AN ARTIST'S LETTERS
FROM JAPAN

The Great Statue of Buddha at Kamakura

AN ARTIST'S LETTERS
FROM JAPAN

BY
JOHN LA FARGE

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1897

Copyright, 1890, 1891, 1893, 1897,
By The Century Co.

The De Vinne Press.

To Henry Adams, Esq.

My Dear Adams: Without you I should not have seen the place, without you I should not have seen the things of which these notes are impressions. If anything worth repeating has been said by me in these letters, it has probably come from you, or has been suggested by being with you—perhaps even in the way of contradiction. And you may be amused by the lighter talk of the artist that merely describes appearances, or covers them with a tissue of dreams. And you alone will know how much has been withheld that might have been indiscreetly said.

If only we had found Nirvana—but he was right who warned us that we were late in this season of the world.

J. L. F.

WHICH IN ENGLISH MEANS:

And you too, Okakura San: I wish to put your name before these notes, written at the time when I first met you, because the memories of your talks are connected with my liking of your country and of its story, and because for a time you were Japan to me. I hope, too, that some thoughts of yours will be detected in what I write, as a stream runs through grass—hidden, perhaps, but always there. We are separated by many things besides distance, but you know that the blossoms scattered by the waters of the torrent shall meet at its end.

[CONTENTS]

[ILLUSTRATIONS]

AN ARTIST'S LETTERS
FROM JAPAN

Yokohama, July 3, 1886.

Arrived yesterday. On the cover of the letter which I mailed from our steamer I had but time to write: "We are coming in; it is like the picture books. Anything that I can add will only be a filling in of detail."

We were in the great bay when I came up on deck in the early morning. The sea was smooth like the brilliant blank paper of the prints; a vast surface of water reflecting the light of the sky as if it were thicker air. Far-off streaks of blue light, like finest washes of the brush, determined distances. Beyond, in a white haze, the square white sails spotted the white horizon and floated above it.

The slackened beat of the engine made a great noise in the quiet waters. Distant high hills of foggy green marked the new land; nearer us, junks of the shapes you know, in violet transparency of shadow, and five or six war-ships and steamers, red and black, or white, looking barbarous and out of place, but still as if they were part of us; and spread all around us a fleet of small boats, manned by rowers standing in robes flapping about them, or tucked in above their waists. There were so many that the crowd looked blue and white—the color of their dresses repeating the sky in prose. Still, the larger part were mostly naked, and their legs and arms and backs made a great novelty to our eyes, accustomed to nothing but our ship, and the enormous space, empty of life, which had surrounded us for days. The muscles of the boatmen stood out sharply on their small frames. They had almost all—at least those who were young—fine wrists and delicate hands, and a handsome setting of the neck. The foot looked broad, with toes very square. They were excitedly waiting to help in the coaling and unloading, and soon we saw them begin to work, carrying great loads with much good-humored chattering. Around us played the smallest boats with rowers standing up and sculling. Then the market-boat came rushing to us, its standing rowers bending and rising, their thighs rounding and insteps sharpening, what small garments they had fluttering like scarfs, so that our fair missionaries turned their backs to the sight.

Two boys struggling at the great sculls in one of the small boats were called by us out of the crowd, and carried us off to look at the outgoing steamer, which takes our mail, and which added its own confusion and its attendant crowd of boats to all the animation on the water. Delicious and curious moment, this first sense of being free from the big prison of the ship; of the pleasure of directing one's own course; of not understanding a word of what one hears, and yet of getting at a meaning through every sense; of being close to the top of the waves on which we dance, instead of looking down upon them from the tall ship's sides; of seeing the small limbs of the boys burning yellow in the sun, and noticing how they recall the dolls of their own country in the expression of their eyes; how every little detail of the boat is different, and yet so curiously the same; and return to the first sensation of feeling while lying flat on the bottom of the boat, at the level of our faces the tossing sky-blue water dotted with innumerable orange copies of the sun. Then subtle influences of odor, the sense of something very foreign, of the presence of another race, came up with the smell of the boat.

We climbed up the side of the big steamer and found the Doctor there, who told us that he had been expecting us for a whole month; so that he soon took possession of us, and we found ourselves in the hotel launch, and at the wharf, and passing the custom house and its officers, who let everything go through quickly except my suspicious water-color blocks. Outside of the gate, in the street, we found the long-expected jinrikisha, an arrangement that you know probably as well as I do—a two-wheeled perambulator or gig, very small, with a hood that is usually lowered, and with a man in the shafts. Our fellows were in blue-black clothes, a big inscription on their backs; and they wore apron-like vests, close-fitting trousers, and broad straw hats poised on their heads. But you know all about these; and I have only to add that we were trundled off to our hotel, along the pretty quay which edges that part of the town, past European houses, unlike ours, and having a certain character which will probably appear very commonplace later, because it is not beautiful, but which is novel yet to us. Our hotel is also on the quay, just at a corner where a canal breaks in, and where we can see big walls and trees on the other side. Our rooms open on the water—that same blue water spangled with sunshine and fading into sky. There men-of-war and steamers far out; picturesque junks sailing past rapidly, flattened out into mere edges of shadow and light against the sea and the sky, their great hollow sterns with the rudder far inboard, and sails which are open at the seams. Not far from us was a little sharp-pointed boat with a man fishing, his big round hat as important as any part of the boat. It was already late in the day. European children were out with their Japanese nurses; from time to time a phaeton or a curricle passed with European occupants, and even in this tremendous heat ladies rode out on horseback. But the human beings are not the novelty, not even the Japanese; what is absorbingly new is the light, its whiteness, its silvery milkiness. We have come into it as through an open door after fourteen gray days of the Pacific which ended only at sunrise this very morning. And we looked again at all the light outside, from the dining-room, where we lunched, where the waiters slipped about in black clothes like those of the runners, and where we were joined at table by a foreign gentleman with high cheek-bones, yellow face, and slanting eyes, and dressed in the latest European fashion with high collar, four-in-hand scarf, and pointed shoes. He was very courteous, and managed what little English he used as skilfully as he dresses. And he gave me a touch of the far East in the story of his being here; for he is under a cloud, an amiable exile whose return to his native land might involve his being boiled in oil, or other ingenious form of death. For well as he figured at luncheon with us, I hear that he has been obliged to leave because of his having poisoned too many of his guests one day at table,—former enemies of his,—and because of his having despatched with the sword those whose digestion had resisted his efforts at conciliation. However this may be, his extradition is demanded; to which he objects, invoking Western ideas of civilization, and protesting that his excesses have been merely political. Then, late in the afternoon, we sauntered out into the Japanese quarter—walking, so that we might mingle with the gray, black, and blue crowd, and respectfully followed by our jinrikisha men, who slowly dragged our carriages behind them, like grooms following their masters. We stopped at little curio shops and bargained over miserable odds and ends, calling up, I feel sure, the unexpressed contempt of the Doctor, the great collector of precious lacquers; but it is so amusing to see things as they are, and not as they should be. We went into a show which had an enormous draped sign outside, and where, in uncertain darkness, an old, miserable, distorted dwarf played the part of a spider in a web, to the accompaniment of fiendish music and the declamation of the showman. Then we lingered outside of a booth in which a wrestling match was going on, but did not enter, and we saw the big wrestlers go in or come out, their shoulders far above the heads of a smaller race of men, and we turned at every moment to look at the children, many of whom are so pretty, and who seem to have an easy time of it. Men carry them in their arms as women do with us, and many a little elder sister walks about with the infant of the family slung behind her maternal shoulders. And then there are curious combinations of Western and Eastern dress—rarely successful. Our hats and shoes and umbrellas—all made here, are used, and our ugly shirts stiffen out the folds of the soft Japanese robes; but the multitude wear their usual dress and make no abuse of hats.

THE KURUMA.

Wearied by the novelty, every detail of which, however, was known to us before, we walked back in the white, milky sunset, which was like a brilliant twilight.

July 5.

We made our first visit to town yesterday; that is to say, we went to Tokio, which is about twenty miles off. Of course we took our jinrikishas at the door of the hotel, and passing through the wide Yokohama streets, saw the semi-European houses, some with high garden walls in which are small doors: there are sidewalks, too, and European shops, and Colonial buildings, post-office, and telegraph office; and the Japanese kura, or storehouses—heavy tile-roofed buildings with black and white earthen surfaces, the black polished to a glaze, as was done with Greek and Etruscan vases. They have deep windows or doors, recessed like our safes, with a great air of solidity, which contrasts with that temporary wooden structure, the usual Japanese house. I came near saying that the little railway station is like ours; but it is better than most of ours, with neat arrangements. We entered the little cars; I noticed, in the third class, Japanese curled up on the seats. The grade is as level as a table, the landscape is lovely, and we saw the shapes we know so well in the prints—the curious shapes of the Japanese pines; little temples on the hillside; and rice-fields with their network of causeways, occasionally a horse or a peasant threading them. The land is cultivated like a garden, the lotus leaves fill the ditches, and one or two pink flowers are just out. From time to time we saw stretches of blue sea. And once, for an instant, as I looked up into the hazy, clouded sky, far beyond the hills, that were lost in the mist into which the rice-field stretched, I saw a pale, clear blue opening in which was an outline more distinct, something very pure, the edge of a mountain, looking as if it belonged to another world than the dewy moist one in which we are—the cone of Fusi-yama.

CASTLE, AND MOAT WITH LOTUS.

On passing through the station, very much like the other with its various arrangements for comfort and order,—first-, second-, and third-class rooms and so forth,—we met a crowd of jinrikishas with their runners, or, as my friends tell me to call them, kuruma and kurumaya, every man clamoring for patronage in the usual way of the hackman.

We selected as a leader Chojiro, who speaks English—a little; is a traveled man, having gone as far as Constantinople; wears the old-fashioned queue, flattened forward over the top of his shaven head; and whose naked feet were to run through the day over newly-macadamized roads, for which a horse would need to be well shod. A little way from us, on the square, stood the car of the tramway, which runs as far as Asakusa, to the great popular temples of protecting divinities, Kuwanon and Jizo,—and Benten, from whose shrine flowed one day copper coins as if from a fountain,—where Buddhist sermons are preached daily; which are full of innumerable images, pictures, and ex-votos; and where prayer-wheels, duly turned, helped the worshiper to be free from annoying sins, or to obtain his desires.

How shall I describe our ride through the enormous city? We were going far across it to call on Professor F——, the great authority on Japanese art, and to be delighted and instructed by him through some fragments of his collection.

AT THE WELL.

In the first street where the tramway runs there are semi-European façades to houses, and in their pilasters the Ionic capital has at length made the circle of the world. Then we took more Oriental and narrower streets, through the quarter of the gei-sha, the dancers and singers who go out perpetually to put a finishing touch on entertainments. At such early hours they are of course unseen. Where houses seemed more closed than usual servants were attending to household duties, and we heard the occasional strum of a guitar. Then great streets again, with innumerable low houses, the usual shops, like open sheds, with swinging signs carved, painted, and gilded, or with draperies of black cloth marked with white characters. Merchants sat on their mats among the crowded goods, girls at corners drew water from the wells; in a narrower street the black streak of a file of bulls peacefully dragging merchandise; where the crowd was thickest a black-lacquered palanquin, all closed, in which was shut some obstinate adherent to ancient fashions. Then bridges and canals, and great empty spaces, long white walls with black copings, and buildings that continued the walls, with gratings like those of barracks. These were the yashikis—inclosed residences of princes who were formerly obliged to spend part of the year at the seat of government with small armies of retainers. Then the walls of the castle, great sloping ramparts of irregular blocks of masonry, about which stand strangely twisted pine-trees, while the great moats of clouded water are almost filled with the big leaves of the lotus. Now and then great gates of gray wood and enormous doors. On some of the wide avenues we met cavalry officers in European costume, correct in style, most of the younger with straggling mustaches, long and thin, whence their nickname of "horn-pouts," naturally connected with that of the "cats," devourers of fish, as the gei-sha are called. Near official buildings we saw a great deal of black frock-coats, and trousers, and spectacles. Everything was seen at a full run, our runners dragging us at horse's pace. Still it was long before we reached our destination. Streets succeeded streets, empty or full, in desolate Oriental wearisomeness. At length we stopped at a little gate in a plank fence, and entered a vast high space, formerly a prince's park, at one end of which we saw trees and hills, and we came to the Professor's house, a little European structure. My mind is yet too confused with many impressions to tell you of what we saw that afternoon and evening, and what was said; all the more that the few beautiful paintings we looked at out of the great collection lifted me away from to-day into an indefinite great past. I dislike to use analogies, but before these ancient religious paintings of Buddhist divinities, symbolical of the elements or of protective powers, whose worn surfaces contained marvels of passionate delicacy and care framed in noble lines, I could not help the recall of what I had once felt at the first sight of old Italian art.

We passed from this sense of exalted peace to plunge again into the crowded streets at night. It was late; we had many miles to go to catch the last train; two additional runners had been engaged for each kuruma—one to push, one to be harnessed in front.

