CHAPTER IV
PLACING
In Japan there is no such thing as accident. A scene which in its beauty and perfect placing appears to the visitor to be the result of Nature in an unusually generous mood, has in reality been the object of infinite care and thought and anxious deliberation to these little Japanese artists, the landscape gardeners. That temple which seems to place itself so remarkably well in relation to the big lines of Nature, its background, has been carefully built and thought out from that standpoint alone. The great trees by the side of the temple, with their graceful jutting boughs that form the principal feature of the picture, have not grown like that, for all their apparent naturalness; they have been nursed and grafted and forced into shape with the utmost care imaginable.
The sense of perfect placing, which is the sense of balance, is the true secret of the Japanese art, by which they attain perfection. All Orientals are more or less possessed of this intuitive sense of balance, and the Japanese carry it into the most minute details of daily life. If you enter a Japanese room you will always find that the bough of blossom is placed in relation to the kakemono and other furniture to form a picture. And the special note of Japanese house decoration is this bough of blossom, with which I was immensely struck. Now, this is an altogether artistic thing. At one party at which I was present I saw a piece of blossom-bough put right out at a curious angle from a beautiful blue jar. Turning to my neighbour, a young Japanese friend who could talk English perfectly well, I said, “How beautiful that is!—although, of course, its quaint curious form is merely accident.” “No—no accident at all,” he replied. “Do you know, it has been a matter of great care, this placing of the plant in the room in relation to other objects?”—I was afterwards informed that in many a household in Japan the children are trained in the method of placing a branch or a piece of blossom, and they have books with diagrams illustrating the proper way of disposing flowers in a pot.
THE RED CURTAIN
The outsides as well as the insides of their houses are decorated in the harmonious principle, even to the painting of signs in the street. They are most particular about placing their richly coloured sign duly in relation to its surroundings. In the same way—whether the subject may be done in a string of lanterns or what not—whatever is done is done harmoniously, and in no case is decoration the result of accident. The sum of it all is that every shop in an ordinary street is a perfect picture. At first you are amazed at the beauty of everything. “How in the world is it,” you ask yourself, “that by a series of apparent accidents everything appears beautiful?” You cannot imagine until you know that even the “common man” has acquired the scientific placing of his things, and that the feeling permeates all classes. Perhaps, however, one of the most curious experiences I had of the native artistic instinct of Japan occurred in this way I had got a number of fanholders and was busying myself one afternoon in arranging them upon the walls. My little Japanese servant boy was in the room, and as I went on with my work I caught an expression on his face from time to time which showed that he was not over-pleased with my performance. After a while, as this dissatisfied expression seemed to deepen, I asked him what the matter was. Then he frankly confessed that he did not like the way in which I was arranging my fanholders. “Why did you not tell me so at once?” I asked. “You are an artist from England,” he replied, “and it was not for me to speak.” However, I persuaded him to arrange the fanholders himself after his own taste, and I must say that I received a remarkable lesson. The task took him about two hours, placing, arranging, adjusting; and when he had finished the result was simply beautiful. That wall was a perfect picture; every fanholder seemed to be exactly in its right place, and it looked as if the alteration of a single one would affect and disintegrate the whole scheme. I accepted the lesson with due humility, and remained more than ever convinced that the Japanese are what they have justly claimed to be, an essentially artistic people instinct with living art.
It is, in point of fact, almost impossible to exaggerate the importance attached to the placing of an object by every Japanese, and it would be no exaggeration to say that if a common coolie were given an addressed envelope to stamp he would take great pains to place that little coloured patch in relation to the name and address in order to form a decorative pattern. Can you imagine a tradesman and his family, wife and children, running across the Strand to watch the placing of a saucepan in their window? Yet this is no unusual occurrence in Japan. You will often see a family collected on the opposite side of the road watching their father place a signboard in front of his shop. It might be a grocer’s shop, and all—even to the mite strapped to the back of its sister—are eagerly watching the moving about of this board, and are interested to see that it should place itself well in relation to the broad masses around, such as the tea-box, etc.
FLOWER OF THE TEA
Now, people who think so much of the details of balance must necessarily approach art in a very different manner from that in which we approach it. Would a tradesman in England hesitate before placing his stamps on a bill? The tradesman in Japan does. Imagine an artist spending three days in anxious thought as to where he should place his signature on his picture! And yet this is what Kiyosai, the greatest of modern painters, actually did before he affixed his red stamp to the hasty sketch of a crow. I have known little Japanese painters to ponder for hours, and sometimes weeks, over the placing of this little vermilion stamp so that it shall form perfect balance, and in all probability the picture itself has only taken a few minutes. Suppose, for instance, a painter has contrived to produce a rapid sketch of a flying crow, or perhaps a fish. That fleeting impression was so strong that he was able to produce it at once without any hesitation; but however vivid and lifelike the picture might be, if the balance were destroyed by the ugly placing of this one little spot of vermilion, from the Japanese standpoint the picture would be utterly worthless. And the proper placing of a thing is really most important. Even the most ignorant and uneducated in matters of art are influenced on seeing a perfect bit of placing. To live with some beautiful thing, a flower or a bough well placed, to watch its delicious curves or the tender buds of a purple iris just bursting, must give joy, and it does, although one may be quite unconscious of its gentle power.
