JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
WITH A NOTE ON CONFUCIUS 41
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF
PAUL-LOUIS GOUGHOUD * *
BY FRANCES RUMSEY, WITH
A PREFACE BY ANATOLE FRANCE
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, W.
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXXI
Printed in Grtt Britain by R. Clay ff Sont, Ltd., London and Sunday.
TO
THE EXQUISITE MASTER
ANATOLE FRANCE
P.-L. C.
2218701
PREFACE
HE French author whom I have
the honour to present to this English
public considered as it is by H.
Taine to be the most serious, the
most reserved and the most attentive
in the world is worthy, I am cer-
tain, to occupy the leisure of so
estimable a collective sensibility. M. Paul-Louis
Couchoud, former scholar of the Ecole Normale,
professor of philosophy and doctor of medicine,
published in 1902, while still very young, a book
which already disclosed the centre of attraction
of a mind ceaselessly stirred by an ardent curiosity,
but which revolves about a central point in that
it is harmonious and fundamentally informed. This
book is a study on Spinoza (published by Alcan) con-
ceived in an original manner. In his belief that
the doctrine of a philosopher is an historic event,
the author has attached the work of the excom-
municated Jew of Amsterdam to those exterior
circumstances which can explain it ; he acquaints
us with the surroundings in which Spinoza lived
and unfolds an animated and inspired series of
pictures. Thus the vocation of M. Couchoud was
manifest at an early hour. He has since made
important studies in psychiatry, he has conducted
vii
viii PREFACE
laboratory researches and has even isolated a new
germ. But his chief desire is to place his acquisi-
tion at the service of the modern Clio and his
interest is to meditate on the history of the moral
ideas which constitute the common base of each
human generation.
It is thus that he has been led to the study of
the origin of Christianity. Having reached the
splendid meridian of the road of life, he is con-
secrating the years of his rich maturity to the com-
position of a book which will present under a new
aspect the obscure beginnings of a religion that has
conquered a vast portion of the world. As much
as it has been given to me to know of this work in
process of formation inspires a vivid interest and
that enthusiasm which emanates from the presenti-
ment of a great accomplishment : Nescio quid majus
nascitur ... I shall not finish the phrase : it would
be a lapse of taste to assume the oracular tone.
But it is none the less true that attentive minds, in
Europe and in America, see this exegesis, after three
centuries of effort, touch on the verge of those
results least awaited by the ignorant multitude.
How magnificent and how worthy of praise are those
men who, with infinite labour, surmounting almost
insurmountable obstacles, and surrounded by the
indifference or the hostility of the mass, ceaselessly
seek the truths which are essentially necessary to
liberty of mind and to tranquillity of heart.
But I have not characterized Dr. Couchoud until
I have defined his familiar spirit, which whispers
perpetually in his ear and leads him at its will.
PREFACE ix
This spirit is the same which goaded the old Hero-
dotus to wander throughout the known world of
the Greeks, to visit the barbarians and to study their
customs, and which furnished the matter of his
tales ; it is the spirit which haunts the curious and
sincere soul whose jealous care is to paint from
nature the spirit of travel ; that spirit which
led Marco-Polo to the Great Mogul, at the price
of cruel fatigues and numberless dangers. To-day
one is a Marco-Polo without difficulty. Favoured
by the genius of his time, Dr. Couchoud has since
the days of his early youth circled the world. The
book which I am here presenting, Japanese Impres-
sions, owes much to this familiar spirit in him.
The title, if it be not exact as a definition, at least
promises us a charming voyage, and it does not
disappoint us. The volume is actually composed
of five studies, three of these consecrated to Japan,
where the author lived, and one to China which he
visited.
How gradual, after all, has been our advance
in the knowledge of the planet we inhabit, one of
the smallest of its system, which is itself not one of
the greatest of the heavenly systems. Even yester-
day, for the European consciousness, the Far East
was scarcely included in the philosophy of history.
It is giVen no place in the Discours sur Vhistoire
universelle of Bossuet. Voltaire's genius divined
China ; but he did not understand it, and in the
eighteenth century it was to us a still inaccessible
country. Ernest Renan, whose mind was so wide
and so curious, concerned himself little with it.
In my youth no one revealed to me the grandeur
and the beauty of the antique Oriental civilizations.
China was scarcely known to us save by its porcelains,
i PREFACE
of whose age we were ignorant, and Japan by its
prints which we admired without discernment.
The European generation to which M. Paul-Louis
Couchoud belongs has been the first to investigate,
to study and to consider at leisure an opened China
and a transformed Japan ; a Japan which was
victor of Russia and rival of the United States,
and which now enters the concert of peoples and
makes itself redoubtable by its fleet, its army and
fts diplomacy.
M. Couchoud, from the moment he saw Japan,
loved it ; not only for its cleverness, and its astound-
ing promptitude in borrowing from Europeans
weapons with which to combat them, but for its
fine love of beauty, its courtesy, its exquisite art
of living and for a sentiment for nature of an
unequalled penetration. Were it not that his
curiosity is universal and that he is possessed by a
need to see and comprehend everything, he would,
like Lafcadio Hearn, have adopted a Japanese life
and passed the remainder of his days in a joint
appreciation, with this people so dedicated to the
love of landscape, of the festivals of the first snow
and the bursting of the cherry trees into flower.
3
His book begins with an article entitled " The
Japanese Quality," treating of the prevalence of
the love of Nature in a country where every one
is a poet, a draughtsman or a musician. In Japan
one paints and writes with the same brush, as M.
Couchoud tells us, and poetry is not the exclusive
property of the erudite. Art is universal. The
woodcutter's wife crowns the little bundle which
PREFACE xi
she carries on her head with a few red leaves. It
is the country of design. With a single stroke the
Japanese can perpetuate the attitude of an animal.
What Pisanello alone created in Italy has constantly,
and during centuries, been created in Japan. Our
author attributes this aptitude to depict both
domestic and wild animals to that sympathy for
every living creature which is natural to Asiatic
peoples. The Japanese believe themselves to be
of the same essence as beasts. It lends them an
amiable and charming quality, that they have not
broken the bond which binds man to animate nature
which is the whole of nature ; they remain in a
communion with universal life, with animals and
with plants, and they have not taken refuge, with
an arrogant ignorance, in the empty spaces of
metaphysics.
After these pages, written with profound feeling
and with enchantment in their style, follows a
section on the Japanese Muse, consecrated in par-
ticular to the haikaij a poem composed in a fixed
form of seventeen syllables. It is thus a fragment of
extreme brevity, beside which the European sonnet
appears an epic. It naturally becomes imperative
that these seventeen syllables should emanate from
a definite emotion. In Japan the poet speaks in a
universal language, the same which a countryman
uses and understands. In its compactness, we are
told, the haikai lays a fine touch on both the ear
and the heart. Basho, the Epictetus and the
Marcus Aurelius of Japan, excelled in this mode
of composition which bears for us an analogy to
the Greek epigram. But there is more art in
xii PREFACE
Meleager than in Basho. Since he is far more
familiar than we with the haikai, M. Couchoud
savours it more intimately. He cites an extensive
selection of these charming dwarf-like morsels and
accentuates for us their salient quality. With his
natural persuasiveness he was able during the war
to inspire one of his friends, Julien Vocance, with
the idea of noting the impressions of trench life
in this rhythm so essentially Japanese, and M.
Vocance has succeeded in expressing, in haikai,
experiences of the finest sensibility. (Julien Vocance,
Cent Visions de Guerre.}
The third section of this collection is " Japanese
Patriotism." It is a transcript of the journal which
the author kept in Tokyo in the month of February,
1904, on the outbreak of war between Japan and
Russia ; notes rapidly flung on paper, of a vivid
interest to all who lived in France and in England
the hours of August and September, 1914, and of the
widest significance for those who consider in a
philosophic spirit the passage of human events.
These last will, perhaps, be struck by the fact that,
taken as a whole and at the same degree of civiliza-
tion, the differences between men are insignificant
and that in like conditions they act more or less in
like fashion. We see a people of a yellow race
preparing to fight a powerful opponent. To watch
them and to hear them inspires a Frenchman, and,
indeed, an Englishman if his self-esteem does not
weaken his judgment, with a sense of their likeness to
himself. In the face of the enemy they show the
same patriotism, the same confidence and the same
PREFACE xiii
enthusiasm. Selecting in advance the formula
which the Allies were afterwards to adopt, Nippon
declared that it was fighting in defence of civilization.
All factions merged into one ; only the Socialists
gave vent to some protestations which were con-
temptuously disregarded. The merchants proved
to be extraordinarily bellicose and recognized that
the war had business advantages for them ; the
government suspended parliamentary guaranties
and established a censorship of books and news-
papers ; the bonzes collected to present the soldiers
with protective charms precisely as, ten years later,
the French priests distributed in the trenches the
medals of the Immaculate Conception. War bonds
were issued and the heavy subscriptions to them,
from patriotic motives, made a handsome aggregate ;
private individuals poured their gold into the coffers
of the state ; and those booths at the fairs where the
loafers of Tokyo came to shoot Russians for a penny
recall to one, vividly enough, the flaring stage of the
Empire Music Hall where Londoners applauded
a clown buffeting with his fists an effigy of President
Kruger.
If one wishes to cite particularities of difference,
one could perhaps note that the Japanese gave his
riches to the state with a liberality unknown to
Europeans. In the diverse agitations of the time
there was exemplified that Asiatic disdain of death
which is without a parallel under our skies. One
is no less struck by the chivalrous spirit inherited
from the old Samurai, notably manifest when the
Russian ambassador quitted Tokyo overwhelmed
with honours and with gifts, and which frequently
expressed itself in courtesies of language in regard
to the enemy. But it must be considered that the
xiv PREFACE
Japanese had not had to bear the strain of long wars
with Russia, with their consequent injuries ; that
since the outbreak of these hostilities the constant
victory of their arms made generosity facile ; and
that in any case their tone essentially changed when
they learned that the Russians were sinking merchant
ships and indulging in acts of piracy. From that
moment they were treated as barbarians, Goths
and Vandals.
It is unprofitable to persist too closely in these
parallels between peoples who never act in circum-
stances which are completely identical. None
the less war lends itself more than peace to such
comparisons, since it discovers the primitive impulses
of men and discloses masses united in a common
action. Since we are led, under the guidance of
an historian-philosopher, to speculate on these
relations of humanity in time and space, we must
necessarily wonder whether mortals, in their sub-
jection to necessity, have not resemblances in the
essential, in all epochs and throughout the world,
and despite the divergences produced by race,
by climate and by all special conditions of life. In
ancient times likeness between peoples seems to
have been the principal point of consideration.
It was the effort of the minds of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries to determine that man
resembled man, under exterior divergences. The
romanticists, with Walter Scott at their head, and
looking to the wider distances, suddenly felt dissem-
blances to be more fine than identities. Augustin
Thierry, to cite that evocator of the past who, in
an epoch of inexactness, kept the measure of his
thought equable and his tone just, is visibly devoted
to distinctive particularities and forces local colour
PREFACE xv
in his pictures. In one chapter of his studies he
takes exception to his predecessor, the old Anquetil,
who fastens upon the French, from Clovis to Louis
XIV, uniform traits. But shortly thereafter Sainte-
Beuve, that profound student of souls, was to esti-
mate that the more one studies history the more
one discovers that men and things, under variations
of form and of costume, have always closely resembled
each other. (For a more thorough dissection of this
compare the histories of Mezeray and Rollin with
those of the two Thierry and Michelet : Guizot
remains of the old school : the reader will be still
more struck, if he places the lelemaque of Fenelon
and the Sethos of the Abbe Terrasson side by side
with the Martyrs of Chateaubriand and the
Salammbo of Flaubert.) The fundamental and rapid
progress of the historical sciences hastened the
romantic defeat. But however we recognize the
essential identities it is none the less true, as the
common language expresses it, that a stranger
remains strange. M. Couchoud is particularly
gifted to write history in accordance with the
exigency of modern thought ; as a philosopher and
an artist he expresses with an equal felicity the
general and the particular.
The fourth and final chapter of the book trans-
ports us from Japan to China, that immense and
venerable land where, under the Sung, as M.
Couchoud recounts, were invented refinements
of sensibility unknown to the rest of the world.
This is the relation of a visit, or I should rather say
of a pilgrimage, to the tomb of Confucius at K'iu-
xvi PREFACE
feou. Our author inspires in us his own love for
this old sage who spoke so little of a celestial provi-
dence, who made no pronouncement upon what
was beyond the knowledge of man, who confined
his teaching to the conduct of life and of public
affairs and who, in advance of the stoics, professed
charity to human kind. M. Couchoud foresees
and hails a day when the best thought of the world,
as a single entity, will unite in a common veneration
of Confucius and of Socrates ; and this concludes
a volume which, composed as it is of detached
articles, forms in its spirit and its doctrine a homo-
geneous whole.
The charm of M. Couchoud lies in that rare
power to evoke ancient or distant facts which is
the faculty of a Renan and a Ferrero, and which
touches history with the interest of a living spectacle.
He is gifted with that rich imagination, as necessary
to the historian as to the poet, and without which
nothing is inspired or illuminated. He has invention
in the strict sense of the word, the art of divining,
of disclosing what is hidden. Yet this penetrating
spirit, which pierces to the depths of things, seems
at times to brush over their surface, so light a hand
does he lay on them. His thought naturally inclines
to benevolence, not that he constrains himself to an
excessive indulgence to individuals, whom he rather
seeks to appreciate with equity. His goodwill
is larger than this, and approaches that of Renan ;
it is to men at large, and to the obscure multitude,
that it lends itself. His kindness radiates like a
living light and dissipates the shadows of an extinct
faith. He loves men even with their faults and
PREFACE xvii
follies, and seems at times to excuse himself for
not participating in their weaknesses.
