Having chosen this, he took his drawing-pad to the spot and made a rough sketch of it with notes written in Japanese of the colours to be used, and any special things he had to remember. Sometimes, where there was a great deal of detail, or of sculpture, he used paper with crossed lines on it, so as to preserve his proportions. But Markino, beautifully as he can paint detail, resents it, and prefers subjects unified by a haze of heat or mist.
He never took his paints out with him, and never did a finished drawing in the open air. He took his notes home with him and ruminated over them, till the idealised picture presented itself to his brain. Then he set to work on it, taking little rest till it was finished—always absolutely faithful to colour and effect, though the picture was painted entirely indoors.
That was his method of painting. He did no writing in Rome. But he came constantly to our flat when he was writing A Japanese Artist in London, My Idealled John Bullesses, and When I was a Child. Sometimes he liked to talk over his chapters before he began to write them, when they were slow at taking shape. But more generally he brought the chapters written in the rough to his Egeria, and read them over to her. They had blanks where he could not remember the English word which he wanted to use. It was in his mind, and he would reject all words till he found the word he was thinking of.
As he read the chapters aloud, the wise Egeria made corrections where they were necessary to elucidate his meaning—to clarify his style, but never treated any Japanese use of English as a mistake, unless it made the sense obscure. That is how the fascinating medium in which Markino writes took shape.
Take, for instance, Markino’s omission of the articles. The Japanese language has no articles. Markino therefore seldom uses them, and his English is written to be intelligible without them, just as a legal document is written to be intelligible without punctuation. Again, if he used a word in a palpably wrong sense—i. e. with a meaning which it had never borne before, or was etymologically unfit to bear—she left it if it helped to express in a forcible way what he intended.
The result of this respectful editing was to produce a most fascinating and characteristic type of English, which has won for Markino a public of enthusiastic admirers. He has, as Osman Edwards said, the heart of a child, when he is writing, and he combines with it a highly original mode of thinking and expressing himself, but their effect would have been half lost if he had not found in his Egeria an adviser with the eye of genius for what should be corrected and what should be retained of his departures from conventional English.
When the chapters were corrected thus, Egeria typed them out, making any corrections or additions which were necessary to the punctuation, and generally preparing the manuscript for the press.
I am encouraged to think that these details of the way in which the books were edited will interest the public, because J. H. Taylor, the golf champion, once cross-examined me on the subject, as we were walking down the lane from the Mid-Surrey golf pavilion to his house. He had been reading A Japanese Artist in London, and was so delighted with it that he wanted to know exactly how this wonderful style of writing was born.
And there is no doubt that it is a wonderful style of writing. It is not pigeon-English; the Japanese do not use pigeon-English, they abhor it. It is the result of a deliberate intention to apply certain Japanese methods of expression (like the omission of the article) to the writing of English, in order to produce a more direct medium, and the result has been a complete success. Markino’s English is wonderfully forcible. It hits like a sledge-hammer. He has a genius for discovering exactly the right expression, and he thinks on till he discovers it. As a reason why his English is not broken English, but a medium using the capabilities of both languages, I may mention that he has been living in America and England for nearly twenty years.
