An Artist's Letters from Japan

by John La Farge

MOUNTAINS IN FOG BEFORE OUR HOUSE.

August 16.

The languor that oppresses me does not disappear, and I live with alternations of exertion that reflect the weather. There has been an immense amount of sunshine and the same amount of rain, compressing into a single day as much as would suffice at home for weeks of summer and winter. Suddenly, from hot blue skies, come down the cloud and the wet. The lovely little hills or mountains opposite our house round out, all modeled and full, in glossy green, to be painted in another hour with thin washes of gray, thickened with white, as in the single-colored designs of the old Limoges enamels. Then their edges grow sharp and thin, and are stamped against further mists, like pale prints of the Japanese designs, making me see those pictures increased to life-size. And I realize how accurate these are, even to the enlarged appearance of the great trees which fringe their tops and edges, as these are seen through the broken, wet veil of moisture. And even here, again, I am puzzled as to whether art has helped nature.

August 17.

Yesterday I suffered seriously from the heat. I had gone to the little flat table-land that lies to the north behind our house, through which runs a small road, untraveled and grass-grown, connecting somewhere or other with the road of the great temples. I had intended to study there, for several reasons; one, among others, because I saw every day, as I looked through my screens, a little typical landscape-picture of Japan. Near by, a small temple shrine all vermilion in the sun, with heavy, black, oppressive roof; then a stretch of flat table-land, overgrown with trees and bushes, from which stood up a single high tree, with peaceful horizontal branches; on each side, conical hills, as if the wings of a stage-scene; far beyond, a tumble of mountains behind the great depression of the river hidden out of sight; and above, and farther yet, the great green slopes that lead to the peak of Nio-ho. It was very hot, and all the clouds seemed far away, the sun very high in the early noon, and no shade. I passed the new priests' houses of the old temple near us, where are billeted, to the inconvenience of the owners, many sailor boys sent all the way from the navy yard of Okotsuka, so that they escape the cholera, as we are doing. They are usually washing their clothes in the torrent that runs under the bridge of three carved stones, which I have to pass to get into the little path, frequented by gadflies, that takes me up to my sketching-ground. Were it not for the amiably obtrusive curiosity of these youngsters in their leisure hours, I should pass through their courtyard into the shady spaces near the little temples and the three-storied pagoda, which the priests' houses adjoin.

I am always courteously saluted by the priests, and one of them, living there in vacation, I know. He is off duty at the temples of Iyémitsŭ, and I have seen him at the home of our friends. I send you a sketch of his face, which appears to me impressed by sincerity and a certain anxiety very sympathetic. When I sketch near the pagoda I see him occasionally ringing the hanging-bell or cymbal, with the same step and air of half-unconscious performance of habitual duty that I remember so well in Catholic priests whom I knew as a boy.

Here the memory of Shodo Shonin comes up again, with a confusion of intention in the assembled worship of Buddhist and native divinities. For the "opener of mountains" built the temple here to the same god, with the never-ending name, whom he met on the summit of Nan-tai-san. And the adjoining chapel, dedicated to Kuwan-on, means that she was in reality the essential being, behind the temporary manifestation, that assumed the name and appearance of this mountain god,—the genius loci. And the Latin words bring back the recollection of curious stones in the mossy green shade, to which is attached the meaning of the oldest past; for they are "male" and "female"—emblems and images of earliest worship, empowered to remind, and perhaps obscurely to influence.

Seated at last under my umbrella, I could feel the hot moisture rising from the grass beneath me. The heated hills on each side wore a thin interlacing of violet in the green of their pines. The mountains across the river were frosted in the sunlight, with the thinnest veil of a glitter of wet.

Between them great walls of vapor rose from the hidden river, twisting into draperies that slowly crawled up the slopes of the great mountain. Far off, its top was capped with cloud, whose mass descended in a shower over its face and between its peaks, and kept all its nearer side in a trembling violet shadow.