LAFCADIO HEARN (continued 2)

My young questioner said "strange" for politeness' sake. His real thought would have been more accurately rendered by the word "indecent." But when I say that to the Japanese mind our typical novel appears indecent, highly indecent, the idea thereby suggested to my English readers will probably be misleading. The Japanese are not morbidly prudish. Our society novels do not strike them as indecent because the theme is love. The Japanese have a great deal of literature about love. No; our novels seem to them indecent for somewhat the same reason that the Scripture text, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife," appears to them one of the most immoral sentences ever written. In other words, their criticism requires a sociological explanation. To explain fully why our novels are, to their thinking, indecent, I should have to describe the whole structure, customs, and ethics of the Japanese family, totally different from anything in Western life; and to do this even in a superficial way would require a volume. I cannot attempt a complete explanation; I can only cite some facts of a suggestive character.

To begin with, then, I may broadly state that a great deal of our literature, besides its fiction, is revolting to the Japanese moral sense, not because it treats of the passion of love per se, but because it treats of that passion in relation to virtuous maidens, and therefore in relation to the family circle. Now, as a general rule, where passionate love is the theme in Japanese literature of the best class, it is not that sort of love which leads to the establishment of family relations. It is quite another sort of love,—a sort of love about which the Oriental is not prudish at all,—the mayoi, or infatuation of passion, inspired by merely physical attraction; and its heroines are not the daughters of refined families, but mostly hetæræ, or professional dancing-girls. Neither does this Oriental variety of literature deal with its subject after the fashion of sensuous literature in the West,—French literature, for example: it considers it from a different artistic standpoint, and describes rather a different order of emotional sensations.

A national literature is of necessity reflective: and we may presume that what it fails to portray can have little or no outward manifestation in the national life. Now, the reserve of Japanese literature regarding that love which is the great theme of our greatest novelists and poets is exactly paralleled by the reserve of Japanese society in regard to the same topic. The typical woman often figures in Japanese romance as a heroine; as a perfect mother; as a pious daughter, willing to sacrifice all for duty; as a loyal wife, who follows her husband into battle, fights by his side, saves his life at the cost of her own; never as a sentimental maiden, dying, or making others die, for love. Neither do we find her on literary exhibition as a dangerous beauty, a charmer of men; and in the real life of Japan she has never appeared in any such rôle. Society, as a mingling of the sexes, as an existence of which the supremely refined charm is the charm of woman, has never existed in the East. Even in Japan, society, in the special sense of the word, remains masculine. Nor is it easy to believe that the adoption of European fashions and customs within some restricted circles of the capital indicates the beginning of such a social change as might eventually remodel the national life according to Western ideas of society. For such a remodeling would involve the dissolution of the family, the disintegration of the whole social fabric, the destruction of the whole ethical system,—the breaking up, in short, of the national life.

Taking the word "woman" in its most refined meaning, and postulating a society in which woman seldom appears, a society in which she is never placed "on display," a society in which wooing is utterly out of the question, and the faintest compliment to wife or daughter is an outrageous impertinence, the reader can at once reach some startling conclusions as to the impression made by our popular fiction upon members of that society. But, although partly correct, his conclusions must fall short of the truth in certain directions, unless he also possess some knowledge of the restraints of that society and of the ethical notions behind the restraints. For example, a refined Japanese never speaks to you about his wife (I am stating the general rule), and very seldom indeed about his children, however proud of them he may be. Rarely will he be heard to speak about any of the members of his family, about his domestic life, about any of his private affairs. But if he should happen to talk about members of his family, the persons mentioned will almost certainly be his parents. Of them he will speak with a reverence approaching religious feeling, yet in a manner quite different from that which would be natural to an Occidental, and never so as to imply any mental comparison between the merits of his own parents and those of other men's parents. But he will not talk about his wife even to the friends who were invited as guests to his wedding. And I think I may safely say that the poorest and most ignorant Japanese, however dire his need, would never dream of trying to obtain aid or to invoke pity by the mention of his wife—perhaps not even of his wife and children. But he would not hesitate to ask help for the sake of his parents or his grandparents. Love of wife and child, the strongest of all sentiments with the Occidental, is judged by the Oriental to be a selfish affection. He professes to be ruled by a higher sentiment,—duty: duty, first, to his Emperor; next, to his parents. And since love can he classed only as an ego-altruistic feeling, the Japanese thinker is not wrong in his refusal to consider it the loftiest of motives, however refined or spiritualized it may he.

In the existence of the poorer classes of Japan there are no secrets; but among the upper classes family life is much less open to observation than in any country of the West, not excepting Spain. It is a life of which foreigners see little, and know almost nothing, all the essays which have been written about Japanese women to the contrary notwithstanding.[1] Invited to the home of a Japanese friend, you may or may not see the family. It will depend upon circumstances.

If you see any of them, it will probably be for a moment only, and in that event you will most likely see the wife. At the entrance you give your card to the servant, who retires to present it, and presently returns to usher you into the zashiki, or guest-room, always the largest and finest apartment in a Japanese dwelling, where your kneeling-cushion is ready for you, with a smoking-box before it. The servant brings you tea and cakes. In a little time the host himself enters, and after the indispensable salutations conversation begins. Should you be pressed to stay for dinner, and accept the invitation, it is probable that the wife will do you the honor, as her husband's friend, to wait upon you during an instant. You may or may not be formally introduced to her; but a glance at her dress and coiffure should be sufficient to inform you at once who she is, and you must greet her with the most profound respect. She will probably impress you (especially if your visit be to a samurai home) as a delicately refined and very serious person, by no means a woman of the much-smiling and much-bowing kind. She will say extremely little, but will salute you, and will serve you for a moment with a natural grace of which the mere spectacle is a revelation, and glide away again, to remain invisible until the instant of your departure, when she will reappear at the entrance to wish you good-by. During other successive visits you may have similar charming glimpses of her; perhaps, also, some rarer glimpses of the aged father and mother; and if a much favored visitor, the children may at last come to greet you, with wonderful politeness and sweetness. But the innermost intimate life of that family will never be revealed to you. All that you see to suggest it will be refined, courteous, exquisite, but of the relation of those souls to each other you will know nothing. Behind the beautiful screens which mask the further interior, all is silent, gentle mystery. There is no reason, to the Japanese mind, why it should be otherwise. Such family life is sacred; the home is a sanctuary, of which it were impious to draw aside the veil. Nor can I think this idea of the sacredness of home and of the family relation in any wise inferior to our highest conception of the home and the family in the West.

Should there be grown-up daughters in the family, however, the visitor is less likely to see the wife. More timid, but equally silent and reserved, the young girls will make the guest welcome. In obedience to orders, they may even gratify him by a performance upon some musical instrument, by exhibiting some of their own needlework or painting, or by showing to him some precious or curious objects among the family heirlooms. But all submissive sweetness and courtesy are inseparable from the high-bred reserve belonging to the finest native culture. And the guest must not allow himself to be less reserved. Unless possessing the privilege of great age, which would entitle him to paternal freedom of speech, he must never venture upon personal compliment, or indulge in anything resembling light flattery. What would be deemed gallantry in the West may be gross rudeness in the East. On no account can the visitor compliment a young girl about her looks, her grace, her toilette, much less dare address such a compliment to the wife. But, the reader may object, there are certainly occasions upon which a compliment of some character cannot be avoided. This is true, and on such an occasion politeness requires, as a preliminary, the humblest apology for making the compliment, which will then be accepted with a phrase more graceful than our "Pray do not mention it;"—that is, the rudeness of making a compliment at all.

But here we touch the vast subject of Japanese etiquette, about which I must confess myself still profoundly ignorant. I have ventured thus much only in order to suggest how lacking: in refinement much of our Western society fiction must appear to the Oriental mind.

To speak of one's affection for wife or children, to bring into conversation anything closely related to domestic life, is totally incompatible with Japanese ideas of good breeding. Our open acknowledgment, or rather exhibition, of the domestic relation consequently appears to cultivated Japanese, if not absolutely barbarous, at least uxorious. And this sentiment may be found to explain not a little in Japanese life which has given foreigners a totally incorrect idea about the position of Japanese women. It is not the custom in Japan for the husband even to walk side by side with his wife in the street, much less to give her his arm, or to assist her in ascending or descending a flight of stairs. But this is not any proof upon his part of want of affection. It is only the result of a social sentiment totally different from our own; it is simply obedience to an etiquette founded upon the idea that public displays of the marital relation are improper. Why improper? Because they seem to Oriental judgment to indicate a confession of personal, and therefore selfish sentiment For the Oriental the law of life is duty. Affection must, in every time and place, be subordinated to duty. Any public exhibition of personal affection of a certain class is equivalent to a public confession of moral weakness. Does this mean that to love one's wife is amoral weakness? No; it is the duty of a man to love his wife; but it is moral weakness to love her more than his parents, or to show her, in public, more attention than he shows to his parents. Nay, it would be a proof of moral weakness to show her even the same degree of attention. During the lifetime of the parents her position in the household is simply that of an adopted daughter, and the most affectionate of husbands must not even for a moment allow himself to forget the etiquette of the family.