There obviously results in his case what results
with most minds who exercise to excess the faculty
of comprehension. Since they recognize the reason
of what exists, they are ready to accommodate
themselves to it. They do not easily combat even
what they least approve ; they rather enter into
that popular thought most opposed to their own
and register its prejudices. Polemics horrify them ;
they wisely fear the loss of time in mere dispute.
If, however, the old Scandinavians were right to
believe in the virtue of runes, and if a sacred word
traced on a stone had the power to change the world,
who better than such men could write that word ?
But I am forgetting the fact that they are ceaselessly
writing it, unknown to themselves, and that it is their
thought which is transforming societies.
M. Couchoud writes without affectation, with
no apparent effort, with a natural beauty and a
winning grace ; his concrete style illumines, colours
and vivifies objects ; like that Venus whom the
gravest of the Latin poets invokes, he brings flowers
to blossom, scatters a radiance and penetrates one's
feeling with a fine flame. Great praise is also due
to Madame Frances Rumsey for having transformed
into English all that could be conserved of so rich
a language.
ANATOLE FRANCE.
January, 1920.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
T may seem appropriate to note the
service which, beyond its original
theme, M. Couchoud's delicate little
volume renders to such thought as is
dedicated to the play of the selective
sense. We have in it not only a charm-
ing glimpse of Japan but, from the
point of view of the English reader, a visible illustra-
tion of the action of the fine French thought dealing
with a subject completely alien. It has become
a tradition with us that the French mind does not
readily travel, in the sense that travel is a projection
and displacement of the imagination ; even in
dealing with history and with art, far removed from
the immediacy of our day, it is our impression that
the French writer remains of his time and of his
particular place ; and that for long he looked upon
Asia as he saw it in the lacquer of Louis XV furniture
and in the chinoiserie of the snuff-boxes at Versailles.
We have before us the interesting instance of a
mind which has travelled in a perfectly defined
degree and with a clarity of purpose possible only
to this race with the purpose of recognizing and
apprehending beauty. M. Couchoud is completely
logical. He makes no attempt to draw artificial
conclusions from either historic or artistic data,
except as they minister to his central idea. He
does not deduce morals from his delightful poetic
xix
xx TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
themes. He applies himself to the facts he sees,
rather than he derives from them a forced con-
clusion. His comments are notations, and not
an attempt at an impossible participation. This
integrity in the French judgment strikes long
echoes as it strikes against the integrity of the
Japanese character and discovers to us much that,
in our looser way, we have never formed into defini-
tion. The French penetration makes evident to
us such points as that, though the Japanese have the
instinct to learn the art and arts of life, it yet so
slightly modifies their actual living ; that in spite
of their cult for Nature, they learn so little from
her ; it defines the line between the progressive
and the imitative, and it understands that there is
no mere formality in the Japanese formalism but
that it is a current ritual of thought and action.
Those very divergences between France and Japan,
of which M. Couchoud reminds us, have their
surprising analogies and correspondences. Some
taste of France comes to us when we realize that
Japanese art, which seems to have all the saliency
of the personal, is produced by the mind of the race
rather than by the individual mind. The sub-
ordination of the individual himself to form touches
the fabric of the French social consciousness ; just
as the Japanese caligraphic sense may strike our
vision as French thought made visible, in its fine
tracery and sharp relativities.
There was no more possibility of translating M.
Couchoud's text literally than of explaining his
impact with the Japanese civilization entirely by
either its affirmations or contradictions. It has
been necessary to feel for the action of his mentality,
a mentality at once ascetic, grave and rich, His
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE xxi
idea has been literally preserved wherever possible ;
since his letter is his spirit, it is hoped that this has
been scrupulously accomplished. His translations
of the haikai have been carried as far as possible
word for word into the rougher medium of English ;
and it is a sign of the beauty of his process that,
even in an Occidental approximation, so much of
their fineness, their sensitiveness and their com-
pactness remains. What is above all a tribute to
M. Couchoud, and to all of France in him, is that a
record of impressions of travel, which was neces-
sarily fugitive, should yet be so vivid and so
distinguished.
CONTENTS
PACE
PREFACE ........ ^
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ...... X1X
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER ..... x
THE JAPANESE QUALITY ..... *3
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN .... 33
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM ...... 73
CONFUCIUS ........ I2 9
XX111
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER
HE four fragments which form this
notation were written in Japan and
in China. In them will be found
the faults, and possibly the verity, of
the immediacy of a first impression.
They were the author's entry into
Asia ; and they are destined for
those who have not yet crossed that enchanted
threshold.
" The Japanese Quality " is an attempt such as one
makes to concentrate, for one's more understanding
friends, the salient elements of a year of an alien
existence. If I had to reconstitute a longer experi-
ence, I should change some of my details and I
should add much, but I should leave throughout
the same colour. There is in Japan an essential
charm which the man of taste will always seek there,
and which he cannot find elsewhere. One captures
it in the sight of the pinnacle of a little temple
amongst the pines, in the ceremonies of the accept-
ance of a cup of tea, or in the smile with which two
Japanese greet each other. Inherent in this charm
is a conception of life and of art whose perfection
was reached at Kyoto, in the fifteenth century, under
the principality of the Ashikaga. Kyoto has the
immanent grandeur of Athens and of Florence ;
like them it resumes an exquisite moment in human
3
4 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
history. The miracle of beauty which united in
Athens the procession of the Panathenea, the
sculpture of Phidias and the tragedy of Sophocles
brought into co-existent being, at Kyoto, the
gardens of the moon, the painting of Sesshu, the
No dances and the rites of communion with great
art. There is in the East a secret taste of life,
a penetration of nature, a fine effusion of pity, an
enjoyment accentuated by brevity and mystery,
and a flash of the spirit, which those who have once
tasted know cannot exist in the Occident. The
art and the moral life of Mediterraneans is too
dependent on their public. Eloquence, dialectic
and humanism are the marrow of their bones. It
is to the senses of that soul which has the passion
of solitude that Japan opens a special world of
beauty, opposed to, but as fine in its values, as that
which exists in the Parthenon. Japan is as eternal
as Greece ; like Greece it is a universal possession.
As long as men exist who have the sensitiveness to
respond to the incomparable art of the Sung and
Ashikaga, and who comprehend the Hagoromo
and Yamamba dances, the spirit of antique Japan
will survive in its irreducible and incomparable
essence.
The exquisite fourteenth-century Japan carries
one's thoughts back to the twelfth century in China,
as Florence turns one's thoughts to Athens. It
was China where, under the Sung emperors and
beside the flowery lakes of Hanchou, there was
invented a refinement of sensibility unequalled in
human history. The thread runs still farther back,
to that first creator of idealism, India, whose mission-
aries brought to the industrious Chinese and the
warlike Japanese that Buddhistic principle which,
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 5
rough but full of fire, was to spread a unique spark
of animation. Asia is one. The same great spiritual
torrents and the same imperceptible tremors of
sensitiveness have passed through it from end to end.
This is the first realization necessary for one who
knocks at any one of its doors. But all these waves
of feeling broke about Japan, and became part of
her own vibration. The Indian ardour and the
Indian delicacy, the Chinese power of reason and
the Japanese force of will, are all necessary, in their
highest intensity, to the production of a Japanese
work of art.
" The Lyric Epigrams of Japan " are in reality,
in the compression of their seventeen syllables, poems
in miniature or a prolonged exclamation, which
lose in translation both their incisiveness and the
speed which makes their life. These epigrams are
the more modern form of the Japanese lyric art ;
the other forms are the classic poems of thirty-one
syllables and the fragmentary chants of the No
dances. These latter are no less essentially Japanese ;
but the sentiment for nature which they exhale
is of Chinese origin and they are saturated with an
Indian ecstasy.
The interest of the epigrams is that they furnish
us with the perfect example of that discontinuous
poetry towards which all Japanese poets, and possibly
all Asiatic poets, tend. Stephane Mallarme has
denounced the facile eloquence which has sub-
merged our own lyrics. He wished that poetic
expression should deal only with those things which
could in no way be treated in prose. Poetry had
been continuously betrayed, as he put it with a
smile, " since the great Homeric deviation." If
6 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
he were reminded of what existed before Homer,
he qualified it by the term orphism. The Vedic
hymns, the early Chinese poems and the Japanese
uta and haikai touch Mallarm^'s own orphism. In
comparison with them all our own poetic styles
are oratorical. Mallarme had an intuition of this
development when he wrote :
Imiter le Chinois au coeur limpide et fin
De qui 1'extase pure est de peindre la fin,
Sur ses tasses de neige a la lune ravie,
D'une bizarre fleur qui parfume sa vie
Transparente, la fleur qu'il a sentie enfant,
Au fillgrane bleu de 1'ame se greffant.
It is above all the discursive and the explanatory
which are extirpated from the Japanese poem. Its
fantastic flower is unique, as it detaches itself from
the snow. A bouquet is always forbidden. The
essence of the creation is sensation, lyrically expressed,
caught at the instant when it bubbles from the
spring, and before a movement of either thought
or passion has placed and utilized it. Logical
relation of experience is left to prose ; the placing
of ideas in affective sequence, by means of rhythm,
redundancy and cadences, is left to eloquence.
The Japanese poetry has its consummation in pure
sensation, which it rigorously refuses to sully with
qualification or explanation. It is therefore essen-
tial that the subject should contain to perfection
this initial purity ; and in this incomparable use
of the selective sense the poet's genius begins and
ends.
Words must always remain an obstacle. The
composition of them in sequence creates a chain
and introduces an elemental order which is instantly
artificial. It is for this reason that Japanese poetry
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 7
has freed itself of all forms but that of seventeen
syllables ; and a discussion of this special instance
of composition will perhaps interest those who have
meditated on the essence of poetry.
" Japanese Patriotism " is a digest of notes kept,
in Japai, during the first two months of the Russo-
Japanese war. They are a cinematographic view
of Japan, at a moment when her destiny hung in
the grave uncertainties of oscillation. As a French-
man, my sympathies were more naturally in the
Russian canp ; but, little by little, Japan conquered
personal instances of dissimilarity, as she afterwards
conquered her enemies.
Neither the war of 1894 nor that of 1914 shook
the country to its foundations or discovered its
essence like "hat of 1904. It was an exceptional
hour for observation. A great war puts a people
to those sup r eme tests to which a vital sickness
puts the individual. Under its disintegration the
profoundest farces of resistance come into play.
We Occidentals are now emerging from such a
condition, and the reader may, perhaps, be curious
to see how ar. Asiatic people has issued from a
similar experieice. I have ventured to present
these notes as ai instantaneous sketch, and without
retouching them. The penetrative mind will judge
for itself if this Japanese devotion to country can
become a part of the soul, and mingle with the deli-
cate poetry and the calm wisdom of Asia.
The Russo-Japanese war will remain a vital date
in the history of peoples. When it ended, in the
victory of the Rising Sun, the contact of Japan
with the Occident was established on terms of
equality. By means of her victory Japan, as the
8 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
champion of Asiatic civilization, created for herself
a place amongst the civilized nations of Europe,
a place which she has since occupied, with che
fullest rights, in the late European war. This
particular participation, whose political results
are in process of formation under our eyes, is rich
with immense consequences for general civilisation.
Across the fine lacquer bridge built by the fepanese
soldier between Asia and Europe, all thi stored
treasures of humanity may be equally exchanged.
" Confucius " is the relation of a Msit which
the author made to the philosopher's tative land,
in company with a young and learned member of
the Ecole franchise d'Extreme-Orient, M. Aurous-
seau. M. Chavannes, so regretted br his many
friends, was kind enough to read this account.
One owes to the Sage of China an impression
of complete continuity ; it is through him that one
discovers that beneath the robe of Chiiese embroid-
eries there is the same reunion o: intellectual
faculties which lies beneath the himaticn of Aristotle,
beneath the toga of Cicero and beneath the pour-
point of Descartes. The power of drect reasoning
appears as one of the most universal of possessions,
identical in its essence across centuries and distances.
From the impenetrability of China and through
the mists of time, Confucius speak to us a word
which we instantly comprehend ; and, in a flash,
he has become our contemporary and our compatriot.
The dissemination of his doctrine of reason,
however, remains an incomprehensible prodigy. It
brings us to a vast and disturbing question : what
respective use of reason has been made by the peoples
of Europe and the peoples of Asia ? In Europe it
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 9
is apparent that reason has essentially been applied
in the realm of knowledge, and that it has both
invented and perfected the sciences. In Asia it
has been applied in the relation of man to man
and to the perfection of justice and happiness. It
is this point which resumes the profound fascination
of Asia. Life there is simpler and softer than with
us because it is more reasoned. " You, Greeks, are
the youth of the world," said the Egyptian priest
to Herodotus. " You are young," is the phrase
of the Asiatic sages to our restless scientists, who
have weighed the stars but who have found no
formula to bring men closer to justice or happiness.
The Revelations are the empiric solution with which
we must still content ourselves. We shall learn
from Asia as much as she will learn from us ; with us
the individual is more remarkable, but her busy
hive of existence is better constructed.
To confront these two halves of humanity will
be the great work of this century. We are approach-
ing an epoch which transcends our imaginations.
At no given period of the past has the human con-
sciousness apprehended the death and the birth
of such vital factors. For the first time, from one
end of the earth to the other, man is aware of man ;
for the first time there is indicated some basis of a
common life for humanity. Between the peoples
who invented the ideograms of Asia and those who
adopted the vocal roots of Europe, there was
formerly a terrifying distance ; there is to-day a
nearness no less terrifying. The inventions of the
mechanical world the locomotive, the steamship,
the automobile, the telegraph, the daily paper and
the cinematograph have automatically accom-
plished this. To-day, in any given twenty-four
io JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
hours, the same news is known, at least virtually,
throughout the world. The mechanical processes
have so united humanity that they are forced to an
identical process of progression.
