chisels work in a totally different way from that of our
chisels, and lend themselves more readily to delicate work. As to their
little wood-carving tools, they are perfect joys! I shall never forget
the expressions on the faces of my British workmen as they unpacked the
cases of goods that arrived from Japan, and came across saws as thin as
tissue paper with their teeth set the wrong way; tiny chisels that
almost broke as they handled them; hammers the size of a lady's hat-pin.
My foreman's face was a study of disgusted contempt. "Now, how can a man
turn out decent work with tools like that?" he exclaimed, looking round
appealingly. And it did seem impossible. But not one of them complained
when they came across the actual work accomplished by these ridiculously
small instruments. The carpenters were loud in their admiration for the
wood-carving, and the foreman merely sniffed. He knew that he himself
could not approach it. And this was soon clearly proved, for if ever my
hands tried to do a bit of patching it was always a failure. All their
joining was as child's play when compared with this Japanese triumph.
There was a man in Osaka, a perfect genius in wood-carving--the king of
carpenters. People journeyed from long distances to pay their respects
to him, and he was the most independent person I ever saw in my life. He
never dreamt of undertaking service for people unless they appreciated
it and understood its value. Very rich Americans have tried to persuade
him to engage for them; but, as he always demanded that would-be
purchasers should be capable of appreciating his work as that of an
accomplished artist, they rarely ever succeeded. Nearly all this man's
work is done for his own people at a very low price, and Japanese
wood-carvers are continually taking pilgrimages to see him and to buy
specimens of his productions. He always demands to know what is going to
become of them, and where they are going to be placed, before consenting
to part with them. I had the wit not to ask him to sell anything to me,
nor to execute anything for me, but simply admired his work as that of a
unique artist.
[Illustration: A SIGN-PAINTER'S]
Most prominent among the toilers of Japan are the workers in lacquer,
clean and dainty beyond description, with whom a great portion of my
time was taken up. The climate of the country is exactly suited to the
making of lacquer, being sufficiently damp. The process is unusually
elaborate, and is a tedious matter of painting on a very large number of
coats of lacquer, rubbing them down always, and allowing them to dry.
When we think of lacquer here in England, we think of it in connection
with our tea-trays and like cheap goods which we complain of as being
made of bad material that chips and breaks and becomes useless in a
distressingly short space of time. "The Japanese have lost the art of
creating the fine old lacquer that they used formerly," we say. But it
is not so at all; it is purely a question of time. If the Japanese were
allowed sufficient leisure, and were not rushed on so by the
requirements of the European market, they would be able to turn out just
as fine and just as durable lacquer as they did in the days when they
worked for the love of their work alone for purchase by their
fellow-countrymen. Practical proof of this can be found in the fact that
all the doors in my London house, which are composed of the best
lacquer, twenty or thirty coats thick, and have been in constant use for
years, are still in perfect condition, and will be two hundred years
hence. One has no idea before going to Japan of the extensive range of
colours in the way of greens, blues, and reds that there is in lacquer,
for most of the colours are entirely unknown in the West. There is
undoubtedly no surface in the world that is as clear and as brilliant as
lacquer, and I have often thought how advantageous it would be if one
could only lacquer pictures over instead of varnishing them; it would
give to the poorest work a brilliancy and crispness that would be simply
invaluable. But this brilliant surface is only brought about by
excessive care and cleanliness in its preparation--indeed, it needs
almost as much attention as the making of a collotype plate.
I was anxious to get some really good cloisonné workers to make some
things for me, and by very good luck I hit upon a man who had just
discovered an entirely new method of handling gold. Coming across one of
his samples at an exhibition in Tokio, I ferreted him out and persuaded
him to engage for me. His cloisonné, unlike the ordinary slate-grey work
that one must needs peer closely into before discovering its fine
qualities, was bold in design, with flower patterns of cherry-blossom
just traceable through a fine lacework of gold, and it looked like a
brilliant rainbow-hued bubble. One is much inclined to fancy that
cloisonné vases with elaborate designs must necessarily be expensive.
That, however, is not the case. There are technical obstacles connected
with making broad sweeps of colour in cloisonné that render simple
designs much more expensive. Japan is the only place in the world that
is capable of producing cloisonné, for the patience and skill required
would overtax the workers of any other country, and such an attempt
would necessarily end in failure. A cloisonné shop is every bit as
depressing as the embroidery works. You will see men picking up on the
end of their tiny instruments gold wire, which is so microscopic as to
be like a grain of dust, and almost as invisible. This tiny morsel has
to be placed on the metal vase and fixed there.