Here I must touch upon one feature of Western literature never to be reconciled with Japanese ideas and customs. Let the reader reflect for a moment how large a place the subject of kisses and caresses and embraces occupies in our poetry and in our prose fiction; and then let him consider the fact that in Japanese literature these have no existence whatever. For kisses and embraces are simply unknown in Japan as tokens of affection, if we except the solitary fact that Japanese mothers, like mothers all over the world, lip and hug their little ones betimes. After babyhood there is no more hugging or kissing. Such actions, except in the case of infants, are held to be highly immodest. Never do girls kiss one another; never do parents kiss or embrace their children who have become able to walk. And this rule holds good of all classes of society, from the highest nobility to the humblest peasantry. Neither have we the least indication throughout Japanese literature of any time in the history of the race when affection was more demonstrative than it is to-day. Perhaps the Western reader will find it hard even to imagine a literature in the whole course of which no mention is made of kissing, of embracing, even of pressing a loved hand; for hand-clasping is an action as totally foreign to Japanese impulse as kissing. Yet on these topics even the naïve songs of the country folk, even the old ballads of the people about unhappy lovers, are quite as silent as the exquisite verses of the court poets. Suppose we take for an example the ancient popular ballad of Shuntokumaru, which has given origin to various proverbs and household words familiar throughout western Japan. Here we have the story of two betrothed lovers, long separated by a cruel misfortune, wandering in search of each other all over the Empire, and at last suddenly meeting before Kiomidzu Temple by the favor of the gods. Would not any Aryan poet describe such a meeting as a rushing of the two into each other's arms, with kisses and cries of love? But how does the old Japanese ballad describe it? In brief, the twain only sit down together and stroke each other a little. Now, even this reserved form of caress is an extremely rare indulgence of emotion. You may see again and again fathers and sons, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, meeting after years of absence, yet you will probably never see the least approach to a caress between them. They will kneel down and salute each other, and smile, and perhaps cry a little for joy; but they will neither rush into each other's arms, nor utter extraordinary phrases of affection. Indeed, such terms of affection as "my dear," "my darling," "my sweet," "my love," "my life," do not exist in Japanese, nor any terms at all equivalent to our emotional idioms. Japanese affection is not uttered in words; it scarcely appears even in the tone of voice: it is chiefly shown in acts of exquisite courtesy and kindness. I might add that the opposite emotion is under equally perfect control; but to illustrate this remarkable fact would require a separate essay.

III

He who would study impartially the life and thought of the Orient must also study those of the Occident from the Oriental point of view. And the results of such a comparative study he will find to be in no small degree retroactive. According to his character and his faculty of perception, he will be more or less affected by those Oriental influences to which he submits himself. The conditions of Western life will gradually begin to assume for him new, undreamed-of meanings, and to lose not a few of their old familiar aspects. Much that he once deemed right and true he may begin to find abnormal and false. He may begin to doubt whether the moral ideals of the West are really the highest. He may feel more than inclined to dispute the estimate placed by Western custom upon Western civilization. Whether his doubts be final is another matter: they will be at least rational enough and powerful enough to modify permanently some of his prior convictions,—among others his conviction of the moral value of the Western worship of Woman as the Unattainable, the Incomprehensible, the Divine, the ideal of "la femme que tu ne connaîtras pas,"[1]—the ideal of the Eternal Feminine. For in this ancient East the Eternal Feminine does not exist at all. And after having become quite accustomed to live without it, one may naturally conclude that it is not absolutely essential to intellectual health, and may even dare to question the necessity for its perpetual existence upon the other side of the world.

IV

To say that the Eternal Feminine does not exist in the Far East is to state but a part of the truth. That it could be introduced thereinto, in the remotest future, is not possible to imagine. Few, if any, of our ideas regarding it can even be rendered into the language of the country: a language in which nouns have no gender, adjectives no degrees of comparison, and verbs no persons; a language in which, says Professor Chamberlain, the absence of personification is "a characteristic so deep-seated and so all-pervading as to interfere even with the use of neuter nouns in combination with transitive verbs."[1] "In fact," he adds, "most metaphors and allegories are incapable of so much as explanation to Far-Eastern minds;" and he makes a striking citation from Wordsworth in illustration of his statement. Yet even poets much more lucid than Wordsworth are to the Japanese equally obscure. I remember the difficulty I once had in explaining to an advanced class this simple line from a well-known ballad of Tennyson,—"She is more beautiful than day." My students could understand the use of the adjective "beautiful" to qualify "day," and the use of the same adjective, separately, to qualify the word "maid." But that there could exist in any mortal mind the least idea of analogy between the beauty of day and the beauty of a young woman was quite beyond their understanding. In order to convey to them the poet's thought, it was necessary to analyze it psychologically,—to prove a possible nervous analogy between two modes of pleasurable feeling excited by two different impressions.

Thus, the very nature of the language tells us how ancient and how deeply rooted in racial character are those tendencies by which we must endeavor to account—if there be any need of accounting at all—for the absence in this Far East of a dominant ideal corresponding to our own. They are causes incomparably older than the existing social structure, older than the idea of the family, older than ancestor worship, enormously older than that Confucian code which is the reflection rather than the explanation of many singular facts in Oriental life. But since beliefs and practices react upon character, and character again must react upon practices and beliefs, it has not been altogether irrational to seek in Confucianism for causes as well as for explanations. Far more irrational have been the charges of hasty critics against Shintō and against Buddhism as religious influences opposed to the natural rights of woman. The ancient faith of Shintō has been at least as gentle to woman as the ancient faith of the Hebrews. Its female divinities are not less numerous than its masculine divinities, nor are they presented to the imagination of worshipers in a form much less attractive than the dreams of Greek mythology. Of some, like So-tohori-no-Iratsumé, it is said that the light of their beautiful bodies passes through their garments; and the source of all life and light, the eternal Sun, is a goddess, fair Amaterasu-oho-mi-kami. Virgins serve the ancient gods, and figure in all the pageants of the faith; and in a thousand shrines throughout the land the memory of woman as wife and mother is worshiped equally with the memory of man as hero and father. Neither can the later and alien faith of Buddhism be justly accused of relegating woman to a lower place in the spiritual world than monkish Christianity accorded her in the West. The Buddha, like the Christ, was horn of a virgin; the most lovable divinities of Buddhism, Jizo excepted, are feminine, both in Japanese art and in Japanese popular fancy; and in the Buddhist as in the Roman Catholic hagiography, the lives of holy women hold honored place. It is true that Buddhism, like early Christianity, used its utmost eloquence in preaching against the temptation of female loveliness; and it is true that in the teaching of its founder, as in the teaching of Paul, social and spiritual supremacy is accorded to the man. Yet, in our search for texts on this topic, we must not overlook the host of instances of favor shown by the Buddha to women of all classes, nor that remarkable legend of a later text, in which a dogma denying to woman the highest spiritual opportunities is sublimely rebuked.

In the eleventh chapter of the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law, it is written that mention was made before the Lord Buddha of a young girl who had in one instant arrived at supreme knowledge; who had in one moment acquired the merits of a thousand meditations, and the proofs of the essence of all laws. And the girl came and stood in the presence of the Lord.

But the Bodhissattva Pragnakuta doubted, saying, "I have seen the Lord Sakyamuni in the time when he was striving for supreme enlightenment, and I know that he performed good works innumerable through countless æons. In all the world there is not one spot so large as a grain of mustard-seed where he has not surrendered his body for the sake of living creatures. Only after all this did he arrive at enlightenment. Who then may believe this girl could in one moment have arrived at supreme knowledge?"

And the venerable priest Sariputra likewise doubted, saying, "It may indeed happen, O Sister, that a woman fulfill the six perfect virtues; but as yet there is no example of her having attained to Buddhaship, because a woman cannot attain to the rank of a Bodhissattva."

But the maiden called upon the Lord Buddha to be her witness. And instantly in the sight of the assembly her sex disappeared; and she manifested herself as a Bodhissattva, filling all directions of space with the radiance of the thirty-two signs. And the world shook in six different ways. And the priest Sariputra was silent.[2]

V

But to feel the real nature of what is surely one of the greatest obstacles to intellectual sympathy between the West and the Far East, we must fully appreciate the immense effect upon Occidental life of this ideal which has no existence in the Orient. We must remember what that ideal has been to Western civilization,—to all its pleasures and refinements and luxuries; to its sculpture, painting, decoration, architecture, literature, drama, music; to the development of countless industries. We must think of its effect upon manners, customs, and the language of taste, upon conduct and ethics, upon endeavor, upon philosophy and religion, upon almost every phase of public and private life,—in short, upon national character. Nor should we forget that the many influences interfused in the shaping of it—Teutonic, Celtic, Scandinavian, classic, or mediæval, the Greek apotheosis of human beauty, the Christian worship of the mother of God, the exaltations of chivalry, the spirit of the Renascence steeping and coloring all the preëxisting idealism in a new sensuousness—must have had their nourishment, if not their birth, in a race feeling ancient as Aryan speech, and as alien the most eastern East.

