Part 8

On the edge of the growing rice-fields the porcelain factory lies. Its doors are open to the sun; and in the corner of the low, white room, where the workmen sit cross-legged like Buddhas, each beside his potter’s wheel, a yellow vase of purple iris stands.

The room is still and fresh and clean. The whirr of the turning wheel is soft as the drowsing of a bee. There is no hurry as there is no idleness. And each worker, as he moulds his clay, looks towards the purple iris in the yellow vase.

The cloisonné works are built in the heart of the city, in the middle of a busy street, where blue-clad coolies continually load and unload the wide coster-barrows which are the waggons of Japan. The hum of working life is in the air, and the wide road which stretches without division of pavement across from side to side, is thronged. Business men in grey _kimono_ and foreign hats go out and in; the loaded barrows drawn by the blue-clad coolies pass up and down; fast-running _kurumaya_ steer in and out among the foot-passengers and the traffic. And the occasional collision is followed by mutual bows and polite _Gomen nasai_ (“I beg your honourable pardon”), on the part of either coolie or _kurumaya_.

Nagoya factories and cotton mills are hard at work.

The gateway of the cloisonné works leads down a wooden passage into a tiny court, a garden set round with the workshops of the factory. And such a garden. It is not larger than the front lawn of a suburban villa, but the skill of a Japanese gardener has planted a whole mountain side with forests of pine and bamboo, has spanned with an arching bridge the stone-grey stream at the mountain’s foot. From inside the tiny matted rooms, no bigger than bathing-boxes, which shut in three sides of the garden, the illusion is complete. And the shade and coolness of the real trees and water, of the imaginary forest and stream, brings a sense of calmness and repose, of quiet peace and beauty, to all the many workers of the factory. It is a living landscape growing unspoiled in the heart of a workshop in the centre of a manufacturing city.

Each on his mat in the clean, bare, matted rooms the workmen sit, the rice-paper _shōji_ pushed open to the mountain stream, and the forest of pine and bamboo. In the first room sit workers outlining the design on the bare metal vase with metal wires, silver wires on silver vases, copper wires on copper vases. And each design is different, and many of the men are old. In the second room the bare metal vases are getting a coat of coloured paste, and now the design stands out rough as a cave-man’s drawing. Here the workers are younger, while boys fill in the body of the vase. In the third and fourth rooms the matted floor at the back is replaced by a large hearthstone, and a round earthen oven; in this the vases are baked, passed back to the men and boys to recoat with the coloured paste, and then rebaked, recoated and rebaked many times, until at last the vase is handed over to the workers in the last rooms. It has lost all trace of design by now; the metal wires are no longer visible; the colours have bubbled over in all directions, the vase is an unmeaning mosaic of a thousand shades. Then the workmen, sitting on their heels on the kneeling-cushions in their clean, bare, matted rooms, tiny as bathing-boxes, polish, polish, polish, sometimes for a whole year, until the worker’s hand wears down the hard smooth surface and the design shows through clean and true once more. The workmen here are grey and old.

But the oldest of all sat by himself in a little room just opposite the arching bridge which crossed the mountain stream. He wore a pair of quaint horn spectacles, and his face was the face of an Eastern sage. He sat with his tools before him fixing silver wires on to a silver vase, with a certainty and a rapidity beyond his fellows; and all that is most beautiful and most difficult in the cloisonné works of Nagoya comes from his hands. The old man pushed back his horn spectacles as I stopped before the open _shōji_, and his eyes rested on the still picture of the garden with a smile.

I, too, turned to look at the row of tiny paper rooms stretching out like arms on either hand, at the living landscape lying in their midst, at the blue sky above, and at the old face beneath the horn spectacles. I did not wonder at the peace which lay upon it, nor at the exquisite beauty of the finished vase standing on the matting beside him. For the garden was still as a cloister, though the cloister was a workshop for cloisonné ware in the manufacturing town of Nagoya.

III

FLOWER ARRANGEMENT

We sat opposite each other on the matting, and she laughed. The polite, audible smile of the Japanese. All around us lay cut branches of fir; and on the long wooden footstool they call a table stood a shallow bronze dish and a wonderful cleft stick of bamboo.

She was a little bent old lady, with the courtly politeness of a thousand Grandisons refined to a subtle essence, and she gave lessons in flower arrangement. The close-cropped grey hair gathered into a slide behind told its own tale of widowhood, and the withered careworn face its story of work and want.

The _shōji_ were shut, and the light through the rice-paper panes sent a warmed white light into the room that knew no colour, a light as though one sat inside a luminous mist, or in the heart of the plum-blossoms. A passionless, lifeless light which was simply light.

And the little old lady laughed again.

“There is much to learn,” I said, stopping to watch her bending the warmed fir branches over the _hibachi_ always to the exact curve, never too near or too far, and mine snapped at the first touch.

She handed me another branch in place of the one I had broken, and watched while I wedged it into the cleft bamboo stick with little chips of wood.

“Very much,” she said. “It takes three years of learning for the pupil and seven for the teacher. And the _Ijin San_ has had four lessons.”

