Part 10

Most people are agreed, I think, upon the thoroughness of workmanship, but sobriety of taste is a more disputed point. We are very fond of talking of the “gorgeous colouring of the East,” and using terms like “barbaric splendour” and “oriental luxury.” These terms may have had some truth as applied to the art of India, but because Japan is also situated in the East, they do not necessarily apply to her. We do not sufficiently realise over here that there is considerably more difference between China and Japan, let alone India and Japan, than there is between any two European countries whatsoever, be they Greeks or Dutch, or what you will; that they are not of the same race, nor do they belong to the same linguistic family. Therefore, to transfer an adjective applicable to India to Japan, just because both are Oriental, is like applying an adjective suitable to the Turks or the Laps to the English, on the ground that both are European. This is, I think, one source of error; the others are more subtle. There is first of all the climate. Now a colour, any colour, under a bright blue sky in a dazzling yellow sunshine, will always look more subdued than that same colour under a grey sky and in a cloudy atmosphere. This is simply an effect of contrast. Therefore, Japanese colouring must be judged as it is seen in Japan, not as it may look when transferred to England. And, again, a study of the actual colour itself will show that the Japanese have learnt how to make the very brightest colours soft in tone. This fact has been well rubbed into me lately, for I have tried both in Paris and in London to match certain Japanese stuffs, or at least to find something in the same note of colour which would go with them. It was quite impossible. All our soft colours, the so-called artistic shades, are too dull in tone, while none of our bright ones are soft enough; by the side of the Japanese colours they look simply crude. These are all quite material reasons, objective facts, but there is another which only those who have stood and looked at the glorious splendour of a Japanese temple such as Nikkō or Shiba, where the whole rainbow is resplendent in carved wood and gilded lacquer, and that is their matchless power of combination and of background. The temples of Nikkō or Shiba are both built in the midst of a wood; the dark, deep, sober forms of the giant pine-trees stand all around. This is the setting; then between each gorgeous gateway comes a still clear space of court, paved with quiet grey pebbles; and when the glory culminates in the temple’s interior the building is of unstained, unpainted wood, soft as the dust-brown carpet of the beech-leaves when the sun’s rays are level. But the temples, supreme in their way among all the products of Japanese art, are exceptional. The average Japanese room is colourless, luminous, but practically colourless. The floor is of the palest yellow matting, the one or two solid walls of the room are washed in the softest of bark browns, the wood of the _tokonoma_ is dark and polished, and the other walls are _shōji_, that is, composed entirely of small panes of rice-paper. Through this paper the sunlight comes luminous but colourless. To sit in that room is like living in the heart of the plum-blossom, or within the petals of a warm white rose.

In their dress the Japanese are equally subdued: the men wear mostly grey or dust-coloured silks, the women soft mauves, blues and greys. It is only the children who are dressed in bright colours and gay patterns. All the working classes, both men and women, wear a dark indigo blue. The Japanese wear no jewellery. Precious stones they have, exquisite mauve and purple amethysts, crystals of blood-red splendour or soft and milky as flushing pearl. And the rich man buys these, not to wear, but to look at, as works of art, as exquisite natural objects. He never hangs them round his own neck, or enmeshes his womankind in them. The Japanese are, I believe, the only nation on the earth who know and value precious stones, and yet wear no jewellery. Might not this be considered convincing evidence of their essential sobriety of taste? Even the landscape, though supremely beautiful and sunny, is never flaunting. There are too many sober green pine-trees, and pale, bewitching bamboos for that. I have never seen anywhere in Japan, in the poorest house, in the cheapest shop, anything that was tawdry or even “loud,” except in that part of porcelain and other factories which supply goods, mostly from “foreign” patterns, for the European market.

In this enumeration of the characteristics of Japanese art, you will perhaps wonder why I have omitted the very popular one of their love of the little, the small, the minute. I have left it out simply because I do not believe it exists as such. Many writers have exclaimed in paragraphs sprinkled with interjections on this passion for the little which they say the Japanese possess; and they have apparently seen in it nothing but a blind unreasoning prejudice for the something small as opposed to the something great. I think this opinion is mostly due to the “little knowledge” of the tourist or the restricted knowledge of the specialist. It leaves also entirely unexplained and inexplicable the _Dai Butsu_ of Kamakura, a bronze statue of Buddha, fifty feet high and of the most exquisite workmanship; the Buddhas of Kyoto and of Nara; the big bronze bell of Kyoto, the largest hanging bell in the world, besides that at Chion-in, the second largest, and at Nara, the third; the _Hongwanji_ at Kyoto, the walls of the castle at Osaka--and the battle of Mukden. A wider acquaintance with the Japanese people and the realities of their daily life will show, I think, that this so-called love of the little is really a highly cultivated and acute sense of proportion, where it is not purely ethical.