Of all these various influences combined to form our ideal, the classic element remains perceptibly dominant. It is true that the Hellenic conception of human beauty, so surviving, has been wondrously informed with a conception of soul beauty never of the antique world nor of the Renascence. Also it is true that the new philosophy of evolution, forcing recognition of the incalculable and awful cost of the Present to the Past, creating a totally new comprehension of duty to the Future, enormously enhancing our conception of character values, has aided more than all preceding influences together toward the highest possible spiritualization of the ideal of woman. Yet, however further spiritualized it may become through future intellectual expansion, this ideal must in its very nature remain fundamentally artistic and sensuous.

We do not see Nature as the Oriental sees it, and as his art proves that he sees it. We see it less realistically, we know it less intimately, because, save through the lenses of the specialist, we contemplate it anthropomorphically. In one direction, indeed, our æsthetic sense has been cultivated to a degree incomparably finer than that of the Oriental; but that direction has been passional. We have learned something of the beauty of Nature through our ancient worship of the beauty of woman. Even from the beginning it is probable that the perception of human beauty has been the main source of all our æsthetic sensibility. Possibly we owe to it likewise our idea of proportion;[1] our exaggerated appreciation of regularity; our fondness for parallels, curves, and all geometrical symmetries. And in the long process of our æsthetic evolution, the ideal of woman has at last become for us an æsthetic abstraction. Through the illusion of that abstraction only do we perceive the charms of our world, even as forms might be perceived through some tropic atmosphere whose vapors are iridescent.

Nor is this all. Whatsoever has once been likened to woman by art or thought has been strangely informed and transformed by that momentary symbolism: wherefore, through all the centuries Western fancy has been making Nature more and more feminine. Whatsoever delights us imagination has feminized,—the infinite tenderness of the sky,—the mobility of waters,—the rose of dawn,—the vast caress of Day,—Night, and the lights of heaven,—even the undulations of the eternal hills. And flowers, and the flush of fruit, and all things fragrant, fair, and gracious; the genial seasons with their voices; the laughter of streams, and whisper of leaves, and ripplings of song within the shadows;—all sights, or sounds, or sensations that can touch our love of loveliness, of delicacy, of sweetness, of gentleness, make for us vague dreams of woman. Where our fancy lends masculinity to Nature, it is only in grimness and in force,—as if to enhance by rugged and mighty contrasts the witchcraft of the Eternal Feminine. Nay, even the terrible itself, if fraught with terrible beauty,—even Destruction, if only shaped with the grace of destroyers,—becomes for us feminine. And not beauty alone, of sight or sound, but well-nigh all that is mystic, sublime, or holy, now makes appeal to us through some marvelously woven intricate plexus of passional sensibility. Even the subtlest forces of our universe speak to us of woman; new sciences have taught us new names for the thrill her presence wakens in the blood, for that ghostly shock which is first love, for the eternal riddle of her fascination. Thus, out of simple human passion, through influences and transformations innumerable, we have evolved a cosmic emotion, a feminine pantheism.

VI

And now may not one venture to ask whether all the consequences of this passional influence in the æsthetic evolution of our Occident have been in the main beneficial? Underlying all those visible results of which we boast as art triumphs, may there not be lurking invisible results, some future revelation of which will cause more than a little shock to our self-esteem? Is it not quite possible that our æsthetic faculties have been developed even abnormally in one direction by the power of a single emotional idea which has left us nearly, if not totally blind to many wonderful aspects of Nature? Or rather, must not this be the inevitable effect of the extreme predominance of one particular emotion in the evolution of our æsthetic sensibility? And finally, one may surely be permitted to ask if the predominating influence itself has been the highest possible, and whether there is not a higher, known perhaps to the Oriental soul.

I may only suggest these questions, without hoping to answer them satisfactorily. But the longer I dwell in the East, the more I feel growing upon me the belief that there are exquisite artistic faculties and perceptions, developed in the Oriental, of which we can know scarcely more than we know of those unimaginable colors, invisible to the human eye, yet proven to exist by the spectroscope. I think that such a possibility is indicated by certain phases of Japanese art.

Here it becomes as difficult as dangerous to particularize. I dare hazard only some general observations. I think this marvelous art asserts that, out of the infinitely varied aspects of Nature, those which for us hold no suggestion whatever of sex character, those which cannot be looked at anthropomorphically, those which are neither masculine nor feminine, but neuter or nameless, are those most profoundly loved and comprehended by the Japanese. Nay, he sees in Nature much that for thousands of years has remained invisible to us; and we are now learning from him aspects of life and beauties of form to which we were utterly blind before. We have finally made the startling discovery that his art—notwithstanding all the dogmatic assertions of Western prejudice to the contrary, and notwithstanding the strangely weird impression of unreality which at first it produced—is never a mere creation of fantasy, but a veritable reflection of what has been and of what is: wherefore we have recognized that it is nothing less than a higher education in art simply to look at his studies of bird life, insect life, plant life, tree life. Compare, for example, our very finest drawings of insects with Japanese drawings of similar subjects. Compare Giacomelli's illustrations to Michelet's "L'Insecte" with the commonest Japanese figures of the same creatures decorating the stamped leather of a cheap tobacco pouch or the metal work of a cheap pipe. The whole minute exquisiteness of the European engraving has accomplished only an indifferent realism, while the Japanese artist, with a few dashes of his brush, has seized and reproduced, with an incomprehensible power of interpretation, not only every peculiarity of the creature's shape, but every special characteristic of its motion. Each figure flung from the Oriental painter's brush is a lesson, a revelation, to perceptions unbeclouded by prejudice, an opening of the eyes of those who can see, though it be only a spider in a wind-shaken web, a dragon-fly riding a sunbeam, a pair of crabs running through sedge, the trembling of a fish's fins in a clear current, the lilt of a flying wasp, the pitch of a flying duck, a mantis in fighting position, or a semi toddling up a cedar branch to sing. All this art is alive, intensely alive, and our corresponding art looks absolutely dead beside it.

Take, again, the subject of flowers. An English or German flower painting, the result of months of trained labor, and valued at several hundred pounds, would certainly not compare as a nature study, in the higher sense, with a Japanese flower painting executed in twenty brush strokes, and worth perhaps five sen. The former would represent at best but an ineffectual and painful effort to imitate a massing of colors. The latter would prove a perfect memory of certain flower shapes instantaneously flung upon paper, without any model to aid, and showing, not the recollection of any individual blossom, but the perfect realization of a general law of form expression, perfectly mastered, with all its moods, tenses, and inflections. The French alone, among Western art critics, seem fully to understand these features of Japanese art; and among all Western artists it is the Parisian alone who approaches the Oriental in his methods. Without lifting his brush from the paper, the French artist may sometimes, with a single wavy line, create the almost speaking figure of a particular type of man or woman. But this high development of faculty is confined chiefly to humorous sketching; it is still either masculine or feminine. To understand what I mean by the ability of the Japanese artist, my reader must imagine just such a power of almost instantaneous creation as that which characterizes certain French work, applied to almost every subject except individuality, to nearly all recognized general types, to all aspects of Japanese nature, to all forms of native landscape, to clouds and flowing water and mists, to all the life of woods and fields, to all the moods of seasons and the tones of horizons and the colors of the morning and the evening. Certainly, the deeper spirit of this magical art seldom reveals itself at first sight to unaccustomed eyes, since it appeals to so little in Western æsthetic experience. But by gentle degrees it will so enter into an appreciative and unprejudiced mind as to modify profoundly therein almost every preëxisting sentiment in relation to the beautiful. All of its meaning will indeed require many years to master, but something of its reshaping power will be felt in a much shorter time when the sight of an American illustrated magazine or of any illustrated European periodical has become almost unbearable.

Psychological differences of far deeper import are suggested by other facts, capable of exposition in words, but not capable of interpretation through Western standards of æsthetics or Western feeling of any sort. For instance, I have been watching two old men planting young trees in the garden of a neighboring temple. They sometimes spend nearly an hour in planting a single sapling. Having fixed it in the ground, they retire to a distance to study the position of all its lines, and consult together about it. As a consequence, the sapling is taken up and replanted in a slightly different position. This is done no less than eight times before the little tree can be perfectly adjusted into the plan of the garden. Those two old men are composing a mysterious thought with their little trees, changing them, transferring them, removing or replacing them, even as a poet changes and shifts his words, to give to his verse the most delicate or the most forcible expression possible.

In every large Japanese cottage there are several alcoves, or tokonoma, one in each of the principal rooms. In these alcoves the art treasures of the family are exhibited.[1] Within each toko a kakemono is hung; and upon its slightly elevated floor (usually of polished wood) are placed flower vases and one or two artistic objects. Flowers are arranged in the toko vases according to ancient rules which Mr. Conder's beautiful hook will tell you a great deal about; and the kakemono and the art objects there displayed are changed at regular intervals, according to occasion and season. Now, in a certain alcove, I have at various times seen many different things of beauty: a Chinese statuette of ivory, an incense vase of bronze,—representing a cloud-riding pair of dragons,—the wood carving of a Buddhist pilgrim resting by the wayside and mopping his bald pate, masterpieces of lacquer ware and lovely Kyōto porcelains, and a large stone placed on a pedestal of heavy, costly wood, expressly made for it. I do not know whether you could see any beauty in that stone; it is neither hewn nor polished, nor does it possess the least imaginable intrinsic value. It is simply a gray water-worn stone from the bed of a stream. Yet it cost more than one of those Kyōto vases which sometimes replace it, and which you would be glad to pay a very high price for.