Then began a furious ride. Mine was the last carriage. We were whirled along with warning cries of "Hai-hai!" now into the dark, then into some opening lighted by starlight, in which I could see the flitting shapes of the other runners and of my companions. I remember the creaking of their carriages, the jerking of them with each pull of the men; then our crossing suddenly other parties lighted by lanterns like ourselves, the lights flaring upon yellow faces and dark dresses and black hair; then our turning some narrow corner and plunging at full speed into lighted streets crowded with people, through whom we seemed to cut our way. Much shouting of our men, and dodging of wayfarers with lanterns and of bystanders who merely turn enough to let us glide by. Then one of my runners at full gallop struck a post and was left behind; another was gathered in somehow without a stop, and we tore through the city, still more crowded as we came nearer to our end—the railway station. We were in time, and we slept in the now familiar train. We reached the deserted station and were jogged peacefully to our hotel; our men, in Japanese fashion, sleepily turning out of the way of the ownerless dogs that lay in the middle of the streets. And when I awoke in the morning I found that the day's impressions had faded in sleep to what I tell you.

ANCIENT.

July 6.

I have been asking myself whether it would be possible to have sensations as novel, to feel as perfectly fresh, things I knew almost all about beforehand, had we come in any other way, or arrived from any other quarter. As it is, all this Japan is sudden. We have last been living at home, are shut up in a ship, as if boxed in with our own civilization, and then suddenly, with no transition, we are landed in another. And under what splendor of light, in what contrasting atmosphere! It is as if the sky, in its variations, were the great subject of the drama we are looking at, or at least its great chorus. The beauty of the light and of the air is what I should like to describe, but it is almost like trying to account for one's own mood—like describing the key in which one plays. And yet I have not begun to paint, and I dread the moment of beginning to work again. Rather have I felt like yielding entirely to the spirit in which I came, the intention of a rest, of a bath for the brain in some water absolutely alien. A—— and I had undertaken that we should bring no books, read no books, but come as innocently as we could; the only compromise my keeping a scientific Japanese grammar, which, being ancient and unpractical, might be allowed, for it would leave me as unready as on the day I left.

The Doctor took us on Sunday afternoon to his club—whose name I think means the perfume of the maple—to see and to listen to some Japanese plays which are given in the club theater built for the purpose. We went there in the afternoon, passing by the Shiba temples, and our kurumas were drawn up at one end of the buildings. There everything was Japanese, though I hear stories of the other club and its ultra-European ways—brandies-and-sodas, single eyeglasses, etc. However that may be, on this side we were in Japan without mistake. We sat on the steps and had our shoes taken off, according to the Japanese fashion, so as not to injure mats, and we could hear during the operation long wailings, high notes, and the piercing sound of flutes and stringed instruments; the curiously sad rhythm mingled with a background of high, distinct declamation. We walked in with careful attention to make no noise, forgetting that in our stocking-feet we could have made none had we wished, and we found the Doctor's place reserved for him and us, and marked with his name, written large. Other low boxes, with sides no higher than our elbows as we sat on the mats, divided the sloping floor down to the stage. The stage was a pretty little building projecting into the great hall from its long side. It had its own roof, and connected with a long gallery or bridge, along which the actors moved, as they came on or disappeared, in a manner new to us, but which gave a certain natural sequence and made a beginning and an end,—a dramatic introduction and conclusion,—and added greatly to the picture when the magnificent dresses of stiff brocade dragged slowly along to the cadence of the music. The boxes were mostly occupied, and by a distinguished-looking audience; the Nō, as this operatic acting is called, being a refined, classical drama, and looked upon differently from the more or less disreputable theater. Hence the large proportion of ladies, to whom the theater is forbidden. Hence, also, owing to its antiquity and the character of its style, a difficulty of comprehension for the general public that explained the repeated rustle of the books of the opera which most of the women held, whose leaves turned over at the same moment, just as ours used to do at home when we were favored by French tragedy.

NŌ DANCER WITH MASK, REPRESENTING THE SAKÉ IMP.

A quiet, sleepy appreciation hovered over the scene; even the devotees near us, many of them older people and belonging to the old régime, showing their approval or disapproval with restrained criticism. I could see without turning my head the expression of the face of my neighbor, a former daimio, a man of position; his face a Japanese translation of the universal well-known aristocratic type—immovable, fatigued, with the drooping under lip. Behind him sat former retainers, I suppose—deferential, insinuating remarks and judgments, to which he assented with inimitable brevity. Still, I thought that I could distinguish, when he showed that the youthful amateurs—for most of the actors were non-professional—did not come up to a proper standard, that his memory went back to a long experience of good acting. And so catching are the impressions of a crowd that I myself after a time believed that I recognized, more or less distinctly, the tyro and the master, even though I only vaguely understood what it was all about. For I need not tell you that the libretto would have been still more difficult for me than the pantomime before me; and very often it was but pantomime, the actor making gestures to the accompaniment of music, or of the declaration of the choragus, who told the poetic story. Occasionally these movements amounted to a dance, that is to say, to rhythmic movements—hence called the Nō dance—to which emphasis was given by rising and falling on either foot, and bringing down the sole with a sudden blow.

There were many short plays, mostly based on legendary subjects, distinguished by gorgeous dresses, and occasionally some comic scenes of domestic life. The monotony of impression was too novel to me to become wearisome, and I sat for several hours through this succession of separate stories, patient, except for the new difficulty of sitting cross-legged on the mats. Moreover, we had tobacco to cheer us. On our arrival the noiseless servants had brought to us the inevitable little tray containing the fire-box with hot charcoal and the little cylinder for ashes, and tea and little sugary balls; and then, besides, notwithstanding the high-toned repose of the audience, there was enough to watch. There were the envoys from Loo Choo, seated far off in the dim light of the room, dressed in ancient costumes, their hair skewered up on the top of the head with a double pin—grave and dignified personages; and a European prince, a Napoleonic pretender, seated alongside, with his suite, and ourselves, the only foreigners. The types of the older people were full of interest, as one felt them formed under other ideas than those of to-day. And though there were no beauties, there were much refinement and sweetness in the faces of the women, set off by the simplicity of their dresses, of blacks, and browns, and grays, and dull violets, in exquisite fabrics, for we were in an atmosphere of good breeding. And I watched one of the young ladies in front of me, the elder of two sisters, as she attended to every little want of her father, and even to his inconveniences. And now it was time to leave, though the performance was still going on, for we wished to return in the early evening. Our shoes were put on again at the steps, our umbrellas handed to us—for sun and rain we must always have one—and we passed the Shiba temples and took the train back for Yokohama.

MODERN.

July 12.

We are doing nothing in particular, hesitating very much as to what our course shall be. One thing is certain—the breaking out of the cholera will affect all our plans. Even the consequent closing of the theaters shows us how many things will be cut off from us. We spend much time in such idleness as bric-à-brac, letting ourselves go, and taking things as they come.

The Doctor's kindness is with us all the time. One feels the citizen of the world that he is when he touches little details of manners here, now as familiar to him as those of Europe.

I enjoy, myself, this drifting, though A—— is not so well pleased, and I try to feel as if the heat and the novelty of impressions justified me in idleness. Once only I was tempted to duty, however, when we went to the temples of Shiba and Uyèno, where are the tombs of the shoguns, rulers of Japan of the Tokugawa line. They are all there but the two greatest, Iyéyasŭ and Iyémitsŭ, who lie at Nikko, the sacred place, a hundred miles away. Here in Tokio are the tombs of the others, and the temples about them splendid with lacquer and carving and gold and bronze, and set among trees and gardens on these hills of the Shiba and Uyèno.

My dreams of making an analysis and memoranda of these architectural treasures of Japan were started, as many resolutions of work are, by the talk of my companion, his analysis of the theme of their architecture, and my feeling a sort of desire to rival him on a ground for fair competition. But I do not think that I could grasp a subject in such a clear and dispassionate and masterly way, with such natural reference to the past and its implied comparisons, for A——'s historic sense amounts to poetry, and his deductions and remarks always set my mind sailing into new channels.

But I must put this off—certainly for to-day—while we discuss whether we shall make our visit to ancient Kamakura and the great bronze statue and the island of Énoshima, or whether to put it off until our return from Nikko, and our seeing the other shrines of the shoguns there. The Doctor, who has just left Nikko, tells us of its beauty in the early summer, a few weeks ago, and I feel all the hotter as he talks of the cold mountain streams which run by his house and of banks of azaleas covering the high rocks. And then the Japanese proverb says, "Who has not seen Nikko cannot say beautiful."

THE LAKE IN UYÈNO PARK.

[FROM TOKIO TO NIKKO]

July 20, 1886.

The cholera was upon us, and we decided to go to Nikko and spend a month there, near the F——s'. The Doctor, who was anxious to get back to its coolness and its other charms, was to pilot us and instruct us by the way, and much of the miscellaneous information that I shall give you has come more or less from him. Late in the morning we rode to Tokio, and lunched in Uyèno Park, looking down on the great pond and the little temple which stands in it, and which you know, having seen them on the fans and colored prints. They were veiled in the haze of the sunlight, as if in a spring or winter mist, and through this fog of light shone the multitudinous little sparkles of the ribs and swellings of the lotus-pads lapping one over another, and reaching to far streaks of clearer water. A denser lightness here and there marked the places of the flowers, and a faint odor came up in lazy whiffs. The roof of the temple seemed to be supported by the moisture below. Above there was no cloud. All things lay alike in the blaze, enveloped in a white glimmer of heat and wet, and between the branches of the trees around us the sky was veiled in blue. The locusts hissed with a crackling sound like that of heated wood. The ugly bronze Buddha at the corner of the tea-house shone as if melting in the sun. Then came the moment of leaving for the station, where, owing to delays of trains, we waited still longer in the heat. In the cleanly waiting-room we looked at the illustrations in the Japanese newspapers, and at the last report of the weather bureau, printed in English and fastened to the wall; or we read a little in that morning's edition of the excellent Yokohama English paper; all these comforts of civilization being supplied by the Road. At length the noise of hundreds of wooden clogs, worn by men, women, and children, clattered upon the stones outside and announced an end to waiting. The tightly-closed train had been baking in the sun all day, and we leaned out of the doors on the sides and gasped for breath.

Our train skirted the great hill of Uyèno, and its dark shadow, which did not quite reach us. Monuments and gravestones, gray or mossy, blurred here and there the green wall of trees. The Doctor told us of the cooler spring-time, when the cherry-trees of Uyèno cover the ground with a snow of blossoms, and the whole world turns out to enjoy them, as we do the first snows of winter.

But this is a lame comparison. The Japanese sensitiveness to the beauties of the outside world is something much more delicate and complex and contemplative, and at the same time more natural, than ours has ever been. Outside of Arcadia, I know of no other land whose people hang verses on the trees in honor of their beauty; where families travel far before the dawn to see the first light touch the new buds. Where else do the newspapers announce the spring openings of the blossoms? Where else would be possible the charming absurdity of the story that W—— was telling me of having seen in cherry-blossom time some old gentleman, with capacious sakè gourd in hand and big roll of paper in his girdle, seat himself below the blossom-showers, and look, and drink, and write verses, all by himself, with no gallery to help him? If there is convention in a tradition half obligatory; and if we, Western lovers of the tree, do not quite like the Japanese refinement of growing the cherry merely for its flowers, yet how deliciously upside-down from us, and how charming is the love of nature at the foundation of the custom!

From the rustling of leaves and reëchoing of trees we passed into the open country, and into free air and heat. In the blur of hot air, trembling beneath the sun, lay plantations and rice-fields; the latter, vast sheets of water dotted with innumerable spikes of green. Little paths raised above them made a network of irregular geometry. Occasionally a crane spread a shining wing and sank again. In the outside ditches stood up the pink heads of the lotus above the crowded pads. At long intervals small groups of peasants, men and women, dressed in blue and white, knee-deep in the water, bent their backs at the task of weeding. The skirts of their dresses were caught up in their girdles, and their arms were freed from their looped-back sleeves.

The Doctor spoke to us of the supposed unhealthiness of rice-planting, which makes life in the rice-fields short, in a country where life is not long.

We are told that the manuring of the rice-fields taints all the waters for great distances, and we are warned not to drink, without inquiring, even from the clearest streams. Not even high up in the mountains shall we be safe; for there may be flat spaces and table-lands of culture which drain into the picturesque wildness below. We learn that with all these hardships the rice-growers themselves cannot always afford this staple food of the country, for cheaper than rice are millet, and buckwheat, and the plants and fungi that grow without culture.

Contrasting with the tillage we were passing, islands of close foliage stood up in the dry plain, or were reflected, with the clouds above, in the mirror of the wet rice-fields. Occasionally a shrine was visible within, and the obligatory Torii stood at the edge of the grove, or within its first limits.

A TORII.

Looking through a Torii one is sure to be in the direction of something sacred, whether it be temple or shrine or holy mountain. Neither closeness nor distance interferes with this ideal intention, and the sacred Fusi-yama is often seen a hundred miles away in the sky, framed by these lines, built for the purpose. This assemblage of four lines of stone or wood or bronze is to me one of the creations of art, like the obelisk or the pyramid. Most impressive, most original of symbolic entrances, whether derived from sacred India or from the ancestral innocence of Polynesia, there is something of the beginning of man, something invented while he lived with the birds, in this elementary porch, whose upper line, repeating the slope of hill and wave, first embodied the curve that curls all upper edges in the buildings of the farther East.

And if indeed, the Torii[1] be nothing but the first bird-perch, then I can imagine the father of all peacocks spreading his gigantic fan across its bars; or I may prefer to suppose it the rest for the disk of the sun-god, whose lower curve is repeated by the Torii's upper beam.