What will arise from this imposed conciliation ?
Before long the terrestrial surface will appear as a
single vast State, in the primary conditions of
disorganization and chaos. It is even probable that
the Richelieu or the Cavour, who will first indicate
the lines of order into which this general aggregate
is to fall, is already born ; and if this must come to
pass with violence, it will none the less come to
pass.
The other perspective which calls us is that of
the individual. The man of to-day is born with a
fabulous heritage from distant and innumerable
sources. He cannot deny his inheritance, and it
is his trust to administer and utilize it. Until now
our thoughts on this matter have been half com-
plete ; we have not seen our Europe in the pro-
portion which it bears to the rest of human kind.
Scarcely forty years ago Renan could write : " Pour
un esprit philosophique il n'y a vraiment dans le
passe" de 1'humanite que trois histoires de premier
inte"ret : 1'histoire grecque, 1'histoire d'Israel, Phis-
toire romaine." He lived in the same intellectual
world known to the Ancients. To-day this would
be impossible. The barrier has fallen. We see
that humanity has developed on two wide levels,
and that it has flashed into the night of history
two great searchlights.
The investigations of the future historian promise
an extraordinary fruition. Each of our arts will
be culminated by one of the arts of our newly
discovered brothers in resemblance or dissemblance.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 11
The product of our emotion, our minds and our
hands will serve as matter for general comparison,
and, one by one, strange correspondences will be
discovered. There is not a problem, whether pro-
found or subtle, posed and resolved on one side of
the planet, which has not repeated itself, in essence,
on the other side. Many of our absolute terms
are about to become relative ; and we shall use the
word universal with a juster sense of its content.
In this stupendous exchange, Japan will be a
pioneer. The last and most vigorous offspring
of Asia, that mother of peoples, she has constituted
herself the guardian, the advocate and the interpreter
of her ancient ancestress. Geographically she is
placed at the single point of intersection between
Asia and Europe. It was essentially in Japan that
such men of the newer culture could appear as
Lafcadio Hearn, Hall Chamberlain, Okakura Kakuzo ;
men who have in their thought united Asiatic to
Occidental culture and in whom there has developed
the consciousness of a unique humanity. If Europe
is to continue an upward march, it will be more
and more vitally European by this extension of
consciousness, and we shall even see Buddhistic
ecstasy and Confucian wisdom distilled into the
Christian liturgy. But if Europe is to founder in
new cataclysms, it will save from the wreck only
what is in its present limited capacity to save ;
and the best of our thoughts would survive as they
are now repeated, in fine ideograms, on silken scrolls.
From the sacred hills of Kyoto, even more than from
those of Rome, the avenues of a new world reach
to the infinite ; and from their summits one divines,
as from the prow of a ship, the new horizon.
THE JAPANESE QUALITY
THE JAPANESE QUALITY
HE most remarkable event of the
years which immediately preceded
the European War was the entrance
of Japan into the rank of the great
powers. We give this term, not to
those nations which are the most
highly civilized but to those which,
in event of war, are most to be feared. Japan has
proved to China, to Russia and to Germany that she
is possessed of a redoubtable strength ; and, now
that we recognize her power, we consent to speak
of her otherwise than in the phrases of Loti's amused
and slightly disdainful curiosity. M. Motono,
former Minister of Japan in Paris, once put it with
a penetration in which there was an element of
sadness : " As long as we consecrated ourselves to the
work of an intensive civilization, as long as we pro-
duced only men of letters, men of knowledge and
artists, you treated us as barbarians. Now that we
have learned to kill, you call us civilized." It will
be essential to keep in mind the lesson inherent in
this observation ; to put on one side the formidable
spectacle of Japan's growth in armaments, and to
penetrate to the characteristic traits of that ancient
and original civilization to which she lays claim,
16 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
and which she is prepared to defend, with European
arms, against Europe itself.
In the first instance we must relegate to its place
what is called, with an obvious grossness, the
Europeanization of Japan. It is unnecessary to
recall a fact of which we are fundamentally aware,
though we at times disregard it that Japan did not
await the arrival of Europeans in order to become
civilized. In the seventh century of our era, when
the Merovingian kings were dragged by oxen
through the forests of Gaul, the flowering of the
arts in Japan was equal to that in the Italy of the
Renaissance and the refinements of living were those
of France under Louis XV. Since this epoch there
have never existed in Japan the same stagnation and
inertia which overcame China. Until about the
year 1830, no matter at what given date one com-
pares Japan with France, the former is almost
always relatively in advance of the latter. It is the
most erroneous of impressions that Japan has
traversed in thirty years the ground which it has
taken Europe ten centuries to cover. What she
has learned from Europe, since 1834, are the
means of defence against the fate of Java, the
Philippines and Indo-China. Outside of this general
conformity to the methods of modern armaments,
Japan owes Europe two main systems of progression :
in the first place, railways, which, France must
remember, date not from the time of Charlemagne
but from that of Louis-Philippe ; and, in the second
place, the parliamentary system, which began to
work on a normal basis in the various Western States
only about the same time, and which is to-day scarcely
assured throughout Europe. As to the develop-
ments of electricity, these date, practically in their
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 17
entirety, from 1870, and the Japanese followed them
and benefited by them at exactly the same time as
the French.
On the arrival of the European influences, there-
fore, Japan was less like a barbarian than like a man
so fundamentally cultured that he is ready to absorb
whatever of value comes to him from another world.
It is sometimes said that Japan has assimilated the
results of science, but neither the methods nor the
spirit which has produced them. This is essentially
erroneous. In physics, in chemistry, in medicine
and in philology Japanese scholars are the equals of
their Occidental brothers. It was a Japanese
physician who isolated the plague bacillus, and it
has been Japanese physicists, with their fortunate
opportunities of studying a volcanic soil, who have
developed to so great an extent the science of
seismography.
In our effort to give a further extension to the
antiquity of our civilization, we are accustomed to
prolong it by attaching it to the civilizations of Rome
and of Greece. In such a postulation it is but just
to add to the Japanese civilization the civilizations
of ancient China and ancient India. Confucius
and Buddha are far anterior to Socrates. Japan is
to-day both the inheritor and the knight-errant of
all Asiatic civilization. It was India which created
that admirable Buddhism which has proved a
practically inexhaustible source of art, of morality,
and of the spirit of goodness. But Buddhism has
long since disappeared from India, and to-day it is
vital and fecund only in Japan. Until the sixteenth
century, China was a constant creator of new forms
of art and of thought. Sculpture, painting, poetry
and philosophy emanated from China and Japan,
1 8 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
and each manifestation of Japanese progression in
these fields corresponds to a new wave of the Chinese
influence. But after the invasion of the Manchus
China sank into torpor, and to-day the ancient monu-
ments of her art are largely in Japanese museums.
In addition to the defence of her national inherit-
ance, Japan is, therefore, also the guardian of the
Indian and Chinese traditions. From the point of
view of Mediterranean culture, it is Japan which
synthesizes the civilization of the other half of
humanity. Seen from this angle, her victory in the
conflict with Russia was an indubitable necessity ;
for in the ruins of Japan all the concentrated survival
of ancient Asia would have perished, and a whole
section of humanity must have fallen to dust.
Any brief attempt to define some traits of the
Japanese mentality must necessarily be superficial
and incomplete. The present study is restricted
to deal with three points : the Japanese love of
nature, the place which they assign to art, and their
moral education.
No people have so keen an emotion in the face
of nature as the Japanese. In spite of a fairly severe
winter climate, it is with reluctance that they close
their houses against what is for them a perpetually
renewed spectacle of beauty. Throughout all the
change of seasons, the Japanese removes the finely
constructed partitions of wood and paper which
separate him from the sky, from the flight of birds,
and from the profound calm of his garden which
symbolizes to him the essential Japan. In every
room he places the tiny tree which resumes in itself
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 19
the spirit of forests. His cities are parks, and his
temples are alive with flowers and with animals.
The national fete-days are the festivals of nature.
Take as an example the day of the fall of the first
snow ; the banks and the shops close, and one has the
impression that the entire population, mounted on
their high clogs, have climbed to the hills to admire
the white miracle of the winter. In February, when
the plum-trees break into blossom beneath the snow,
the people crowd around them in a fever of admira-
tion which has the elements of a personal piety.
The old trees, which are weary with bearing, are
given the support of wooden crutches ; and there
is a general participation in an act of thanks for
the vision of flowers and the scent of perfume during
a still inclement season. There exists towards nature
a ritual in the face of which other duties are
suspended. In February, 1904, the plum-trees
flowered a few days after the declaration of war, and
the event was not less marked than in other years.
In April, there is a solemn celebration of the
flowering of the cherry-trees, the most fragile of all
blossoms. In the chances of wind or of rain, their
life endures but three days, and for this reason the
delicate mist of flowers inspires the most ardent
enthusiasm. Along the length of the river at
Tokyo, which is bordered with cherry-trees, boats
pass and repass in a wake of petals. There are people
who take the two days journey to Yoshino, to view
a mountain covered with the flowers ; and others
travel farther still, into the scarcely accessible forest,
to catch a glimpse of the marvellous shining of a
solitary cherry-tree amongst the pines. The peach-
trees bloom a little later. These trees, like the
cherry and the plum trees, are not trained to bear
20 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
fruit. The Japanese have no use for the grafting
which is an attempt to domesticate, and they love
the flowers for their wildness. In summer they have
the same devotion for the elegant wistaria and the
frail peony ; and with the coming of autumn the
thousand coloured chrysanthemums are greeted in
every garden, and high on the mountains the
devotees of nature watch the purpling of the maples.
Autumn is the season of the most ardent of
celebrations, that of the moon. The hours of sleep
are changed to day-time, so that people can be free
to follow at night the vibrant variations of moon-
light. A Japanese journalist who recently arrived in
Paris made, as his first comment, the observation that,
beautiful as the city was, the houses were too high to
permit one to see the moon ; and on the nights of
full moon, he could only betake himself to the quais,
astonished to be alone with so much splendour.
It is not such a sentiment for nature but rather
its extension to an entire people which is extra-
ordinary. The enthusiasm penetrates to country-
people, to coolies, and to the roughest labourers.
A coolie was one day dragging my rickshaw through
a snowstorm. The road was rough and the man
was plainly exhausted ; yet he turned back to me,
not to complain, but to draw my attention to the
veil of snow crowning a tree. This is the oldest and
profoundest trait of the race. While in French
literature, until the time of Jean-Jacques, any
recorded impression of nature is exceptional,
Japanese poetry, ever since its farthest origin, has
bloomed into landscapes. The almost prehistoric
inhabitants noted the most exquisite examples of
these impressions in short poems which were collected
in the sixth century of our era.
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 21
There are some charming miniature poems of the
twelfth and fifteenth centuries which treat of this
passion, and which are remarkable for their extreme
brevity. They consist of five short verses with a
cesura after the third and in Japanese they mount
to only thirty-one syllables. There exist even
shorter poems, of three verses. One is constantly
reminded of the fact that the Japanese genius shows
in refinement and concision.
Nocturne :
Midnight.
On the summit of Fuji
The moon has paused . . .
Only the mountain's smoke
Can soil the sky.
Moonrise :
With a beating of wings
The wild geese tear apart
The little cloud . . .
As they utter their cry,
The moon !
The spring breeze :
The sudden wind
Has flung
The tree flowers to the grass . . .
I thought that I saw leap
A waterfall.
An old priest :
In spring
I recommence my love
Of this illusory world . . .
In what future star
Shall I find such flowers ?
The Willow :
At the breeze's breath
The willow's hair
Trembles and sways . . .
Always towards that same land
Where dies the spring
22 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
The Japanese poet constantly compares the snow
to the drifting petals of the cherry ; he links it to
his Buddhistic meditations more than once, as in
the following :
When in winter days
From the sinister skies,
The white blossoms flutter and fall,
My heart knows that past the clouds
A spring surely shines.
The following is, amongst thousands, a final
example of these brief poems :
Night and solitude,
The noise of the women who wash in the stream
Becomes fitful . . .
As they toss the white linen
They must be watching the moon !
The poet does not arrogate to himself alone the
privileges of the apprehension of beauty. On the
same plane with him and with the profoundest
theologian is recognized the right of the poorest
women to celebrate the splendours of this world.
That sense of nature which with the Occidental is a
sentiment essentially dedicated to calm moments
of rare manifestation is to the Japanese a perpetual
devotion before which all else keeps silence.
3
That same passion of the intelligence which
relates the Japanese to nature exists also in his senti-
ment for art. With the French, the artists form
an aristocracy or, if the term may be risked, a
class. They are fundamentally distinct from the
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 23
bourgeois. This division has its derivation in the
rigid requirements of technique. No people know
better than the French that, in Occidental develop-
ment, to become a painter, a musician or a poet is
not a matter of improvisation. In Japan a man
partakes naturally of the elements of the poet, the
musician and the painter, and without reflective
thought. He paints and writes with the same
pencil, and sees no distinction between the two
modes of expression. His music is without orches-
tras, and still exists in the freedom of popular
invention ; and his poetry, in its intrinsic simplicity
and brevity, is essentially denuded of artifice. The
countryman who, after the harvest, sets out on a
pilgrimage across Japan, slings at his sash a little
note-book for the reception of his impressions,
whether in the form of a brief sketch or of three
little verses. The art of art is diffused throughout
the people ; it has saturated their country and
impregnates their life with vitality.
The claim has been made that the Japanese art
has not penetrated to the distances spanned by the
European ; and it is questionable whether it has
expressed and exemplified the profundities of the
human soul. But it is undeniable that it has better
mastered the fulfilment of a social necessity, and
that it diffuses more freely and more widely a general
sense of joy and of beauty.