In the garden of the little house I now occupy in Kumamoto, there are about fifteen rocks, or large stones, of as many shapes and sizes. They also have no real intrinsic value, not even as possible building material. And yet the proprietor of the garden paid for them something more than seven hundred and fifty Japanese dollars, or considerably more than the pretty house itself could possibly have cost. And it would be quite wrong to suppose the cost of the stones due to the expense of their transportation from the bed of the Shira-kawa. No; they are worth seven hundred and fifty dollars only because they are considered beautiful to a certain degree, and because there is a large local demand for beautiful stones. They are not even of the best class, or they would have cost a great deal more. Now, until you can perceive that a big rough stone may have more æsthetic suggestiveness than a costly steel engraving, that it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, you cannot begin to understand how a Japanese sees Nature. "But what," you may ask, "can be beautiful in a common stone?" Many things; but I will mention only one,—irregularity.

In my little Japanese house, the fusuma, or sliding screens of opaque paper between room and room, have designs at which I am never tired of looking. The designs vary in different parts of the dwelling; I will speak only of the fusuma dividing my study from a smaller apartment. The ground color is a delicate cream-yellow; and the golden pattern is very simple,—the mystic-jewel symbols of Buddhism scattered over the surface by pairs. But no two sets of pairs are placed at exactly the same distance from each other; and the symbols themselves are curiously diversified, never appearing twice in exactly the same position or relation. Sometimes one jewel is transparent, and its fellow opaque; sometimes both are opaque or both diaphanous; sometimes the transparent one is the larger of the two; sometimes the opaque is the larger; sometimes both are precisely the same size; sometimes they overlap, and sometimes do not touch; sometimes the opaque is on the left, sometimes on the right; sometimes the transparent jewel is above, sometimes below. Vainly does the eye roam over the whole surface in search of a repetition, or of anything resembling regularity, either in distribution, juxtaposition, grouping, dimensions, or contrasts. And throughout the whole dwelling nothing resembling regularity in the various decorative designs can be found. The ingenuity by which it is avoided is amazing,—rises to the dignify of genius. Now, all this is a common characteristic of Japanese decorative art; and after having lived a few years under its influences, the sight of a regular pattern upon a wall, a carpet, a curtain, a ceiling, upon any decorated surface, pains like a horrible vulgarism. Surely, it is because we have so long been accustomed to look at Nature anthropomorphically that we can still endure mechanical ugliness in our own decorative art, and that we remain insensible to charms of Nature which are clearly perceived even by the eyes of the Japanese child, wondering over its mother's shoulder at the green and blue wonder of the world.

"He" saith a Buddhist text, "who discerns that nothingness is law,—such a one hath wisdom."

V

BITS OF LIFE AND DEATH

I

July 25. Three extraordinary visits have been made to my house this week.

The first was that of the professional well-cleaners. For once every year all wells must be emptied and cleansed, lest the God of Wells, Suijin-Sama, be wroth. On this occasion I learned some things relating to Japanese wells and the tutelar deity of them, who has two names, being also called Mizuha-nome-no-mikoto.

Suijin-Sama protects all wells, keeping their water sweet and cool, provided that house-owners observe his laws of cleanliness, which are rigid. To those who break them sickness comes, and death. Rarely the god manifests himself, taking the form of a serpent. I have never seen any temple dedicated to him. But once each month a Shinto priest visits the homes of pious families having wells, and he repeats certain ancient prayers to the Well-God, and plants nobori, little paper flags, which are symbols, at the edge of the well. After the well has been cleaned, also, this is done. Then the first bucket of the new water must be drawn up by a man; for if a woman first draw water, the well will always thereafter remain muddy.

The god has little servants to help him in his work. These are the small fishes the Japanese call funa.[1] One or two funa are kept in every well, to clear the water of larvae. When a well is cleaned, great care is taken of the little fish. It was on the occasion of the coming of the well-cleaners that I first learned of the existence of a pair of funa in my own well. They were placed in a tub of cool water while the well was refilling, and thereafter were replunged into their solitude.

The water of my well is clear and ice-cold. But now I can never drink of it without a thought of those two small white lives circling always in darkness, and startled through untold years by the descent of plashing buckets.

The second curious visit was that of the district firemen, in full costume, with their hand-engines. According to ancient custom, they make a round of all their district once a year during the dry spell, and throw water over the hot roofs, and receive some small perquisite from each wealthy householder. There is a belief that when it has not rained for a long time roofs may be ignited by the mere heat of the sun. The firemen played with their hose upon my roofs, trees, and garden, producing considerable refreshment; and in return I bestowed on them wherewith to buy saké.

The third visit was that of a deputation of children asking for some help to celebrate fittingly the festival of Jizō, who has a shrine on the other side of the street, exactly opposite my house. I was very glad to contribute to their fund, for I love the gentle god, and I knew the festival would be delightful. Early next morning, I saw that the shrine had already been decked with flowers and votive lanterns. A new bib had been put about Jizō's neck, and a Buddhist repast set before him. Later on, carpenters constructed a dancing-platform in the temple court for the children to dance upon; and before sundown the toy-sellers had erected and stocked a small street of booths inside the precincts. After dark I went out into a great glory of lantern fires to see the children dance; and I found, perched before my gate, an enormous dragon-fly more than three feet long. It was a token of the children's gratitude for the little help I had given them,—a kazari, a decoration. I was startled for the moment by the realism of the thing; but upon close examination I discovered that the body was a pine branch wrapped with colored paper, the four wings were four fire-shovels, and the gleaming head was a little teapot. The whole was lighted by a candle so placed as to make extraordinary shadows, which formed part of the design. It was a wonderful instance of art sense working without a speck of artistic material, yet it was all the labor of a poor little child only eight years old!

II

July 30. The next house to mine, on the south side,—a low, dingy structure,—is that of a dyer. You can always tell where a Japanese dyer is by the long pieces of silk or cotton stretched between bamboo poles before his door to dry in the sun,—broad bands of rich azure, of purple, of rose, pale blue, pearl gray. Yesterday my neighbor coaxed me to pay the family a visit; and after having been led through the front part of their little dwelling, I was surprised to find myself looking from a rear veranda at a garden worthy of some old Kyōto palace. There was a dainty landscape in miniature, and a pond of clear water peopled by goldfish having wonderfully compound tails.

When I had enjoyed this spectacle awhile, the dyer led me to a small room fitted up as a Buddhist chapel. Though everything had had to be made on a reduced scale, I did not remember to have seen a more artistic display in any temple. He told me it had cost him about fifteen hundred yen. I did not understand how even that sum could have sufficed.

There were three elaborately carven altars,-a triple blaze of gold lacquer-work; a number of charming Buddhist images; many exquisite vessels; an ebony reading-desk; a mokugyō[1]; two fine bells,—in short, all the paraphernalia of a temple in miniature. My host had studied at a Buddhist temple in his youth, and knew the sutras, of which he had all that are used by the Jōdō sect. He told me that he could celebrate any of the ordinary services. Daily, at a fixed hour, the whole family assembled in the chapel for prayers; and he generally read the Kyō for them. But on extraordinary occasions a Buddhist priest from the neighboring temple would come to officiate.

He told me a queer story about robbers. Dyers are peculiarly liable to be visited by robbers; partly by reason of the value of the silks intrusted to them, and also because the business is known to be lucrative. One evening the family were robbed. The master was out of the city; his old mother, his wife, and a female servant were the only persons in the house at the time. Three men, having their faces masked and carrying long swords, entered the door. One asked the servant whether any of the apprentices were still in the building; and she, hoping to frighten the invaders away, answered that the young men were all still at work. But the robbers were not disturbed by this assurance. One posted himself at the entrance, the other two strode into the sleeping-apartment. The women started up in alarm, and the wife asked, "Why do you wish to kill us?" He who seemed to be the leader answered, "We do not wish to kill you; we want money only. But if we do not get it, then it will be this"—striking his sword into the matting. The old mother said, "Be so kind as not to frighten my daughter-in-law, and I will give you whatever money there is in the house. But you ought to know there cannot be much, as my son has gone to Kyōto." She handed them the money-drawer and her own purse. There were, just twenty-seven yen and eighty-four sen. The head robber counted it, and said, quite gently, "We do not want to frighten you. We know you are a very devout believer in Buddhism, and we think you would not tell a lie. Is this all?" "Yes, it is all," she answered. "I am, as you say, a believer in the teaching of the Buddha, and if you come to rob me now, I believe it is only because I myself, in some former life, once robbed you. This is my punishment for that fault, and so, instead of wishing to deceive you, I feel grateful at this opportunity to atone for the wrong which I did to you in my previous state of existence." The robber laughed, and said, "You are a good old woman, and we believe you. If you were poor, we would not rob you at all. Now we only want a couple of kimono and this,"—laying his hand on a very fine silk overdress. The old woman replied, "All my son's kimono I can give you, but I beg you will not take that, for it does not belong to my son, and was confided to us only for dyeing. What is ours I can give, but I cannot give what belongs to another." "That is quite right," approved the robber, "and we shall not take it."