The Japanese understand these subtleties as do no other nation. If they are entertaining a guest, their one aim and object is to make him perfectly and deliriously happy; they strive to divine his inmost thoughts and desires; it is their ambition to satisfy them to the best of their ability.
A STREET IN KIOTO
A friend of mine, an American, once gave me a description of a week he had spent with a very ancient Japanese gentleman in a little country village; it was a week of intense interest and happiness to him, one which, when he grows to be as old as his host was then, will still remain in his memory with a lingering sweetness as something good to be remembered, something purer and quite apart from the regular routine of his past life. He was a student, a naturalist; and the purity of this Japanese household, the seclusion and dainty decoration of his study, the freedom of it all, and the kindly attention and sympathy that was proffered to him by every member of the family combined to make the quiet recluse feel, for once in his life, almost boisterously happy. Towards the end of his visit he tried to look back and discover what it was that had brought about this unwonted feeling of joy in him, little realising that all this time these dear people had been scheming and planning for no other object than to give him pleasure. It was not until the last day of his stay, however, that it all unfolded itself clearly before his eyes, and that he learnt the reason why he had been so happy. On this last morning he had chanced to rise early—at daybreak, in fact—and as he passed the room that he had been using as a general sitting-room, he saw through the partially-opened sliding doors a sight which caught his breath with amazement, and made tears spring to his eyes. There was his host, the dear ancient Japanese gentleman, kneeling before a bough of pink blossom, which he was struggling to arrange in a fine blue china pot. The naturalist stood and watched him for nearly an hour, as he clipped a bough here, and bent a twig there, leaning back on his heels now and then to view his handiwork through half-closed eyes. He must see that the blossom placed itself well from the decorative standpoint in relation to the kakemono that hung close by; he must also see that the curves of the bough were correct; and the care taken by this old gentleman in the bending of the bough was a lesson to my friend. It became clear to him that every morning his aged host must have risen at daybreak to perform this little act of kindness. Like a flash he remembered that each day there had been some dainty new arrangement of flowers placed in his room for him to enjoy. He had not given it much thought, for it looked more or less like an accident, flowers that had formed themselves naturally into that shape; yet, all unconsciously, this little bit of perfect placing had influenced his work and had gone far towards making the visit so joyous to him. He did not understand placing; but it interested him and gave him an intense amount of pleasure, in the same way that superbly fine work always does even to the most uneducated.
The proper placing of objects is not only an exact science, but also it forms almost a religion with the Japanese. When you just arrive in Japan you are at once impressed with the perfect placing of everything about you. You find yourself surrounded by a series of beautiful pictures; every street that you see on your journey from the station to the hotel is a picture; every shop front, the combination of the many streets, the town in relation to the mountains round about it—everything you chance to look at forms a picture. In fact, the whole of Japan is one perfect bit of placing.
HEAVY-LADEN
“Nature has favoured this place,” says the globe-trotter. “I never found when I lived in Surrey that great trees placed themselves against hill-sides so as to form perfect pictures. I never saw the lines of a bush pick up those of a fence with one broad sweep. Nature never behaved like that in Dorking.” Of course Nature didn’t; nor does she in Japan. There the whole country, every square inch of it, is thought out and handled by great artists. There is no accident in the beautiful curves of the trees that the globe-trotter so justly admires: these trees have been trained and shaped and forced to form a certain decorative pattern, and the result is—perfection. We in the West labour under the delusion that if Nature were to be allowed to have her own sweet way, she would always be beautiful. But the Japanese have gone much further than this: they realise that Nature does not always do the right thing; they know that occasionally trees will grow up to form ugly lines; and they know exactly how to adapt and help her. She is to them like some beautiful musical instrument, finer than any ever made by human hands, but still an instrument, with harmonies to be coaxed out. And the Japanese play on Nature, not only in a concentrated way as with a kakemono or a flower in a room, but also in the biggest possible form, on landscapes; dragging in mountains, colossal trees, rushing cataracts—nothing is too much or too great an undertaking for these masters of decoration. Any ordinary little baby boy that is born in Japan has almost a greater decorative sense than the finest painter here in the West.