The fundamental principle on which Japanese
taste is based would seem to be a constant applica-
tion of refinement and a conservation of simplicity.
The Japanese have as instinctive a repugnance to
multiplication as to coarseness. The arrangement of
their houses is the finest tribute to this quality. No
single article of furniture is permanently placed.
24 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
The same bare room becomes a dining-room when
the servant brings in a tiny lacquer table, and a
bedroom when she unrolls the silken mattresses.
Nothing has the rigidity of the stationary. A single
place is always consecrated to contain a work of art,
or any object of beauty ; for the delicate statuette
is often replaced by a flowering branch, or even by
a single shining pebble. These changes are made
according to the varying beauties of the season, the
fluctuating light of the different hours, to corre-
spond with the imaginative mood of the host or the
taste of the guest whom he hopes to receive. But
the consecrated object radiates its influence
throughout the house. The poorest cottage possesses
one beautiful thing, and the richest would never
put on exhibition more than one at a time.
The selective sense of the Japanese has divined
the charm of the temporary as well as the charm
of the unique. It is distasteful to their sensitiveness
for the inanimate to permit a work of beauty to fail
of its audience and to become an object of indiffer-
ence, before which one passes without either respect
or emotion. Even in the museums, which have
been established on the Western plan, the paintings
are rolled in their cases, every five days, and the eye
is refreshed by others.
The most definite social expression of this cult of
art is what is called the " ceremony of tea," which is
in reality an aesthetic ritual whose rites have been
prescribed since the fifteenth century. Five friends,
following the canonical number, meet in the morn-
ing, in the depths of an odorous garden, in a pavilion
so small that it consists of only three braidings of
straw, and made of thatch and of the simplest woods.
An antique painting of authoritative beauty is
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 25
suspended on one wall ; but the company does not
turn to it until the conversation has fallen into
established form, and deals in the grave and the
delicate, Then, with a preliminary examination of
the case which has contained it and the mounting
which supports it, each guest approaches the work
of art ; and the phrases of their appreciation form
the starting-point for a discussion of the arts which
stretches into the hours. The simple repast is
prepared by the guests themselves, in porcelains
which are always old and exquisite, and when night
surprises them the five pilgrims on the road to a
finer apprehension feel that they have made a stage
of their journey. Those who practise this ceremony
of tea the chajin form an aristocracy of taste
which has interpreted the acceptances and refusals
of artistic Japan. Popular esteem ranks a famous
chajin with a revered statesman or a great general.
But every Japanese is essentially and eternally a
chajin, and prides himself on his appreciation of the
lines of a drawing or the curve of a vase.
All the little ornaments which emanate from
Japan and which the West puts to such absurd uses
the lacquer, the ivory boxes, the sabre guards
are in customary use in their country of origin.
The tiny vase which lifts its flowery contours in a
European Museum often comes from the kitchen of
a peasant. Since the diffusion of culture in ancient
Greece there has not been so rich and dissemin-
ated a creation in the domestic arts.
The influence of the Japanese production has been
felt throughout the world. In the seventeenth
century their lacquer brought new life to the form
and design of French furniture. Those faiences of
Kyoto which a Dutch ship carried to the West gave
26 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
the wings of inspiration to this art at Delft and,
later, to the same at Copenhagen. Amongst painters,
from Whistler to Degas, and amongst print makers,
from Riviere to Toulouse-Lautrec, those who have
saturated themselves in the Japanese sense of line
are easily marked. If one speaks of the influence of
Europe in the military development of Japan, it is
an equal justice to recognize the Japanese influence
in the development of European culture. But the
too facile success of the too superficial Japanese pro-
duction has weakened our mature judgment of their
basic art. We give its familiar and more ephemeral
examples too important a place, in the fashion of
that historian of Greek art who was so absorbed in
talking of the Tanagra that he forgot the Parthenon.
We are only academically aware that Japan has
formed, produced and perpetuated a great school
of sculpture and a great school of painting and that,
almost without exception, the perfected examples of
both arts are still in Japan.
The school of sculpture of Nara and the school of
the Kano landscapes have taken categoric rank with
the schools of Florentine sculpture and of Dutch
landscapes ; but in the future there will be a more
general consciousness that they are part of the
artistic patrimony of all races. In spite of predic-
tions to the contrary, no decadence in Japanese art
can be signalized. It seems to enclose the germ of
an eternal rebirth, due to the perpetuity of an
aristocracy of taste and to the extension of this taste
to the public at large. A police officer, whose salary
was perhaps twelve hundred yen a year, has been
known to pay a hundred yen for a cup which passed
his criticism and pleased his fancy. As long as such
dissemination of good judgment exists amongst a
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 27
people, there will arise artists worthy to satisfy the
demands made of them.
The link between moral and religious life is par-
ticularly strong in Japan, and the form of one is
infused with the vitality of the other. Japan, even
more strikingly than Italy, is the country of astonish-
ing confirmations and particularly in matters of
belief.
The curious anomaly created by the survival of
Shintoism has produced a situation which would be
paralleled only if ancient Celtic forms of faith had
kept pace with Christianity and if to-day, in addition
to the priest of the popular theocracy, there was
included a Druid in his white robes, surrounded
with that same mystical potency which hangs about
the traditional cutting of the mistletoe at New Year,
with a golden sickle ; above all if, conjointly with these
two hierarchies and acceptable to them both, there
existed a rationalistic philosophy. Shintoism stands
in the position which would in that case be occupied
by the Druidic faith, the equivalent of Buddhism
would be Christianity, and the rationalistic thought
would be Confucian philosophy.
Shintoism has as its basic postulation the tenet
that Japan is the chosen country of the gods, and
that the Japanese, as descendants of the goddess
Amaterasu, are by this privilege immune from the
need of any moral code other than their own. There
exists, therefore, very little sense of that personal
responsibility which springs from the doctrines of a
more intensive morality. The consequent belief is
that the Japanese need only give free rein to their
28 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
innate impulses, and let speak in themselves the
generosities of nature, of honour and of patriotism
which are the hereditary instincts of so noble a race.
A Japanese believing himself a descendant of the
gods, and with credence in the possibility that, at
his death, he himself may become a half-deity, has
little use for the restrictive fears of the usual man ;
the pride of his birth inspires all his actions and is
sufficient in all circumstances.
The Emperor is the nearest link with this divine
inheritance. This cult for the Emperor is more
fundamental than any attachment of the subject
to the sovereign ; indeed, for many centuries the
Emperor completely lacked political authority. It
may be called the cult of Japan personified. When
the bulletin of a victory states that the armies have
triumphed, because of the inherent virtue of the
sovereign, the allusion is not alone to the reigning
Emperor, but to the perpetual and perpetuated
Emperor ; that is, to this eternally personified
expression of the genius of the nation.
One is struck by the fact that although there is
scarcely any conscious idea of sin in the Japanese
mentality, and no law exists to deal with polygamy,
adultery or divorce, the habits of the people are
essentially moral and the family life is constituted
on a basis of solidity. The supposition that Japan
is dissolute is the falsest of fictions. The superficial
observers who leap to this conclusion have been taken
unaware by the atmosphere of joy and of sensitive-
ness to beauty which reigns throughout the country.
The elaborate courtesy of the men and the fine smile
of the women have surprised them into inaccuracies
of judgment, and they have believed themselves to
be in conditions related to those of Tahiti. French
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 29
travellers have been especially apt to commit this
particular error, since with them all literature of
travel carries a tradition of libertinism. The French
language has a regrettable tendency to give to alien
terms, as well as to alien impressions, the implication
of a gallant meaning. For example, the ordinary
Turkish words seraglio and harem, the first signify-
ing a palace and the second corresponding to the
English word home, have assumed in French a
special sense. In the same way the Japanese terms
mousme and geisha have come to represent, in
French, women constituted and trained for the
relation of the sexes, whose chastity is not on the
defensive. The mousme is quite simply the
daughter of the household, the eldest sister. The
geisha are women who can be compared only to
vivified objects of art, and whose sole role is to be
lovely and charming. They exemplify the grace of
Japan, as the Japanese officers express the spirit of
the national honour. The most beautiful stuffs are
woven for their robes and their sashes, and the finest
of jewels and of lacquer are for their use. They are
actresses without a stage, who are sought for their
beauty and their wit, their talent of musician-
poetesses, and the play of their imagination ; and,
if they have their loves and their caprices, they are
far from being venial. A Japanese in exile regrets a
geisha as one of the living images of his country.
Something of their origin as Shintoist priestesses
persists in them, and they symbolize that delicate and
noble epicureanism which is the moral of Japan.
The Buddhism of Japan an alien religion has
softened the intrinsic egoism of this epicureanism.
The metaphysics of this faith are profound, its morals
are ascetic and sublime, and its doctrine is one of
30 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
renunciation and of a universal goodness. Its posi-
tive action is comparable to that of Christianity or
to that of the epicureanism of antiquity. But
Buddhism has never been a faith which permitted
persecutions, and it has allowed pagan temples to
sleep in their ancient peace. It has concentrated its
force in converting to its doctrines the most sensitive,
the most highly-developed and the most disen-
chanted minds. These it has led to a moral per-
fection by the passion it instils for artistic perfection,
since art presupposes in the first degree renunciation
and concentration on one's inner development ;
and, according to the laws of Japanese Buddhism,
the experienced man who comes to its temples to
find peace must become an artist before he can be
a saint. The influence of Buddhism is waning to-
day, but for twelve centuries it was a school of
idealism. It formed great spirits, tortured by the
nostalgia of the infinite, and on the other hand
saints so tender and so saturated with peace that
they are comparable to our Francis of Assisi.
Scarcely an Eastern art has not emanated from it ;
scarcely any activity of Eastern life has escaped its
transforming touch. It has penetrated vast masses
of people by the sense of mystery, by a silent good-
ness, and a belief in the mystic solidarity of souls ; all
that transcends reason and which the heart divines.
The virility of the Japanese nature has emanated
from Confucianism. Since the gradual subsidence
of the influences of Buddhism, those of Confucianism
have made a more and more penetrative progress.
Confucianism is a philosophy, and above all a system-
atized morality, whose principles, borrowed from
the Chinese classics, have been adapted by the
Japanese to the particularities of their character.
THE JAPANESE QUALITY 31
Its principal tenet deals with the principles of honour,
or, to speak more exactly, the morality of deport-
ment. From their earliest school days, children are
taught what is called in Japanese the art of managing
the body, which embraces everything from cleanli-
ness to self-mastery. They learn, and they learn as
an art, to control their tears, their anger and their
fear. They are given an heroic education which is
without concession or attenuation. The rarest
courage is presented to them as a simple necessity
of propriety. A physician never hides from a
patient the gravity of his condition : it would be
an insult to expose him to the failure of a ceremonious
propriety in the face of death. At the beginning of
the war with Russia I was frequently enabled to
observe the departure of troops from small wayside
stations. The function never varied. The geisha
of the village, in their loveliest robes and most
elaborate head-dresses, gathered to offer the soldiers
a last cup of tea ; they passed through the ranks
smiling and bending in salutation. The priests
distributed their amulets, to the lightest sound of
laughter, which seemed to indicate that if these little
objects could do no good at least they did not harm.
Finally, with the approach of the parents and wives,
came the instant when the men seemed most fully
aware that they were going on their way to a desired
death. In Japan people neither embrace nor shake
hands ; their expression was therefore limited to
two inclinations, two long looks, and two smiles.
It was impossible to detect a cry or a tear. One
divined that the pain was none the less penetrative,
but that it was a law scrupulously to repress it until
privacy was reached. It is a Japanese proverb that
the pillow alone shall know one's tears.
32 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
In a country where the values are so nicely
balanced, people need a tempered fineness, a stoicism
and a steadiness of bearing to escape dissolution of
character. This hard discipline, which is not in-
spired by nature but inculcated by education, gives
Japan its moral tone, and in the face of danger what
is called in Japanese national unanimity. It is an
astonishing fact that among this nation of epicureans
there are no anarchists, no dilettanti and no idlers.
Artisan and artist are equally faithful to their work
and, when need arises, to their national duty. In
the flash of an instant the nation can become a
unanimous whole and one Japanese indistinguishable
from another.
At the beginning of the war with China the
Emperor left his palace and went to live in a cottage,
to range himself with the humblest of his subjects.
The gravity with which each Japanese lives his
personal life is equally applicable to his part in the
collective effort, and is a form of his consecration
to deportment. Here is evidenced the miracle of
Japan : an artistic sensibility which is so highly
refined united to an immutable military discipline ;
an island of poets which is the most unified nation
of to-day.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN
HAIKAI is a Japanese poem in three
verses, or a phrase in three short
members, the first of five syllables,
the second of seven and the third of
five : seventeen syllables in all. It
is of the most elementary poetic
construction ; indeed, it is a ques-
tion whether one can venture to define as poetry
a stanza of three verses, in which there is no regard
for rhyme, for quantities or for accentuation, and
where even the number of syllables admits some
licence. A haikai can be compared neither to a
Greek nor Latin distich, nor to a French quatrain.
It is neither a " thought," nor a " word," nor a
proverb ; an epigram in neither the modern sense
nor in the antique, which is rather an inscription.
It is the simplest picture, in three movements of
the brush, a sketch which is a brief touch or impres-
sion. The abstract is entirely deleted. Its syntax
is elliptical to excess. With three rapid notations,
a landscape or the vision of a scene is composed.
All the poetic effort is bent on the choice of those
three suggestive sensations which must give birth
to a train of others.