[Illustration: A CLOISONNÉ WORKER]
Talking of the delicate and exquisite tools used by cloisonné workers
reminds me of tools that are just as delicate, but used for quite
another purpose--namely, those which the Japanese dentists handle so
dexterously. However, the stock-in-trade of a Japanese dentist chiefly
consists of the proper use of his finger and thumb. The most
strongly-rooted tooth invariably gives way to this instrument. A
Japanese dentist has only to apply his fingers to a tooth, and out that
tooth comes on the instant. It is sometimes very amusing to see a group
of dentists' assistants, all mere children, practising their trade by
endeavouring to pull nails out of a board, beginning with tin tacks and
ending with nails which are more firmly rooted than the real teeth
themselves.
When I had gathered my team together by the help of my right-hand ally,
Inchie, after having chosen the best of them from every branch of art,
they continued to go on well and assiduously, and the decorations of my
house were in full swing, when suddenly there was a break, a distinct
break. I went round to the store early one lovely morning in May, as was
my habit, and found, to my surprise, that the whole place was empty. Not
a metal-worker or carpenter was to be seen. They had all mysteriously
disappeared--where? To view the cherry-blossom! Inchie also, whom I had
relied upon as a good steady colleague, had, on the first opportunity,
and without any warning, drifted away into the open air with the whole
band to view the blossom. The Japanese workmen, who are skilled, and
want examples from Nature, evidently adhere to the principle that "all
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," and so, whether I liked it or
not, when such a glorious day had presented itself, they were not going
to miss the opportunity of enjoying it. It was a holiday, or rather the
sunshine had declared it to be a holiday, and all Japan, rich and poor,
employers and employed, had turned out to picnic in the parks, and feast
their eyes upon the cherry-blossom. So universal was the holiday, and so
persistently did Inchie implore that I should join them, that I soon
found myself sitting under the trees in Uyeno Park, surrounded by my
deserters, enjoying things as well as any one of them there.
[Illustration: A TOY-SHOP]
It was on this day, out of the pure joy of the idea, that Inchie
proposed to give me a real Japanese dinner, and at the same time show me
some of the fine old classical dances of Japan. I remember that night so
well! Inchie invited three other Japanese friends, and we all went down
into the basement with rod and line, or, to be exact, with a net, to
catch our own fish for dinner. It was to me novel sport chasing those
lazy old goldfish round the tank. I secured a monster, which beat
Inchie's out and out for size. Inchie was in splendid form on this
occasion; it was a field-night for him, and he was quite at his best. He
was an enormous eater; he ate anything you chose to give him, and he
enjoyed the dinner that followed our half-hour spent below stairs, I
must confess, far more than I did. For although the repast was of the
very best quality, it was after all Japanese, which statement speaks for
itself, as every one knows that Japanese food does not by any means
commend itself to the British palate. There was our just-caught fish
cooked with bamboo, meat of different sorts, and many varieties in the
soup character, some of which were not bad. As for the Sake, it tasted
like bad sherry; but it had a most exhilarating effect on Inchie, and in
a very short time produced in him a most natural and joyous frame of
mind which enabled me to see a side of his disposition that under
ordinary conditions would never have come to the surface. One of the
courses of this dinner of dinners was a chicken, provided out of
deference to my European tastes, and Inchie carved it. It was a muscular
bird; but Inchie carved it with a pair of large chopsticks as I have
never seen a chicken carved before in any part of the globe. Not even
Joseph of the Savoy with his flourish of fork and knife in mid-air could
compete with Inchie and his pair of wooden chopsticks. No knives nor
fingers were used; but the whole was limbed, cut up, and served in less
than the period that Joseph would take in his skilled dexterity.
I remarked upon his skill in handling the chopsticks, and Inchie at once
suggested that we should all have a competition to see who could pick up
the greatest amount of peas with chopsticks in the shortest possible
time. Each was given a lacquer tray with carefully numbered green peas,
cold and cooked--the number according to the proficiency of the player.
Inchie's plate was loaded; the guests and geishas had a fair amount; but
I had only three, and the aim was to pick them up one by one and put
them into our mouths, the competitor whose plate was empty first being
declared the winner. We started, and I was so intent on the manipulation
of my three green peas that I was only conscious of a whirl of hands,
never having noticed that the rest had finished their pile before I had
picked up my second pea. I never undertook such a task before, nor ever
will again. The discouragement of it was final. My first pea, after no
little exertion and much sleight of hand, I had raised to my lips on the
points of the chopsticks, when just at the critical moment it abruptly
left its moorings, went like a shot from a catapult across the room, and
settled itself on the lap of one of the geishas, who was thereby
promptly put out of the contest. I do not know what happened to the
second pea, much less of the fate of the third; all I remember is that I
came in a very bad last in the chopstick competition.
