An Artist's Letters from Japan

by John La Farge

Nikko, July 28.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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