Sometimes there were traces of inclosure about these woods; sometimes they had no edgings but their own beautifully-modeled contours. Long ages, respectful care, sometimes fortunate neglect, have made of these reserved spaces types of an ideal wildness, for these are sacred groves, and they are protected by the divine contained within them.

This preservation of a recall of primeval nature, this exemption of the soil from labor, within anxious and careful tillage, is a note of Japan constantly recurring, and a source of perpetual charm.

Notwithstanding the men and women working in the fields, there was a certain desolateness in the landscape, and A—— made out its reason more easily than I, and recalled that for miles and miles we had traveled without seeing any of the four-footed beasts which the Western mind always associates with pastoral life and labor.

As the evening came on we crossed a large river and looked down from the height of the new bridges upon the discarded ferry-boats, and upon the shape of a more fantastic one that was never meant to sail—a pine-tree, shaped and trimmed, which spread its green mast and sails in a garden by the water. Far away were lines of mountains and the peaks of extinct volcanoes.

At every station now the country people gathered to stare at the novelty of the train; we saw the lighting up of the farm-houses as we passed; in the dooryards, behind high hedges reminding me of Normandy, bonfires were being made to keep off mosquitoes: then temples and shrines with lights before them, and at eight o'clock on a festal night we came into Utsunomiya.

The streets were full of people carrying lanterns; children ran about together, with little toy shrines, and the whole town was drowned in noise. We got into a basha, a sort of omnibus, attached to two wild horses, and were hurled through the crowded streets, much as if carrying the mails, with apparent disregard of the lives and limbs of the inhabitants.

The hotel, where we were expected and where the Doctor had represented us as distinguished visitors, opened its whole front, in a Japanese way, to receive us, for there was no outside wall to the lower floor. We were driven quite into the house, and beheld an entire household drawn up in line on the platform, which occupied a full half of this lower space. The Doctor did all that was right, while we remained in amused embarrassment before our prostrated host and the kneeling attendants. As we sat helpless on the steps of the platform our shoes were taken off, and in stockinged feet we were ushered through the crowd and the lower part of the house, through the preparations for passing travelers, the smell and heat of washing and cookery, and an inexpressibly outrageous odor, even for this land of frightful smells, evidently of the same nature as that of the rice-fields.

Notwithstanding this horror, we found, on clambering up the steep little staircase of dark, slippery wood, better fitted to stockings than to boots, a most charming, cleanly apartment ready for us: ready, I say, but its three big rooms, which took all one side of the court, contained nothing but a drawing hanging in each room and a vase filled with flowers; in justice, I ought to add a European table of the simplest make, and three European chairs. Under them was spread a piece of that red cloth which seems to have a fascination for the Japanese—perhaps as being European.

Everything was of the cleanest—wall, floor, stairs, tables; everything was dusted, wiped, rubbed, polished.

It was too hot and we were too tired to go out and see the town, noisy with the excitement of a festival. The Doctor directed the preparation of a meal on a Japanese basis of rice, mingled and enlivened with the contents of various cans; and meanwhile I went down another little staircase of cleanly white wood, at the farther end of our apartment, to our little private bath-room below.

This was about six feet square, and its furniture consisted of a deep lacquer tray to lay clothes in. The bathtub was sunk in the floor, but so that its edge rose high above the level of the room. I had declined the "honorable hot water," which is the Japanese necessity, and obtained cold, against protest. I had yet to learn the luxury and real advantage of the Japanese hot bath. I closed my door, but my window was open, and through its wooden bars I could see our opposite neighbors across the garden of the courtyard—a whole family, father, mother, children, and young daughter—file down to the big bath-room at the corner, whose windows were open to mine. I heard them romp and splash, and saw heads and naked arms shining through the steam. Meditating upon the differences which make propriety in various places, I joined my friends at dinner and listened to what the Doctor had to say upon the Japanese indifference to nudity; how Japanese morals are not affected by the simplicity of their costumes, and that, of course, to the artist it seems a great pity that the new ideas should be changing these habits in a race so naturally law-abiding; for even the government is interfering, and enforcing dress within city limits. Then came the question whether this be a reminiscence of Polynesian ancestry and simplicity, or born of climate and cleanliness. And, indeed, all Japan spends most of its time washing, so that the very runners bathe more times a day than our fine ladies. Meanwhile the servant-girls were spreading for us the blue-green mosquito nettings, put together with bands of orange silk. They were slung by cords from the corners of the beams, which serve for a cornice, and they made a good-sized square tent in the middle of the room. Inside, our beds were made up on the floor, of well-wadded coverlets folded one upon another. One of these I took for a pillow. I have not yet dared to try the block of wood, hollowed out for the nape of the neck, which serves for a pillow in Japan, notwithstanding that it has a pad to relieve its severity—a pad of paper fastened on, and which you remove sheet by sheet as you want a clean pillow-slip. I can understand, however, how precious it must be in a country where the women keep, day and night, undisturbed, those coiffures of marvelous black hair, glistening with camellia oil, the name of which I like better than its perfume. From inside my netting I could see, as I was lying,—for the screens, which made our windows, remained wide open,—through the topmost branches of the trees of the garden, the Japanese family opposite, now ending their evening meal.

OUR RUNNER.

Laughter and chatter, clattering of cups, rap of pipes against boxes, a young man came in and bent over one of the women seated upon the floor; the girl repeated some prayer, with clapping hands outstretched; the lights were put out, all but the square "ando," or floor night-lantern, and they drew their screens. I fell asleep, to be waked with a start by the watchman, who, every hour, paced through the garden, striking a wooden clapper, and impertinently assured us of the hour.

This weary noise marked the intervals of a night of illness, made worse by nightmares of the cholera, from which we were flying. The earliest dawn was made hideous by the unbarring and rolling of the heavy amados,[2] the drawing back of the inside screens (shojis), and the clattering of clogs over pavement, through other parts of the house. Our Japanese family across the way I could hear at their ablutions, and, later, tumultuously departing for early trains; and at last I slept in broad daylight.

Late in the morning we entered our friend the basha. In the daylight I noticed that the horses wore something like a Dutch collar, and were harnessed with ropes. Two men, one the driver, the other the running groom, sat on the low front seat. Our trunks and bags and Japanese baskets encumbered the omnibus seats, on which we stretched our sick and wearied bodies, for the Doctor himself was ill, and smiled mechanically when I tortured him with questions. We left town at a full gallop, and at risk of life for every one in the streets; one of our drivers meanwhile blowing wildly through a horn, to the inspiriting of the horses and the frightening of the Japanese small-boy. Soon one of our men plunged off his seat and began running by the horses in the old Japanese way—hereditary with him, for they follow the calling from generation to generation. Running without pause and without sweating, he threw his body back as if restraining his pace to that of the horses. At the limits of the town, in full run, he stripped his upper garments and showed himself tattooed at every visible point. Above the double strip of his breech-clout, a waterfall, a dragon, and a noble hero made a fine network of blue and pink on the moving muscles.

Now the road became heavy, wet, and full of deep ruts, and our miserable ponies came to a standstill—and balked. The Japanese mildness of our driver disappeared. He took to beating their poor backs with a heavy bamboo cane, while we remonstrated feebly, regretting that we had not sufficient strength to beat him too. Then he explained, deferentially, that confusion seized him at being unable to keep his promise of delivering us to Imaichi for the appointed hour, and I felt as if we had been put in the wrong. Imagine the difference had he been—any one but a Japanese. We turned aside from the main way into a little dry side-path, which led us into the hills and moors. As we got among them we left the annoying odors of the rice-fields and smelled for the first time the fragrance of wild roses, looking like ours, but a little paler. This was the first thing which reminded me of home—the roses that the Japanese do not seem to care for, do not seem to understand. With them the rose has no records, no associations, as with us; for, once on this farther side of the garden of Iran, the peony and the chrysanthemum, the lotus and the iris, the peach, the cherry, and the plum, make up the flower-poetry of the extreme East.

IN THE GREAT AVENUE OF CRYPTOMERIA.

Then, leaving the dry and sunny uplands, we entered a famous avenue, shaded for twenty miles by gigantic cryptomeria trees 60 to 120 feet high. They were planted, as an act of homage, some two centuries ago, by some mighty noble, when it was decided to place at Nikko the tomb of the great shogun Iyéyasŭ. They rise on each side of the sunken road, from banks and mounds, over which steps lead, from time to time, to plantations and rice-fields beyond, and to shrines peeping out among the trees. In side-roads above, on either hand, passed occasionally peasants and pack-horses laden with forage, or the bright shine of a peasant woman's red skirt. Where an occasional habitation, or two or three, are niched in some opening, the tall columns of the great trees are interrupted by spaces filled with crossed branches of the wilder pine; and behind these, outside, sometimes the light-green feathery mass of a bamboo grove. Against the bank stood low, thatched buildings; near them the great trees were often down, or sometimes dying; an occasional haystack, sliced off below by use, was fastened, in thick projection, around some smaller tree. Once, at a turn of the road, near a building with wide roof, pushed against the corner bank out of a basin fringed with iris, sprang into the air a little jet of water. Near by, a solitary ditcher had placed in a bamboo fence some bright red blossom, with its stem and leaves, apparently to cheer him at his work.

The heavy road was being ditched on each side to carry off the soaking waters, and our weary, miserable horses broke down again. A—— and I rested by going in advance, and I experienced the new sensation of walking among the bamboo stems, like an insect among the knotted stalks of a gigantic grass. The still heat of the sun burned in great smoky streaks across our way, spotted by the flight of many yellow butterflies. There was no sound of birds in the high spaces above; the few peasants that we met slipped past on their straw sandals, their noiseless horses also shod with straw; occasionally a shiver of the great spruces overhead, and far behind us the cries of our grooms to their horses.

It was two o'clock when we galloped bravely, as if with fresh horses, into the single long street which is Imaichi village. We were now on high ground, some two thousand feet above our point of departure, and could feel, but not see clearly, in the blaze of sunlight, great mountains lost in great wet clouds.

We stopped at the village inn; drivers and runners were sitting on the stone bench in front, drinking tea, when we drove up. We sat down on the straw-matted porch inside, the whole front of the building open, and drank miserable, herby tea, and tasted the usual sweet balls of sugary stuff.

Alongside the tea-house, in one of the recesses between the buildings, we could see the runners of kurumas being washed off and rubbed down, just as if they were horses in a livery stable. As they stood naked, their companions poured pails of water over them, its brown spread covering the stone slabs. Some of them, in the porch, lay on their backs, others prone, others on the side, all near a kettle, which hung over a charcoal fire, in which, perhaps, they were heating sakè. One on his back, his neck on the wooden pillow, was smoking. The village itself lay in hot, clean repose,—not dusty,—the rows of buildings on each side of the street irregular, but all of the same appearance. Most of the fronts were open, the goods all displayed outside of the walls, or on the floors, innumerable pieces of paper hanging about everywhere. A few men sat about on the porches, their naked feet hanging off, their sandals on the ground below them, the inevitable umbrella by their side. Most of the village was asleep in nakedness. The color of flesh glowed in the hot shade; brown and sallow in the men, ruddy on the breasts of the women and the entirely nude bodies of the children.

NIKKO-SAN.

And here, now, we said good-by to the basha, and got into the two-wheeled baby wagon, which they call a kuruma. One man ran between the shafts, and another, in front, was fastened to the cross-bar by a long strip of cloth tied about him. The file of our five wagons started off at a rapid trot—we had two for our baggage—with the Doctor ahead, his white helmet dancing before us in the sun. From under my umbrella I tried to study and occasionally to draw the motions of the muscles of our runners, for most of them were naked, except for the complicated strip around the loins—a slight development of the early fig-leaf. The vague recall of the antique that is dear to artists—the distinctly rigid muscles of the legs and thighs, the rippling swellings of the backs—revived the excitement of professional study and seemed a god-send to a painter. The broad, curved hat, lifted by a pad over the head, was but an Eastern variation, not so far removed from the Greek πέτασος of Athenian riders. Some heads were bare; that is to say, their thick black thatch was bound with a long handkerchief, which otherwise hung on the shoulders or danced around their necks. Not all were naked. The youngest, a handsome fellow, had his tunic pulled up above the thighs, and the slope of his drapery and his wide sleeves gave him all the elegance of a medieval page. I found it easier now to struggle against heat and indolence, and to make my studies as our runners ran along, for we had entered again the avenue of the great cryptomeria. We had passed the entrance of another, which in old times was the road traveled by the Mikado's ambassador, in the fifth month, when he journeyed across the island to carry offerings to Iyéyasŭ, in his tomb at Nikko. The big trees grew still taller in this higher air, their enormous roots spreading along the embankments in great horizontal lines and stages of buttresses. Prolonged wafts of cool air blew upon us from the west, to which we were hurrying. Above us spread a long avenue of shade, high up and pale in the blue. And so we got into Nikko as the sun was setting with the delicious sensation that at last we were in coolness and in shade.

Right before us, crossing the setting sun, was the island mountain of Nikko-san; small enough to be taken in by the eye, as it stood framed by greater mountains, which were almost lost in the glittering of wet sunlight. The mountain threw its shade on the little village; down its one long street we rode to the bridge that spans the torrent, which, joining another stream, gives Nikko the look of an island. Alongside this bridge, at a distance of two hundred feet, crosses the red lacquer bridge, over which we are not allowed to pass. It is reserved for the family Tokugawa, the former shoguns of japan, whose ancestors built the great shrines of Nikko, and for the Emperor on his occasional visits. It stands supported on a gigantic framework of stone, imitating wood, the uprights being pierced to allow the crosspieces to run through, against all European constructional principles, but with a beauty which is Japanese, and a fitness proved by time.