After receiving a few robes, the robbers said good-night, very politely, but ordered the women not to look after them. The old servant was still near the door. As the chief robber passed her, he said, "You told us a lie,—so take that!"—and struck her senseless. None of the robbers were ever caught.

III

August 29. When a body has been burned, according to the funeral rites of certain Buddhist sects, search is made among the ashes for a little bone called the Hotoke-San, or "Lord Buddha," popularly supposed to be a little bone of the throat. What bone it really is I do not know, never having had a chance to examine such a relic.

According to the shape of this little bone when found after the burning, the future condition of the dead may be predicted. Should the next state to which the soul is destined be one of happiness, the bone will have the form of a small image of Buddha. But if the next birth is to be unhappy, then the bone will have either an ugly shape, or no shape at all.

A little boy, the son of a neighboring tobacconist, died the night before last, and to-day the corpse was burned. The little hone left over from the burning was discovered to have the form of three Buddhas,—San-Tai,—which may have afforded some spiritual consolation to the bereaved parents.[1]

IV

September 13. A letter from Matsue, Izumo, tells me that the old man who used to supply me with pipestems is dead. (A Japanese pipe, you must know, consists of three pieces, usually,—a metal bowl large enough to hold a pea, a metal mouthpiece, and a bamboo stem which is renewed at regular intervals.) He used to stain his pipestems very prettily: some looked like porcupine quills, and some like cylinders of snakeskin. He lived in a queer narrow little street at the verge of the city. I know the street because in it there is a famous statue of Jizō called Shiroko-ō,—"White-Child-Jizō,"—which I once went to see. They whiten its face, like the face of a dancing-girl, for some reason which I have never been able to find out.

The old man had a daughter, O-Masu, about whom a story is told. O-Masu is still alive. She has been a happy wife for many years; but she is dumb. Long ago, an angry mob sacked and destroyed the dwelling and the storehouses of a rice speculator in the city. His money, including a quantity of gold coin (koban), was scattered through the street. The rioters—rude, honest peasants—did not want it: they wished to destroy, not to steal. But O-Masu's father, the same evening, picked up a koban from the mud, and took it home. Later on a neighbor denounced him, and secured his arrest. The judge before whom he was summoned tried to obtain certain evidence by cross-questioning O-Masu, then a shy girl of fifteen. She felt that if she continued to answer she would be made, in spite of herself, to give testimony unfavorable to her father; that she was in the presence of a trained inquisitor, capable, without effort, of forcing her to acknowledge everything she knew. She ceased to speak, and a stream of blood gushed from her mouth. She had silenced herself forever by simply biting off her tongue. Her father was acquitted. A merchant who admired the act demanded her in marriage, and supported her father in his old age.

V

October 10. There is said to be one day—only one—in the life of a child during which it can remember and speak of its former birth.

On the very day that it becomes exactly two years old, the child is taken by its mother into the most quiet part of the house, and is placed in a mi, or rice-winnowing basket. The child sits down in the mi. Then the mother says, calling the child by name, "Omae no zensé wa, nande attakane?—iute, gōran."[1] Then the child always answers in one word. For some mysterious reason, no more lengthy reply is ever given. Often the answer is so enigmatic that some priest or fortune-teller must be asked to interpret it. For instance, yesterday, the little son of a copper-smith living near us answered only "Umé" to the magical question. Now umé might mean a plum-flower, a plum, or a girl's name,—"Flower-of-the-Plum." Could it mean that the boy remembered having been a girl? Or that he had been a plum-tree? "Souls of men do not enter plum-trees," said a neighbor. A fortune-teller this morning declared, on being questioned about the riddle, that the boy had probably been a scholar, poet, or statesman, because the plum-tree is the symbol of Tenjin, patron of scholars, statesmen, and men of letters.

VI

November 17. An astonishing book might be written about those things in Japanese life which no foreigner can understand. Such a book should include the study of certain rare but terrible results of anger.

As a national rule, the Japanese seldom allow themselves to show anger. Even among the common classes, any serious menace is apt to take the form of a smiling assurance that your favor shall be remembered, and that its recipient is grateful. (Do not suppose, however, that this is ironical, in our sense of the word: it is only euphemistic,—ugly things not being called by their real names.) But this smiling assurance may possibly mean death. When vengeance comes, it comes unexpectedly. Neither distance nor time, within the empire, can offer any obstacles to the avenger who can walk fifty miles a day, whose whole baggage can be tied up in a very small towel, and whose patience is almost infinite. He may choose a knife, but is much more likely to use a sword,—a Japanese sword. This, in Japanese hands, is the deadliest of weapons; and the killing of ten or twelve persons by one angry man may occupy less than a minute. It does not often happen that the murderer thinks of trying to escape. Ancient custom requires that, having taken another life, he should take his own; wherefore to fall into the hands of the police would be to disgrace his name. He has made his preparations beforehand, written his letters, arranged for his funeral, perhaps—as in one appalling instance last year—even chiseled his own tombstone. Having fully accomplished his revenge, he kills himself.

There has just occurred, not far from the city, at the village called Sugikamimura, one of those tragedies which are difficult to understand. The chief actors were, Narumatsu Ichirō, a young shopkeeper; his wife, O-Noto, twenty years of age, to whom he had been married only a year; and O-Noto's maternal uncle, one Sugimoto Ivasaku, a man of violent temper, who had once been in prison. The tragedy was in four acts.

Act I. Scene: Interior of public bathhouse. Sugimoto Nasaku in the bath. Enter Narumatsu Ichirō, who strips, gets into the smoking water without noticing his relative, and cries out,—

"Aa! as if one should be in Jigoku, so hot this water is!"

(The word "Jigoku" signifies the Buddhist hell; but, in common parlance, it also signifies a prison,—this time an unfortunate coincidence.)

Kasaku (terribly angry). "A raw baby, you, to seek a hard quarrel! What do you not like?"

Ichirō (surprised and alarmed, but rallying against the tone of Kasaku). "Nay! What? That I said need not by you be explained. Though I said the water was hot, your help to make it hotter was not asked."

Kasaku (now dangerous). "Though for my own fault, not once, but twice in the hell of prison I had been, what should there be wonderful in it? Either an idiot child or a low scoundrel you must be!"

(Each eyes the other for a spring, but each hesitates, although things no Japanese should suffer himself to say have been said. They are too evenly matched, the old and the young.)

Kasaku (growing cooler as Ichirō becomes angrier). "A child, a raw child, to quarrel with me! What should a baby do with a wife? Your wife is my blood, mine,—the blood of the man from hell! Give her back to my house."

Ichirō (desperately, now fully assured Kasaku is physically the better man). "Return my wife? You say to return her? Right quickly shall she be returned, at once!"

So far everything is clear enough. Then Ichiro hurries home, caresses his wife, assures her of his love, tells her all, and sends her, not to Kasaku's house, but to that of her brother. Two days later, a little after dark, O-Noto is called to the door by her husband, and the two disappear in the night.

Act II. Night scene. House of Kasaku closed: light appears through chinks of sliding shutters. Shadow of a woman approaches. Sound of knocking. Shutters slide back.

Wife of Kasaku (recognizing O-Noto). "Aa! aa! Joyful it is to see you! Deign to enter, and some honorable tea to take."

O-Noto (speaking very sweetly). "Thanks indeed. But where is Kasaku San?"

Wife of Kasaku. "To the other village he has gone, but must soon return. Deign to come in and wait for him."

O-Noto (still more sweetly). "Very great thanks. A little, and I come. But first I must tell my brother."

(Bows, and slips off into the darkness, and becomes a shadow again, which joins another shadow. The two shadows remain motionless.)

Act III. Scene: Bank of a river at night, fringed by pines. Silhouette of the house of Kasaku far away. O-Noto and Ichiro under the trees, Ichirō with a lantern. Both have white towels tightly bound round their heads; their robes are girded well up, and their sleeves caught back with tasuki cords, to leave the arms free. Each carries a long sword.

It is the hour, as the Japanese most expressively say, "when the sound of the river is loudest." There is no other sound but a long occasional humming of wind in the needles of the pines; for it is late autumn, and the frogs are silent. The two shadows do not speak, and the sound of the river grows louder.

Suddenly there is the noise of a plash far off,—somebody crossing the shallow stream; then an echo of wooden sandals,—irregular, staggering,—the footsteps of a drunkard, coming nearer and nearer. The drunkard lifts up his voice: it is Kasaku's voice. He sings,—

"Suita okata ni suirarete; Ya-ton-ton!"[1]

—a song of love and wine.

Immediately the two shadows start toward the singer at a run,—a noiseless flitting, for their feet are shod with waraji. Kasaku still sings. Suddenly a loose stone turns under him; he wrenches his ankle, and utters a growl of anger. Almost in the same instant a lantern is held close to his face. Perhaps for thirty seconds it remains there. No one speaks. The yellow light shows three strangely inexpressive masks rather than visages. Kasaku sobers at once,—recognizing the faces, remembering the incident of the bathhouse, and seeing the swords. But he is not afraid, and presently bursts into a mocking laugh.