The Japanese beer-glass, you will remember, was the size of a doll’s tumbler. “Why?” “Oh, because they have a passion for little things” is certainly the easiest and most obvious answer. But follow that glass to its home on its Japanese dinner tray, in its Japanese room, and you will see that its littleness is in exact proportion to the tray and the room. Nor are the rooms so small, but because we insist on bringing our encumbering “foreign” ideas into them. There is no furniture in a Japanese room, no furniture of any kind whatsoever. Two kneeling-cushions and a round box, a brazier, are the only possible objects which could come under that heading, therefore the whole space within the four walls of a room is space for movement. If a measurement were taken of the actual feet of free space in many a modern European drawing-room, I believe that it would be found to be something _less_ than that in the “tiny” Japanese apartment.

Another thing to be borne in mind is that life in Japan is lived, not above the floor on chairs, but on the floor itself. Try living on the floor and you will find the whole horizon of a room opening out in the most astonishing way. What we call a stool, for instance, represents the same level as a table. The actual difference in the height of the eyes sitting on one’s heels on a Japanese floor and on a chair is really between two and three feet, while it must also be remembered that Japanese eyes, belonging as they do to a body shorter on the average than our own, come still nearer to the ground.

Thus a careful examination of the things which are small in Japan, which they have deliberately chosen to make small, copied smaller than the foreign originals, will show, I think, that it is due to their acute sense of fitness and proportion. There is also another reason, which is not artistic but ethical.

The Japanese are a sober and abstemious race, a race of high culture and of ancient civilisation. When we were running about clad in the inadequate skin, gorging off half-raw oxen, and drunken with seven-day feasts of mead, they lived already under an ordered and an organised government with most, if not all, of the essentials of civilisation. And after all, is not one of the hall-marks of real civilisation the learning to take “a little” instead of “a lot,” in extracting from each atom the whole of its use, enjoyment and pleasure? Children and savages are always wasteful. We do not now try to eat whole oxen or drink mead for seven days, we have learnt to get as much if not more pleasure out of one glass of wine and one slice of beef, and the reason is that we are slowly learning _not_ to gulp. If you watch the working man drink his beer, or the working woman her tea, you will see that they usually gulp it down in big draughts, imagining, I suppose, that it is sheer quantity which produces flavour. They have not yet learnt that profound ethical truth, expressed by the old epicure when he said approvingly of some young man that he “had already learned to sip his wine and not to gulp it.” The Japanese have learnt to sip. Their wine-glasses, which are china bowls, hold perhaps two tablespoonfuls, their tea-cups three, their pipes just three fleeting whiffs. Drunkenness is exceedingly rare; it does exist, but with a glass holding two tablespoonfuls there is time for reflection. It is also more economical than the foreign variety, the actual quantity required to produce intoxication when taken in small doses being, I believe, considerably less.

There is always another side to a people’s art, a side which is frequently overlooked, and that is the art, not in the object, but in the workman. A people’s art will show itself, not only in the actual object produced, but in the life of the producer and in the conditions of production.

In the cloisonné works of Nagoya, an industrial centre of a quarter of a million of inhabitants, the workers sat in peace and solitude, not a sound of the busy streets penetrated to the long series of matted rooms where they worked. Each room and each workman looked towards a quiet garden, cool with running water, and still with the deep mystery of the pines. In the modern porcelain factory, dedicated to the production of goods for the “foreign” market, the long white room looked out through open doors upon the waving rice-fields, and each potter’s wheel was turned to see the branch of purple iris standing in its yellow vase. There is a cotton factory in Japan which is a positive addition to the beauty of the landscape.

Nor is it only the big and wealthy workmen who produce good art. Some of the most beautiful silver enamel-ware in Tokyo was made by a little man who owned the smallest and poorest of general shops, where halfpenny tooth brushes and farthing sheets of paper formed the richest portions of his stock. All this beautiful silver enamel-work was done in the back parlour, and at no time could he have had more than ten _yen_ (£1) worth of such goods in hand. Yet he was an artist to the tips of his fingers, and the sheen and colour of his enamelled silver lotus flowers were a joy to the beholder.

In Nikkō there was a carpenter who made wooden trays for the inhabitants. His stall, the merest shanty, was the littlest imaginable, yet he carved me a wooden box with a design in chrysanthemums which was skilled artistic work, and even his cheap wooden trays had the stamp of art. He did them with a penknife, and the whole surface of the tray was grooved in shallow curving lines.