[Illustration: A SWEET-STUFF STALL]
What with the Sake, the competition, and the dinner, Inchie became more
and more brilliant, until at last an idea sparkled out that was worthy
of his distinction. I was to have a piece of wood-carving in my London
house that should be as it were the eye of the peacock--the first ever
made in Japan! We should go to Osaka together, he remarked, the very
next day, choose a great piece of wood 8 or 9 feet in length, 3 feet
broad, and about 6 inches through, and have it carved in the most
beautiful and magnificent chrysanthemum pattern ever seen--for the hall
was of chrysanthemums. His eyes sparkled as he said, "You are going to
have berry number one house; must have one big number one piece
chrysanthemum carving--better than any other carving, better than temple
carving." The Sake passed round, the geishas danced, and Inchie talked,
while with every cup he grew brighter and brighter, and his eyes
sparkled like jewels. I was beginning to see the real Inchie. Was this
really the little man, the laughing-stock of the hotel, bullied and
sworn at by every one? He talked of Hookosai, who, he asserted, was not
the great master that he is universally considered to be in Europe.
Hookosai was too realistic; many other artists were far finer. Yet
another cup of Sake was passed round and drained. "I will demonstrate
some Hookosai pictures," said little Inchie, in a tone of suppressed
excitement; and, stepping behind a screen as he spoke, reappeared almost
immediately with a handkerchief rolled round his head and his kimono
tucked up, posing in the attitude of one of the most celebrated of
Hookosai's pictures. Twenty or thirty pictures were represented, and in
each he was a different man merely by changing the muscles of his face.
Never have I seen such acting in my life; he was like a gallery of
Hookosai's pictures rolled into one, with all their queer exaggeration.
More Sake was drunk, and later in the evening Inchie became so excited
that, in order to work off his condition, he made the remarkable
proposal that he should show me a devil dance. When he emerged from
behind the screen, the geishas were frightened and drew back in alarm;
for he was no longer the gentle little monkey merchant, but a real
devil. As for the dancing, I never saw anything so superbly fine! It
almost took my breath away. He seemed almost superhuman, an ethereal
creature.
The evening ended up in the usual way. Next morning Inchie came round to
my hotel, sat down on a chair looking amazingly sheepish, and blinked
solemnly at me. "Well, what's up now, Inchie?" I inquired, seeing that
he had something to say. "Berry number one bad night last night, Sir,"
moaned Inchie with a shake of his head. "I no want you to tell people I
do the devil dance last night. They no understand and berry much talk.
Please, I beg you not tell!" And poor little Inchie went about for days
with a drooping head, looking the picture of misery. But in my opinion,
he had no reason to be ashamed of his conduct; he had shown himself to
be a versatile genius. He had acted as I never before have seen a man
act; he had also danced as I have never seen a man dance; and he had
drunk as I have never seen a man drink without becoming badly affected.
Nevertheless, this was the man who had allowed himself, and was allowing
himself, to be sworn at, bullied, and even kicked by the common sorts
and by the vulgar globe-trotters.
The day following the night of the never-to-be-forgotten dinner, Inchie
and I went, as we had intended, to Osaka to choose a fine and
sufficiently well-seasoned piece of wood for this famous and
all-important wood-carving, the eye of the peacock. I think we must have
visited every timber-yard in Osaka in search of a fitting plank, and it
was too funny to see the way Inchie would crawl over a piece of wood,
like the small monkey that he was, scratching, rubbing, picking it with
his nail, and even putting his tongue upon it to test its quality. At
last a plank was found that was declared to be "berry number one," and
the great undertaking, the work of carving it, began. Five men were at
work on it for five months. And now that it is completed and fixed in my
chrysanthemum hall, it is a triumph! It is a joy--it is a possession! At
the same time, when we were in Osaka, Inchie was struck with another
brilliant idea. I must have a gong, he said, a superb gong; and as
Inchie himself had once been a metal-worker, he was an excellent judge
of gongs and undertook to choose one for me. Before that day I had no
notion that there could be such a vast difference in gongs. We went to
about twenty or thirty stores in Osaka, at each of which several gongs
were produced for our inspection. And Inchie bounded about the shop like
a cat or a leopard, from one corner of the room to the other, crouching
down on the ground with his hand over his ear, striking each in turn,
and listening to its vibration. "No berry good that," he would whisper
to me, and then, talking charmingly to the merchant,--for Inchie was
always charming--he would bow himself gracefully out of the shop. At
each store in turn the same thing happened, until at last we reached a
shop which seemed to me still more improbable than the rest, for it was
a dirty little hole of a place, with no such thing as a gong in sight.