In his study of the haikai, Mr. Basil Hall Chamber-
35
36 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
lain * calls them " the lyric epigrams of Japan." This
title defines two of their essential qualities brevity
and the power of suggestion. The lyric epigram
has scarcely any analogy in Occidental poetry. It
is a perfect exemplary of the Japanese spirit ; its
terseness holds even in the realms of emotion and
ideality. It discloses what is the most intimate trait
of their nature and their most inveterate tendency :
the instinct of concentration.
The lyric epigram is one of the accepted forms
of Japanese art ; it carries the general character of
all Japanese expression in a simplification so rigorous
that it is audacious. One can compare a haikai to a
Japanese sketch which encloses, in a few precise
strokes, either the subtlest details of a human
chronicle or the spaces of an infinite landscape. In
the first instance the pencil has traced words, and
in the second visual traits ; but the eye has seen the
same vision. In the course of a trip through Japan,
I had as companion a young painter who noted
alternately, in a sketch and in a haikai, the impres-
sions of our journey.
Both poetry and painting one frequently a
translation of the other have had the same evolu-
tion. The haikai, whose origin is as remote as the
end of the fifteenth century and whose greatest
vogue was in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, developed contemporaneously with the
* B. H. Chamberlain, " Basho and the Japanese Poetical
Epigram," in Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol.
XXX, Part II.
I have borrowed from Mr. Chamberlain some historical notes
on Basho and some of the most charming of the examples he
quotes. I desire also to acknowledge my debt to the erudition of
my friend M. C.-E. Maitre, who gives a substantial notice on the
haikai in the Bulletin de FEcole franf aise d* Extreme-Orient.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 37
popular school of painting, Ukyoe. Their name
signifies comic, vulgar, popular. It is not their con-
cision which distinguishes them from the uta or
classic poems. A uta, indeed, has only thirty-one
syllables ; its form is that of a haikai to which two
verses of seven syllables have been added. The line
of demarcation between the two is rather in the
choice of subject. The classic poetry of the uta
corresponds to the classic painting of the School of
Kano. There is the same nobility of inspiration,
the same refinement of form, and the same tradi-
tional treatment of flowering cherries, of reddened
maples, of the October moon, of the austere Chinese
landscapes and of all the subtle inspirational subjects
of Chinese poetry. They had the same public :
the courts of the Emperor and Regent, the prin-
cesses, the great nobles with a taste for letters, and
the prelates with a taste for aesthetics. The haikai
represent realistic painting. No subject is for-
bidden to them ; all the aspects of Japan meet in
them and all Japanese life can seethe in their brief
compass. No object is so fantastic and no action
so ordinary that it cannot inspire a haikai. A word
of slang or a foreign twist to language often gives
them their savour. It is a form of expression which
is without crippling restrictions, and it is essentially
the poetry of the class not privileged to wear two
sabres.
At that epoch when their beauty was at its height,
the haikai were composed by mystical priests like
Basho, revolutionary painters like Buson, and
naturalistic romancers like Saikaku, by philosophers
baying at the moon, by pilgrims who dreamed in the
starlight, by all that vagabond company which
treads the footpaths of Japan. It was this strange
38 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
admixture of men, sometimes rascals but always
artists, who undertook to reduce all their experience
to scraps of poetry.
Until to-day the uta and the haikai have followed
parallel ways. A general and a university professor
will write in the uta form. They retouch a syllable
or two of an ancient poem, as a Kyoto painter
imitates, with imperceptible changes, a painting of
Motonobu or Okyo. It is the journalists who write
the haikai. The war with Russia brought forth
hundreds of them, in the same way in which it gave
subjects of popular interest to the artists.
A mind entirely consecrated to the notation of
delicate differences would give, in Japan, only a
brief consideration to these haikai, just as a real
chajin would glance only cursorily at the work of
Hokusai and Hiroshige. But the realistic art of
Japan essentially appeals to a quality in the European
intelligence. To appreciate a uta it is necessary
to have both the Chinese and the Japanese classic
education. A haikai, on the contrary, even in its
translated form instantly strikes us. It resumes a
vision, directly addressed to the eye ; it is a rapid
impression which may awaken some sleeping sensa-
tion. Its complete import is doubtless lost for any
but a Japanese, and we cannot perceive its delicate
resonances. But across the foreign words some
drift of meaning comes to us, like the sound of a
cithar from behind a screen or the scent, through a
fog, of plum-trees in flower.
The diversity of the haikai is best shown by a
division of their subjects into three groups : those
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 39
which deal with animals, trees and flowers, those
which deal with landscape, and finally those treating
of a characteristic scene, the significance of a moment
or the hidden sense of an action.
The power to create at a stroke a visual picture of
the life of an animal is the least contested talent of
the Japanese. Their marvellous penetration of
the animal world is universally recognized. They
have the qualities essential to deal in it a patience
which derives and combines, a rapidity of glance
which simplifies, and an intelligence which instinc-
tively animates with life the object seen. Their
kakemono, their silks, and even their household
utensils are ornamented with cranes, with wild
geese, with deer, with monkeys and with carp,
painted with a sense of freshness and a fidelity to
life which Pisanello alone is capable of recalling.
The makers of the haikai vied in this field with the
painters. Their sketches in words would have
delighted Jules Renard. As examples, we have the
white heron in its dreamy immobility :
Save for his thin voice
The motionless heron
Is but a drift of snow.
Sokan, 1465-1554.
Sometimes the movement alone is preserved :
A long line of wild geese
Against the lonely peak,
In the moonlight.
Buson.
Or the butterfly :
A fallen petal
Rises to its branch :
Ah, a butterfly !
Arakida Moritake, 1472-1549.
40 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
The last example is typical. A brief astonish-
ment is the definition of the essence of the haikai.
A delicate shock is its method of impression. The
sudden and the unexpected are the fundamental
bases of its treatment. The three little verses seem
composed to define a visual surprise. For example,
this little scene is that which meets a traveller when,
in the freshness of earliest morning, he approaches
a Buddhist temple, at the same moment when the
priest, still half asleep, strikes the bronze bell with
his huge hammer :
A mountain temple . . .
The bell, at daybreak,
Scatters afar the crows !
Yokoi Yayu, 1702-1783.
And one's eye follows to the farthest distance the
flight of the birds.
To the Japanese a sketch of an animal neces-
sarily evokes more than it does for us. Whether
Buddhist or Shintoist, he believes himself to be
created of the same essence as beasts. The mind
of the Japanese poet has an almost childish in-
genuousness which puts him on a par with the direct
action of the animal world. Not that he for a
moment attempts to liken it to the human world ;
he tries, on the contrary, to penetrate these rudi-
mentary beings with a regard for the integrity of their
minute dreaming souls, whether they show them-
selves ill-natured, ardent, or vindictive, and with
the understanding that they are always puerile. The
form of the lyric epigram, which would be almost
absurdly terse for an expression of human psych-
ology, seems to him perfectly adjusted to define an
action of the animal consciousness. He regrets,
with a vivid intensity, the limitations of his instinct
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 41
which rob him of the capacity to feel the little
flame of desire burning in the butterfly :
The flowery dream
Of the butterfly, I seize it ...
But it is gone.
Reikan.
A Chinese philosopher had written a treatise on
this " flowery dream " of the butterfly ; and in the
margin the poet put this haikai as a commentary,
half touching and half satirical, on the attempt to
dogmatize beauty.
He divines with no less sensitiveness the dream
of the wandering trout, of the swallow who never
ceases his flight, of the inquisitive sparrow, of the
placid buffalo and the wild boar's stupid appetite
for plunder. He has neither disdain nor indifference
for any member of the animal kingdom. Their
small desires and their monotonous hopes interest
him. He turns most naturally to those whose
incipient consciousness seems to him suffering or
touched by nostalgia : to the apes shivering in the
winter rain, the deer which cries out to an invisible
mate, to the new-born mice, searching for the pro-
tection of their parents, and to the fire-flies with
light in the heart of their tiny bodies. Insects,
above all, appeal to him, such infinitely little
creatures and so nearly invisible that he knows of
them only the thin sound of their voices through the
dark ; yet a sound of such vastness that it seems to
him the voice of the earth itself.
The vegetable world is painted with the same
sureness of observation as the animal, the same gift
of infusing life, the same delicate tenderness. The
Japanese imagination seems to glide from one to
the other, in a like effusion.
42 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
A tree becomes a living being, of a felt and recog-
nized charm. The willow flings out its soul
through the spring mists in the sensitive swaying
of its fringes. The cedar lifts itself in a tranquillity
full of force ; the hollow camphor is racked by an
ugly secret, and the bamboo is as slim and fine as
a geisha of Kyoto. Each tree has, to the Japanese
perception, its favourite seasons and haunts. Winter
rejoices the black pines, rising from stretches of
silver slopes, and autumn strikes into life, in the
valleys, the glory of maples and the gold of the
icho.
Certain flowers, which seem to have the subtle-
ties of a secret feeling, draw and hold the Japanese
poet's attention. Basho is a little disdainful of
the crude magnificence of the chrysanthemum,
which seems to him as inanimate as porcelain. He
prefers the high-bred orchid to the camellia, and
paints still more feelingly the hedge flowers in their
frail beauty. In them he feels the nascent soul
which inspires his own emotion. The hill-side
flowers seem to him to open to the passion of the
wind as he opens his own heart ; the thistles and
the cumin quiver under the first breath of autumn
more sensitively than he, and the violets keep silent
in themselves all the fever of spring.
A Japanese is accustomed to place a flower in his
room not as an ornament but as a companion.
Many of the lyric epigrams play on this refinement
of taste. The poppy is even frailer than a sick
child :
Alone, in the room
Where no soul exists,
A tall white poppy.
Buson.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 43
The lily is as capricious and impressionable as a
young girl :
The evening's cold
Touches the pallid lily's skin
Before it touches me.
Isshu.
Buddhism has exalted in the Japanese that sym-
pathy for everything animate which is natural, it
seems, to the various Asiatic peoples. The haijin,
or makers of haikai, were for the most part priests
who practised both their cult and their art in a wide
range of human contact. They formed a third
order of poetical Buddhism. A universal pity was
the first article of their rule. It was a necessary
result of their tradition and training that, into the
light silhouettes of thought which they so freely
sketched, there should creep something deeper than
an amused curiosity. Their thin brushes express,
at a stroke and spontaneously, a little of the vast
Buddhist tenderness.
Absorbed in his passionately exact measurement
of the suggestive power of every word, the adept
haijin has known how to profit by the particular
train of thought which certain names awaken in
the Japanese. He cites the cherry blossom, and his
reader instinctively evokes the superb and fragile
honour of the Samurai ; the lotus rises to the surface
of thought like the mirages of Amida and with the
misty presentiment of future worlds. The pine
brings to mind the dignity and magnificence of age
and awakens a longing for longevity; and in a
haikai like that of Nishiyama Soin :
Between the hedges of two gardens
Floating, swaying, floating,
A willow . . .
44 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
the Japanese instinctively translates the verse into
the troubled vision of a woman vibrating between
two loves.
This sense of symbolic value carries to the Japanese
consciousness a concomitant drama. The sudden
apparition of a blossom strikes light from the
greyness of reality, as in the following :
Blind with memories
I mounted to the ruins :
And all was eglantines in flower.
This is the essence of the haikai : a rapid touch,
laid lightly on the senses ; a pure high note, which
creates in us, as it reverberates and dies, its own
harmonies.
The three quick glimpses which make the vision
of the haikai can evoke for us the breadth of a land-
scape even more exactly than they can particularize
the fine fabric of detail. Their brevity is compact
with so much force that it expresses the immense
more readily than it does the miniature. They
carry the resonance of a vibration which indefinitely
enlarges itself. Indeed the haikai are above all
notable for the vastness of their interpretation of
nature. The term " picture " fails to compass
their extent ; they are rather drops of the essence
of poetry, each of which mirrors the whole of Japan.
Sometimes these haikai assemble the quick nota-
tions of a traveller :
A mountain cottage,
And by the well
A plum-tree flowering.
Kikwan.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 45
In the trembling sunlight,
In golden grain,
A water-mill.
Buson.
At times the notation is even briefer :
A boat and its net
Fade into shadow.
Evening's freshness.
Buson.
Suddenly,
In the autumn sky,
Mount Fuji !
Onitsura, 1661-1738.
The haijin have always tasted all the salience of
their native land. While the classic poets entwined
their dreams about China and admired in Japan
only a limited number of landscapes so famous that
they were consecrated by general appreciation and
thus corresponded to the canon of Chinese perfec-
tion, the rougher makers of the haikai loved the
soil in all the sharp characterization of its pecu-
liarities. Their thought scaled the mountainous
islands whose relief is so accentuated and so original
and the edges of which, in the finest mists, dissolve
into the sea with no less harmony than that with
which spring dissolves into summer. " Too de-
licious a country," as Kipling has said, " to be soiled
by a pen." The haikai is, perhaps, the only touch
light and fragmentary enough to express it.
With their parasols of straw, swinging their bells
at the top of which tinkled two bronze rings, their
robes tucked up and the baskets containing their
tiny braziers slung on their backs, the haijin were
always afoot on their aesthetic pilgrimages. They
experienced all the marvels and adventures of ancient
46 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Japan, which one recreates from the albums of
Hokusai the Tokaido or the One Hundred Views of
Fuji from the old account of Kaempfer or, better
still, from the passionate austerity of the letters of
St. Francis Xavier. They caught the water of
countless torrents in their tiny cups ; they lay at
night in the open fields and fell in with the tur-
bulent processions which followed the daimyos.
Since they had nothing to lose, they had frank and
easy intercourse even with ruffians and at times they
made poets out of thieves. As they carried no arms,
they were not stopped at the barriers of Hakone.