The fifth and last branch being successfully wedged into line, I got on to my knees to admire the effect, while Arabella, from her camp-stool in the corner--she considered it lowering to sit on the floor--bridled.

“Oh, the _Japanese_,” she said; “but any European could learn in half a dozen lessons.”

The little old lady bowed, letting her forehead almost touch the ground, as she sat on her heels on the kneeling-cushion.

“The august stranger----” she began, when I interrupted.

The contemplation of my five branches of fir, two curving to the left and three to the right, had not filled me with any satisfaction. They wobbled. All their curves were wrong, and the five stems, instead of being hidden one behind the other, so that the illusion of a single branch growing out of the bronze dish was created and kept, were all distinctly and decidedly visible.

“It doesn’t look a bit right,” I said; “but what is the matter?”

The task of sticking five branches of fir, already bent to the prescribed curves for me, into a cleft stick had not seemed difficult, especially with three lessons behind me, and I had worked hard and been very confident that morning.

With a thousand apologies the little old lady pulled the bronze dish towards her, while Arabella cleared her throat.

“In Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice adapted to a kindergarten class--her Japanese voice, “we do not learn such a simple thing, we do it naturally. Every European woman can arrange flowers, and they are flowers” (with a glance at the fir branches in the little old lady’s hand--she was busy correcting) “not trees.”

The little old lady was putting back the five fir branches into the cleft stick with the deftest of deft fingers. Arabella unclasped the brooch at her neck and pulled out what she called a “nosegay.” A bamboo vase, just a piece of the stem hollowed out, in which the fir had come from the florist that morning, lay on the floor. She picked it up.

“It should be of glass,” she said forgivingly, “but I will make it do.”

And then with her own hand she proceeded to arrange the Yokohama nosegay in the slender bamboo stem. There was a bit of spiræa, one fat red rose, and some miscellaneous leaves, which Arabella referred to grandiloquently as “green.” These she crammed tightly into the bamboo stem, and then placed it, with a “who-shall-deny-me” air, upon the table.

I looked at it. No, it was not a good specimen even of Western flower arrangement, but in how many buttonholes, on how many tables, had I seen something like it.

Flower arrangement is taught in the schools in Japan, and every Japanese girl learns. If she did not, she would not “arrange” anymore than we should paint or play.

The little old lady had finished, and she pushed the bronze dish along the table beside the bamboo vase. Then, with many compliments and much bowing, she thanked the _Ijin San_ for her “august kindness” and her “honourable condescension.” And the smooth phrases ran on and on, while I sat back on my heels and looked.

East and West, they stood there before me. At the best, what we aimed at was a scheme of colour, and at our worst no scheme at all. And what they strove after was line, whether in fir branches or lily leaves, in plum-blossom or iris flowers, line, and a coherent whole. Each branch, each twig, each flower, nay, each curve of the branch, each petal of the flower, each leaf of the twig, were parts, essential parts of the whole; for in Japan they draw with flowers and fir branches as we only draw for “design.” And line is beyond colour as sculpture is beyond painting.

The sun through the walls of rice-paned _shōji_ spread a warmed white light through the room, a limpid, liquid light in which there was no shadow.

The little old lady had been busy tidying up. The room was one clear sheet of pale yellow matting. On the low empty _tokonoma_ stood the bronze dish and its pure line drawing in fir. Arabella was offering the bamboo vase and its mixed contents “as a model,” and the little old lady bowed to the ground.

Once more I looked at the bronze vase and the pure outlines of the fir branches, at the bare room perfectly proportioned, at the rice-paned _shōji_, and the snowflake whiteness of that light which knew no colour and no shadow struck on my consciousness.

I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not colour but a blot. Outside the rice-paned _shōji_ lay life and colour enough. Here was but light and line.

Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese _sayonara_.

I looked back one last time--and Arabella’s nosegay vanished.

IV

GOD’S MESSENGER

The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the Iris, _Hana-shōbu_, and along the raised causeway, between the fields, the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the _kurumaya_, silhouette against the blue sky.

You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden, and they are an hour’s _’ricksha_ ride from the city, so that the _fête_ is select. In the covered court of the entrance the _kuruma_ are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while the _kurumaya_, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the slender shafts and smoke their pipes--three whiffs from the metal thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp _tink_, _tink_, as the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long _kuruma_ ride proving prohibitive; but the grey _kimono_ of the classes, Tokyo shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack of the wooden _gheta_ on the earthen pathway, as the little _musmé_ carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed summer-houses, is incessant.

We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit _on_ the cushions, with our feet on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous to see the _Ijin San_ sitting on the tables with their legs hanging uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each little white _tabi_ sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea, inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the _Ijin San’s_ legs are not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized boot could only have been invented by people without toes?

The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea, and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly doing something, not even the children.

In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes; one of them is writing a poem. And a _bourgeois_ Sabbath peace is over the land.

The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack of the _musmé’s gheta_ on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers.

Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend, Iris, _Hana-shōbu_. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving people alone know how to create--and how to read. For many generations have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to black or to the purest white.