In reply to our usual question the proprietor dived into a tangled bit
of garden at the back, and presently reappeared with an old rusty gong,
very thin with age and use and exposure to all weathers, and looking not
worth twopence. Inchie struck it, and the expression on his face was
extraordinary as he looked round at me. The tone was superb. This was
the gong of gongs! "That berry number one," he exclaimed in a stage
whisper. We secured the gong for a few cents. "Big-pockety man no berry
clever, I think," remarked Inchie pensively.
It was on the day of my last visit to his store before sailing for
England, and Inchie was very sad, very earnest, and very anxious to give
me the best possible advice as to what to do in the way of selling when
I arrived at my "store," as he termed it, in England. "When big-pocket
man come to Japan, every merchant know, and all wait for him," said
Inchie, by way of demonstrating to me how very easy it was to entrap a
rich man into buying one's goods. Inchie also told me the following
story of how two big-pockety men once fared at the hands of a very
subtle merchant. He was a Tokio merchant, and directly he heard of their
probable arrival he sent experienced guides to almost every port in
Japan to waylay these arrivals. They were eventually caught at Kobe, and
were led all over Japan by a remarkably efficient guide, in due course
reaching Tokio. After visiting many curio stores they were safely landed
at the store of the master exactor. Then the trickery developed. The
merchant began to flatter and compliment the richer of the two, and
knowing that they were anxious to buy gold lacquer he said: "You are a
great connoisseur on gold lacquer, I believe. They tell me that you have
a quick eye for fine work, and I have heard much of your appreciation of
Japanese art." The big-pockety man was thus won over into a limp and
restful condition, for no one can flatter to such good advantage as the
Japanese.
[Illustration: A CANAL IN OSAKA]
Meantime the guide was walking about the shop with his mouth wide open
and looking silly. He was there to protect the two men, and the keenest
observer could never have guessed that he was in reality the agent of
this merchant. "I want your guide to take you round to all the gold
lacquer shops you can, for I know that that is what you appreciate and
love so much. After you have seen all that the merchants can show you,
come back to me and see what you think of my specimens." All this time
he was toying with a little insignificant-looking gold lacquer tray,
turning it about under the rich man's very nose in such a way that he
was bound to notice it. "We Japanese are so clever, you know, and we are
such good imitators of lacquer that even I, a Japanese, am liable at
times to be misled by some of the deceptions. But," continued the
merchant in an off-hand manner, "there is one sure test of real gold
lacquer, and that is the fire test." So saying he carelessly lit a match
and allowed it to play all over the gold lacquer tray; then quietly and
without any demonstration he handed it to the rich man and begged him to
observe that it was not harmed in any way, taking it for granted that
he, the rich man, naturally knew of the fire test.
The big-pocket man puckered his fat brow critically--he really knew
nothing about it--and rubbed his greasy palm over the surface of the
lacquer. The difference between the hands of the two men was a
characteristic study--one big and flabby, the other slim and sinuous
with fingers that almost turned back in their energy. After examining
the tray closely the visitor admitted that it was in truth untouched.
The master exactor smiled, and, like the rogue he was, never referred to
it again. The two rich men went away with their guide and visited half
a dozen other stores in Tokio, trying the fire test on all the gold
lacquer they could find, with disastrous consequences.