"Hé! hé! The Ichirō pair! And so you take me, too, for a baby? What are you doing with such things in your hands? Let me show you how to use them."

But Ichirō, who has dropped the lantern, suddenly delivers, with the full swing of both hands, a sword-slash that nearly severs Kasaku's right arm from the shoulder; and as the victim staggers, the sword of the woman cleaves through his left shoulder. He falls with one fearful cry, "Hitogoroshi!" which means "murder." But he does not cry again. For ten whole minutes the swords are busy with him. The lantern, still glowing, lights the ghastliness. Two belated pedestrians approach, hear, see, drop their wooden sandals from their feet, and flee back into the darkness without a word. Ichirō and O-Noto sit down by the lantern to take breath, for the work was hard.

The son of Kasaku, a boy of fourteen, comes running to find his father. He has heard the song, then the cry; but he has not yet learned fear. The two suffer him to approach. As he nears O-Noto, the woman seizes him, flings him down, twists his slender arms under her knees, and clutches the sword. But Ichirō, still panting, cries, "No! no! Not the boy! He did us no wrong!" O-Noto releases him. He is too stupefied to move.

She slaps his face terribly, crying, "Go!" He runs,—not daring to shriek.

Ichirō and O-Noto leave the chopped mass, walk to the house of Kasaku, and call loudly. There is no reply;—only the pathetic, crouching silence of women and children waiting death. But they are bidden not to fear. Then Ichirō cries:—

"Honorable funeral prepare! Kasaku by my hand is now dead!"

"And by mine!" shrills O-Noto.

Then the footsteps recede.

Act IV. Scene: Interior of Ichirō's house. Three persons kneeling in the guest-room: Ichirō, his wife, and an aged woman, who is weeping.

Ichirō. "And now, mother, to leave you alone in this world, though you have no other son, is indeed an evil thing. I can only pray your forgiveness. But my uncle will always care for you, and to his house you must go at once, since it is time we two should die. No common, vulgar death shall we have, but an elegant, splendid death,—Rippana! And you must not see it. Now go."

She passes away, with a wail. The doors are solidly barred behind her. All is ready.

O-Noto thrusts the point of the sword into her throat. But she still struggles. With a last kind word Ichiro ends her pain by a stroke that severs the head.

And then?

Then he takes his writing-box, prepares the inkstone, grinds some ink, chooses a good brush, and, on carefully selected paper, composes five poems, of which this is the last:—

"Meido yori Yu dempō ga Aru naraba, Hay aha an chaku Mōshi okuran."[2]

Then he cuts his own throat perfectly well.

Now, it was clearly shown, during the official investigation of these facts, that Ichirō and his wife had been universally liked, and had been from their childhood noted for amiability.

The scientific problem of the origin of the Japanese has never yet been solved. But sometimes it seems to me that those who argue in favor of a partly Malay origin have some psychological evidence in their favor. Under the submissive sweetness of the gentlest Japanese woman—a sweetness of which the Occidental can scarcely form any idea—there exist possibilities of hardness absolutely inconceivable without ocular evidence. A thousand times she can forgive, can sacrifice herself in a thousand ways unutterably touching: but let one particular soul-nerve be stung, and fire shall forgive sooner than she. Then there may suddenly appear in that frail-seeming woman an incredible courage, an appalling, measured, tireless purpose of honest vengeance. Under all the amazing self-control and patience of the man there exists an adamantine something very dangerous to reach. Touch it wantonly, and there can be no pardon. But resentment is seldom likely to be excited by mere hazard. Motives are keenly judged. An error can be forgiven; deliberate malice never.

In the house of any rich family the guest is likely to be shown some of the heirlooms. Among these are almost sure to be certain articles belonging to those elaborate tea ceremonies peculiar to Japan. A pretty little box, perhaps, will be set before you. Opening it, you see only a beautiful silk bag, closed with a silk running-cord decked with tiny tassels. Very soft and choice the silk is, and elaborately figured. What marvel can be hidden under such a covering? You open the bag, and see within another bag, of a different quality of silk, but very fine. Open that, and lo! a third, which contains a fourth, which contains a fifth, which contains a sixth, which contains a seventh bag, which contains the strangest, roughest, hardest vessel of Chinese clay that you ever beheld. Yet it is not only curious but precious: it may be more than a thousand years old.

Even thus have centuries of the highest social culture wrapped the Japanese character about with many priceless soft coverings of courtesy, of delicacy, of patience, of sweetness, of moral sentiment. But underneath these charming multiple coverings there remains the primitive clay, hard as iron;—kneaded perhaps with all the mettle of the Mongol,—all the dangerous suppleness of the Malay.

VII

December 28. Beyond the high fence inclosing my garden in the rear rise the thatched roofs of some very small houses occupied by families of the poorest class. From one of these little dwellings there continually issues a sound of groaning,—the deep groaning of a man in pain. I have heard it for more than a week, both night and day, but latterly the sounds have been growing longer and louder, as if every breath were an agony. "Somebody there is very sick," says Manyemon, my old interpreter, with an expression of extreme sympathy.

The sounds have begun to make me nervous. I reply, rather brutally, "I think it would be better for all concerned if that somebody were dead."

Manyemon makes three times a quick, sudden gesture with both hands, as if to throw off the influence of my wicked words, mutters a little Buddhist prayer, and leaves me with a look of reproach. Then, conscience-stricken, I send a servant to inquire if the sick person has a doctor, and whether any aid can be given. Presently the servant returns with the information that a doctor is regularly attending the sufferer, and that nothing else can be done.

I notice, however, that, in spite of his cobwebby gestures, Manyemon's patient nerves have also become affected by those sounds. He has even confessed that he wants to stay in the little front room, near the street, so as to be away from them as far as possible. I can neither write nor read. My study being in the extreme rear, the groaning is there almost as audible as if the sick man were in the room itself. There is always in such utterances of suffering a certain ghastly timbre by which the intensity of the suffering can be estimated; and I keep asking myself, How can it be possible for the human being making those sounds by which I am tortured, to endure much longer?

It is a positive relief, later in the morning, to hear the moaning drowned by the beating of a little Buddhist drum in the sick man's room, and the chanting of the Namu myō ho renge kyō by a multitude of voices. Evidently there is a gathering of priests and relatives in the house. "Somebody is going to die," Manyemon says. And he also repeats the holy words of praise to the Lotus of the Good Law.

The chanting and the tapping of the drum continue for several hours. As they cease, the groaning is heard again. Every breath a groan! Toward evening it grows worse—horrible. Then it suddenly stops. There is a dead silence of minutes. And then we hear a passionate burst of weeping,—the weeping of a woman,—and voices calling a name. "Ah! somebody is dead!" Manyemon says.

We hold council. Manyemon has found out that the people are miserably poor; and I, because my conscience smites me, propose to send them the amount of the funeral expenses, a very small sum. Manyemon thinks I wish to do this out of pure benevolence, and says pretty things. We send the servant with a kind message, and instructions to learn if possible the history of the dead man. I cannot help suspecting some sort of tragedy; and a Japanese tragedy is generally interesting.

December 29. As I had surmised, the story of the dead man was worth learning. The family consisted of four,—the father and mother, both very old and feeble, and two sons. It was the eldest son, a man of thirty-four, who had died. He had been sick for seven years. The younger brother, a kurumaya, had been the sole support of the whole family. He had no vehicle of his own, but hired one, paying five sen a day for the use of it. Though strong and a swift runner, he could earn little: there is in these days too much competition for the business to be profitable. It taxed all his powers to support his parents and his ailing brother; nor could he have done it without unfailing self-denial. He never indulged himself even to the extent of a cup of saké; he remained unmarried; he lived only for his filial and fraternal duty.

This was the story of the dead brother: When about twenty years of age, and following the occupation of a fish-seller, he had fallen in love with a pretty servant at an inn. The girl returned his affection. They pledged themselves to each other. But difficulties arose in the way of their marriage.

The girl was pretty enough to have attracted the attention of a man of some means, who demanded her hand in the customary way. She disliked him; but the conditions he was able to offer decided her parents in his favor. Despairing of union, the two lovers resolved to perform jōshi. Somewhere or other they met at night, renewed their pledge in wine, and bade farewell to the world. The young man then killed his sweetheart with one blow of a sword, and immediately afterward cut his own throat with the same weapon. But people rushed into the room before he had expired, took away the sword, sent for the police, and summoned a military surgeon from the garrison. The would-be suicide was removed to the hospital, skillfully nursed back to health, and after some months of convalescence was put on trial for murder.

What sentence was passed I could not fully learn. In those days, Japanese judges used a good deal of personal discretion when dealing with emotional crime; and their exercise of pity had not yet been restricted by codes framed upon Western models. Perhaps in this case they thought that to have survived a jōshi was in itself a severe punishment. Public opinion is less merciful, in such instances, than law. After a term of imprisonment the miserable man was allowed to return to his family, but was placed under perpetual police surveillance. The people shrank from him. He made the mistake of living on. Only his parents and brother remained to him. And soon he became a victim of unspeakable physical suffering; yet he clung to life.