All this beauty and perfection that meets one on every side is the result of centuries and centuries of habit, until it has become intuitive to the people. I can safely say there is no point in Japan where an artist cannot stand still and frame between his hands a picture that will be perfect in placing and design. In a Japanese garden, every stepping-stone, every tree, every little miniature out-house, is thought out as a bit of placing to form perfect balance. And it is thought out not as an isolated bit of Nature, but in relation to everything around that you can see, whether it is a temple, a large tree, or the side of a hill; and whatever position you happen to be in, in that garden you will always see a perfectly balanced picture. When you have been pottering about in the towns for some weeks, you eventually become accustomed to the idea that everything is thought out by these brilliant students in order to form a picture, and you begin to feel proud of the knowledge you have gleaned and to make practical use of it. You escort your friends, who are a trifle fresher than yourself, about the towns, pointing out to them that there is no accident in all the beauties that they so much admire—the shops, the signboards, the placing of the flower by the side of the workman—all this has been carefully thought out from the decorative standpoint, to be beautiful. But then, when one travels from the beaten track, away out in the country, even the resident who is by way of being artistic, and has had the fact that the Japanese are an artistic people driven into his stupid head by sheer force, even this poor dear is swept off his feet when he finds that Nature is still going on doing the same thing all these miles away from the town. He has probably come to view the cherry-blossom, and he discovers to his amazement that these huge hill-sides of blossom place themselves perfectly one against the other—colossal trees with jutty boughs frame themselves against the sides of the mountains to form a picture. One huge sweep of blossom is thought out in relation to another sweep that is deeper in tone; near by is a curiously-shaped bare patch of earth which is designed to give value to the brighter colour; and so it continues indefinitely.
The whole country is thought out in huge blotches to form a picture perfect in harmony and in design. I once had a very interesting experience of the felling of a tree in Japan, and here again placing formed a very prominent part of the proceedings. Of course this was placing of a nature very different from the artistic placing that I have just described; but as a scientific bit of work it was simply wonderful! It was an enormous tree by the side of a temple; there were two little men sawing away at its base, little mites of men, half hidden by the huge gaping crowd, chiefly composed of children, that stood watching the performance, waiting for the tree to fall. A wall stood close by with an opening cut in it, just large enough to allow the trunk to place itself; and away in the distance strewn about at different angles were a series of huge stone boulders, and these, I soon found out, were to split up the boughs for firewood when the tree fell, thus saving labour. Imagine the science of it—the calculation and the accuracy of their judgment! The men went on sawing, every now and then pausing in their work to look up at the sky with their backs against the wall. At last there came a moment when the excitement was terrific: the trunk was nearly sawed through, and the tree seemed prepared to fall anywhere and everywhere, more particularly in my direction. Presently it began to give slightly, and it was one of the prettiest and most wonderful things I have ever seen in my life, the way that tree began to bend—gently, gracefully, ever so gently, the trunk fitting itself into the wall, and the branches dashing on to those great boulders that were waiting for them, splitting them up into fragments. Those little mites of Japanese handling that giant of a tree was a sight that I shall never forget. Where we would have had twenty men with ropes and paraphernalia, they had nothing but their big heads and their power to place a thing mathematically in the right position to help them. And it all looked so graceful and so easy that it would not have surprised me in the least to have seen one of those little men come sailing down on the branches. But what struck me the most forcibly was the great confidence of the people. They all stood round, almost touching the tree, but quite sure of the success of this venture; the fact that it was possible for the wood-cutter to fail never occurring to them for an instant.
PEACH-BLOSSOM
Placing takes a prominent part in everything that the Japanese undertake; it shows itself not only in the arrangement of the landscape and in artistic matters where there is scope for their decorative powers, but also in small, out-of-the-way, inartistic things, as, for instance, photography. I have seen in the Tokio shop-windows photographs taken by native correspondents during the Chinese war, and it was quite extraordinary how their sense of placing showed itself even in this. You never by any chance see a photograph by a Japanese looking in the least like a European. If they photograph a group of men they will be sure to place that group near a great bough that juts across the picture; they cannot help it—it seems to be in the blood of a Japanese to be decorative. Their taste with regard to enjoyment is widely different from ours: a little bit of Nature which would give them intense pleasure would probably be ignored by us altogether. We want parks and stags and moorlands, broad expanses of country and huge avenues, while the Japanese will be content with one exquisite little harmony. They will gaze for whole hours in rapture at a little branch of peach-blossom, only a cluster, just a few inches of rose-red peach-blossom, with a slim grey twig, placing itself against a background of hills that stretch away in the distance indefinitely.
At the same time they love expanse of view as well. It is one of their greatest joys to look from the top of a mountain downwards, but only at certain times of the day. A Japanese, holiday-making, will sometimes spend one whole day waiting for an effect that will perhaps last only a few moments, or he will toil for hours up a mountain-side to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of a fleeting colour harmony.
ART IN PRACTICAL LIFE