[Illustration: UMBRELLAS AND COMMERCE]
They had to pay for damages wherever they went, and wherever they went
the merchants were indignant, for real gold lacquer, as every one knows,
will not stand such treatment unless it happens to be a flat tray. But
the rich men only chuckled at their superior knowledge and paid the
damages without a murmur. Then they went back to the store of the evil
prompter and did exactly as he expected they would do; they bought ten
thousand pounds' worth of gold lacquer, all of which was "berry number
one imitation gold lacquer," as Inchie remarked. "Well, but, Inchie, I
couldn't treat people like that." I told the little man "I shouldn't
know how." "But I will show you how to sell," quoth Inchie: "I show you
how to sell two-cent blue porcelain pot in your store for two hundred
dollars to big-pockety man"; whereupon Inchie proceeded to give me a
lesson in the art of selling. He first brought out a nest of six lacquer
boxes that fitted one into the other; then he held up the two-cent
porcelain pot,--and the way he handled it made it already begin to
appear valuable in my eyes. I truly believe that Inchie could stroke out
a piece of newspaper and make it seem as rare as a bank-note. Then this
little genius wrapped the worthless blue porcelain in yellow silk, and
placed it in the smallest lacquer box, which with its lid he secured
inside a larger box, and so on until the entire six boxes and their lids
encased his gem. Placing it upon the table, he began to explain how I
should sell it, and in order to describe the subtlety of the transaction
I must give it in Inchie's own words: "Big-pockety man come your store
in England and he say, 'Mr. Menpes, you bought number one curio in
Japan?' You say, 'No buy curio in Japan,' but you talk much to him of
all the beautiful things you see in Japan. After a time you look on the
ground and think--much you show you think. Big-pockety man look at you
and he no talk. You look up quick and you say, 'Oh, number one curio I
buy Japan, I remember!' He say, 'Please show me curio.' 'Never I show
curio,' you tell him. 'I buy number one curio, but I no want to show.'
Then you talk to him about Japan, all the streets and the theatres you
see in Japan; but all the time he talk of curio--'I ber-ry much want to
see,' he say. You say, 'You friend, you number one friend? Very well, I
show.'" After having thus given way you must go upstairs and look for
the curio, and--Inchie laid a stress upon this last statement--"you must
be a long time finding it. When you come back you place the large
lacquer box containing the five smaller boxes and the Buddha's eye--the
Holy of Holies--upon the table, and much you begin to talk about Japan,
berry like American lady talk I think; you no talk to him then about
porcelain. After much talk about beautiful blossom you take out one box;
then you talk more and take out another box--gentleman he ber-ry much
want to see. When you come to final piecee box he berry much excited,
and when you take out the porcelain and yellow silk you berry berry
quiet--no artistic to talk now. Then you drop the corners of the silk
and look at the porcelain. You no talk, big-pockety man no talk; he no
understand this--berry funny. Somebody must talk, all quiet; you rest
long time no talk, and big-pockety man say, 'Berry much number one curio
that I think--how much you sell?' You say, 'I no sell. Berry much money
that costee me Japan, much ricksha, much hotel. Number one Chinese
porcelain that. Number one glaze. I no sell,'" And to cut the story
short I must explain that "the big-pockety man"--that is the
millionaire--is by this time in a perfect fever to possess my priceless
blue porcelain, and, Inchie says, here I must weaken, and after asking
him if he is "daimio gentleman number one," I must allow him to buy my
two-cent vase for two hundred dollars.
In giving me this important lesson in the art of selling, Inchie
considered that he had shown me the truest mark of friendship, and that
he had given me the most valuable present in his power, and far more
useful than any jewel could be.
Towards the end of the work, when the house was nearly completed, and I
had entertained mentally almost every friend I knew, and had missed
nothing from the door-mat to the red lacquer soup-bowls on the
dining-room table, I suddenly remembered the door-knocker. There was no
door-knocker! I immediately interviewed Inchie and asked him to help me
to design a door-knocker. Seeing that the only doors they have in Japan
are sliding ones made of tissue paper, it was some time before Inchie
could comprehend my meaning. "I no understand why you want to knock at
the door. Very funny that!" he said. I explained that in England it was
necessary to have very strong doors which one could not leave open lest
people should come in and steal. He blinked his little eyes and looked
up at me intelligently: "I understand!" he exclaimed, "berry number one
bad Chinaman come and steal." "No," I said, "not Chinaman, but
Englishman." "I no understand," he repeated. After much pantomime and
talk I at last conveyed to him a fairly good idea of what was needed in
the way of a door-knocker, and sent him home to work out some suitable
design. Three days after he came back carrying under his arm a huge roll
of drawings, which he proceeded to unfold on the floor. A glance was
enough to show me that the little fellow had not got hold of the kind of
door-knocker I required, and I watched him with a limp and hopeless
feeling. "Go on, Inchie: explain it," I said. He was in very good
condition this morning--pleased with himself and the world in general,
and more especially with his door-knocker design. Drawing in his breath
with a little satisfied hiss, he began: "Now, you see, you first put on
the door a large chrysanthemum in bronze," and Inchie went through the
performance in pantomime. "In the centre of this chrysanthemum a rod of
steel must be fixed five inches in length. Suspended from the rod of
steel must be a silk cord about five inches in length, and attached to
the cord a marble about the size of a child's playing marble. Underneath
the large chrysanthemum, and in line with the marble, should be placed
another chrysanthemum with a miniature gong in the centre three-quarters
of an inch in diameter." "Wait a bit, Inchie," I cried, for this
description was too much for me--I must digest it more slowly. I
pictured to myself the strings of children that pass and repass my house
in Cadogan Gardens on their way to and from school, and their feelings
concerning this small metal ball waving in the soft wind of a summer's
afternoon on its apple-green cord. It would be too gorgeous an
attraction by far! No child could have the heart to destroy so rare a
thing at once, it would be far too great a joy; they would save it at
least until their return journey from school before even touching it.