The old wound in his throat, although treated at the time as skillfully as circumstances permitted, began to cause terrible pain. After its apparent healing, some slow cancerous growth commenced to spread from it, reaching into the breathing-passages above and below where the sword-blade had passed. The surgeon's knife, the torture of the cautery, could only delay the end. But the man lingered through seven years of continually increasing agony. There are dark beliefs about the results of betraying the dead,—of breaking the mutual promise to travel together to the Meido. Men said that the hand of the murdered girl always reopened the wound,—undid by night all that the surgeon could accomplish by day. For at night the pain invariably increased, becoming most terrible at the precise hour of the attempted shinjū!

Meanwhile, through abstemiousness and extraordinary self-denial, the family found means to pay for medicines, for attendance, and for more nourishing food than they themselves ever indulged in. They prolonged by all possible means the life that was their shame, their poverty, their burden. And now that death has taken away that burden, they weep!

Perhaps all of us learn to love that which we train ourselves to make sacrifices for, whatever pain it may cause. Indeed, the question might be asked whether we do not love most that which causes us most pain.

VI

THE STONE BUDDHA

I

On the ridge of the hill behind the Government College,—above a succession of tiny farm fields ascending the slope by terraces,—there is an ancient village cemetery. It is no longer used: the people of Kurogamimura now bury their dead in a more secluded spot; and I think their fields are beginning already to encroach upon the limits of the old graveyard.

Having an idle hour to pass between two classes, I resolve to pay the ridge a visit. Harmless thin black snakes wiggle across the way as I climb; and immense grasshoppers, exactly the color of parched leaves, whirr away from my shadow. The little field path vanishes altogether under coarse grass before reaching the broken steps at the cemetery gate; and in the cemetery itself there is no path at all—only weeds and stones. But there is a fine view from the ridge: the vast green Plain of Higo, and beyond it bright blue hills in a half-ring against the horizon light, and even beyond them the cone of Aso smoking forever.

Below me, as in a bird's-eye view, appears the college, like a miniature modern town, with its long ranges of many windowed buildings, all of the year 1887. They represent the purely utilitarian architecture of the nineteenth century: they might be situated equally well in Kent or in Auckland or in New Hampshire without appearing in the least out of tone with the age. But the terraced fields above and the figures toiling in them might be of the fifth century. The language cut upon the haka whereon I lean is transliterated Sanscrit. And there is a Buddha beside me, sitting upon his lotus of stone just as he sat in the days of Kato Kiyomasa. His meditative gaze slants down between his half-closed eyelids upon the Government College and its tumultuous life; and he smiles the smile of one who has received an injury not to be resented. This is not the expression wrought by the sculptor: moss and scurf have distorted it. I also observe that his hands are broken. I am sorry, and try to scrape the moss away from the little symbolic protuberance on his forehead, remembering the ancient text of the "Lotus of the Good Law:"—

"There issued a ray of light from the circle of hair between the brows of the Lord. It extended over eighteen hundred thousand Buddha fields, so that all those Buddha fields appeared wholly illuminated by its radiance, down to the great hell Aviki, and up to the limit of existence. And all the beings in each of the Six States of existence became visible,—all without exception. Even the Lord Buddhas in those Buddha fields who had reached final Nirvana, all became visible."

II

The sun is high behind me; the landscape before me as in an old Japanese picture-book. In old Japanese color-prints there are, as a rule, no shadows. And the Plain of Higo, all shadowless, broadens greenly to the horizon, where the blue spectres of the peaks seem to float in the enormous glow. But the vast level presents no uniform hue: it is banded and seamed by all tones of green, intercrossed as if laid on by long strokes of a brush. In this again the vision resembles some scene from a Japanese picture-book.

Open such a book for the first time, and you receive a peculiarly startling impression, a sensation of surprise, which causes you to think: "How strangely, how curiously, these people feel and see Nature!" The wonder of it grows upon you, and you ask: "Can it be possible their senses are so utterly different from ours?" Yes, it is quite possible; but look a little more. You do so, and there defines a third and ultimate idea, confirming the previous two. You feel the picture is more true to Nature than any Western painting of the same scene would be,—that it produces sensations of Nature no Western picture could give. And indeed there are contained within it whole ranges of discoveries for you to make. Before making them, however, you will ask yourself another riddle, somewhat thus: "All this is magically vivid; the inexplicable color is Nature's own. But why does the thing seem so ghostly?"

Well, chiefly because of the absence of shadows. What prevents you from missing them at once is the astounding skill in the recognition and use of color-values. The scene, however, is not depicted as if illumined from one side, but as if throughout suffused with light. Now there are really moments when landscapes do wear this aspect; but our artists rarely study them.

Be it nevertheless observed that the old Japanese loved shadows made by the moon, and painted the same, because these were weird and did not interfere with color. But they had no admiration for shadows that blacken and break the charm of the world under the sun. When their noon-day landscapes are flecked by shadows at all,'tis by very thin ones only,—mere deepenings of tone, like those fugitive half-glooms which run before a summer cloud. And the inner as well as the outer world was luminous for them. Psychologically also they saw life without shadows.

Then the West burst into their Buddhist peace, and saw their art, and bought it up till an Imperial law was issued to preserve the best of what was left. And when there was nothing more to be bought, and it seemed possible that fresh creation might reduce the market price of what had been bought already, then the West said: "Oh, come now! you must n't go on drawing and seeing things that way, you know! It is n't Art! You, must really learn to see shadows, you know,—and pay me to teach you."

So Japan paid to learn how to see shadows in Nature, in life, and in thought. And the West taught her that the sole business of the divine sun was the making of the cheaper kind of shadows. And the West taught her that the higher-priced shadows were the sole product of Western civilization, and bade her admire and adopt. Then Japan wondered at the shadows of machinery and chimneys and telegraph-poles; and at the shadows of mines and of factories, and the shadows in the hearts of those who worked there; and at the shadows of houses twenty stories high, and of hunger begging under them; and shadows of enormous charities that multiplied poverty; and shadows of social reforms that multiplied vice; and shadows of shams and hypocrisies and swallow-tail coats; and the shadow of a foreign God, said to have created mankind for the purpose of an auto-da-fé. Whereat Japan became rather serious, and refused to study any more silhouettes. Fortunately for the world, she returned to her first matchless art; and, fortunately for herself, returned to her own beautiful faith. But some of the shadows still clung to her life; and she cannot possibly get rid of them. Never again can the world seem to her quite so beautiful as it did before.

III

Just beyond the cemetery, in a tiny patch of hedged-in land, a farmer and his ox are plowing the black soil with a plow of the Period of the Gods; and the wife helps the work with a hoe more ancient than even the Empire of Japan. All the three are toiling with a strange earnestness, as though goaded without mercy by the knowledge that labor is the price of life.

That man I have often seen before in the colored prints of another century. I have seen him in kakemono of much more ancient date. I have seen him on painted screens of still greater antiquity. Exactly the same! Other fashions beyond counting have passed: the peasant's straw hat, straw coat, and sandals of straw remain. He himself is older, incomparably older, than his attire. The earth he tills has indeed swallowed him up a thousand times a thousand times; but each time it has given back to him his life with force renewed. And with this perpetual renewal he is content: he asks no more. The mountains change their shapes; the rivers shift their courses; the stars change their places in the sky: he changes never. Yet, though unchanging, is he a maker of change. Out of the sum of his toil are wrought the ships of iron, the roads of steel, the palaces of stone; his are the hands that pay for the universities and the new learning, for the telegraphs and the electric lights and the repeating-rifles, for the machinery of science and the machinery of commerce and the machinery of war. He is the giver of all; he is given in return—the right to labor forever. Wherefore he plows the centuries under, to plant new lives of men. And he will thus toil on till the work of the world shall have been done,—till the time of the end of man.

And what will be that end? Will it be ill or well? Or must it for all of us remain a mystery insolvable?

Out of the wisdom of the West is answer given: "Man's evolution is a progress into perfection and beatitude. The goal of evolution is Equilibration. Evils will vanish, one by one, till only that which is good survive. Then shall knowledge obtain its uttermost expansion; then shall mind put forth its most wondrous blossoms; then shall cease all struggle and all bitterness of soul, and all the wrongs and all the follies of life. Men shall become as gods, in all save immortality; and each existence shall be prolonged through centuries; and all the joys of life shall be made common in many a paradise terrestrial, fairer than poet's dream. And there shall be neither riders nor ruled, neither governments nor laws; for the order of all things shall be resolved by love."

But thereafter?

"Thereafter? Oh, thereafter by reason of the persistence of Force and other cosmic laws, dissolution must come: all integration must yield to disintegration. This is the testimony of science."

Then all that may have been won, must be lost; all that shall have been wrought, utterly undone. Then all that shall have been overcome, must overcome; all that may have been suffered for good, must be suffered again for no purpose interpretable. Even as out of the Unknown was born the immeasurable pain of the Past, so into the Unknown must expire the immeasurable pain of the Future. What, therefore, the worth of our evolution? what, therefore, the meaning of life—of this phantom-flash between darknesses? Is your evolution only a passing out of absolute mystery into universal death? In the hour when that man in the hat of straw shall have crumbled back, for the last mundane time, into the clay he tills, of what avail shall have been all the labor of a million years?