THE WATERFALL IN OUR GARDEN.

These great posts under the bridge lean against what seems the wall of the mountain; the rock foundation being supplemented, everywhere that a break occurs, by artificial work. Here and there cascades fall over natural and over artificial walls and glisten far up through the trees on the opposite side of the bridge. As we rattled over it, we looked down on the overflowing long wooden trough, which carried the pure waters of the mountain to the village that we had passed, and upon the torrent below, whose limpid clearness was made blue by mist, where the warmer air was chilled by a coldness drawn from far-up mountains. Before us steps of enormous width passed under the foliage and turned above in many directions, and there on the lowest step, her dainty feet on straw sandals, whose straps divided the toes of the close-fitting Japanese socks, with bare ankles, stood our hostess, in latest European dress, most graceful contrast to our own consciousness of being jaded and dirty, and to the nakedness of our runners. Panting with the last run, they stood at rest, and leaned forward against the cross-bar of the shafts, with muscles still trembling, clear streams of sweat varnishing their bronze nakedness, and every hair plastered with wet on forehead, chest, and body. Just before them rustled the unrumpled starched spread of the skirts of the fair American. She was summering at Nikko, and, friendly with the Buddhist clergy, had arranged that one of the priests should let us have his house, and kindly walked with us to it, a little way up in one of the first open spaces of the mountain. After passing the great outside fringe of trees we found a large clear opening, broken up by walled inclosures, the wall sometimes high and sometimes low, and edged by gutters through which the torrents ran. These were the former residences of princes, whom etiquette obliged to worship officially at Nikko. A quarter of a mile up we came to our own garden,—with an enormous wide wall or embankment of stone, some twenty feet deep,—which also had been a prince's, and now belongs to the little Buddhist priest who is our landlord. There are two houses in the inclosure, one of which he lets to us. Ours is brand-new and two stories high, while his is old and low, with an enormous roof, and an arbor built out from the eaves and connecting with his little garden. High behind his house rise rocks and wall; and on top of them are planted willows, pines, maples, and the paulownia, whose broad leaves are part of the imperial crest. A little waterfall tumbles over the rocks and gives us water for our garden and for our bath. In our house we made the acquaintance of Kato, who is to wait upon us. A few minutes later we were welcomed by our landlord, dressed for the occasion. He conducted us to our rooms, and, leaving for a moment, returned with a china bowl that was covered with a napkin, and contained sweetmeats which he told me are peculiar to Nikko.

Seeing that we were helpless with the language, he bowed low and left us to our bath and to a survey of our new quarters. We were tired, sick, miserable, weary travelers, having gone through a shipwreck of heat and fatigue, but there was a fascination in feeling that this baby-house was ours, that it was typical, that on entering we left our shoes out on our own threshold and were walking on the soft clean mats, stocking-toed; that in a few minutes we should be stretched on these as on a bed, and that Kato would pour out our tea. Our lowest story, which has a veranda, can be divided so as to make a servant's room and a hall beyond. In an L behind stretches out a wash-room with a big dresser fixed to the wall, under which, through a trough, rolls a torrent from the waterfall; and, farther on, is the little square bath-room with one side all open to the floor, when the wooden screen is drawn, through which we get light and air, and through which the box containing burning charcoal is brought from the priest's house to heat our bath. We have a little staircase—just the width of our trunk—which leads sharply up to the veranda above, from which we step into A——'s room and then into mine; they are separated by movable screens, so that we can be about as private as if the division were a chalk line. But outside we have a wealth of moving wall: first the paper screens, which, when we wish, can separate us from the veranda; then, lastly, on its edge, the amado, or wooden sliding-doors, which are lying now in their corner box, but which later will be pulled out and linked together, and close the open house for the night.

Then, as we were about leaving, we solemnly placed a great ornamental revolver before the little god of Contentment who sits upon the Tokonoma—that mantelpiece which is at the level of my eye when I lie on the floor, and which is the Japanese ideal seat of honor, but never occupied. This revolver is left there to appease a Japanese conventional fear of robbers. We went down in the twilight to our friends, and had a very European supper, and sat on their veranda, looking through the trees toward the bridge, in a moonlight of mother-of-pearl; and we were so sleepy that I can only suppose we must have talked of home, and I can only remember our host clapping his hands for lanterns, and Kato leading us back, with the light held low, and the noise of the torrents running under the little stone bridges that we passed, and our taking off our shoes on our own door-step, and the thunder of the amado as Kato rolled them out for the night.

[THE SHRINES OF IYÉYASŬ AND IYÉMITSŬ
IN THE HOLY MOUNTAIN OF NIKKO]

July 25.

From where we are in the Holy Mountain, our first visit would be naturally to the shrine of the shogun Iyéyasŭ, whose extreme walls I see among the highest trees whenever I look from our balcony over our little waterfall.

Iyéyasŭ died in 1616, having fought, he said, ninety battles and eighteen times escaped death, having almost destroyed Christianity, and leaving his family established as rulers of Japan. In obedience to his dying wishes, his son and successor removed the body of his father from its resting-place in the south to this final tomb at Nikko. Here, in 1617, with complicated and mystic ceremonial, he was buried and deified.

If you have no work on Japan near by to refer to, sub voce Iyéyasŭ, I can tell you, briefly, what he did or what he was, though I, too, have no books at my hand. He was a great man, a patient waiter upon opportunity, who at the end of the sixteenth century came upon the scene of a great civil war, then filled by two protagonists, the military ruler, Nobunaga, and his lieutenant, Hidéyoshi, who was to be known later as Taiko Sama. Their aim was to settle something more definitely, of course in their favor; and, in fact, the death of the former and the triumphant success of the latter, who succeeded him, went far toward disposing of many contending claims, and toward a crystallizing of the feudal system, which had grown of centuries of civil war. This is the moment that we see reflected in the annals of the first Christian missionaries, to whom the military chiefs of Japan were alternately kind or cruel.

PORTRAIT-STATUE OF IYÉYASŬ IN CEREMONIAL DRESS.

When Hidéyoshi died he had grown to be the master of Japan; he had been made Regent of the Empire, as a title of honor, for he was that and more in reality; he had become one of the greatest of Oriental warriors, and had begun life as a groom, the son of a humble peasant. The name of Taiko (Great Gate) he took like other regents, on retiring nominally from office, but with the addition of Sama (Lord) it is applied to him alone in popular memory. Naturally, then, he believed in a possible dynasty originating in him. At his death he could see, as his greatest fear for the future of the young son to whom he wished to leave his power, this man Iyéyasŭ Tokugawa, lord now of many provinces, but who had begun humbly, and who had assisted him in breaking many enemies, receiving a reward with every success, and consolidating meanwhile his own smaller powers. The dying Taiko made complicated arrangements to secure the good-will of Iyéyasŭ, and also to prevent his encroachments. These arrangements, including and combining the agencies of numbers of princes and vassals, many of them newly Christianized, seem only the more certainly to have forced on a position in which Iyéyasŭ, with few allies, but with clear aims and interests, took the field against a larger number of princes, commanding more men, but not united in any intention as fixed as his was. These he defeated for once and all, on a great battlefield, Sékigahara, on some day in October in the year 1600. It was the greatest battle that Japan ever saw, and one of the bloodiest—remarkable for us because of the death of three of the Christian leaders against Iyéyasŭ, warriors distinguished before in many wars, who could not, being Christians, take their own lives in defeat, as their Japanese traditions of honor commanded. Hence the victor had them beheaded—a shameful death, and thereby heroic. These were almost his only immediate victims. Iyéyasŭ wisely forgave, when it paid, and merely weakened the beaten, increasing the possessions but not the powers of his adherents; and finally remained in undisputed power, with great titles from the Mikado, who, though poor in power, was still a dispenser of honors, for, as with the greater gods, the victrix causa pleased.

Meanwhile the protection of the son of the great Taiko Sama, for which all this war had been supposed to grow, had not been effected, and even this one obstacle or reminder was to disappear from before Iyéyasŭ, but not for several years, and only just before his death.

AVENUE TO TEMPLE OF IYÉYASŬ.

He had, in Japanese custom, resigned his apparent power to his son, for behind him he could act more obscurely and with less friction. Then began the drama of the extinction of Christianity; slowly, for many reasons, not the least being that several Christian princes, with their vassals, had supported Iyéyasŭ in his struggle. And at length the son of Taiko Sama, Hidéyori, indirectly connected with the Christian side, fell before Iyéyasŭ. His strong castle at Osaka was said to have become a place of refuge for the persecuted and the discontented, even to the very Christians whom his father had cruelly persecuted.

Which was in the wrong and disturbed the waters, the wolf or the lamb, I do not know, but only that in June, 1615, the great castle was attacked by Iyéyasŭ and his son in as bloody a battle as was ever fought; and notwithstanding that for a moment victory hung in the balance, the Tokugawa Luck prevailed, the castle took fire, thousands perished, and Hidéyori and his mother disappeared.

Whether Iyéyasŭ was the author of the code of laws or rules at which he is supposed to have worked during these years of waiting, with the aid of learned scholars, to bequeath them to his descendants for the maintenance of the order of things he left, I do not know; nor perhaps was the information I once had about them at all accurate. They, or their spirit, however, served to guide the nation for the next two hundred and fifty years; that is to say, until the second Commodore Perry came to Japan, with the increased weight of an outside world much changed.

SKETCH OF STATUE OF IYÉYASŬ TOKUGAWA.

Meanwhile the great man died, leaving a great personal fame behind him, over and above the powers he could transmit. He was buried here, as I said. The place was chosen in 1616; at the end of the same year the buildings were begun, and in the beginning of the next year were partly completed. When the funeral procession arrived, in nineteen days from Iyéyasŭ's former resting-place, amid great ceremonies and religious rites, the title of "Supreme Highness, Lord of the East, Great Incarnation," was given to the hero and ruler and son of the small laird of Matsudaira.

While he was being thus deified the persecution of the Christians increased in violence, passing into a hideous delirium of cruelty; wiping out its victims, but unable to affect their courage. There can be apparently no exaggeration of the sufferings of the martyrs nor of the strength of mind shown by them—a courage and constancy ennobling to Japan.

Hidetada, the son of Iyéyasŭ, is buried at Yeddo (Tokio); but Iyémitsŭ, the grandson, has a temple and a tomb here in the forest, alongside of his grandfather's.

He succeeded to power in 1623, and lived and ruled some thirty years more with an energy worthy of Iyéyasŭ, and carried the system to completion. The laws known as the laws of Iyéyasŭ are sometimes made out to be his. These laws, based on the old feudal habits, and influenced and directed by the great Chinese doctrines of relationship and duties, are not laws as we think of law, nor were they to be published. They were to be kept secret for the use of the Tokugawa house; to serve as rules for conduct in using their power, so as to secure justice, which is in return to secure power, that exists for its own end in the mind of rulers. These laws, some of which are reflections, or moral maxims, or references to the great man's experience, made out a sort of criminal code,—the relations of the classes,—matters of rank and etiquette, and a mechanism of government. They asserted the supremacy, and at the same time destroyed the power, of the Mikado, and by strict rules of succession, residence, and continued possession bound up the feudal nobles. They reasserted the great individual virtues of filial piety and of feudal loyalty, and insisted on the traditions of military honor. "The sword" was to be "the soul of the Samurai,"[3] and with it these have carried the national honor and intelligence in its peculiar expressions.

Full recognition was given to the teaching, "Thou shalt not lie beneath the same sky, nor tread on the same earth, with the murderer of thy lord." The rights of the avenger of blood were admitted, even though he should pay the penalty of his life.

Suicide, which had long been a Japanese development of chivalrous feeling and military honor, was still to be regarded as purifying of all stain, and, for the first time, allowed in mitigation of the death penalty.

Indeed, half a century later, the forty-seven Ronin ("wave-people"—Samurai who had lost their natural lord and their rights) were to die in glorious suicide, carrying out the feudal idea of fidelity.

You know the story probably; at any rate, you will find it in Mitford's tales of old Japan. It is a beautiful story, full of noble details, telling how, by the mean contrivance of a certain lord, the Prince of Ako was put in the wrong, and his condemnation to death and confiscation obtained. And how, then, forty-seven gentlemen, faithful vassals of the dead lord, swore to avenge the honor of their master, and for that purpose to put aside all that might stand in the way. For this end they put aside all else they cared for, even wife and children, and through every obstacle pursued their plan up to the favorable moment when they surprised, on a winter night, in his palace, among his guards, the object of their vengeance, whose suspicions had been allayed by long delay. And how his decapitated head was placed by them upon his victim's tomb, before the forty-seven surrendered themselves to justice, and were allowed to commit suicide by hara-kiri, and how they have since lived forever in memory of Japan.

These laws, then, destroyed nothing; they reasserted certain Japanese traditions and customs, but made out, through many details, the relations of dependence of all classes of society upon the shogun, as vassal indeed of the Mikado, but supreme ruler who held the key of all. All this did Iyémitsŭ carry out, as well as the consequent seclusion of the country; the only manner of avoiding ideals which might clash with those upon which this consolidation of the past was based. And to many of these ideals, to the idea of the sacredness of the family, to the idea of subjection to the law of the ruler, Christianity, by its ideal of marriage, by its distinctions of the duty to Cæsar,—to name only a few reasons,—might be found an insidious dissolvent. Therefore, if it be necessary to find a high motive, Iyémitsŭ did what he could to trample out the remains of Christianity, which were to expire, a few years after his death, in a final holocaust as terrible and glorious as Nero himself could have wished to see.

