CHAPTER XXI
JAPANESE TOUCH
With the Japanese art is an inspiration. They are incapable of bad taste in art. If their work is not always great, it is always fine. It sometimes lacks depth, it never lacks grace.
Lightness of touch, exactness of touch, characterise all Japanese work; but it would be grossly untrue to say that all Japanese work lacks strength, depth, and force. Much that the Japanese do, they do “from the shoulder.” Their cloisonné is rich, their carvings are masterly, and on the stages of their theatres I have seen handling of group-masses that was powerful in the extreme.
But finish and delicacy are the most general characteristics of all Japanese work. Even when the Japanese are positively bold in design and execution, it is so well bred a boldness that we are apt to lose sight of it, and be absorbed in admiration of the details.
Japanese finish is so extreme that it is almost veneer. The Japanese are as polished as their own lacquers; and all their work is a reflection of themselves.
Art and Nature are at their loveliest in Japan. Nowhere else is Nature so artistic. Perhaps because nowhere else does there dwell a people so intensely sympathetic with Nature. In Japan the scenery is so perfect that we almost suspect it of being studied. And the Japanese architecture—of hut or of temple—is so appropriate to its background, so fits the landscape, that we feel that both have been arranged by the same master-hand.
No other people can boast an art that breaks into so many lines of beauty, and that smiles with such sweet wealth of colour-harmony. But there are parts of the globe where both Art and Nature seize upon us more quickly and hold us more powerfully.
In the Alps, in the Sierra Nevadas, in Tasmania, in Gippsland, in the Himalayas, Nature takes you by the shoulders and shakes you—shakes a soul into you if you never had one before.
In Japan, Nature has vines and blossoms in her hair, and wine on her lips. She smiles into your face. She stretches out to you her warm, dimpled arms. She has bewitched you. You may tear yourself away from her, but you will never forget her. She will haunt you in your London club; and when you are deer-stalking in Scotland or yachting in the Norway fiords you will close your eyes sometimes and feel once more upon your cheeks the perfume of her breath. Her beauty has mastered you. You love her, with a light love, perhaps, but then, alas, the light loves are the loves that last. You have escaped to honest English civilisation and to Regent Street, but to the day of your death you will long to go back to the gentle, scented embrace of the blithe Nature that laughs and rollicks and lavishes her myriad beauties on Japan.
I have seen strong men weep in Dresden and in Rome, moved to a new emotion by some gigantic achievement of Occidental art,—an achievement that was great, but far from faultless. The great proportion of Japanese art is faultless, but far from great.
After all, I have no right to decide what constitutes greatness. Is a forest greater than a maple leaf? I doubt it. Art is so infinite,—all artists are so finite! The artists of Japan embroider with their pencils, and paint with their needles. They follow their own art ideal. Because it appeals to us less, it is not necessarily a smaller ideal than our own.
The very delicacy of touch and mind that makes the Japanese the most exquisite of all workmen, makes them the most sensitive of all peoples, the most petulantly resentful of criticism. I fear that it would be impossible for a European to write an article about Japan that would be inoffensive to the Japanese, unless it were an article of unqualified praise.
We reached Nagasaki in the early daylight. So should one always first see Japan. To touch the shores of Japan in the dawning, to begin a new day and a new exquisite experience, to steal with the sun into Nagasaki; that is something to remember for ever, with gratitude. As we approached Nagasaki it looked like a collection of cheerful Orientalised Swiss chalets.
Nagasaki nestles against the hilly side of fair, green Kiu-siu like a quaint burr clinging to the petal of a huge, lovely flower.
Japan in many parts is not unlike Switzerland—Switzerland grown warm and comfortable, Switzerland reduced to a minute scale, Switzerland burst into myriad bloom and softened into a new and gentle beauty. The sun lit up the island more clearly as we stepped into the clean, little, canoe-like tug that came to take us ashore.
A long line of ’rickshaws, as impatient as prancing horses, stood at the low, sandy landing-place. Hundreds of quaintly-clad, bright-eyed people, brown-skinned and buff, were moving daintily about the delicate scene.
Over a very serious, but a rather lazy-looking wooden building floated the Stars and Stripes, and the Union-Jack-adorned British Consulate looked as eminently respectable and as unpicturesque as did the official residence of the American Consul.
Our family divided into three parties when we were well ashore. I was the only adult wicked enough to ride behind a “human horse.” My husband went to call at the Consulates, and to inspect the theatre, at which we intended to play on our return. And Nurse marched bravely off, leading the boy bairn, and followed by the wee girl bairn, who looked like a great human snowball in the arms of black John the Madrassi.
I made a bargain with a sturdy, cheerful-looking jinrickshaw coolie, who spoke good English and better French, and he started off into the heart of bright, busy Nagasaki.
That coolie was a genius. And, unlike many genii, he had not mistaken his avocation. He was a capital cicerone. He rang, or rather ran, the changes on the Nagasaki sights in the deftest and most admirable way. From the choicest shops to the queerest temple, from beside the jolliest little vine-hung stream into the densest coolie quarter, for seven hours he directed my travels in a masterly manner. And just when the captain (so he afterwards told me) was almost beginning to use inelegant English, the clever little native whirled me down to the shore, bowed me into a tug, clapped his hands, laughed, and cried, “Sayonara.”