And the worker himself? If there is art in the product and in the conditions of production, what of the producer? Is there art in his life and his tastes? Is there art in the life of the labourer, of the coolie and the _’ricksha_ man? Is there art in the daily life of the common people as well as in the things they use?

A man’s tastes are known by his pleasures. When the common people of Tokyo make “Bank Holiday” they go to see a handful of pink cherry-blossoms against the blue of an April sky. They walk politely, looking up at the trees, and though the crowd is thick, endless, nobody pushes or fights or swears. No special posse of policemen is turned out to keep order. Down the long two-mile avenue of cherry-trees at Mukojima the crowd wanders amiably, and the municipality of Tokyo has never thought to invent a single penalty for the destruction of young trees and shrubs. The world stares contentedly, drinks tea, and goes home again. And this is considered to be the rowdiest crowd at the most popular resort on the favourite “Bank Holiday” of the year.

The blossoming of all the other flowers, plum, peach, azalea, peony, wistaria, iris, lotus, convolvulus, maple, chrysanthemum, are equally visited, and advertised daily in the newspapers. The people of Japan take few holidays, but those they do take are almost always at the time of the flower festivals.

When they can afford something more expensive they go to the “Royal Academy,” which opens its doors twice in the year for the aristocratic sum of 3 _sen_ (¾_d._) _gheta_ (wooden clogs) and umbrellas left outside, 5 _rin_ (10 _rin_ make ¼_d._). The other picture exhibitions, not having the status of the Tokyo “Royal Academy,” are more moderate, averaging 1 to 2 _sen_ for admission, and _gheta_, free. The entrance to the exhibitions of bronze, lacquer, porcelain and other arts is the same. Even on the basis of Japanese incomes, where a General earns £300 a year, the Headmaster of a Public School £160 and a coolie 6_d._ a day, the charges are exceedingly moderate. And the people, the real working people, go. I should be curious to find out how many working men have paid at the turnstiles of Burlington House.

Besides art exhibitions, Japanese workmen go to the theatre, but this is a taste they share with many other nations; what is all their own is their love of pilgrimages, not only to temples of religious repute, but to places of celebrated beauty. Fujiyama is yearly ascended by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Here religion and beauty are mingled. For the great mountain is sacred. So is almost every spot in Japan that is particularly beautiful. As one journeys through the country, the traveller will always find that the most beautiful point of view, the grandest scene, the loveliest nook, has a temple, or at least a wayside shrine, set up by the common people and tended by them. There never was a nation since the days of Ancient Greece who so entirely believed that beauty is sacred, or who so entirely disbelieved that art can be divorced from ethics. They have the love of beauty innate and inalienable. A man I knew was once crossing Tokyo in a _’ricksha_; he was a prosperous, commercial being with a vast contempt for the “heathen.” It was late afternoon. His _kurumaya_, after looking round at him several times, suddenly stopped short, and waving his hand to the west said respectfully but firmly:

“Honourably please to observe the unusual glory of the sunset.”

“And I told him to jolly well get on,” was the end of the story as I heard it.

A favourite pastime of the _’ricksha_ men on the cab-stands as they wait for a fare is to draw in the dust of the roadway one against the other. If sand has been spilled from a cart anywhere within reach the whole _’ricksha_ stand migrates and has the happiest time. I have seen really good outlines of Fujiyama and of flying birds, or blossoming flowers, all on the roadways by the _’ricksha_ stands. And whatever their faults, they at least had life, for the _’ricksha_ man has knowledge, knowledge based on intelligent observation and on the inherited training of his race.

In the Japanese language there is a word, _edaburi_, which means “the formation or the arrangement of the branches of a tree.” Merely to possess such a word shows the long training in art and observation which the nation must have undergone. But this word is not a technical term used only by artists and the cultured classes; it is a living, breathing expression, part of the vocabulary of every Japanese, even the Board School educated. _Kurumaya_ discuss _edaburi_ in the streets of Tokyo. Railway porters at wayside stations argue the matter with the stationmaster. Every peasant knows, understands, and talks of the matter as though he had brought himself up on long courses of Ruskin. It has often been a subject of great regret to me that Ruskin did not know the Japanese, for in them he would have found the living proof of so much of his teaching.