Seeing that the small man was becoming a little offended, I said, "Fire
away, Inchie,--what next?" "Well, when you come home after dinner, you
take the marble and hold it five inches from the gong. You shut one eye
and take aim; then you let go, and he goes ping! ping! and gentleman he
come and open the door." "No, he doesn't, Inchie," I shouted: "you're
wrong there--the gentleman doesn't open the door." "I no understand,"
said little Inchie, his face falling,--"why he no open the door?"
"Because," I explained, "when you come home late at night after dinner
you must have very sure habits of taking aim in order to strike that
miniature gong three-quarters of an inch in diameter." Inchie looked up
at me with bright pathetic little eyes, and said, "Berry fine daimio
door-knocker this, and it is not difficult for you to strike. I no
understand!" Then I took him on one side, not wanting to hurt his
feelings, and explained to him how almost impossible it would be for a
man coming home after dinner, having walked hurriedly and all that, to
take aim at his miniature gong. "You told me you could shoot a rifle,"
was Inchie's reply. After that there was no more to be said, for I
realised that one must necessarily be a rifle shot before you could get
home at nights.
[Illustration: PLAYFELLOWS]
The last I ever saw of poor little Inchie was when he came on board the
P. and O. steamer at Yokohama to see me off on my journey to England.
The authorities would not allow him to lunch with me in the saloon, and
the poor little fellow, who was far more refined and certainly had far
more intelligence than any one on board, captain and officers included,
was compelled to eat his luncheon standing up in the steward's pantry,
which hurt his feelings terribly. The only figure that I seemed to see
in the mist that enwrapped Yokohama wharf was poor little Inchie
standing there in his blue kimono and quaint bowler hat, watching me
with eager blinking eyes that had a suspicion of moisture about them,
and lips that twitched slightly; and the last thing I heard was, "I
think when you go to England you send me berry many letters--often you
send me." And I felt as the steamer moved away that I had lost a good
and a true friend.
When the decorations for my house arrived in London, the next and all
important question to be considered was how to put them up. Everything
was finished and ready to fix in its place without nails, and the only
thing left to be completed by the British workmen was the slight wooden
beams and square framework in which the carved panels were to be fixed.
I secured five or six good workmen, and literally taught them how to
handle this material, but it took them two years to put up what my
Japanese craftsmen had produced in one year. It was all straightforward
clean design, and there was no artistic effort needed for it; but the
obstacle was that they always struggled to make the woodwork a little
thicker than necessary. Their inclinations were always to strengthen
things, and it took a great deal of perseverance and patience to uproot
their fixed ideas. Then I had a great deal of trouble with the painters.
At first they almost refused to put distemper on my walls. Strings upon
strings of painters I was compelled to dismiss because they would
persist in putting what they called "body" into the paint. Sometimes
they would slip it in behind my back; but I always detected it and
dismissed the men on the instant. It was the only way. "Well, I've been
in the trade for thirty years and I've always used body"--they all said
that, and every workman I have ever employed, or is yet to be employed,
always says the same. No matter how young or how old they may be, they
have always been in the trade for thirty years. One painter I educated
sufficiently to allow of him going so far against his principles as to
leave out "body," but when I ordered him to mix oil and water by beating
them together in a tub he declined and left. The only men whom I was
able to persuade to do this for me were my foreman and one of the
carpenters. The foreman was a very intelligent little man, whom I had
educated to such an extent that his views of life and of workmen in
general were entirely changed. He sneered at them, and was altogether so
won over to my ideas that I am afraid I totally destroyed him for any
other work. The painter, on the other hand, had no intelligence at all,
but was equally devoted, and I feel quite sure that those two poor
operatives are drifting about now doing anything but their respective
trades of carpentry and painting. They undertook the beating of the oil
and water very energetically, and kept it up for days, relieved
occasionally by the caretaker. Eventually the oil did mix, and the
experiment was a great success. Towards the end of their training these
men became so accustomed to looking at things, if not feeling them, from
the decorative standpoint, that it was no unusual occurrence to overhear
such remarks as the following. The foreman would say to his pal as he
caught sight of the reflection of his grimy face in a mirror: "I say,
Bill, my flesh tone looks well against this lemon yellow, don't it?" or
"I suppose I must start and wash off this toney"--toney meaning dirt,
but to call it dirt would be to their enlightened minds vulgar in the
extreme. Everything with them was "tone."