I do not know what delighted me most in Nagasaki I never knew what delighted me most in Japan, it was all so delightful. Nagasaki was the first bit of Japan I ever saw. I found in it a new charm. China was to me like the land of the mighty magicians; Japan was fairyland.
The Japanese islands are running over with flowers. The Japanese temples are a-tinkle with the music of bells. The soft-voiced people walk among the blossoms, and their fine faces are aglow with the love of beauty, and they themselves are innocently intoxicated with the delight of living.
Nagasaki is so sweetly clean that one cannot wonder that tourists who spend a few hours there rush back to their boats and write to the journals of Europe and America that the Japanese are the cleanest people on earth. I thought that the first day I was in Nagasaki. Alas, I learned better in a dozen other Japanese cities!
It was in Nagasaki that I first felt the full force of Japanese courtesy. My husband lunched in an elaborate fashion with friends at the hotel, but I begged off and spent all of my seven hours in investigating Nagasaki. When my coolie thought I had fasted long enough, he dropped the shafts of the ’rickshaw and ran into a droll little papier-maché looking house that was perched on the hilly highway, midway between the cemetery and the bamboo-bridged streamlet. In a few moments he came back carrying a tea-tray, and followed by a half-grown girl, who had cakes and fruit in a lacquer basket. An old woman toddled after, and spread a paper napkin on my lap. I enjoyed my al fresco lunch very much, as I sat in the ’rickshaw; the sunshine danced about me, but I was cool under the shade of an immense plum tree. They brought me a strange copper bowl, filled with warm water, and when I had paid the reasonable bill, we went back to the little paradise of shops.
The great works of Western art move us to awe. Upon Europeans the universal effect of Japanese works of art is a mad, insatiable desire to possess. Very good people long to buy. I am not very good; my enemies say that I am not good at all. Certainly, until my money gave out I longed to buy everything I saw in Japan. But when my money gave out, as it soon did, my one desire was to steal. I do not remember that I ever did steal anything in Japan, but I often wanted to do so. And my husband says that he mysteriously lost a hundred yen in Yokohama.
European art—if it is great art—holds us at a distance. Japanese art woos us; we long to own it—to stroke it. Japanese art is as approachable as it is fine. Occidental art keeps us in our place.
I saw Nagasaki again, when we were leaving Japan. Again our ship stopped there for a few hours. We played Hamlet there; it was an ethereal experience—a fitting end of our stay in the daintiest, prettiest, most mannerly country on the globe. We walked through the moonlight to the theatre. The streets were silent, save for the plaintive whistle of the blind shampooers. It sounded doubly sad to me as I realised that possibly I should never hear it again.
I have often wondered what Ophelia would have said could she have seen half the strange flowers I have worn in her name. Cowboys have brought me the wild flowers of their wilder West (it was my wild West too). Maharanees have sent me scented roses from behind purdahed gardens. Gold kings and silver paupers have sent me soft flannel flowers, and pink colonial roses from the Australian bush,—in all the quarters of the globe I have been the recipient of the perfumed tribute paid to me because I represented, however unworthily, the sweet, meek maiden who was the genius-born daughter of Shakespeare’s pen.
In Nagasaki we had a paucity of scenery; but I had a wealth of flowers for the “mad scene,” and as I wreathed the wistaria and the honeysuckle with the pompom-like chrysanthemums, the Japanese lilies, and the matchless roses, I almost wept over them my farewell to Japan.
In the late starlight we went back from the theatre to the boat. Japan was almost hidden by the night. We stole into Japan in the dawning; we stole out of Japan in the midnight dusk. Fit beginning, fit end of an experience almost too exquisitely beautiful to be a reality,—an experience of which I shall always think as of a Heaven-sent dream.
But between the early morning when the beauty of Japan dawned upon us, and the night in whose deep dusk we lost sight of the incomparably lovely islands, we had many weeks of rare delight,—weeks spent in Hondo.
The little voyage up the “Inland Sea” was well-nigh marvellous. The lakes and the mountains were as intricate as a Chinese puzzle, and as beautiful as we fancy the Garden of Eden.
Kobe—the Hiogo of yore—broke the sylvan panorama of our sail and Fusiyama accented it. Fusiyama rose between the green Japanese hills and the blue Japanese sky like a white point of holy exclamation. It was dormant, but a dozen lesser volcanoes threw up tongues of flame as we passed.
In Kobe we found old friends—friends from London, from Boston, and from Nevada. We found shelter in a cosy, well-cuisined hotel, and its presiding genius had once been our Boniface in Montano. We were given great hospitality in Kobe. We made some charming Japanese friends. I revelled in the Japanese shops. And the fierce, rainy day that we sailed for Yokohama, I was given such a roll of sumptuous black satin, on which wonderfully skilled Japanese fingers had embroidered great clusters of purple fleur-de-lis!