"By one keeping the heart free from stain, virtue and right and wrong are seen clearly as forms in a mirror."
VIII
I returned by another way, through a quarter which I had never seen before,—all temples. A district of great spaces,—vast and beautiful and hushed as by enchantment. No dwellings or shops. Pale yellow walls only, sloping back from the roadway on both sides, like fortress walls, but coped with a coping or rootlet of blue tiles; and above these yellow sloping walls (pierced with elfish gates at long, long intervals), great soft hilly masses of foliage—cedar and pine and bamboo—with superbly curved roofs sweeping up through them. Each vista of those silent streets of temples, bathed in the gold of the autumn afternoon, gave me just such a thrill of pleasure as one feels on finding in some poem the perfect utterance of a thought one has tried for years in vain to express.
Yet what was the charm made with? The wonderful walls were but painted mud; the gates and the temples only frames of wood supporting tiles; the shrubbery, the stonework, the lotus-ponds, mere landscape-gardening. Nothing solid, nothing enduring; but a combination so beautiful of lines and colors and shadows that no speech could paint it. Nay! even were those earthen walls turned into lemon-colored marble, and their tiling into amethyst; even were the material of the temples transformed into substance precious as that of the palace described in the Sutra of the Great King of Glory,—still the aesthetic suggestion, the dreamy repose, the mellow loveliness and softness of the scene, could not be in the least enhanced. Perhaps it is just because the material of such creation is so frail that its art is so marvelous. The most wonderful architecture, the most entrancing landscapes, are formed with substance the most imponderable,—the substance of clouds.
But those who think of beauty only in connection with costliness, with stability, with "firm reality," should never look for it in this land,—well called the Land of Sunrise, for sunrise is the hour of illusions. Nothing is more lovely than a Japanese village among the hills or by the coast when seen just after sunrise,—through the slowly lifting blue mists of a spring or autumn morning. But for the matter-of-fact observer, the enchantment passes with the vapors: in the raw, clear light he can find no palaces of amethyst, no sails of gold, but only flimsy sheds of wood and thatch and the unpainted queerness of wooden junks.
So perhaps it is with all that makes life beautiful in any land. To view men or nature with delight, we must see them through illusions, subjective or objective. How they appear to us depends upon the ethical conditions within us. Nevertheless, the real and the unreal are equally illusive in themselves. The vulgar and the rare, the seemingly transient and the seemingly enduring, are all alike mere ghostliness. Happiest he who, from birth to death, sees ever through some beautiful haze of the soul,—best of all, that haze of love which, like the radiance of this Orient day, turns common things to gold.