A few days before they left for good I overheard a conversation between
Bill and his mate, who had begun to feel the hopelessness of attempting
work of a different nature. "What shall we do, Bill, when this blooming
job's over?" said the foreman. "I suppose we shall go a-'opping!"
replied Bill. It was then just about the hopping season.
CHARACTERISTICS
CHAPTER XI
CHARACTERISTICS
Perhaps one of the most admirable features in the character of the
Japanese is their great power of self-control. The superficial observer
on his first visit to Japan, because of this very quality of theirs, is
at first liable to imagine that the Japanese have no emotion. This is a
mistake. I have lived with them; I know them through and through; and I
know that they are a people of great emotions, emotions that are perhaps
all the deeper and stronger because they are unexpressed. Self-control
is almost a religion with the Japanese. In their opinion it is wrong and
selfish to the last degree to inflict one's sorrows and one's cares upon
other people. The world is sad enough, they argue, without being made
sadder by the petty emotions of one's neighbour: so the people of Japan
all contrive to present a gay and happy appearance to the outside world.
You may express your feelings in the solitude of your own room, and
there is no doubt that the Japanese suffer terribly among themselves,
although a stranger, and especially a European, will never detect a
trace of it.
I once went to call, with a resident of Japan, on an old Japanese lady,
to condole with her on the loss of her husband and her only son, who had
both been swept away, with thousands of others, in a great tidal wave
only a few days previously. As we neared the house we saw, through the
partially-opened sliding door, the old woman rocking herself to and fro
in an agony of sorrow, literally contending with emotion, and suffering
as I have never seen a human being suffer before. I was terribly
shocked, and we naturally hesitated for some time before announcing
ourselves; but by the time the mourner appeared at the door to greet us,
she was all smiles. It was difficult to believe that she was the same
woman. Her face shone with radiant happiness, and all traces of sorrow
had disappeared. In the course of the conversation she did not avoid the
sore subject, but rather chose it, and talked of the death of her
husband and her son with a smiling face and an expression by which one
might very pardonably have judged that she had no feelings whatever.
This was self-control indeed, and it is only in Japan that one
encounters such striking illustrations of superb pluck and endurance.
[Illustration: YOUTH AND AGE]
In my opinion, this great self-control is an evidence of the very high
standard of civilisation of the Japanese. If one is at all observant and
really in sympathy with the people, one is continually catching glimpses
of their real natures and instances of their magnificent self-command.
Once I was talking to a little Japanese merchant, along with some
friends whom I had taken round to his store to buy curios. I had made
quite a friend of this man, and knew him well. We were all chaffing him
about getting married, and one of my friends said to him, "Well, why
don't you get married? But perhaps you have already got a wife!" The
little man looked up quickly with a smile on his face, and said--"Me
married already; me wife die two years past; two children die two years
past; all die, I think." The voice was perfectly steady, and the face
smiling, as he uttered this amazingly sad statement; but some one
chanced to look up and saw two great tears standing in his little
monkey-like eyes. Of course he was "no class," and, not being an actual
workman, but only a merchant, he was considered to be of rather a low
grade. Still, for this slight show of emotion, he had utterly disgraced
himself in his own eyes, and would afterwards, no doubt, atone for it by
torturing himself in private.
I saw many remarkable instances of the self-control of the Japanese
people when I visited the scenes of desolation caused from that great
tidal wave which destroyed nearly three thousand people. Village after
village I visited, some of them with only three or four living
inhabitants left; but in no case, with men, women, or children, did I
see the slightest trace of emotion. Here and there, indeed, you passed a
woman huddled up in a corner muttering and screaming, but only because
her mind had become unhinged by the loss of her home, or probably
village, and every relation she possessed. No Japanese in his senses
would amid the same circumstances be guilty of so much as a murmur or a
tear.