From that time, for two centuries, all went on the same, until the arrival of the foreigners found a system so complete, so interlocked and rigid, as to go to pieces with the breaking of a few links.

That break was supplied by the necessity of yielding to the Christian and foreign demand of entrance, and in so far abandoning the old ways.

With this proof of weakness the enemies of the Tokugawa and those of the system began to assert themselves, circumstances aiding, and in 1868 the last of the race resigned all powers and retired to private life.

The details of the enormous changes, as they followed one another, are too many and sudden, and apparently too contradictory, for me to explain further. Even now I repeat this deficient summary of the Tokugawa story only because of wishing to recall who they were that have temples and tombs about us, and to recall, also, that such has been the end of the beginning which is buried here.

STABLE OF SACRED HORSES.

The approach to the temple, to which most paths lead, is through a great broad avenue, a quarter of a mile long, bordered by high stone walls, above which rise high banks and higher trees. Between these dark green walls, all in their own shade,—in the center of the enormous path and in the full light of the sky,—a brilliant torrent rushes down in a groove of granite, hidden occasionally under the road. Here and there drop out from the walls noisy columns of clearest water.

In the distance beyond, through a mass of closer shade, made by two rows of dark cryptomeria, that are planted on banks faced with stones,—for here the road divides into three different grades of ascent by enormous steps,—shine the high white walls of the temple grounds, edged with a red-lacquered fence and a black roofed gate of red and gold. In the open space before it, with wide roads diverging through high walls, crowned with scarlet fences, stands a granite Torii, some thirty feet high, whose transverse stones are crossed by a great black tablet, marked with the gilded divine name of Iyéyasŭ. On one side a five-storied pagoda, graceful and tall, certainly one hundred feet high, blood-red and gold in the sunlight, and green, white, and gold in the shadows of its five rows of eaves, rises free from the trees around it and sends a tall spear, encircled with nine gilded rings, into the unbroken sky. Bindings and edges of copper, bright green with weathering, sparkle on its black roofs, and from their twenty corners hang bells of bright green copper. Above the steep steps, against the white wall, we pass through the first gate. It is recessed, and two gigantic columns of trees stand in the corners. Two monsters of uncertain lion-form occupy the niches on each side. From the upper side of the red pillars, as supports for the engaged lintel, stretch out the gilded heads of tapirs,—protectors against pestilence,—of lions and elephants, and great bunches of the petals of the peony. Above, the architrave and frieze are painted flat with many colors and with gold, and the ends of the many beams which support the roofing are gilded. Everywhere, even to the ends of the bronze tiles of the black roof, the crest of Iyéyasŭ's family, the Tokugawa, is stamped in gilded metal.

At the inside corner of the gate stands a gigantic cedar, said to have grown to this height since the time when Iyéyasŭ carried it about with him in his palanquin. Opposite to three red buildings, which are storehouses for the memorial treasures of the temple, stands, closer to the wall, a charming building, mostly gray,—partly owing to the wearing of the black lacquer with time,—and decorated with carved panels, which make a frieze or string-course all around its sides. Above this line of green, red, blue, white, and gold, a large space of gray wood, spotted with gilt metal where the framework of the outer beams is joined, spreads up to the pediment under the eaves, which is all carved and painted on a ground of green. The heavy roof above is of black bronze and gilded metal and is spotted with the golden Tokugawa crest. Below the colored band, midway, the black wall has gratings with golden hinges, for this delicate splendor is given to a stable—the stable of the sacred horse of the god Iyéyasŭ. The patient little cream-colored pony has no look of carrying such honors; and I can scarcely imagine his little form galloping out in the silence of the night under the terrible rider.

SACRED FONT.

A gentle splashing of water, which mingles with the rustling of the trees and the quiet echoes of the pavement, comes from the end of the court where its edge is a descent filled with high forest trees. This lapping sound comes from the temple font, a great wet mass of stone, looking like solid water. It has been so exactly balanced on its base that the clear mountain stream overflows its sides and top in a perfectly fitting liquid sheet. This sacred well-basin has a canopy with great black bronze-and-gold roof, supported by white stone pillars, three on each corner, that are set in bronze sockets and strapped with gilded metal. The pediment and the brackets which cap the pillars are brilliantly painted, and the recessed space below the curved roof-beam is filled with palm-like curves of carved waves and winged dragons. Next to this, and at right angles to it, is a heavy bronze Torii, through which we go up to another court, turning away from the buildings we have seen. On the dark surface of the Torii glisten the golden Tokugawa crests; on the great tie-beam, the upper pillars, and the central upright. Near us, the eaves of its lower roof continuing the lines of the water-tank pavilion, is the closed library, red, delicately adorned with color under the eaves, and with the same heavy black roofing of bronze dotted with gold which all the buildings have in a heavy monotony. The steps lead us to another court, spotted with different buildings, among tremendous trees—a bronze pavilion with a hanging bell, a bell tower, and a drum tower, closed in with sloping walls of red lacquer, and a large lantern of bronze under a bronze pavilion, whose curious, European, semi-Gothic details contrast suddenly with all this alien art, and prove its origin a tribute from trading Christian Holland to the mortal deity worshiped here. On one side, where the forest slopes down in sun and shadow, stands a Buddhist temple, sole survivor of the faith in this place, now turned over to the official and native worship. The latticed gold-and-black screens were all closed, except in the center, through which we could see the haze and occasional glitter of the gold of gods and altar ornaments, and the paleness of the mats. On its red veranda stood a young Buddhist priest, whom our companions knew; a slight, elegant figure, a type of modesty and refinement. Farther back, on the other side of the veranda, an older companion looked down the valley at some girls whose voices we could hear among the trees.

YOUNG PRIEST.

The main entrance rises above the high steps to a little esplanade with heavy railing, on the level of a higher embankment. The court that we were in was full of broken shadows from its own tall trees, and from all this accumulation of buildings, red-lacquered and gilded, black-and-bronze roofed, spotted and stained with moss and lichens, or glittering here and there in their many metals. Long lines of light trickled down the gray trunks and made a light gray haze over all these miscellaneous treasures. Great lanterns (toro) of stone, capped with green and yellow moss, metal ones of bronze and iron, stand in files together here and in the lower court, or are disposed in rows along the great stone wall, which is streaked by the weather and spotted with white and purple lichens. Along its upper edge runs the red-lacquered wall, heavily roofed, of the cloister which surrounds the farther court above. Its face is paneled between the metal-fastened beams and posts with two rows of deep carvings of innumerable birds and trees and waves and clouds and flowers. All these are painted and gilded, as are the frieze above and the intervals between the gilded rafters.

On all this space, and on the great white gate, the "Gate Magnificent," the full sun embroidered the red and white and colored surfaces with millions of stitches of light and shadow.

The gate, or triumphal arch, is a two-storied building with heavy bronze-tiled roof, capped and edged, like all the rest, with gilded metal, and spotted with the gilded crest of the Tokugawa. Its front toward us rises in the well-known curve, shadowing a pediment, full of painted sculpture. Eight white pillars embroidered with delicate reliefs support the white lintel, which is embossed with great divine monsters and strapped with gilded metal. In the niches on each side are seated two repellant painted images, inside of white walls, which are trellises of deeply-carved floral ornament. These figures are warriors on guard, in ancient and Japanese costume, armed with bows and quivers of arrows, whose white, wrinkled, and crafty faces look no welcome to the intruder, and recall the cruel, doubtful look of the guardian statues of foxes that protect the entrances of the primitive shrines of the land-god Inari. The far-projecting white capitals are the half-bodies of lion-like monsters with open mouths and stretched-out paws. Above these, below the carved balcony which marks the second story, the cornice is made of a wilderness of tenfold brackets, black lacquered and patterned with gold, and from each of the ten highest ones a gilded lion's head frowns with narrowed eyes.

The balcony is one long set of panels—of little panels carved and painted on its white line with children playing among flowers. Above, again, as many white pillars as below; along their sides a wild fringe of ramping dragons and the pointed leaves of the bamboo. This time the pillars are crowned with the fabulous dragon-horse, with gilded hoofs dropping into air, and lengthy processes of horns receding far back into the upper bracketings of the roof. Upon the center of the white-and-gold lintel, so delicately carved with waves as to seem smooth in this delirium of sculpture, is stretched between two of the monster capitals a great white dragon with gilded claws and gigantic protruding head. But all these beasts are tame if compared with the wild army of dragons that cover and people the innumerable brackets which make the cornice and support the complicated rafters under the roof. Tier upon tier hang farther and farther out, like some great mass of vampires about to fall. They are gilded; their jaws are lacquered red far down into their throats, against which their white teeth glitter. Far into the shade spreads a nightmare of frowning eyebrows, and pointed fangs and outstretched claws extended toward the intruder. It would be terrible did not one feel the coldness of the unbelieving imagination which perhaps merely copied these duplicates of earlier terrors.

DETAILS OF BASES OF CLOISTER WALLS, INNER COURT.

So it is, at least, in this bright, reasonable morning light; but I can fancy that late in autumn evenings, or in winter moonlight, or lighted by dubious torches, one might believe in the threats of these blinking eyes and grinning jaws, and fear that the golden terrors might cease clinging to the golden beams. It is steadying to the eye to meet at last the plain gold-and-black checker pattern of the ends of the final rafters below the roof, and to see against the sky peaceful bells like inverted tulips, with gilded clappers for pistils, hanging from the corners of the great bronze roof.

And as we pass through the gate we are made to see how ill omen was turned from the Luck of the Tokugawa by an "evil-averting pillar," which has its pattern carved upside down as a sacrifice of otherwise finished perfection.

I noticed also that a childish realism has furnished the lower monsters of the gate with real bristles for their distended nostrils; and this trifle recalls again the taint of the unbelieving imagination, which insists upon small points of truth as a sort of legal protection for its failing in the greater ones.

Within this third cloistered court which we now entered is an inclosed terrace, some fifty yards square. Inside of its walls are the oratory and the final shrine, to which we can pass through another smaller gate, this time with lower steps. The base of the terrace, which makes the level of the innermost court, is cased with large blocks of cemented stone. Above it is a fence or wall with heavy roof and projecting gilded rafters. Great black brackets support the roof. Between them all is carved and colored in birds and flowers and leaves, almost real in the shadow. Between the decorated string-courses the wall is pierced with gilded screens, through which play the lights and darks, the colors and the gilding of the shrine inside. At the very bottom, touching the stone plinth, carved and painted sculptures in high relief project and cast the shadows of leaves and birds upon the brilliant granite.

Beyond this inclosure and the shrine within it the court is abruptly ended by a lofty stone wall, high as the temple roof, and built into the face of the mountain. From its very edge the great slope is covered with tall trees that look down upon this basin filled with gilding and lacquers, with carvings and bronze, with all that is most artificial, delicate, labored, and transitory in the art of man.

It is in this contrast, insisted upon with consummate skill, that lies the secret beauty of the art of the men who did all this. The very lavishness of finish and of detail, the heaped-up exaggerations of refinement and civilization, bring out the more the simplicity and quiet of the nature about them. Up to the very edges of the carvings and the lacquers grow the lichens and mosses and small things of the forest. The gilded temples stand hidden in everlasting hills and trees, open above to the upper sky which lights them, and to the changing weather with which their meaning changes. Nothing could recall more completely the lessons of death, the permanence of change, and the transitoriness of man.

We went up the steps of the recessed gate, which repeats the former theme of white and gold and black in forms of an elegance that touches the limits of good taste. Its heavy black roof, whose four ridges are crowned by long bronze dragons and crawling lions, opens in a high curve on the front and sides to show under the bent white-and-gold ridge-beams a pediment strapped and intersected by spaces of small carvings, white and tinted, relieved by red perpendiculars of beams.

DETAIL OF CLOISTER WALLS, INNER COURT.

White and gold shine in the great brackets and the recesses of the rafters. Below the white frieze, carved with many small figures of Chinese story, the pillars and the lintel are inlaid in many carved woods, ornaments of dragons, plants, and diapered patterns on the whitened ground. The opened doors repeat the same faint tones of wood, and of white and gold, and of gilded metals. The walls, which are open at the base, are merely lattice screens. Their exquisite flowered patterns fluctuate with gilded accents of whites, greens, lavenders, and blues.

LINTEL, BRACKET CAPITAL.

The gate inside is, therefore, nothing but an ornamented trellis, made still lighter by contrast with the solid white doors, trellised at top, but whose lower panels are exquisitely embellished with inlaid carved woods and chiseled golden metal. We took off our shoes, and ascended the bronze-covered steps of the oratory and shrine, which come down from the red-lacquered veranda, behind the four carved white pillars of the descending porch. Great white dragons with spiky claws project from the pillars, and crawl in and out of the double transom. In the shadow of the roof golden monsters hang from the complex brackets. The friezes and bands of the temple face are filled with carving, delicate as embossed tapestry, while the panels, deeply cut into auspicious forms of birds and flowers, carry full color and gold far up into the golden rafters.

INSIDE THE "CAT GATE"—GATE TO THE TOMB.

