When I left home toward a certain Doctor’s who had promised to show me his collection of chirography and art, the unusual summer wind which had raged since midnight did not seem to calm down; the rain-laden clouds now gathered, and then parted for the torrent of sunlight to dash down. I was most cordially received by him, as I was expected; in coming under threat of the weather I had my own reasons. I always thought that summer was worse than spring for examining (more difficult to approve than deny) the objects of art, on account of our inability for concentrating our minds; the heat that calls all the shoji doors to open wide confuses the hearts of bronze Buddhas or Sesshu’s “Daruma” or Kobo’s chirography or whatever they be, whichever way they have to turn, in the rush of light from every side; I thanked the bad weather to-day which, I am sure, I should have cursed some other day. The Doctor’s house had an almost winter-sad aspect with the shoji, even the rain-doors all shut, the soft darkness assembling at the very place it should, where the saints or goddesses revealed themselves; hanging after hanging was unrolled and rolled before me in quick succession. “Doctor, tell me quick whose writing is that?” I loudly shouted when I came to one little bit of Japanese writing. “That is Koyetsu’s,” he replied. “Why, is it? It seems it is worth more than all the others put together; Doctor, I will not ask you for any more hangings to-day,” I said. And a moment later, I looked at him and exclaimed in my determined voice:
“What will you say if I take it away and keep it indefinitely?”
“I say nothing at all, but am pleased to see how you will enjoy it,” the Doctor replied.
The evening had already passed when I returned home with that hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all the gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was properly hanged at the “tokonoma” when the candles were lighted, whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of world-wearied heart?) YEARNING OF POETICAL SOUL allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again, Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with the haunting charm of a ghost. They say:
“Where’s cherry-blossom?
The trace of the garden’s spring breeze is seen no more.
I will point, if I am asked,
To my fancy snow upon the ground.”
“What a yearning of poetical soul!” I exclaimed.
It is your imagination to make rise out of fall, day out of darkness, and Life out of Death; not to see the fact of scattering petals is your virtue, and to create your own special sensation with the impulse of art is your poet’s dignity; what a blessing if you can tell a lie to yourself; better still, not to draw a distinct line between the things our plebeian minds call truth and untruth, and live like a wreath shell with the cover shut in the air of your own creation. Praised be the touch of your newly awakened soul which can turn the fallen petals to the beauty of snow; there is nothing that will deny the yearning of your poetic soul. It is not superstition to say that the poet’s life is worthier than any other life. Some time ago the word loneliness impressed me as almost divine as Rikiu pledged himself in it; I wished, through its invocation, to create a picture, as the ancient ditty has it, of a “lone cottage standing by the autumn wave, under the fading light of eve.” But I am thankful for Koyetsu to-day. How to reach my own poetry seems clearly defined in my thought; it will be by the twilight road of imagination born out of reality and the senses—the road of idealism baptised by the pain of death.