The first impression was almost uncanny. Rising sheer from the flood on either hand, the tall green silent hills stretched away before us, changing tint through the summer vapour, to form a fantastic vista of blue cliffs and peaks and promontories. There was not one sign of human life. Above their pale bases of naked rock the mountains sloped up beneath a sombre wildness of dwarf vegetation. There was absolutely no sound, except the sound of the steamer's tiny engine—poum-poum, poum! poum-poum, poum! like the faint tapping of a geisha's drum. And this savage silence continued for miles: only the absence of lofty timber gave evidence that those peaked hills had ever been trodden by human foot. But all at once, to the left, in a mountain wrinkle, a little grey hamlet appeared; and the steamer screamed and stopped, while the hills repeated the scream seven times.
This settlement was Chiburimura, of Chiburishima (Nakashima being the island to starboard)—evidently nothing more than a fishing station. First a wharf of uncemented stone rising from the cove like a wall; then great trees through which one caught sight of a torii before some Shinto shrine, and of a dozen houses climbing the hollow hill one behind another, roof beyond roof; and above these some terraced patches of tilled ground in the midst of desolation: that was all. The packet halted to deliver mail, and passed on.
But then, contrary to expectation, the scenery became more beautiful. The shores on either side at once receded and heightened: we were traversing an inland sea bounded by three lofty islands. At first the way before us had seemed barred by vapoury hills; but as these, drawing nearer, turned green, there suddenly opened magnificent chasms between them on both sides—mountain-gates revealing league-long wondrous vistas of peaks and cliffs and capes of a hundred blues, ranging away from velvety indigo into far tones of exquisite and spectral delicacy. A tinted haze made dreamy all remotenesses, an veiled with illusions of colour the rugged nudities of rock.
The beauty of the scenery of Western and Central Japan is not as the beauty of scenery in other lands; it has a peculiar character of its own. Occasionally the foreigner may find memories of former travel suddenly stirred to life by some view on a mountain road, or some stretch of beetling coast seen through a fog of spray. But this illusion of resemblance vanishes as swiftly as it comes; details immediately define into strangeness, and you become aware that the remembrance was evoked by form only, never by colour. Colours indeed there are which delight the eye, but not colours of mountain verdure, not colours of the land. Cultivated plains, expanses of growing rice, may offer some approach to warmth of green; but the whole general tone of this nature is dusky; the vast forests are sombre; the tints of grasses are harsh or dull. Fiery greens, such as burn in tropical scenery, do not exist; and blossom-bursts take a more exquisite radiance by contrast with the heavy tones of the vegetation out of which they flame. Outside of parks and gardens and cultivated fields, there is a singular absence of warmth and tenderness in the tints of verdure; and nowhere need you hope to find any such richness of green as that which makes the loveliness of an English lawn.
Yet these Oriental landscapes possess charms of colour extraordinary, phantom-colour delicate, elfish, indescribable—created by the wonderful atmosphere. Vapours enchant the distances, bathing peaks in bewitchments of blue and grey of a hundred tones, transforming naked cliffs to amethyst, stretching spectral gauzes across the topazine morning, magnifying the splendour of noon by effacing the horizon, filling the evening with smoke of gold, bronzing the waters, banding the sundown with ghostly purple and green of nacre. Now, the Old Japanese artists who made those marvellous ehon—those picture-books which have now become so rare—tried to fix the sensation of these enchantments in colour, and they were successful in their backgrounds to a degree almost miraculous. For which very reason some of their foregrounds have been a puzzle to foreigners unacquainted with certain features of Japanese agriculture. You will see blazing saffron-yellow fields, faint purple plains, crimson and snow-white trees, in those old picture-books; and perhaps you will exclaim: 'How absurd!' But if you knew Japan you would cry out: 'How deliciously real!' For you would know those fields of burning yellow are fields of flowering rape, and the purple expanses are fields of blossoming miyako, and the snow-white or crimson trees are not fanciful, but represent faithfully certain phenomena of efflorescence peculiar to the plum-trees and the cherry-trees of the country. But these chromatic extravaganzas can be witnessed only during very brief periods of particular seasons: throughout the greater part of the year the foreground of an inland landscape is apt to be dull enough in the matter of colour.
It is the mists that make the magic of the backgrounds; yet even without them there is a strange, wild, dark beauty in Japanese landscapes, a beauty not easily defined in words. The secret of it must be sought in the extraordinary lines of the mountains, in the strangely abrupt crumpling and jagging of the ranges; no two masses closely resembling each other, every one having a fantasticality of its own. Where the chains reach to any considerable height, softly swelling lines are rare: the general characteristic is abruptness, and the charm is the charm of Irregularity.
Doubtless this weird Nature first inspired the Japanese with their unique sense of the value of irregularity in decoration—taught them that single secret of composition which distinguishes their art from all other art, and which Professor Chamberlain has said it is their special mission to teach to the Occident. [6] Certainly, whoever has once learned to feel the beauty and significance of the Old Japanese decorative art can find thereafter little pleasure in the corresponding art of the West. What he has really learned is that Nature's greatest charm is irregularity. And perhaps something of no small value might be written upon the question whether the highest charm of human life and work is not also irregularity.
Sec. 9
From Chiburimura we made steam west for the port of Urago, which is in the island of Nishinoshima. As we approached it Takuhizan came into imposing view. Far away it had seemed a soft and beautiful shape; but as its blue tones evaporated its aspect became rough and even grim: an enormous jagged bulk all robed in sombre verdure, through which, as through tatters, there protruded here and there naked rock of the wildest shapes. One fragment, I remember, as it caught the slanting sun upon the irregularities of its summit, seemed an immense grey skull. At the base of this mountain, and facing the shore of Nakashima, rises a pyramidal mass of rock, covered with scraggy undergrowth, and several hundred feet in height—Mongakuzan. On its desolate summit stands a little shrine.
'Takuhizan' signifies The Fire-burning Mountain—a name due perhaps either to the legend of its ghostly fires, or to some ancient memory of its volcanic period. 'Mongakuzan' means The Mountain of Mongaku—Mongaku Shonin, the great monk. It is said that Mongaku Shonin fled to Oki, and that he dwelt alone upon the top of that mountain many years, doing penance for his deadly sin. Whether he really ever visited Oki, I am not able to say; there are traditions which declare the contrary. But the peaklet has borne his name for hundreds of years.