All recesses and openings are filled with half-realities, as if to suggest a dread or a delicious interior, as flowers might pass through palings, or great beasts, types of power, might show great limbs through confining barriers. The long building, indeed, is a great framework, strongly marked, dropped on a solid base, and weighted down by a heavy roofing. The white pillars or posts which divide its face and corners stand clear between the black-and-gold latticed screens, partly lifted, which make almost all its wall.

Strips of the sacramental white paper hang from the lower lintel against the golden shade of the interior. Inside, pale mats cover the black-lacquer floor. Exquisite plain gold pillars, recalling Egyptian shapes, divide the gilded central walls. Here and there on the gilded tie-beams curved lines of emerald-green or crimson, like tendrils, mark with exquisite sobriety a few chamfered cuttings. On either side of the long room (fifty feet) are two recesses with large gold panels on which symbolic forms are freely sketched, and carved inlays of emblematic birds fill their farthest walls. Their ceilings are carved, inlaid, and painted with imperial flowers, mystic birds, and flying figures, and the pervading crest of the Tokugawa. For these were the waiting-rooms of the family, and, as A—— remarked, the impression is that of a princess's exquisite apartment, as if the Tartar tent had grown into greater fixity, and had been touched by a fairy's wand.

All was bare except for an occasional sacred mirror, or hanging gilded ornament, or the hanging papers of the native worship; and this absence of the Buddhist images and implements of worship left clear and distinct the sense of a personal residence—the residence of a divinized spirit, not unlike the one that he was used to in life.

Even more, on the outside of the building the curved stone base, like a great pedestal, with pierced niches filled with flowers carved and painted between the great brackets that support the veranda, makes the temple seem as if only deposited for a time, however long that time may be.

We merely looked at the central passage, that, dividing the building, leads down and then up to the shrine itself, and waited for the time when we shall get further permission, and I shall be allowed to sketch and photograph. As for me, I was wearied with the pleasure of the endless detail; for even now, with all my talk, I have been able to note but a little of what I can remember.

We withdrew, put on our shoes again at the gate, and turned below to the east side of the court. We passed the Hall of Perfumes, where incense was once burned while the monks chanted prayers in the court, as they did when Iyéyasŭ was buried. We passed the Hall of the Sacred Dances, whose open front makes a large, shady, dim stage, with a great red railing on its projecting edge. Within it moved a white shadow, the figure of a woman-dancer. And then we came to a white-and-gold gate, inside of the roofed cloister wall. Above the open door that leads to it sleeps a carved white cat, in high relief, said to have been the work of a famous left-handed sculptor, carpenter, and architect. Its cautious rest may not have been so far from the habits of the living Iyéyasŭ, to whose tomb, farther on, this is the entrance.

Framed by the gold and white of the gate and of the half-opened door rise the steps built into the hillside and all carpeted with brilliant green mosses. The stone railings, which for two hundred feet higher up accompany the steps, are also cushioned with this green velvet, and our steps were as noiseless as if those of the white cat herself. All is green, the dark trees descending in sunlight to our right and rising on the bank to our left, until we reach an open space above, with a bank of rocky wall inclosing the clearing.

Here is the small final shrine, and behind it a stone esplanade with a stone fence, within which stands, in the extreme of costly simplicity, the bronze tomb of Iyéyasŭ. A large bronze gate, roofed in bronze, of apparently a single casting, with bronze doors, closes the entrance. Before the monument, on a low stone table, are the Buddhist ornaments—the storks, the lotus, and the lion-covered vases, all of brass and of great size.

The tomb itself is of pale golden bronze, in form like an Indian shrine: a domed cylinder surmounted by a great projecting roof which rises from a necking that separates and connects them above—the roof a finial in the shape of a forked flame. Five bronze steps, or bases, support this emblematic combination of the cube, the cylinder, and the globe.

The crest of the Tokugawa, ten times repeated, seals the door upon the burnt ashes of the man who crystallized the past of his country for more than centuries, and left Japan as Perry found it. All his precautions, all his elaborate political conservatism, have been scattered to the winds with the Luck of the Tokugawa, and the hated foreigner leans in sightseeing curiosity upon the railing of his tomb.

TOMB OF IYÉYASŬ TOKUGAWA

But the solemnity of the resting-place cannot be broken. It lies apart from all associations of history, in this extreme of cost and of refined simplicity, in face of the surrounding powers of nature. There is here no defiance of time, no apparent attempt at an equal permanency; it is like a courteous acceptance of the eternal peace, the eternal nothingness of the tomb.

We leaned against the stone rails and talked of Iyéyasŭ—of his good nature, of his habit of chatting after battle, of his fraudulent pretensions to great descent; and of the deadening influence of the Tokugawa rule, of its belittling the classes whose energies were the true life of the country. We recognized, indeed, that the rulers of Iyéyasŭ's time might have perceived the dangers of change for so impressionable a race, but none of us asked whether the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives of courageous Christians had been made up in the strength of the remaining blood.

Far away the sounds of pilgrims' clogs echoed from the steps of distant temples; we heard the running of many waters. Above us a few crows, frequenters of temples, spotted the light for a moment, and their cries faded with them through the branches. A great, heavy, ugly caterpillar crept along the mossy edge of the balustrade, like the fresh incarnation of a soul which had to begin it all anew.

ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF IYÉMITSŬ.

[IYÉMITSŬ]

We were told by our good friends that the temple of Iyémitsŭ, the grandson of Iyéyasŭ, far less pretentious than the shrine of the grandfather and founder, would show us less of the defects which accompanied our enjoyment of yesterday. The successors of Iyémitsŭ were patrons of art, sybarites, of those born to enjoy what their ancestors have sown. The end of the seventeenth century has a peculiar turn with us, a something of show and decadence, of luxury and want of morals; and the same marks belong to it even in Japan. Indeed, I feel in all the Tokugawa splendor something not very old, something which reminds me that this was but the day of my own great-grandfather; a time of rest after turmoil, of established sovereigns on various scales, of full-bottomed wigs, of great courtliness, of great expenses in big and little Versailles. I miss the sense of antiquity, except as all true art connects with the past, as the Greek has explained when he said that the Parthenon looked old the moment it was done.

••••••

The temple of Iyémitsŭ is, indeed, charming and of feminine beauty, complete, fitted into the shape of the mountain like jewels in a setting. From near the red pagoda of Iyéyasŭ's grounds a wide avenue leads, all in shade, to an opening, narrowed up at its end to a wall and gate, which merely seem a natural entrance between the hills. There are great walls to the avenue, which are embankments of the mountains. From them at intervals fountains splash into the torrents at each side, and overhead are the great trees and their thin vault of blue shade. The first gate is the usual roofed one, red, with gilded rafters and heavy black bronze tiles, and with two red muscular giants in the niches of the sides. Its relative simplicity accentuates the loveliness of the first long court, which we enter on its narrowest side. Its borders seem all natural, made of nothing but the steep mountain sides, filled with varieties of leafage and the columns of the great cedars. These indeterminate edges give it the look of a valley shut at each end by the gate we have passed, and by another far off disguised by trees. This dell is paved in part, and with hidden care laid out with smaller trees. Down the steep hillside, a cascade trembles through emerald grass, part lost, part found again, from some place where, indistinct among the trees, the jaws of a great bronze dragon discharge its first waters. A simple trough collects one rill and sends it into the large stone cube of a tank, which it brims over and then disappears.

The little pavilion over this well is the only building in the inclosure. It is more elegant than that of Iyéyasŭ, with its twelve columns, three at each corner, sloping in more decidedly, their white stone shafts socketed in metal below and filleted with metal above, melting into the carved white architrave. In the same way the carvings and the blue and green and red and violet of the entablature melt in the reflections under the shadow of the heavy black-and-gold roof with four gables. From under the ceiling, and hanging below the lintels, flutter many colored and patterned squares of cloth, memorials of recent pilgrims.

LOOKING DOWN ON THE WATER-TANK, OR SACRED FONT, FROM THE SECOND GATE.

As we turn to the highest side of the court on the left and ascend slowly steep, high steps to a gorgeous red gate above our heads whose base we cannot see, the great cedars of the opposite side are the real monuments, and the little water-tank, upon which we now look down, seems nothing but a little altar at the foot of the mountain forest. The gate, when we look back, is only a frame, and its upper step only a balcony from which to look at the high picture of trees in shadow and sunlight across the narrow dell which we can only just feel beneath us.

The great red gate has two giant guardians of red and green, and innumerable bracketings for a cornice, all outlined, and confused all the more by stripes of red and green and white and blue.

A PRIEST OF IYÉMITSŬ.

Just behind the gate, as if it led to nothing, rises again the wall of the mountain; then we turn at right angles toward a great esplanade, lost at its edges in trees, from which again the forest would be all the picture were it not that farther back upon the hill rises a high wall, with a platform and lofty steps, and the carved red-and-gold face of a cloister, with another still richer gate of a red lacquer, whose suffering by time has made it more rosy, more flower-like.

Up these steps we went, the distant trees of the mountains ascending with us, and we rested in the red-and-gold shade. Above us the gold brackets of the roof were reflected back, in light and dark, upon the gold architrave, adorned by the great carved peonies, red and white, and great green leaves which stood out with deep undercutting. From the fluted red columns projected great golden tapirs' heads and paws, streaked with red like the bloom of tulips. The gilded metal sockets and joinings and the faint modeled reliefs of the wall, all of dull gold, looked green against the red lacquer. Beyond, the inner lintel was green, like malachite, against the sunny green of the forest. Its chamfered edge reflected in gold the lights and shadows beyond, and against the same green trees stood out the long heads and trunks of the tapir capitals in red and gold.

Through this framework of red and many-colored gold we passed into the inner court, made into a cloister by walls and narrow buildings, rich in red lacquer and black and gold. As before with Iyéyasŭ, so also within this inclosure, is another raised upon a base faced with great blocks of granite, fretted, spotted, and splashed with white and purple lichens. The sun-embroidered wall or fence that edges it is black with a bronze-and-gold roof; its trellises are of white, edged with gold; as usual, bands of carved and colored ornament divide so as almost to pierce its face; and its beams are capped with jointings of chiseled metal. The central gate spots joyously the long line of black and gold and color and bronze, with imposts of white carving, framed in rosy lacquer, and with gold pillars and a gold lintel, upon which is spread a great white dragon, and with a high gold pediment, divided by recesses of golden ornament on ultramarine, and with golden doors fretted with a fairy filagree of golden ornament.

Through this lovely gate, with an exquisite inlaid ceiling of pearl and gold and walls of carved and colored trellises, we pass to the main shrine, only just behind it.

Here again, less pretense than with Iyéyasŭ, and greater and more thoughtful elegance. The long white carved columns of the portico run straight up to the brackets of its roof—except where, to support the cross-beam of the transoms, project red lions' heads and paws, looking like great coral buds. The entire architrave of the building is divided into a succession of long friezes, stepping farther and farther out, like a cornice, until they meet the golden roof. Only a few gold brackets support the highest golden beam—carvings, color, and delicate stampings of the lacquer embroider the gold with a bloom of color. The gold doors look like jewelers' work in heavy filagree.

All within was quiet, in a golden splendor. Through the small openings of the black-and-gold gratings a faint light from below left all the golden interior in a summer shade, within which glittered on lacquer tables the golden utensils of the Buddhist ceremonial. From the coffered ceiling hangs the metal baldachin, like a precious lantern's chain without a lamp.

IN THE THIRD GATE OF THE TEMPLE OF IYÉMITSŬ, LOOKING TOWARD THE FOURTH.

A PRIEST AT IYÉMITSŬ.

The faces of the priests who were there were known to us, the elder's anxious and earnest, the younger's recalling an Italian monsignore. One of them was reading by the uplifted grating and rose to greet us, and to help to explain. We entered the narrow passage which makes the center, through whose returning walls project, in a curious refinement of invention, the golden eaves of the inner building beyond. Gratings which were carved and gilded trellises of exquisite design gave a cool, uncertain light. We passed out of a trellised door on to the black lacquered floor of a veranda, and then sat awhile in a simple room with our hosts to look at temple manuscripts and treasures, and at the open palanquin which once brought here the dead Iyémitsŭ—not reduced to ashes, as his grandfather Iyéyasŭ, but wrapped and covered up in innumerable layers of costly and preserving vermilion. We passed into the corridor behind the building and looked at the picture hanging on the wall, which faces the mountain and the tomb, in which Kuwan-on the Compassionate sits in contemplation beside the descending stream of life. Then for a few moments we entered by a low door the sanctuary, narrow and high and with pyramidal roof.

KUWANON, BY OKIO.

By the flickering torch which alone gave light, all seemed of gold—the wall, the columns which run up to the central golden roof, and the transoms which connect them. In the darker shade stood a golden shrine, never opened. Whatever precious details there may be were bathed in a shade made of reflected gold. An exquisite feeling of gentle solemnity filled the place. We passed out suddenly into the glare of day and under the blazing blue sky, which hung over the inclosure of tall trees and the temple like the ceiling of a tent.

Again a great wall, spotted with moss and lichens, is built around as an inclosure. It makes a base for the greater wall of the mountain rising above it, which is covered with forest trees, as if the skirting of the wilderness of northern Japan were here suddenly limited. Across one single opening, on the one side, where show the seams of the immense cyclopean construction, and joining two corners, broken by great patches of the shadows of the gigantic trees, stretches a white wall, heavily roofed, against a shadow almost black. In its center is a strange, white gate-building, moundlike in shape, absolutely plain, but capped by a great roof, which is stretched out upon a mass of brackets, all of gold and colors, and with carved golden doors, whose central panels are all fretted and chiseled and stamped with the Wheel of the law. Here begin the distant steps leading through the trees to the tomb where lies the body of Iyémitsŭ, cased in layers of vermilion, under golden bronze, like his grandfather Iyéyasŭ, and surrounded by the still more solitary splendor of the forest.