When they approached the famous temples, they
hung their well-worn sandals on a tree as a votive
offering; and, packed in the swaying crowd of
pilgrims, they listened in absorption to the local
saintly legend, droned in the nasal voice of the
beadle. In an access of devotion they plunged into
the pond of Fudo, tossed a stone to the knees of the
statue of Jiso, patron saint of travellers, and, in
intention of humility, rubbed devoutly the shoulder
of the unfaithful Disciple. Above all they had a
sense of splendid indignation when they saw the
profanation of neglect in those places which history
had made sacred, as in the following :
Behold the tomb
Of the hero Kaneshira :
Now only pale green rice !
Kikwan.
April found them entranced before the cherry-
trees of Yoshino, and June knee-deep in the poppies
of Hasedera. In these effulgent months they steadily
drained their gourds of sake, and with their cheeks
burning they often fell asleep amongst the flowers.
Most frequently they made their journeys alone,
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 47
with a sense of the calm security of the open fields ;
but they loved to haunt the foreign markets and
listen to the murmur of gossip which rose up with
each dawn.
They traversed little villages in the golden dust
of thrashed wheat. When they lifted their eyes to
find kites in the sky they knew that a city was near ;
their fatigue fell from them and their steps hastened
with the hope of rest :
Joy!
I approach Nara,
And I laugh at the rain.
Shorio.
In winter they sought their shelter from house to
house :
All doors are closed,
The length of the street,
To the lantern and the snow.
They knew the gross surprises of the life of the
wayside inn and the intimate charm of accidental
hospitality ; and they paid their host by reading to
him a set of poems, or made for him a little epigram
of farewell. Then once more they took the road,
almost always on foot, against wind and rain and
under the snow and the flame of the dog-days, the
doors of their senses thrown open and their spirits
full of the brief flash of that haikai which they would
carve on a hill-side rock or tie, with a thread of silk,
to a flowering branch.
It was instinctive with the haijin to try to fix his
impression of a brief spectacle, and he did it with the
eye of a painter, as in the following :
What commotion ! . . .
Under the sudden shower,
The sails swing towards us and away !
48 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
A scene frequently owes the savour of its charm to
a single detail :
Pilgrims on the road . . .
Their bells swing
Above the harvest.
Isshu.
This type of haikai is purely pictorial ; it even ex-
presses a kind of visible humour. Properly speaking,
a haikai cannot be witty because it is devoid of
reflection or comment. Its resumption is entirely
visual.
We always feel behind this vision the personality,
so to speak, of a particular eye. Through the charm
of the detail noted there penetrates that special
quality which appealed to a special appreciation in
the author. The three touches of verse are alive
with the selective intention which brought them
together. They inevitably betray the sentiment,
whether frivolous or serious, which animated their
composer and show the genesis of an emotion,
whether grave or fine, which has all the personality
of a definite individual and of a definite instant.
In this sense, a haikai is an equal definition of a state
of mind and a state of soul. It is thus that it reveals
to us all Japan, the delicate fall of its rains and the
variations of its skies, the rich mixture of its verdure,
the arched bridges bright with the colours of a
crowd, the villages sunk to the knees in harvest, the
sacred forests dim with the diffusion of a spiritual
light, the tiny temples of the country-side where,
behind an open screen, a worm-eaten statue of the
god smiles in the shadow, the peaks and the sea
all that goes into the fabric of that landscape which
seems made of a living silk, embroidered with
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 49
fringed and snow-crowned islands. But it also
reveals to us in perfection a racial genius which is
unique, a completely original sentiment for nature,
and the drift of the dreams of a people whose
receptivity invariably takes the form of art.
We are perpetually struck by the Japanese taste
for a country-side seen under snow or under moon-
light. It is possible to explain this tendency by
reasons entirely connected with the pictural sense.
Snow at once simplifies masses and places them in
proper relation. It prepares the contexts and con-
trasts of the painter by throwing certain objects into
the foreground and softening the accents of others.
Moonlight is no less important in establishing the
plane of values. It enwraps verdure, it touches
with a silent mystery the tops of sleeping houses,
and it rests on a tree in flower with the light of
death. Its luminousness has the highest force and
intensity of concentration. But there are addi-
tional reasons for the haijin's ardour for the vibrant
tremulousness of moonlight and the frail mirages
of the snow. It is instinctive with him, the more
his powers of appreciation are educated and special-
ized, to have his admiration warm to emotion.
The exquisite monotony of a snowy country-side
and the poignancy of diffused moonlight penetrate
him, without complexity and reaction, and soften
all his thought. It is in these simpler manifesta-
tions of beauty that nature seems most clearly in
unison with him. The frozen landscape touches
him with a peculiar intimacy :
Long, long,
The lonely line of a river
In a land covered with snow.
School of Basho.
So JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
The omnipresent beauty of the moon is in these two
little nocturnes :
A rainy night,
And everywhere, on everything,
A pale luminance.
Etsujin.
In the long summer rains,
One night, furtively,
The moon in the pines.
Ridta, 1719-1789.
The fairy-like fineness of these spectacles seems to
Mm a largess for rich and poor alike :
The grey villages,
Without gold or flowers,
To-night have the moon.
Saikaku, 1641-1693.
Both snow and moon are universal to him, and
carry some of the quality of eternity.
We touch, at this point, a vital characteristic of
this special atavism. The most distinguished and
distinguishing emotion, to a Japanese, is not joy
but a delicate pain, refined and spiritualized by the
poetic apprehension. This is, perhaps, another
result of Buddhism, which enjoins a faith and a
charity without hope, which knows no Church
triumphant, and which puts sorrow into its para-
dise. The old poem of the uta expresses to satiety
the charms of melancholy. It analyses the par-
ticular moment when the cry of pines in the wind
is most despairing ; it feels love most keenly in suf-
fering and sees the face of nature in its greatest
beauty through tears.
Though less exclusively dedicated to this attitude,
the trend of the haikai is in the same direction.
Landscapes of gaiety are rarely noted ; one of the
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 51
few of Ransetsu carries some of the light movement
of a holiday :
A cold clear New Year's Day,
A cold clear sky, and the
Chattering sparrows.
It is on a grey canvas that the memories of the haikai
detach themselves most richly and that their ex-
pression of fugitive sensation attains the poignancy
of perfection :
The sharp breath of autumn,
A lantern flashes afar . . .
Dusk.
Buson.
Stillness ! Through
The rainy midnight,
The sound of a bell. . . .
Kikaku.
Amongst the scattered pines,
Lighting, dying, lighting,
The fire-flies.
Hakuyu.
A graveyard,
And here, and there,
The fire-flies of autumn.
School of Kikaku.
Between the three little lines one feels the
implacable cold of death. The haikai convey, in an
instantaneous flash, the impression of the flight of
time. More sensible than we to the brevity of
human existence, the Japanese note the imperceptible
stages of its passage. They instinctively fix and
embalm the memory of an instant :
Flame beneath the ashes,
A house beneath the snow.
Midnight.
Buson.
52 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
They watch the slow rotation of natural phenomena,
with a sense of differences in the different hours
which is vivid to the point of lending each a per-
sonal quality. They know the hour of the bind-
weed, six o'clock in the morning, when the corolla
of the opening world is steeped in freshness ; midday
is to them the hour of the greatest beauty of the
ivy, when even the dark leaves shine with the sun's
radiation ; dusk the hour of most delicate sen-
sitiveness, when we are open to the touch of any
impression :
Hour of velvet soft-winged bats . . .
The soft-eyed maid
Throws me a velvet glance.
Buson.
Above all they know that pale hour which has a
special name in their language, and when, before
the sun has risen, the moon has not yet died. They
follow the light changes of atmosphere no less than
they follow the succession of the seasons. The
sense of sequences runs throughout their thought
and illustrates their profoundly rooted continuities.
Their vignettes are thus not only notations but
definitions of a state of mind. Each scene has a
significance. All the movements of nature become
human gestures and her total immobility measures
itself against the fugacity of the individual life.
The discontinuities of experience conform at last
to the certain rhythm of the great metamorphoses,
and the waves of accident scatter into foam against
the inflexibility of eternal order.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 53
To the haijin, as well as to the painter, landscape
is the supreme inspiration. Human incidence in
the haikai is a light diversion and the poet never
accords the individual case, no matter how striking
or how distinguished in its manifestation, the same
artistic value which he gives to a sketch from nature.
In the sixteenth century, Matahei, who was
entrusted with the decoration of the palace of
Nagoya, made a new departure when he covered
the fine screens of the interior with human figures.
He divided his vast landscape into sections, alive
with illustrations of personal activity. The life of
the period flows richly and actually across the folds ;
the stir of colour and the long rhythm of the move-
ment are those of a Japanese Watteau. The detail
is precise, the costumes exact in all their beauty and
the gestures never fail to be salient. Public taste
was surfeited with the sombre and magnificent
refinement of the Ashikaga, in its Japanese reflection
of the Sung period. The popular eye was beginning
to find the Sesshu landscapes thin, in their unity of
tone and their attempt still further to simplify an
extreme simplicity. A new wave of Chinese in-
fluence had broken and passed. The sumptuous
Ming, with its golden embroideries, its peacocks
and rare flowers, its rivers of goldsmith's work and
its dedication to magnificence of colour, was the
fitting expression of the passion for luxury of the
epoch of Hideyoshi. Into the splendours of this
romanticism, Matahei, in his art, infused realistic
expression. The battle of artistic formulae was as
ardent in the Japan of the sixteenth as in France of
54 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
the nineteenth century. There emerged from it
the Ukyoe, that school of a vivid realism, whose
glory, though it is contested in Japan itself, has been
proclaimed in our time by Europe and by America.
About the same period the haijin slipped into
their collections, between their notes on the scent
of a flower and the tenuous mists of the autumn
moon, some slight sketches of men and of women.
But the courage to produce this type of work did
not come to them until later. In the seventeenth
century, which is their golden age, they are still
essentially inspired by landscape and by animal life.
In the eighteenth century the haikai become more
frequently miniatures of human personality. Entire
collections are consecrated to this theme. Their
scenes change to those of life in the country inn and
in the artist's workshop, in the theatre and in the
sacristy, in the towns and the villages, and all the
human comedy is resumed in the flash of rapid
gestures. The haijin developed a particular subject
until he made of it his specialty. One would excel
in noting the eccentricities of country folk, another
in depicting courtesans ; some drew, in their pig-
ment of words, only women, as Haronobu or Koryu-
sai drew only women in their prints. Prints and
poems flow together in the unity of their artistic
apprehension. It is difficult to dissociate the
following from its visual expression :
Her saucepan in her hand,
She runs across the little bridge
Through the snow.
Buson.
Or in this apparition of the young girl awaiting her
lover in an autumn garden :
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 55
The steps of him I wait,
How far they sound . . . faint
Upon the fallen leaves !
Buson.
We see also in actuality the wood-cutter's wife,
carrying on her head the bundle of sticks to which
she has added, for her sense of beauty, some scarlet
leaves ; the young wife, with her head weighted by
her heavy hair and her long neck of old ivory. Each
one only passes and has time to make only a single
gesture. It is the extreme use of the vital instant
or the evocative attitude, as in the following, of
Kikin, when we get the concentrated force of the
turbulence in a young girl's heart :
" 'Tis summer has made me thin and sad ! "
But as she speaks
Her heart breaks in tears.
The haijin, poetic vagabond as he was, could never
resist making his caricature of the people he met on
his way : the garrulous gardener, the hunter with
his bow and arrow, awaiting a quail, the light-
hearted workman, a handkerchief about his head
and his pipe thrust in his belt. He watched the
trembling flame of the fire of hemp kindled on a
fisherman's boat and followed with his eye a traveller
across a bridge whose length is proverbial :
Under the beating rain
A man runs the long length
Of the bridge of Seta.
Joso.
In winter he catches the attitude of people who
bend before the wind and lift their frozen hands
to their lips. He is amused at the expense of an
elegant, with his head enveloped in a silk veil, as he
56 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
swings his inlaid sabre and waves his fan. The
haijin himself carries only his old umbrella :
The moon casts sudden shadows
Of my tattered umbrella,
In the autumn rain.
Buson.
He follows above all the life of the priests, with
whom he generally is or has been affiliated. He
knows the secret corridors of temples ; he has
seen the gods from behind the scenes, and has
examined their grotesque or pitying faces without
fear. Buson gives us a delightful series of eccle-
siastical types : the great Shintoist, in his white
splendour, the meditative old bonze whose only
occupation is to gather his lotus flowers ; the
necromancer making his incantations in the smoking
fire of benzoin ; the penitent pilgrim hidden under
his vast straw hat ; and the monk in his insatiate
search for alms, who never ceases to strike the little
bell hanging against his breast :
Along the winding road
The psalmody of begging monks
Goes wandering.
It is singular that amongst this catholic collection
almost none is satiric. To the Gallic apprehension,
the short poem which depicts the intensification of
personality is almost invariably pitched in that
tone. It is the French sense, indeed, of the word
epigram. In this interpretation the haikai, prac-
tically without exception, could not be called
epigrams. They express no action of raillery, but
a comment made for the direct pleasure in its
creation, and are far removed from the biting
brilliance of Boileau or Piron. The salt of French
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 57
epigrams is almost always in their play of words ;
they are very justly called mots : " Piron was
nothing, not even an Academician " ; " Egle com-
poses his visage and does not compose his verse."
They are light lashes of the tongue. The haikai is
a coup cTczil. It is limited by the limitation of a
glance ; it is scarcely even a caricature, since a
caricature would presuppose the interposition of an
idea between the eye and the object seen.
But if the outlining of the silhouette betrays a
feeling since, in the last analysis, all composition
is conscious that feeling is almost invariably one
of an indefinite sympathy, which extends from a
benevolent curiosity to the profundities of pity.