The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read.

V

THE ART OF THE PEOPLE

It is usual in judging the art of a nation to consider solely the art of the artists and never the art of the people. The first is naturally of greater importance; it affords moreover an easy method of comparison and enables art critics to register the high-water mark of a country’s art, and this being found, the question is considered settled and the nation judged accordingly. We say the French are artistic and think promptly of Corot, Meissonier, or Puvis de Chavannes, not of the people of France. But the art of a nation, always something less, is often something very different from the art of its artists, and though the artists’ art will give you the high-water mark, it does not and it cannot give the general art level of the people. The English nation produced the greatest dramatist who ever lived, and several fine comedians, yet the level of the nation’s dramatic instinct is acknowledged to be far below that of the French. If we wish to get a true opinion of French and English dramatic feeling we must study something more and something other than the dramatists. For it is not the presence or the absence of a certain number of celebrated men, or even the greater or the lesser value of their works, which necessarily makes a whole nation dramatic or artistic, but it is the general level of the dramatic or artistic feeling in the average individual of that nation. That a truly dramatic or artistic nation has more chance of producing a greater number of dramatists or artists is certain, the conditions under which they would work being so much more favourable, but to consider no one but the artist and nothing but his art, and then to transfer the judgment on the artist’s art to the whole nation, is surely a confusion of ideas. It is a confusion to which art seems particularly susceptible. For most people, in England any way, seem to regard art as comprising only expensive objects suitable for exhibition in museums, and not as an integral part of every article used in daily life. Museum art is the product of a nation’s artists, for the enjoyment of the rich and the cultured, but the art of a people is as wide as its life, it touches everything and is for the joy and the pleasure of all men.

Artists’ art is an end in itself, its whole reason for existence is to create beauty, but the art of a people is not an end, but a means. The problem before it is very different and really more complicated, for it is to add beauty to mere utility, and by force of art to create art in objects whose _raison d’être_ is usefulness. And the greater the number of useful objects made beautiful, and the more beautiful the useful objects, and the further removed from beauty and the more sunk in mere utility the useful object is, so much greater will be the people’s art.

To add beauty to mere utility, art may be said to use three ways. It does it

(1) Directly, by moulding the shape (the material of useful objects being already determined);

(2) Indirectly, by decoration; and

(3) Extra-directly, by arrangement.

And if art be truly in a people, even the most ugly and stubborn of useful objects will, by one of these three methods, be made beautiful.

I suppose that any one who has ever seen a rice-field will allow that for at least some six months in the year it is one of the ugliest objects in the world. Made of liquid mud, it lies for half the year a slimy, greasy black pond shut in by low mud walls. On its oozy surface gather unwholesome growths that shine with metallic reflections, while the manure, in Japan mostly human, decomposes in the thick mud. There is nothing, I suppose, much uglier, nothing more useful, and its ugliness is the condition of its utility. The Japanese cannot change the thick black ooze, they cannot change the low mud walls which embank the slimy pools. These, with all their ugly consequences, are fixed and determined. But the art of the Japanese people has yet rendered the rice-fields beautiful. They change the shape. Those embanking walls of mud are moulded as a potter moulds his clay. A series of dead square fields I have never seen. Two, three, four, five, six, even eight-sided rice-fields can be found in Japan, and often the curves of the mud wall itself are graceful as the lines of a Greek vase.

Beneath the temple of Tesshuji, which looks towards the wonder of Fujiyama, with its two pure lines of exquisite grace, is a great fertile plain, a plain of innumerable rice-fields, one of the richest in the country. When I stood on the steps of that deserted temple and looked down, the fields were all black and naked, and yet the plain was neither ugly nor monotonous, for the peasants had curved their rice-fields into exquisite lines, and not two were alike.

A wall has certainly more possibilities than a rice-field, but our modern walls, the high brick atrocity of a prison or an embankment, is not usually beautiful. We make spasmodic attempts to beautify their monotonous ugliness with creepers or other coverings. That is, we do not beautify the wall, we take something less ugly and conceal it. Now the Japanese beautify the wall. (We are only considering here walls of mere utility, where all decoration or ornamentation is out of the question.) Except for the brick walls of the foreign buildings, walls in Japan are made of hewn stone usually shaped like pyramids and hammered base outwards into a bank of earth. In a country whose architecture, from the most glorious of its temples to the humblest of its houses, is all of wood, a clumsiness, a _gaucherie_ in its stonework might be well excused, yet Japanese walls are a wonder to all who see them, for the hard enduring granite is plastic beneath their fingers. Their walls are never dead straight. The line always curves softly outward as it touches the ground. And this not only in the strong walls of the _daimyō’s_ castle, or the long moat walls of the Mikado’s palace, but in the embankment walls of the tiniest shrine, in the modern walls of the modern temple of the modern coaling port of Moji.

To beautify a useful object indirectly by decoration is a great deal easier, at any rate the means and the possibility of doing so are more apparent; and yet, do we draw designs on our sacks, on our flour sacks, grain sacks, potato sacks, as they do in Japan?