The Japanese are a brave people--not only the men, but the women too. In
fact, the women more especially are brave. Many women destroyed
themselves during the China-Japanese war, because their husbands had
been killed in battle. There was one Japanese woman in Tokio who felt so
deeply the disgrace placed upon her country by the attempt on the life
of the present Emperor of Russia some years ago by a common coolie, that
she committed suicide. She felt that this great European prince had
visited her country as a guest, and that before Japan could raise its
head once more the nation must make some great sacrifice. Day after day
she visited the Legation, and begged to be allowed admission to some of
the high officials--in vain: they were too busy to see her. At last,
after some weeks of fruitless effort, she went home in despair and
killed herself, leaving a pathetic little letter to the Minister stating
that she hoped that the sacrifice of her life might in some way help to
cleanse her country from its disgrace.
[Illustration: LOOKERS-ON]
Patriotism is a strong trait in the character of the Japanese; but
perhaps their imagination and their love of Nature are even stronger,
and at all events will cause them to bound forward and become a
first-rate power. This universal force of the imagination is a quality
that no other nation possesses, and it is a quality that will cause her,
not so very many years hence, to dominate the world. All the Japanese
possess imagination, from the highest to the lowest; it is shown in
every action and detail of their daily life. There is no one of them,
even to the poorest coolie, who has not some little collection of
exquisite works of the art that he loves. Your jinricksha man, if you
were ever allowed the privilege of visiting his house, would in all
probability be able to show you one or two choice specimens, either in
china or in bronze, of his household gods. And so strongly is the love
of Nature impressed within him that he cannot pass a beautiful scene--a
hillside of blossom, or a sunset--without stopping his ricksha to allow
you also the privilege of enjoying it. Often when taking a drive in the
country he will suddenly stop in front of some delightful scene, put
down your ricksha, and, taking from his kimono sleeve a little roll of
rice, wrapped in a dainty bamboo leaf, will sit down and begin to eat it
with his chopsticks, continuing to gaze at the scene, every now and then
looking up at you for sympathy. If you are an artist, and will look at
the scene intelligently and appreciatively, this little ricksha man will
be your slave for life and will do anything for you.
Men are esteemed in Japan in proportion to their artistic capabilities,
and not for their banking accounts. It is in this quality of imagination
that we Britishers are deficient. Our lack of imagination will be the
cause of the decline of our Empire, if it does decline.
Then, the Japanese are a polite people. If you give a present to some
little child, a mite strapped to the back of a sister that is scarcely
bigger than itself, you are almost sure to find that little child
waiting for you on your return to your hotel with some small trifle to
offer you; and this little one will bow to you from its rather awkward
position with all the grace imaginable. Two coolies sweeping the roads,
when meeting for the first time in the day, will lay down their brooms
and salute each other before passing on their way to work.
I have had many experiences, when sketching the streets of Japan, of the
people's politeness. A policeman becoming interested in my work would
help to keep clear a space in the road, and never dream of overlooking
my work or of embarrassing me in any way. In one street of a village he
actually had the traffic turned down another way, so as not to interfere
with my sketching. Fancy a policeman in England diverting the traffic
simply because an artist wanted to sketch a meat shop!
One of the most remarkable illustrations of the native politeness that I
have ever witnessed was in Tokio. A man pulling along a cart loaded high
up with boughs of trees chanced to catch the roof of a coolie's house in
one of his pieces of timber, tearing away a large portion of it (for a
roof is a very slim affair in Japan). The owner of the house rushed out
thoroughly upset, and began to expostulate, and to explain how very
distressing it was to have one's roof torn off in this manner. No doubt
if he had been a Britisher he would have used quaint language; but there
are no "swear words" in the Japanese language--they are too polite a
people. The abused one stood calmly, with arms folded, listening to the
harangue, and saying nothing. Only, when the enraged man had finished,
he pointed to the towel which in his haste the coolie had forgotten to
take off his head. At once the coolie realised the enormity of his
offence. Both hands flew to the towel, and tore it off in confusion, the
coolie bowing to the ground and offering humble apologies for having
presumed to appear without uncovering his head. For in Japan one must
always uncover, whether to a sweep or to a Mikado. The two parted the
best of friends. One had been impolite enough to forget to uncover; the
other had torn away a roof. The rudeness of the one balanced the injury
of the other. Thus are offences weighed in Japan.
THE END
_The illustrations in this impression were engraved and printed by the
Carl Hentschel Colourtype Process. The letterpress was printed by
Messrs. R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh._
[Illustration]
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