"Nay!" answers the West. "There is not any universal death in such a sense. Death signifies only change. Thereafter will appear another universal life. All that assures us of dissolution, not less certainly assures us of renewal. The Cosmos, resolved into a nebula, must recondense to form another swarm of worlds. And then, perhaps, your peasant may reappear with his patient ox, to till some soil illumined by purple or violet suns." Yes, but after that resurrection? "Why, then another evolution, another equilibration, another dissolution. This is the teaching of science. This is the infinite law."

But then that resurrected life, can it be ever new? Will it not rather be infinitely old? For so surely as that which is must eternally be, so must that which will be have eternally been. As there can be no end, so there can have been no beginning; and even Time is an illusion, and there is nothing new beneath a hundred million suns. Death is not death, not a rest, not an end of pain, but the most appalling of mockeries. And out of this infinite whirl of pain you can tell us no way of escape. Have you then made us any wiser than that straw-sandaled peasant is? He knows all this. He learned, while yet a child, from the priests who taught him to write in the Buddhist temple school, something of his own innumerable births, and of the apparition and disparition of universes, and of the unity of life. That which you have mathematically discovered was known to the East long before the coming of the Buddha. How known, who may say? Perhaps there have been memories that survived the wrecks of universes. But be that as it may, your annunciation is enormously old: your methods only are new, and serve merely to confirm ancient theories of the Cosmos, and to recomplicate the complications of the everlasting Riddle.

Unto which the West makes answer:—"Not so! I have discerned the rhythm of that eternal action whereby worlds are shapen or dissipated; I have divined the Laws of Pain evolving all sentient existence, the Laws of Pain evolving thought; I have discovered and proclaimed the means by which sorrow may be lessened; I have taught the necessity of effort, and the highest duty of life. And surely the knowledge of the duty of life is the knowledge of largest worth to man."

Perhaps. But the knowledge of the necessity and of the duty, as you have proclaimed them, is a knowledge very, very much older than you. Probably that peasant knew it fifty thousand years ago, on this planet. Possibly also upon other long—vanished planets, in cycles forgotten by the gods. If this be the Omega of Western wisdom, then is he of the straw sandals our equal in knowledge, even though he be classed by the Buddha among the ignorant ones only,—they who "people the cemeteries again and again."

"He cannot know," makes answer Science; "at the very most he only believes, or thinks that he believes. Not even his wisest priests can prove. I alone have proven; I alone have given proof absolute. And I have proved for ethical renovation, though accused of proving for destruction. I have defined the uttermost impassable limit of human knowledge; but I have also established for all time the immovable foundations of that highest doubt which is wholesome, since it is the substance of hope. I have shown that even the least of human thoughts, of human acts, may have perpetual record,—making self-registration through tremulosities invisible that pass to the eternities. And I have fixed the basis of a new morality upon everlasting truth, even though I may have left of ancient creeds only their empty shell."

Creeds of the West—yes! But not of the creed of this older East. Not yet have you even measured it. What matter that this peasant cannot prove, since thus much of his belief is that which you have proved for all of us? And he holds still another belief that reaches beyond yours. He too has been taught that acts and thoughts outlive the lives of men. But he has been taught more than this. He has been taught that the thoughts and acts of each being, projected beyond the individual existence, shape other lives unborn; he has been taught to control his most secret wishes, because of their immeasurable inherent potentialities. And he has been taught all this in words as plain and thoughts as simply woven as the straw of his rain-coat. What if he cannot prove his premises? you have proved them, for him and for the world. He has only a theory of the future, indeed; but you have furnished irrefutable evidence that it is not founded upon dreams. And since all your past labors have only served to confirm a few of the beliefs stored up in his simple mind, is it any folly to presume that your future labors also may serve to prove the truth of other beliefs of his, which you have not yet taken the trouble to examine?

"For instance, that earthquakes are caused by a big fish?"

Do not sneer! Our Western notions about such things were just as crude only a few generations back. No! I mean the ancient teaching that acts and thoughts are not merely the incidents of life, but its creators. Even as it has been written, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts."

IV

And there comes to me the memory of a queer story.

The common faith of the common people, that the misfortunes of the present are results of the follies committed in a former state of existence, and that the errors of this life will influence the future birth, is curiously reinforced by various superstitions probably much older than Buddhism, but not at variance with its faultless doctrine of conduct. Among these, perhaps the most remarkable is the belief that even our most secret thoughts of evil may have ghostly consequences upon other people's lives.

The house now occupied by one of my friends used to be haunted. You could never imagine it to have been haunted, because it is unusually luminous, extremely pretty, and comparatively new. It has no dark nooks or corners. It is surrounded with a large bright garden,—a Kyūshū landscape garden without any big trees for ghosts to hide behind. Yet haunted it was, and in broad day.

First you must learn that in this Orient there are two sorts of haunters: the Shi-ryō and the Iki-ryō. The Shi-ryō are merely the ghosts of the dead; and here, as in most lands, they follow their ancient habit of coming at night only. But the Iki-ryō, which are the ghosts of the living, may come at all hours; and they are much more to be feared, because they have power to kill.

Now the house of which I speak was haunted by an Iki-ryō.

The man who built it was an official, wealthy and esteemed. He designed it as a home for his old age; and when it was finished he filled it with beautiful things, and hung tinkling wind bells along its eaves. Artists of skill painted the naked precious wood of its panels with blossoming sprays of cherry and plum tree, and figures of gold-eyed falcons poised on crests of pine, and slim fawns feeding under maple shadows, and wild ducks in snow, and herons flying, and iris flowers blooming, and long-armed monkeys clutching at the face of the moon in water: all the symbols of the seasons and of good fortune.

Fortunate the owner was; yet he knew one sorrow—he had no heir. Therefore, with his wife's consent, and according to antique custom, he took a strange woman into his home that she might give him a child,—a young woman from the country, to whom large promises were made. When she had borne him a son, she was sent away; and a nurse was hired for the boy, that he might not regret his real mother. All this had been agreed to beforehand; and there were ancient usages to justify it. But all the promises made to the mother of the boy had not been fulfilled when she was sent away.

And after a little time the rich man fell sick; and he grew worse thereafter day by day; and his people said there was an Iki-ryō in the house. Skilled physicians did all they could for him; but he only became weaker and weaker; and the physicians at last confessed they had no more hope. And the wife made offerings at the Ujigami, and prayed to the Gods; but the Gods gave answer: "He must die unless he obtain forgiveness from one whom he wronged, and undo the wrong by making just amend. For there is an Iki-ryō in your house."

Then the sick man remembered, and was conscience-smitten, and sent out servants to bring the woman back to his home. But she was gone,—somewhere lost among the forty millions of the Empire. And the sickness ever grew worse; and search was made in vain; and the weeks passed. At last there came to the gate a peasant who said that he knew the place to which the woman had gone, and that he would journey to find her if supplied with means of travel. But the sick man, hearing, cried out: "No! she would never forgive me in her heart, because she could not. It is too late!" And he died.

After which the widow and the relatives and the little boy abandoned the new house; and strangers entered thereinto.

Curiously enough, the people spoke harshly concerning the mother of the boy—holding her to blame for the haunting.

I thought it very strange at first, not because I had formed any positive judgment as to the rights and wrongs of the case. Indeed I could not form such a judgment; for I could not learn the full details of the story. I thought the criticism of the people very strange, notwithstanding.

Why? Simply because there is nothing voluntary about the sending of an Iki-ryō. It is not witchcraft at all. The Iki-ryō goes forth without the knowledge of the person whose emanation it is. (There is a kind of witchcraft which is believed to send Things,—but not Iki-ryō.) You will now understand why I thought the condemnation of the young woman very strange.

But you could scarcely guess the solution of the problem. It is a religious one, involving conceptions totally unknown to the West. She from whom the Iki-ryō proceeded was never blamed by the people as a witch. They never suggested that it might have been created with her knowledge. They even sympathized with what they deemed to be her just plaint. They blamed her only for having been too angry,—for not sufficiently controlling her unspoken resentment,—because she should have known that anger, secretly indulged, can have ghostly consequences.

I ask nobody to take for granted the possibility of the Iki-ryō, except as a strong form of conscience. But as an influence upon conduct, the belief certainly has value. Besides, it is suggestive. Who is really able to assure us that secret evil desires, pent-up resentments, masked hates, do not exert any force outside of the will that conceives and nurses them? May there not be a deeper meaning than Western ethics recognize in those words of the Buddha,—"Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule"? It was very old then, even in his day. In ours it has been said, "Whensoever a wrong is done you, and you do not resent it, then so much evil dies in the world." But does it? Are we quite sure that not to resent it is enough? Can the motive tendency set loose in the mind by the sense of a wrong be nullified simply by non-action on the part of the wronged? Can any force die? The forces we know may be transformed only. So much also may be true of the forces we do not know; and of these are Life, Sensation, Will,—all that makes up the infinite mystery called "I."