To ridicule is only to play at wit, and the haijin's
wit is touched by his heart. His compassion is
sometimes superficially mute but always sensitive :
The weary carrier
Travels his road, and never sees
The mountain cherries.
Buson.
The poet, with no other burden than that of
enjoying the spring flowers, has the sense of a certain
remorse because of his privileges, as he watches the
heavily-laden man who has neither time nor strength
to lift his eyes.
Wanderer as he is, he has a vital comprehension
of human misery. His contacts are far from that
dream of moonlight and flowers in which the poet
of the uta uniquely exists. He knows that the
grinding noise of a little saw, through the night,
means that somewhere a workman is struggling to
gain his bread ; he has divined the instinctive effort
of the woman who gleans to remain in the sun, as
58 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
she creeps forward in her work, because her rags
scarcely cover her body ; and the three brief lines
are moist not only with the freshness of the first dew
but with the beauty of tears.
The emotion trembling through the little poems
at times vibrates as far as the realm of philosophic
sentiment. In the following haikai is given an
example of the continuity of the Japanese vision of
life and of their custom, on every New Year's Day,
to plant before each house a pine as the symbol of
perpetuity :
Pines at the doorway !
They mark the miles
Of the road to eternity.
Raizan, 1654-1716.
The next, still more philosophic in tone, gives us
in a flash the unbroken flow of human experience,
with all the Buddhistic disenchantment. Its use
of interruption is more than a striking means of
expression and impression, and symbolizes the image
of the sensible world :
They spread their beauty And
We watch them And
The flowers turn and fade And . . .
Onitsura.
The third is one of the most purely exquisite of
all haikai. Its pessimism is veiled by a half-shame-
faced epicureanism, which is none the less enjoyed
with the savour of a sin. " World of dew " is the
usual dogmatic term of the priests, to designate the
fugacity of things :
This world of dew
Is, alas, only a world of dew !
Yet, none the less . . .
Issa, 1763-1827.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 59
This is a resumption of the haijin's creed. He is
to perfection a fervent Buddhist, who doubts neither
the sublimity of his doctrine nor the efficaciousness
of his morality. He practises mercy to men and to
animals, to plants and to demons. Seventy times
each day he concentrates his thought at that point
in his belief where all creatures confound themselves
in a unique being. But he cannot deny that fact
evidenced by his senses that, in the appalling
journey of the human consciousness to the final
abyss of nothingness, there are none the less lovely
moments. He looks with all his consistency at the
inconsistent face of this world of unrealities ; yet
he finds it beautiful to look at.
On the rare occasions when the haijin expresses a
direct personal sentiment, he reverts to that im-
passioned contemplation which is his vocation. He
is far from the man whose intoxication is meta-
physical : the noise of a frog diving in the still of a
pond can stir the finest fibres of his imagination.
In the series of his reincarnations he asks nothing
more than to be part of the intrinsic beauty of
nature and no role more splendid than that of the
mute immobility of a great tree :
Oh, marvellous moon !
Could I be born again
A pine set on a peak !
Ryota.
The fewest words are enough to express his
limitless ecstasy. Even the traditional terseness of
his medium seemed to him at times too redundant.
The poet Teishitsu (1608-1671) burnt all his works
with the exception of a single haikai which is only
an exclamation :
60 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Ah, Ah!
Is all the heart can say
Before the flowers of Yoshino.
He had penetrated the essence of the haikai ; the
fact that its seventeen syllables are an interjection,
a cry which has its meaning only from the depths of
the feeling out of which it rises, and only for the
sensibility of the ear which hears it.
In the innumerable chorus of the makers of the
haikai, it is difficult to distinguish special voices.
A Japanese can isolate and analyse them ; the
Western mind has a deeper pleasure in confounding
and generalizing their beauty. The lyric epigram
assumes for us the qualities of a national char-
acteristic ; and in each case it is not a particular
man, but the entity of Japan, whose expression
reaches us.
It is, however, essential to separate from the
others the most ardent and penetrative of all,
Basho (1644-1694). It was he who gave the haikai
its soul ; who transformed it from a delicate amuse-
ment and touched it with the purity of a work of
art, a work which rose at times to the height of the
religious.
His life has a strange context with that of Pascal,
whose young contemporary he was, on the farther
edge of so widely disparate a world. He was a
Japanese Pascal, without the geometrical sense,
but equally grave and equally tormented by the
desire to discover access to the human heart. His
ardently austere youth received its deepest impress
from the loss, when he was sixteen, of a friend to
whom he clung with all the passion of life. Basho
retired to the monastery of Koya, the Monte Cassino
of Japan, and lived in the midst of nature, of books
and of works of art, absorbed in the work of creating
his soul. When he finally quitted the convent
he went to Edo (the future Tokyo), followed the
courses of the most famous teachers of the day,
and shortly founded his own school. He was
surrounded by priests and men of letters, by mer-
chants and nobles, by women and by children, and
was the central point of a circle whose literary
authority was almost democratic in quality, in the
midst of a strictly hieratical society.
At the age of thirty-eight he experienced the
profundities of a second conversion. He studied
more deeply the doctrine of the sect of Zen, a kind
of Buddhistic Jansenism, but a Jansenism both
tolerant and joyous and whose rigidity is tempered
by a sense of art and of the charm of human inter-
course. A bond of intimate comprehension was
woven between him, his professor in Buddhism
and a servant of the latter, a man of no education,
who had raised his consciousness to a high spiritual
illumination. The conflagration of 1683, in which
his house and the greater part of Edo were destroyed,
was his miracle of the Holy Thorn ; he escaped
death only by throwing himself into the garden
pond, and the experience was a visible illustration
of the Buddhistic text that all human life exists
only as a house in the midst of flames.
From this moment Basho became an apostle whose
ardour was as intrinsic as his gentleness. He used
poetry as a means of conversion. When his disciples
transgressed the rule of poverty, humility and
patience he reprimanded them by saying : " That
62 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
is not in the spirit of haikai." More frequently
he taught by illustration. He set out with them,
through the length and breadth of the country,
to give them a sense of communing with mountains
and rivers, forests and waterfalls, to show them
actual historic spots, and to fulfil the canons of the
Buddhistic ideal. He visited with them places
consecrated by legend and by heroism, battlefields,
tombs and temples, and landscapes celebrated for
their beauty, seeking everywhere not facts but an
edification of the spirit. His aim was not science
but illumination, in the Buddhistic sense. Basho
was himself an accomplished mystic. He realized
in actuality the precepts of the Zen doctrine
that doctrine of ecstasy which, using art as its
instrument of stimulation, carries its followers to
the very summit of pure contemplation ; a doctrine
at once powerful and gentle, and under whose
influence have developed those virtues of sim-
plicity, nobility and grace and that sobriety of good
taste which is immanent in the art of ancient Japan.
In the costume of the poorest pilgrim, Basho
travelled with two or three disciples, his only
burden a set of writing implements and a few
books. He slept at inns or in wayside huts. At
times his reputation brought him an invitation from
some powerful personage ; in such instances he
refused any formality of reception and accepted for
himself and his companions only a bowl of cold
rice, served by the master of the house and not by
his servants. Without any attitude of prudery,
he led a life which was extreme in its purity a
rare instance in the midst of the licence of the
first century of the Tokugawa. His principal
precepts were never to give way to anger and to
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 63
practise charity to all living things. This tender-
ness for beasts and flowers became the most accen-
tuated characteristic of the school.
His disciples educated themselves to an elevation
worthy of him. Three of them, including Kikaku
and Ransetsu, who came from surroundings of
riches and culture, lived together in a little room
without other furnishing than a teapot and a kettle,
and with its only ornament a statue of the child
Buddha in a niche. They shared a single mattress,
which was so short that their feet protruded beyond
it ; and when the cold was too bitter they went
out of doors and composed their haikai. Throughout
Japan Basho left his trace in this half-convent,
half-studio life. He never tired of inculcating into
his pupils the fact that in order to be poets they
must infuse poetry into their lives. He rarely
spoke of art in any artificial isolation, and made
little of the pretended rules of inventive processes.
In composing he was in the habit of saying, " Do
not compose too much. You will lose what springs
from nature ; let your haikai rise from your heart."
He wrote to a correspondent : " Your zeal in
creative work is the best of news ; but the heart
is more important than any erudition. There are
many who can turn their three verses ; there are
few who observe the rules of the heart." Elsewhere
he says : " Let your haikai resemble the willow
branch, wet with light rain and tremulous in the
breeze," defining in this way the fact that the
emotion with which the little poems are charged is
all their price.
Basho felt only contempt for the banalities of
artificial poetry. The haikai were far from unknown
before his time ; it had, on the contrary, been a
64 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
fashion to excel in their composition. For the
preceding century and a half, they had been per-
fected by such successful poets as Sokan, Moritake,
Teitoku, Teishitsu, Soin and Saikaku. There even
existed men who made a profession of correction,
and who retouched the attempts of beginners.
The art was in its fullest vogue, but it was not
above the level of a fine play of words. Basho
raised it, at a stroke, to a height where he alone
could sustain it.
In a letter to a friend he divides the composers
of the haikai into three classes : first, those who
pass their lives wrangling over the points of cor-
rection made by their instructors " an innocent
folly which at times causes them to forget wife,
children and liege lord " ; secondly, the rich who
use poetry as a distraction and are indifferent as
to whether the censors give them good or bad
criticism " they resemble children at play " ;
thirdly, those who make poetry with their hearts
and who use it as a means to attain the philosophic
and mystic life " of these there are scarcely a dozen
in all the empire."
He died at the age of fifty. On the day of his
death he seated himself on his bed, his closest
disciples facing him and the others on either hand.
He sent messages to several pupils and charged
those who were present to grant pardon to a disciple
whom he had been forced to dismiss from the band
for a grave offence ; then, joining his hands, he
recited the sutra of the Goddess of Pity and fell
into death as if he fell into sleep.
A list of his effects has been preserved : a statue
of Buddha, a copper bowl, a wooden ink-pot, a few
books and a few kakemono.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 65
It was Basho's privilege to regenerate the taste
of his day, and his figure dominates an entire epoch
of Japanese literature. His haikai, which are difficult
for even the Japanese appreciation, are often
intelligible only to a mind nourished on Buddhistic
doctrine, Chinese literature and Japanese history.
Those which are accessible to us strike us either
by the unforgettable simplification of a single
impression, as in the following :
An ancient pond,
And, when a frog dives,
A sudden sound in the silence.
Or by so delicate a familiarity with animals that he
recalls to us St. Francis of Assisi :
On the flower where it glances,
Ah, spare the little bee,
Friend sparrow ! *
Or above all by the grave and perpetual thought
of death :
Death against the heart,
Nothing announces it
In the grasshopper's song.
The summer's green !
All that remains
Of the dreams of dead warriors.
This last example was written on the site of a
battlefield.
* Kikaku once brought to his master this haikai :
The glorious dragon-fly,
Strip his wings,
And he is but a reddened grain.
Basho reproached him for the downward movement of his
imagination and corrected the composition as follows :
Lift a reddened grain
With wings, and behold
A glorious dragon-fly.
F
66 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Until about 1720 the school of Basho kept at its
height the flame which the Master had kindled.
Onitsura, Kikaku, Ransetsu, Kyorai, Joso, Kyoroku,
Shiko, Yaha, Etsujin are on a plane with both
the beauty and austerity of Basho's composition :
some of their epigrams attain the absolute quality
of perfection. From 1720 to 1750 a decline is
evidenced. The haikai became once more a play
of wit, often nothing more fundamental than a
charming enigma. But in the second half of the
eighteenth century there was a renascence of the
real haikai. The great haijin of this period was
Buson (1716-1783). He was a painter of Kyoto,
with a sharply defined independence and originality
of spirit. At Kinkakuji there are two rooms
decorated by him, in a few strokes of brown and
ochre, showing an execution at once brutal and
confident. The peninsulas advancing into the
waters of his lakes are peopled with trees bent by
the tempest ; on the lakes are laden rafts, which
make their slow progress by means of the long
boat-hooks in the hands of the sailors. The pilgrim
who leaps to the bank recalls the sketch in the
haikai by the same author :
The boat grounds in sand . . .
I spring to shore
Among the violets.
Set in the corners of the composition the rags of
scattered groups of beggars infuse a touch of black
and of rose. At intervals there is a note of yellow
like the melancholy of a Cazin : a cottage with
its thatch torn and tattered stands against a horizon
of sandy hills. There is a screen by Buson in the
Kyoto Museum, painted with wild horses in rare
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 67
tints of green, violet, rose and white. The painting
is crude and somewhat arid the white tail of one
horse and the whiteness in the water of a cascade
have the density of plaster but it is a profoundly
original work, of breadth and of probity, which
shows none of the evanescent qualities of the
desire to please. During his lifetime, Buson was
supremely valued for his haikai ; after his death
there was a recrudescence of the cult for his paint-
ings ; to-day his fame as a poet is again the more
accentuated of the two. The dominant note of
his haikai is that of his sincere love of the poor
and the suffering. They are less profound than
the haikai of Basho, less exquisite, less philosophic,
more purely picturesque, possibly more varied,
and at times of a more simple and poignant humanity.
An anthology of the haikai of Buson would give the
best idea of all the various resources and expressions
of this art.
In the list of the makers of the lyric epigram
mention should be made of the poetess Chiyo
(1703-1775), who wrote with a delicately feminine
accent of compassion. Every Japanese knows the
little lines in which she has enclosed the eternity
of her grief at the death of her young son :
The little hunter of dragon-flies,
To what far country
Has he taken his hunting ?