Astonishing as is the contrast to-day, in the abundance and glory of summer, of the bronze and the lacquered colors, and the golden carvings, with the wild rocks and trees, the grass and the mosses, I should like to see in the snow of winter this richness and glitter and warmth of red and white and black and gold.

Can it bring out still more the lavishness of refinement, which wells up as if exhaustless? Does its white monotony and the dark of the great cedars make one feel still more the recklessness of this accumulation of gold lacquer and carving and bronze, all as if unprotected and trusted to the chances of the recurring seasons?

As we repeat each look, on our slow return through the temples, the same elegance, the same refinement, the same indifference to the outrages of time, contrast again with the permanence and the forces of nature. With the fatigue and repetition of the innumerable beauties of gold and color, carving and bronze, the sense of an exquisite art brings the indefinable sadness that belongs to it, a feeling of humility and of the nothingness of man. Nowhere can this teaching be clearer than in this place of the tombs. It is as if they said, serenely or splendidly, in color and carving and bronze and gold: "We are the end of the limits of human endeavor. Beyond us begins the other world, and we, indeed, shall surely pass away, but thou remainest, O Eternal Beauty!"

[TAO: THE WAY]

Nikko, July 28.

Osomi and Tategawa were the architects of Nikko; Osomi planned the lovely pagoda,—so I am told,—and I hasten to put down their names. At that time the great Tenkai was abbot. He was a friend and adviser of Iyéyasŭ, as he was the teacher of Iyémitsŭ, the grandson, and of Hidetada, the less illustrious son. It may be with him that Iyéyasŭ arranged the plan of fixed endowment for the Church; an endowment not to be added to or diminished, so that it should be an element of stability and no longer a fluctuating danger. With this seems to have ended the possible reasons for military dependents in the service of the Church.

Tenkai is said to have planned or prepared beforehand the temples of Iyéyasŭ, which might explain the extremely short time given in the record for their building; so that, begun in 1616, the stable, the surrounding edifices, and the shrine were completed in the third month of 1617.

I have been careful to give you some account of the temples of Iyéyasŭ and Iyémitsŭ, because I regret having said so little of those temples of Shiba in Tokio, where the remainder of the Tokugawa rulers repose in a state adorned by similar splendors. But these temples of the founders are of a more complete type, and, with one exception, seem to me more impressive. Yet even with the beauties that I have tried to describe, I am still not quite so carried away as I might have been by such complete works of art. There is a something, a seeming of pretense or effort or ingeniousness, which I cannot seize, but which seems to me to belong to a splendor not quite secure, or perhaps only just secured,—something like what I might call the mark of the parvenu.

Yes; I think that is it. It is still, after all this time, just a little new. But what thorough adaptation of means to ends; how delicately subtle the arrangements, and simple; and how impossible to describe through words or drawings. How the result alone is aimed at, and what little parade is made of the intention and preparation. This work, which seems to betray an inferiority to its own ideal—this work, which has even a touch of the vulgar, is charming enough to look like a fairyland. It displays a capacity for arrangement which none of us to-day could hope to control; has a charm that any passer-by could feel; has more details of beauty than all our architects now living, all together, could dream of accomplishing in the longest life. When I began to reflect how this wood and plaster had more of the dignity of art and of its accessible beauty than all that we have at home, if melted together, would result in; that these frail materials conveyed to the mind more of the eternal than our granite, it seemed to me that something was absolutely wrong with us.

And the cause of this result was not the splendor of line and color; it was not the refinement. The last time I could recall a similar sensation had been before some little church tower of England; it was certainly the subordination of all means to a single end, and their disappearance in one impression.

... Since my first visit to the temples my mind has been dwelling more and more in an involuntary manner upon the contrast with all modern art, and I venture to note down for you some of the thoughts forced upon me. It seems as if I were really reminded of what I always knew, or ought to have known; and perhaps what I may say about ourselves is as good a way as any other of giving an opinion upon what I see here. For, indeed, what I see here that I admire I feel as though I had always known, had already seen; it is rather most of our own that seems queer, strange, and often unreasonable.

I can make no set and orderly arrangement of my rather confused thinking, but can only trace it out as it occurred to me—as if it were from outside; as if something whispered to me now and then out of small occurrences, and said, "Don't you understand more clearly?"

... On leaving the temples we went back to our friends' house, which was once the residence of the regent of Japan—a large, low wooden building of the kind so carefully described by Mr. Morse in his book. All is extremely simple; there is nothing to call any attention. The woodwork is merely put together with great care; some little panels of the closets are nicely trimmed with metal and highly ornamented. This, with metal nail-heads and a pretty wall-paper, is all the decoration.

Here we found the mail and papers, and enjoyed the watering-place feeling of news from town. There were copies of "Life" and of the London "Punch," many of whose drawings did not look out of place in this land of clever sketchers. Indeed, that in them which once seemed good across the seas still held its own in presence of the little prodigies of technique that one meets in Japanese drawings.

Indeed, they recalled one another. Both call out one's sudden recollection of some facts in nature; and besides, all good sketches resemble one another as being the nearest approach to the highest finished work. They have in common with it the essential merit of being better than they appear, of indicating more than is necessary to tell the tale, of not being strictly measurable quantities. We grow so ungrateful when too well treated that we forget how Mr. Du Maurier throws in, over and above the social epigram in lines, an elegance and grace that might belong to a poetic picture; that Mr. Keene tells his story over and over again in the very folds of each individual's dress; that he will, unconcernedly, present us with a landscape as full of nature as his human figures, instead of the indifferent background which would have been sufficient for the story of the caricaturist. Now, the feeling of disenchantment, of having "found out" appearances, of having come to the end of a thing, is never forgiven by the average healthy mind. In greater things one turns, some day, to those which are always richer and fuller of meaning with time,—as one looks to-day at a Corot or a Delacroix or a Millet once uncared-for,—and that means that at length our eyes are opened. The sketch, like the great work of art, is better than it appears, and recalls to me the emperor in the story, whom the old woman could not recognize in the presence of the big drum-major. We can appreciate what suffering the little old woman underwent when she discovered her mistake, and how she never forgave the big drum-major. For mankind has never believed at heart that the work itself is to be judged, but has always (at least in the case of one's neighbor) acknowledged that it is the work of art which judges us.

So says a Japanese friend, and I think that he has it exactly. Hence an importance attaches to criticism which otherwise would be inexplainable,—the importance there is in being right,—because we shall be judged ourselves if we are wrong, and often by ourselves as judges.

... And late numbers of the magazines had come, pleasant to look over before dinner,—while the noiseless servants glided over the matting, and our hostess put on her Japanese costume,—serving to make the distance greater, as we feel that all goes on at home with the usual regularity.

Some architectural sketches in facsimile in a magazine became entangled with the thread of my thinking and brought to my mind an inevitable lesson.

They were charming, and so different from the realities which they were meant to embody. One I dwelt upon, bright and clever, where every dark of window or of shadow intensified the joyfulness of the white wall of a residence at home, which you daily pass. In the reality, alas! its Fifth Avenue monotony is unrelieved. The wall is not bright, the windows are paler than the walls, and the projections and adornment are duller yet. The drawing was an abstraction, probably meant for the sweet enticement of the client, and was what the building should have been. The draughtsman "knew better than he builded." As my mind analyzed this curious professional misstatement of truth, it seemed to me that I could see how the art of architecture in Japan was real compared to ours, even though none of their architects, any more than those of the great past of the world, could have made such a drawing—such a brilliant promise of a performance not to be, such a beautifully engraved check upon a bank where there were no funds. Not knowing the science and art of perspective drawing, nor the power of representing shadows according to rule, nor having the habit of ruling lines with a ruler to give interest, nor of throwing little witty accents of dark to fill up blanks, they were perhaps the more obliged to concentrate their powers upon the end of the work; and their real motive was the work itself.

This may be strange and contradictory to the modern Western mind, gradually accustomed to polished cartoons for bad paintings and worse glass, to remarkable designs for decoration and architecture which look their best in woodcuts, to great decorative paintings which are carried out so that they may be photographed without any injury to their color, nay, to its vast improvement. Do you remember how B——, the famous sculptor, used to preach to me that to-day no one looked at a thing itself, no one expected to, and that the fame of the artist was for those whose work could be adequately represented in the newspapers. That an excellence which could not be duplicated, that a tone which could not be matched, that a line which could not be copied, was not to be appreciated and could not be cared for. In fact, that such refinements were only worthy of the mind of an Oriental, "of a man accustomed to wear the moon embroidered on his back." Why spend days in obtaining the color of a wall which any architect will think can be adequately replaced by his description of something like it to the painting firm around the corner? Why make the thing itself, if something like it will do as well? Why strike the note exactly, if any sound near it satisfies the average ear? For us, to-day, things and realities no longer exist. It is in their descriptions that we believe. Even in most cultivated France an architect or designer like Viollet-le-Duc will seriously undertake to restore old work, every square inch of which has had the patient toil of souls full of love and desire of the best, by rubbing it all out, and making a paper drawing or literary description for others to restore again in a few modern weeks the value of ancient years of ineffably intelligent care. Consider this impossibility of getting a decent restoration carried out by our best intelligences, and note that while they are unable with all money and talk and book-learning to replace the past in a way that can deceive us, there exist patient, obscure workmen who, beginning at the other end of the work, produce little marvels of deception in false antiquities—purchased by museums and amateurs for sums their authors never could get in their proper name. But these latter have only one object, the thing itself, and are judged by the result; while we, the arbiters and directors better known, who never employ them, are satisfied, and satisfy others by our having filed in the archives of to-day notices that we are going to do something in the utterly correct way. I took as an example our friend Viollet-le-Duc, the remarkable architect whose works we have both studied, because he has written well,—in some ways, no one more acutely and more wisely; because of his real learning, and on account of his very great experience. Is all that this man and his pupils did in their own art of making, worth, as art, the broken carving that I kick to-day out of my path?

Has such a risible calamity ever occurred before in any age? Destruction there has been, replacing of old, good work with better or with worse by people who did not understand, or care, or pretend to care; but the replacing of good with bad by people who do understand, and who claim to care, has never been a curse until to-day. This failure in all restoration, in all doing of the thing itself, must be directly connected with our pedantic education and with our belief in convenient appliances, in propositions, in labor-saving classifications, in action on paper, in projects for future work, in soul-saving theories and beliefs—in anything except being saved by the—work itself.

Indeed, I have always felt that perhaps in the case of poor Richardson, just dead, we may begin to see the shape of an exception, and can realize what can be accomplished through what we called deficiencies. He was obliged, in the first place, to throw overboard in dealing with new problems all his educational recipes learned in other countries. Then, do you think that if he had drawn charming drawings beforehand he would have been able to change them, to keep his building in hand, as so much plastic material? No; the very tenacity needed for carrying out anything large would have forced him to respect his own wish once finally expressed, while the careful studies of his assistants were only a ground to inquire into, and, lastly, to choose from.

For many little prettinesses and perfections do not make a great unity. Through my mind passes the reminiscence of something I have just been reading, the words of an old Chinese writer, an expounder of Tao (the Way), who said what he thought of such matters some twenty-five centuries ago. What he said runs somewhat in this way:

The snake hissed at the wind, saying: "I at least have a form, but you are neither this nor that, and you blow roughly through the world, blustering from the seas of the north to the seas of the south."

"It is true," replied the wind, "that I blow roughly, as you say, and that I am inferior to those that point or kick at me, in that I cannot do the same to them. On the other hand, I blow strongly and fill the air, and I can break huge trees and destroy large buildings. Out of many small things in which I do not excel I make ONE GREAT ONE in which I do excel."

••••••

In the domains of the One there may not be managing.

Hence, also, the difficulty, I had almost said the impossibility, of finding a designer to-day capable of making a monument: say, for instance, a tomb, or a commemorative, ideal building—a cathedral, or a little memorial. There is no necessity in such forms of art, nothing to call into play the energies devoted to usefulness, to getting on, to adaptation, to cleverness, which the same Taoist says is the way of man, while integrity is the way of God.

Art alone, pure, by itself, can be here the object of the maker's contemplation; the laws of the universe that men call beauty are the true and only sufficient materials of construction.

With what preparation does a designer of humbugs come to such work, failure in which cannot be excused because of any practical reasons, because of any pressing necessities—that really belongs to the public, to everybody more than to its possessor, or to its owner, or to those who have paid for it—that, finally, can be saved from adverse criticism only for a short time, while passing interests are concerned.

Who knows this better than yourself? Where on earth to-day can you find a thing done by us designers that an artist will go to look at for love, for the deep desire of enjoyment which makes us visit so many little things of the past, and go far for them? If you can, imagine any painter desiring to note, so as to make them his own by copy, a modern set of moldings, the corner of a modern building.