But the people of Japan not only discuss _edaburi_, they write poetry. There is an exceedingly simple form of poetry called _hokku_. It consists of only three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and is written in the language of daily life. The _hokku_ was invented by a man called Bashō, for the definite ethical purpose of cultivating the taste and improving the morals of the people. He believed in the composition of poetry as an ethical force, and he wished to bring it from the home of the educated into the lives of the poor. He succeeded. Not because the _hokku_ is a so much easier form of poetry than the English couplet, but because the people have taste, and art, and civilisation in the very cells of their brains. Every one writes poetry, even the typical _jinricksha_ man, who is to the Japanese what the _charbonnier_ is to the French or the coster to us. When the _kurumaya_ and his wife go to visit their relations the whole party amuses itself by composing these tiny poems. On all occasions of joy and grief, on birth, death and marriage, at the time of each flower festival, or of any other happening, the people compose poetry. Literary composition has always been inculcated as the best medicine for sorrow, and as such is practised daily.

This is a little poem taken from the diary of a woman who died in Tokyo a year or two ago. She lived with her husband, a doorkeeper, on an income of £1 a month, and she was very delicate. She bore him three children, who all died shortly after birth; then the poor mother died herself. Her diary came into the possession of Lafcadio Hearn, who translated it under the title of “A Woman’s Tragedy.” This poem was composed on the death of the third baby and runs:

“Tanoshimi mo Samété haka nashi. Haru no yumé.”

“All my delight has perished, and hopeless I remain. It was a dream, a dream of spring.”

Here is another poem which is more typically Japanese. It was composed by the same woman after the death of her second baby, and runs:

“Sami daré ya Shimerigachi naru Sodé no tamoto wo.”

“Oh, the month of rain; all things have become damp; the ends of my sleeve are wet.”

Which being interpreted is: “Oh! the time of grief. All things now seem sad. The sleeves of my robe are moist with tears.”[1]

[1] The long sleeve of a Japanese _kimono_ is always held before the face to hide emotion.

It is this very allusiveness, this saying of something simple and commonplace, and hiding behind it a whole meaning of intense emotion, which makes this poem so typically Japanese, for Japanese art is always suggestive, it always needs the observer to bring his share of thought and mind to its interpretation.

It is interesting to speculate how much the two most universally recognised characteristics of the Japanese, politeness and cleanliness, owe to their sense of art. If one looks into the psychology of the race, one sees, of course, that this national trait of exquisite politeness was built up, or at least assisted, in many ways. There was that stern training of the _samurai_ which taught eternal, never-ending self-control. There is the whole Buddhistic teaching, which is one long gospel of unselfishness and kindness. But other nations have had training in self-control, we ourselves among the number--think for a moment of the Puritans and our public schools. And other religions preach kindness and unselfishness, our own again, and yet there is no other nation so widely recognised, even by the snappiest of tourists who ever wrote his “memoirs,” as universally polite from the Emperor to the coolie in the streets. It is a hypothesis which I put forward with some hesitation, because the origins of national psychology are not for the amateur, but I do think that a certain stress is to be laid upon this innate and instinctive, but much cultivated sense of art. Has not the politeness something to do with that love of a beautiful outline, that desire for a perfect curve in the relations between man and man as well as between man’s eye and his drawing? Is not, in fact, a rude action a something inartistic in the social whole, a blot of crude colour that jars?

The whole of the _cha-no-yu_, or tea ceremony, one of the few Japanese things of which Europeans have heard more or less vaguely, is an illustration in point. The tea ceremony, divested of its subsidiary and attendant growths, is in essence nothing more than the proper making and the proper drinking of a simple cup of tea. This, in the course of centuries, has been elaborated into an imposing and very complicated ceremonial. Nowadays the _cha-no-yu_ is regarded mainly as a useful reservoir of etiquette and politeness, and is taught as such. But the whole idea on which it rests is that for every given action there is always one, and only one, right and proper attitude, that is to say, the most graceful. So that the curve of every finger in the mere passing of a tea-cup is the result of careful thought and long experience. Everything has to be considered, the room, the person, the relation of the body to the arm, of the arm to the hand, of the hand to the tea-cup, the position of the person serving, and of the person served, the place of the tea-cups, of the teapot, and the tea-kettle; all have been taken into consideration by the tea ceremonialists, and the proper, the most graceful attitude carefully evolved.

That you may not think politeness a matter of social caste in Japan, I may say that the _kurumaya_ when they run into one another at the corners, the coolies hauling carts when they collide, bow profoundly and beg one another’s pardon.

And the exquisite cleanliness? Some one once defined dirt as “matter out of place.” Is not much of art just the putting of things in their right places, in their best and most appropriate and consequently their most beautiful place; in the putting of a thing in such a place that you feel it never could have been otherwise. As the child said when lost in admiration of his birthday cake, “It’s so beautiful I think God must have made it.” It is this cleanliness, this neatness, which the Japanese possess, a neatness which has passed beyond mere precision, passed on into its essence--grace.