And yet what a rush of delight comes upon us with a few Greek moldings, with a fragment of Greek or Gothic ornament, with the mere look of the walls of some good old building. How the pleasure and the emotions of those who made them have been built into them, and are reflected back to us, like the smile from a human face. I know that I have told you often how the fragment of a Gothic window from old English Boston set into the cloister of Trinity of the new Boston always seemed to me to outweigh the entire building in which it rests. And yet it is only a poor fragment of no great period. But then the makers thought and felt in the materials that they worked in, even if their drawings were rude and incomplete and often incorrect. And no architect seems to realize to-day that his walls could give us the same emotions that we receive from a Rembrandt, or a Van Eyck, or a Veronese, and for the same reasons, and through a similar use of a real technique.

You draw well; you can make a sketch, I am sure, which, like many others, would have spots of light on a black surface, or a pretty wash of sky above it, or little patches of shadow, like clever lichens, spread over it, and that would be correct in artificial perspective, and recall something of older design, and have no great blemishes to take hold of. How far would it help you to have made a million such if you seriously wished to do a thing for itself, not for its effects upon a client, nor for a claim upon the public, nor for a salve to your own vanity?

And now do you see how, as we architects and designers gradually work more and more on paper and not in the real, our energies are worked out in accomplishing before we get to our real work,—that of building a work of art,—and the result of our drawings grows feebler and feebler and tamer as it presses to its end. Then, for this weak frame of conception, the men who have come in to help (and that only because the director's time would not admit of his doing all himself, otherwise he would, in his jealous weakness, adorn as poorly as he imagines)—then, I say, if the painter, the sculptor, the decorator, shows any strength or power, there is another danger. There is danger that the sculptor's relief will be more powerful than the weak projections of solid masonry,—that the lines of the painter will be grander and more ample than those which were meant to guide and confine them—that the paint of the decorator will appear more massive and more supporting than the walls of the architect. Whence all will be tamed, all annulled and made worthless and paltry, so as not to disturb the weak efforts of the master directing. And for the first time in the history of art we shall have buildings which the Greek or the Roman, the Medieval or the Oriental, would have been unable to adorn, while in their times the masters who were architects, great and small, found no trouble in placing within their buildings, made famous to all time by this choice, the sculptures of the Parthenon or of Olympia, the glass or the statues of Christian cathedrals, or the carvings of India or of Japan.

So that when the greatest painter of the century left instructions for his tomb, he asked that it should be copied from some former one of antiquity or renaissance, so that it might have—to typify his love and his dislikes—masculine moldings and a manly character, contrary, as he said, "to all that is done to-day in architecture."

You may say that through all this wandering of thought I am telling you little about Japanese art. Wait; perhaps I may be merely preparing your mind and mine for what I shall have to say later. Or, rather, let us think that I am carried away by the spirit, and that I am certainly talking of what I do not find here; and if there is no novelty in what I say, and that you know it, and have always known it, we shall come back to what you also know, that art is the same everywhere and always, and that I need not come this distance to learn its principles. If there is anything good here, it must resemble some of the good that we have with us. But here at least I am freer, delivered from a world of canting phrases, of perverted thought, which I am obliged to breathe in at home so as to be stained by them. Whatever pedantry may be here, I have not had to live with it, and I bear no responsibility in its existence. And then again, art here seems to be a common possession, has not been apparently separated from the masses, from the original feeling of mankind.

To-day at dinner, Kato, who was waiting upon us, could give his opinion upon the authenticity of some old master's work, at the request of our host, himself a great authority; so that I could continue my dreaming through the conversation and the semi-European courses, marked by my first acquaintance with the taste of bamboo shoots—a little delicacy sent in by A-chin, the children's nurse.

Much was talked of the Tokugawa race, and some cruelty was shown to their memory as a family of parvenus who had usurped the power theoretically invested in the mikados—an usurpation practised over and over again by every successful shogun, as by Yoritomo, Taikosama. Indeed, the Ashikaga move through Japanese history against a background of mikados. And when O—— comes in later he talks of Masashige, and of others, who during centuries, at long intervals, attempted to realize what has now been accomplished—the restoration of the mikado to his ancient powers and rulership of twenty centuries ago.

Yes, the Tokugawa splendor was that of parvenus. Their half-divine masters lie in no gilded shrines nor under monumental bronze, but buried beneath the elements, their graves marked only by mounds or trees, as it might have been with their earliest ancestors, the peaceful chieftains of a primitive family: a simplicity recalled to-day by the little fragment of dried fish that accompanies presents, in memory of the original humility of the fishing tribes, the ancestors of this almost over-cultivated race.

These Tokugawa, then, were parvenus, and naturally asked of art, which lasts and has lasted and is to last, an affirmation of their new departure. This splendor was made for them, and its delicious refinement has not quite escaped that something which troubled me at Shiba—an anxiety that all should be splendid and perfect, an unwillingness to take anything for granted. And yet, by comparison, this looks like a fairyland of refinement. What should we do when called to help a new man to assist or to sweeten his acquired position? What vulgarity of vulgarities should we produce? Think of the preposterous dwellings, the vulgar adornments given to the rich; the second-hand clothing in which newly acquired power is wrapped. The English cad, and the Frenchman not good enough for home, put the finishing touch upon the proofs of culture which are to represent them to their children.

I need not refer to what is seen in San Francisco as an example. At home in New York we have more than are pleasant to think of. I know that some may say that we have only what we deserve for thinking that we can escape, in the laws that govern art, the rules that we have found to hold in everything else.

Some years ago I told you how once a purveyor of decorations for the millionaire, a great man in his line, explained to me how and why he had met his clients half-way. "You despise my work," he said, "though you are too polite to say so,"—for we were friendly in a manner,—"and yet I can say that I am more thoroughly in the right than those who would seek to give these men an artistic clothing fit for princes. Is there anything more certain than that the artist represents his age, and is all the greater for embodying it. Now that is what I do. You will say that my work is not deeply considered, though it is extremely careful in execution; that its aims are not high; that it is not sober; that it is showy, perhaps even more; that it is loud occasionally—when it is not tame; that it shows for all it is worth, and is never better than it looks. And who, pray, are the people that live surrounded by what I make? Are they not represented by what I do? Do they not want show of such a kind as can be easily understood, refinement that shall not remind others of a refinement greater than theirs, money spent largely, but showing for every dollar? They want everything quick, because they have always been in a hurry; they want it on time, whatever happens, because they are accustomed to time bargains; they want it advertisable, because they live by advertising; and they gradually believe in the value of the pretenses they have made to others. They are not troubled by what they feel is transient, because their experience has been to pass on to others the things they preferred not to keep. They feel suspicious of anything that claims or seems to be better than it looks; is not their business to sell dearer than they buy? They must not be singular, because they must fit into some place already occupied.

"I claim to have fully expressed all this of them in what I do, and I care little for the envious contempt of the architects who have to employ me and who would like to have my place and wield my influence. And so I reflect my clients, and my art will have given what they are."

Thus the great German rolled out his mind with the Teutonic delight at giving an appearance of pure intellect to the interested working of his will—incidentally sneering at the peacock feathers, the sad-eyed dados, the poverty-stricken sentimentality, half esthetic, half shopkeeper, of his English rivals, or at the blunders in art which Mr. Stanford White once called our "native Hottentot style."

Of course my German was merely using a current sophistry that is only worth quoting to emphasize the truth.

Augustus, the greatest of all parvenus, did not ask of Virgil to recall in verse the cruelties of civil war. No true artist has ever sought to be degraded; no worker of the Middle Ages has reflected the brutality of the world around him. On the contrary, he has appealed to its chivalry and its religion. No treacherous adventurer of the Renaissance is pictured in the sunny, refined architecture that was made for him. You and I know that art is not the attempt at reflecting others, at taking possession of others, who belong to themselves; but that it is an attempt at keeping possession of one's self. It is often a protest at what is displeasing and mean about us; it is an appeal to what is better. That is its most real value. It is an appeal to peace in time of brutal war, an appeal to courageous war in time of ignoble peace; it is an appeal to the permanent reality in presence of the transient; it is an attempt to rest for a moment in the true way.

We are augurs conversing together, and we can afford to laugh at any respected absurdity. We know that cleverness is not the way to the reality; cleverness is only man's weak substitute for integrity, which is from God.

All these words—miscalled ideas—poured out by my German friend and his congeners are merely records of merchants' ways of looking at the use of a thing, not at the thing itself. Such people are persuaded that they must surely know about the thing they sell or furnish. If not they, then who? For none can be so impartial, as none are so disinterested, in the use of the thing sold.

It is too far back for you to remember the charming Blanco, the great slave-dealer, but you may have heard of his saying, which covers the side of the dealer. He had been asked why he felt so secure in his judgment of his fellow-creatures, and especially of women. "Because," said he, "I have traded in so many"—J'en ai tant vendu. I have sometimes quoted this saying to dealers in works of art, to dealers in knowledge about art, without, however, any success in pleasing them. In fact, one has no judgment of one's own in regard to anything sold that is not a matter of utility until one feels quite thoroughly, as if it were one's own, the sense of Talleyrand's treatment of the persuasive dealer. I am sure that you do not know the story. Two friends of his, ladies of rank, had chosen his study as a place of meeting. They wished to select some ring, some bracelet, for a gift, and the great jeweler of Paris was to send one of his salesmen with sufficient to choose from. Of course the choice was soon limited to two, and there paused, until Talleyrand, sitting at the farther end of the long library, called out, "Let me undertake to help you to make your decision. Young man, of these two trinkets tell me which you prefer." "This one, certainly, your Excellency." "Then," ended the experienced cynic, "please accept it for your sweetheart; and I think, ladies, that you had better take the other." I tell you anecdotes; are they not as good as reasons?

Listen to what my Chinese writer says: "Of language put into other people's mouths, nine-tenths will succeed. Of language based upon weighty authority, seven-tenths. But language which flows constantly over, as from a full goblet, is in accord with God. When language is put into other people's mouths, outside support is sought. Just as a father does not negotiate his son's marriage, for any praise he could bestow would not have the same value as praise by an outsider. Thus the fault is not mine, but that of others, who would not believe me as the original speaker." Again, a story of China comes back to me, told by the same writer, who lived before our purer era, and who was, as a Japanese friend remarks, a strategist in thought, fond of side attacks, of presenting some point apparently anecdotic and unimportant, which, once listened to, turns the truthful mind into channels of fresh inquiry. The anecdote is old, told by the old writer many centuries before Christ, and before any reflections about art troubled our barbarian minds.

It is about a court architect who flourished in celebrity some twenty-seven centuries ago, and who answered admiring queries as to how he did such wonderful things. "There is nothing supernatural about it," he said. "I first free my mind and preserve my vitality—my dependence upon God. Then, after a few days, the question of how much money I shall make disappears; a few more days, and I forget fame and the court whose architect I am; another day or so, and I think only of THE THING ITSELF. Then I am ready to go into the forest"—the architect and the carpenter were one then—"whose wood must contain the form I shall seek. As you see, there is nothing supernatural about it."

Twenty-seven centuries ago the formula of all good work was the same as it has been since. This looking for "the thing itself," not for the formula to control it, enabled men who were great and men who were little, far down toward us, far down into the times of the Renaissance (until pedantry and night covered human freedom and integrity), to be painters or poets, sculptors or architects, as the occasion required, to the astonishment of our narrowed, specialized vision of the last two hundred years.

Again, if I have not put it clearly enough in this story of the far East, let me add another, which includes the meaning of the first. You will forgive it in honor of the genius loci, for these writings of the Chinese philosophers form a staple of conversation and discussion in social gatherings of cultivated people here. The story is of the greatest of Chinese rulers, the "Yellow Emperor" of some forty-seven centuries ago. He was in pursuit of that law of things, that sufficient ideal which is called "Tao" ("the Way"), and he sought it in the wilds beyond the world known of China, in the fabulous mountains of Chu-tzu. He was accompanied by Ch'ang Yu and Chang Jo, and others of whom I know nothing; and Fang Ming, of whom I know nothing also, was their charioteer. When they had reached the outside wilderness these seven sages lost their way. By and by they fell in with a boy who was tending horses, and they asked him if he knew the Chu-tzu Mountains. "I do," said the boy. "And can you tell us," said the sages, "where Tao, the law, abides?" "I can," replied the boy. "This is strange," said the Yellow Emperor. "Pray tell me how would you govern the empire?"

"I should govern the empire," replied the boy, "in the same way that I tend my horses. What else should I do? When I was a little boy and lived within the points of the compass my eyes grew dim. An old man advised me to visit the wilderness outside of the world. My sight is now better, and I continue to dwell outside of the points of the compass. I should govern the empire in the same way. What else should I do?"

Said the Yellow Emperor, "Government is not your trade, but I should be glad to learn what you would do." The boy refused to answer, but being urged again, said: "What difference is there between governing the empire and looking after horses? See that no harm comes to the horses; that is all."

Thereupon the emperor prostrated himself before the boy; and calling him divine teacher, took his leave.

I am writing these vagaries by the sound of the waterfall in our garden; half of the amados are closed; the paper screens near me I have left open, and the moths and insects of the night flutter around my lamp in orbits as uncertain as the direction of my thoughts. I have given up my drawing; it is too hot to work. And I have already tired myself with looking over prints and designs. Among them there is a sketch by Hokusai which reminds me of the way in which my mind bestrides stray fancies that float past. The picture is that of Tekkai (the beggar), the Sennin exhaling his spiritual essence in a shadowy form, which shadow itself often rides away upon the spirit horse that Chokwaro or Tsuga evokes occasionally from his traveling-gourd.