The author of a biography of Buson remarks :
" European poetry has a power of seduction, but it
is superficial. Japanese poetry has little artifice,
but it is vivified with soul." The severity with
68 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
which this author limits the field of our poetry
should warn us of the difficulties in judging the
poetic expression of an alien race. There have been
several charming definitions of the haikai, which
may attest our appreciation of it. Mr. Chamber-
lain characterizes it as the opening of a trap-door,
for an instant, on a tiny glimpse of life ; a half-
formed, sudden smile ; or a quick sigh, interrupted
and dispersed before it has been heard. In his
lovely studies of Japan, M. Andre Bellessort uses
particularly happy terms of definition : a poem
made of the glimmer of light and the tremulousness
of feeling ; the perfection of exactitude enveloped
in a dream ; sparks which light our vision with
infinite vibrations of sensibility. He likens the
haikai also to delicate old fans which, in the second
in which one opens and closes them, flash before
one's eyes the miracle of a great landscape.
The Greeks, of certain phases of whose art the
Japanese art not infrequently reminds us, believed
that one of the characteristics of their poetry was
a winged concision. It is interesting to compare
with the haikai certain epigrams of the Anthology.
" The perfect epigram," as Cyrillos puts it, " is in
two verses ; beyond three it ceases to be an epigram
and becomes an epic."
These exquisite distichs are fashioned quite
otherwise than the haikai. Instead of the three
brief notes of surprise, there are two exclamations
prolonged by the rhythm of tragedy. Though
they are almost as brief as the haikai, their difference
in essence is enclosed in their limited space. They
are impregnated with a ritual gravity and a nobility
of grandeur, and one feels it their destiny to be
inscribed in perpetuity on bronze or marble, and
not on the light scrap of silk paper which is as
tenuous as a flower.
The great columns of Naxos, Megatimos and Aristophoon
Are planted, oh vast Earth, in thy breast.
Archilochus of Paros.
Alkibe gave her ritual veil of hair
To Hera, who vouchsafed the sanctity of marriage.
Archilochus.
To the fisher Petagon his father Meniscos consecrates
His fish trap and his oar, symbols of his hard life.
Sappho.
Prexedike has made it, Dyseris has designed it,
This sacred mantle : their love has united in it.
Anacreon.
Those who brought to Phoebus the booty of the Tyrrhenians,
The same sea, the same bark, the same tomb, holds them.
Simonides of Ceos.
The solemn distich falls into the slower move-
ment of mourning in the following :
A child of twelve years ! Philip has laid here
His son Nicoteles, his only hope.
Callimachus.
Ordinarily the Greek epigrams are composed of
two, three or four distichs. Like the haikai they
remained an intellectual fashion for centuries. It
was a matter of pride to turn them exquisitely
and elegantly. Several collections exist of the best
amongst them. One constantly notes in these the
persistency of the same basic idea which animates
the haikai, but its advance is measured to an even
tread, instead of a light flight of feet. The metro-
nome is changed, and instead of the Japanese
prestissimo there is the calm of andante.
There is a curious charm in the contrast between
the animals depicted by the haijin and two Greek
7 o JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
epigrams treating of animals, by the poetess Anyte
of Tegea, who was the Chiyo of Greece. The
first is on a goat :
The children have strapped red reins and a bridle, oh goat, to
thy bearded chin,
They sport before the temple, that the god may protect their
play.
The next is on a dolphin :
Nevermore in the swinging seas shall I lift my dripping head from
the vast deeps
And against the brassy prows of ships scatter my watery breath,
joyous to see my own image.
The dark waves have beat me to land, and I lie conquered on
the soft sands of the shore.
The following are two Greek landscapes, by Plato.
In the first the God Pan speaks :
Sit thee beside this singing pine whose verdure, far above, quivers
with every air,
And on thine eyes, beside my tremulous brook, my flute will lay
sleep's magic.
In the second he is also present :
Hush, and drink from the dryad's rock waters burst from the
stone. The sheep call to their young.
It is he who holds the melodious flute. To the gathered reeds
Pan has touched his moist lips,
And they cluster around and their restless feet feel for the dance
Nymphs of water and Nymphs of the wood,
In the final example the epicurean sense of the
ephemeral is a far echo of the haijin's Buddhistic
sense of mortality :
Here, even now, are roses and young peas, and the delicate hearts
of cabbages, those that are first to be cut,
And anchovies with their moisture, fresh white cheese, and the
pale leaves of curled lettuces.
THE LYRIC EPIGRAMS OF JAPAN 71
Shall we not climb the cliffs and look afar, oh Sosylos, as we have
done each year ? . . .
Behold, Antigene and Bacchios yesterday loved in the sun ; to-day
cold earth receives them.
Philodemus.
In French expression, certain extremely terse
poems of Verlaine are perhaps what most intrinsically
convey the Japanese essence. Even these contain
four or five times as much matter as the Japanese
poems. The apparent facility in the construction
of a haikai is its most inherent danger. It is the
form of literature from which the so-called literary
manner is most completely excluded. Since expres-
sion is reduced to what may be called a supreme
minimum, it is impossible to create in this space
an elemental beauty unless one has had an elemental
sensation or a genuine emotion. A haikai is, indeed,
a pure sensation ; and, if this sensation is no more
than ordinary in its revelation, the fabric falls to
pieces. On the other hand, as a form to phrase
in its palpitant purity an acute moment of life,
there is perhaps no poetic composition superior to
that of the haikai.*
The interest of such attempts in French is that
it shows what an effort of limitation the Western
artist must impose on his receptivity in order to
condense his feeling into a unique sensation. This
* Julien Vocance (Cent visions de guerre), during the winter of
1914 and the year 1915, in the Champagne trenches where he
fought and was wounded, conceived the idea of noting in this
form his impressions of the war. The lyric epigram proved to be
extraordinarily adapted to express this terrible substance. In my
opinion, these haikai of Julien Vocance are worthy to be placed
beside the Japanese models, as one of our prints is sometimes
hung beside the Japanese example which has inspired so much
of its beauty. [Author's Note.]
72 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
compression is natural to the Japanese poet. It
is strange to think that Japanese poetry almost in
its entirety the poetry of thirteen centuries is
composed of these tiny morsels, for the poems of
three verses are the primitive poems of five verses
divided in half. In the work of all French poets
it would be possible to trace passages which, if
isolated, would exist as haikai. In La Fontaine,
above all, there are perfect ones. But all these
are inserted in a whole which flows to its own end.
The Japanese poet would treat them for their
individual value. One notes here an essential
divergence between the Japanese and the French ;
the most fragmentary of the French poets are
eminently constructive compared to theirs.
These differences are finally reducible to the
elements of psychologic definition. An Occidental
mind instinctively constructs ; a Japanese mind
instinctively dissociates. This is an atavistic ten-
dency, a trend of habit accentuated by early educa-
tion and at times corrected by advanced instruction.
The French child who tries his hand at drawing
first makes a house or a man ; the little Japanese
draws a tree or the curve of a finger-nail. The
one reacts at once to the whole ; the other, with
the immediacy of instinct, to detail. Their differ-
ences of impression and of execution are after all
differences of immensity, if they have the great-
ness to integrate their dreams and if one becomes
a Corot and the other a Motonobu.
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM
OKTO, 6th February 1904. An im-
perial decree, published this morning,
promulgates the continuance under
arms of the marine forces which
were shortly to be demobilized.
A fact still more serious, and the
publication of which has been for-
bidden, is that the army reservists have been called
to the colours. A crowd is gathered about the
barracks to acclaim them. There is a general belief
that the declaration of war is imminent.
The government keeps the public in complete
ignorance of both its intentions and its decisions.
An absolute censorship is exercised in regard to all
news concerning military operations. Even to-day,
when the streets of Tokyo are alive with the excite-
ment caused by the issuance of the call to reservists,
the papers refrain from publishing this order. This
state of ignorance fails to calm general opinion and
definitely exasperates it. During the six months
that the government has passed through a period
of hesitation and delay, the patriotic and military
ardour of the people has been progressively inflamed.
From the class of journalists and professors this
ardour has penetrated to the merchant class, to
workmen and to women. My rickshaw man has
fervent visions of the conquest of Corea ; a charm-
75
7 6 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
ing young lady told me yesterday that her two
brothers have joined the colours and that she
herself is enlisted as a nurse. Nothing in Japan
equals the popularity of the Red Cross, and every
mousme wishes to crown her dark hair with a
white muslin cap. The little soldiers one passes
in the streets, with all their straps tightly buckled
and their equipment shining, are red with the
excitement of anticipation. No war has ever been
acclaimed here with a more universal popularity,
and there has never been a more unbroken confidence
in victory. The government, which alone could
define for the country the actuality of the difficulties
to be overcome, is silent, and this silence augments
the general confidence.
It is interesting that the commercial class are
the most keenly enthusiastic for the war. Possibly
they foresee a stimulation of trade. It is they who
swell the membership of the many national leagues
recently founded, and who are most noticeable at
patriotic banquets. At the moment they have
collected two million yen as a war subscription.
With them must be ranged the instructors and
professors, who have had a paramount influence in
transforming what was in reality a war of con-
flicting interests into a war of an almost sacred
enthusiasm. The patriotic intensity of hatred for
Russia is not new in Japan. The smallest school-
child is sensitive to the stigma of the ceding of
Sakhaline, in 1875, in exchange for a group of
valueless islands ; above all he is aware of the fact
that the Russians deprived Japan of the fruits of
her conquests in China. Every one quotes the
teacher who taught his pupils to walk on the snow,
in order to accustom them to the climate of the
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 77
enemies of Japan. There is acute appreciation of the
fact that what Russia now menaces is Corea, the
country twice conquered by Japan and the goal of her
secular ambition ; and this at a moment when Japan
is stronger than at any previous period of her history,
when she has emerged victorious from two wars
and when she owns the largest armoured ships in
the world. This is the belief of the little Japanese
and what inspires his impatience for departure ;
it is evident this people has had no education in
the spirit of defeat.
While all the action of the government isolates
it from the nation at large, the people are con-
comitantly conscious of a complete unanimity of
determination. The vivifying force of this en-
thusiasm is such that if, at the moment, the Japanese
obtained by diplomacy all the advantages they
hope to achieve, there would exist an inevitable
disappointment. They are keyed up to the ardour
of a war with a European power, in order to astonish
Europe ; and they are convinced that any con-
cessions on the part of Russia would bear the stamp
of perfidy.
With war openly desired by those business interests
hostile to Russia and passionately longed for by the
nation at large, the issues, as it seems, have been
determined by a silent and circumspect government.
The Japanese fleet is concentrated between Sasebo
and Tsushima ; the people have heard, with some
anxiety, that the Russian fleet has left Port Arthur
for an unknown destination ; they can only await
developments.
8th February. The various journalists are sum-
moned to meet this evening at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, to receive an announcement from
78 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Baron Komura. In these eight months of waiting
for a definitive word, it is the first time that a
member of the government has made any declara-
tion. During this silence the newspapers have been
left to formulate their own opinions, without either
moderation or enlightenment from official sources,
and they have been constantly discouraged by the
strangeness of this reserve. They have finally, and
in desperation, published anything and everything
in order to elicit at least correction ; but the
government has steadily refused to direct public
opinion. This has been its greatest weakness. It
is possible that the official world itself will now be
influenced by the publication of fictitious and
exaggerated statements, which have all that dis-
proportion of judgment which comes from editorial
offices. The more the journalists have felt the
reserve of the politicians, the more their irritation
has grown. They have excited the country at
large and given its enthusiasm the dangerous note
of infatuation. From a troublesome neighbour
Russia has been changed by the newspaper men
into an ogre.
It is announced each morning that Russia will be
easier to conquer than China ; and since Japan has
never had the salutary experience of misfortune,
since a wave of Cossacks sweeping from the North
to the South has never given another turn to the
opinion of the populace, this statement has been
half credited. If war is definitely announced
to-night, the triumph of the journalists will be
complete. They have done everything possible to
render it inevitable.
Last December the two Chambers had an exist-
ence of only five minutes before their dissolution,
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 79
and it is therefore only to the press representatives
that the Minister will read his declaration. The
diplomatic corps has in the course of the day been
apprised of the contents of this declaration. It is
understood that since the 6th oral negotiations with
Baron de Rosen have ceased. For the last two days
reservists from the country at large have poured
into Tokyo. The coolies are erecting temporary
shelters for horses along the length of the canals.
There is a general belief that action is imminent.
At half-past nine I met one of the staff of the
Yomiuri, who told me that though nothing was
certain the rupture of negotiations had been
announced, and hurried on to prepare his article.
tyh February. The papers have published the
declaration of the Ministry ; and at a stroke we have
learned the result of the negotiations and in what
they have consisted. On the 1 2th of last August,
Japan claimed a quasi-protectorate in Corea, with
an engagement to respect commercial freedom ;
this also involved the recognition by Russia of
Chinese sovereignty and commercial freedom in
Manchuria. On the 3rd of October, Russia refused
to assume alone any engagement regarding Man-
churia and demanded that Japan should undertake
not to use Corea for any strategic purposes. Her
requirements included the establishment of a neutral
zone in the north of Corea and a recognition by Japan
that Manchuria was beyond the sphere of her
interests. This was, in a word, the proposition
known as Manchuria against Corea. Japan cate-
gorically refused it, calculating that a half -Japanese
Corea would be menaced by a Manchuria completely
Russian. At this point negotiations were sus-
pended, and they have now been broken off. Japan,
8o JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
concludes the declaration, " has abandoned all hope
of reconciliation."
It is undeniable that it is difficult to see either
an imperative or urgent reason for war. Nor does
the situation contain a serious threat against the
security of Japan or even against the probable develop-
ment of her ambitions. What is definite is that
Japan fears, even if she is given a complete liberty
in Corea, that she may be preceded there by Russians,
and that she would in consequence be unable to
absorb it as quickly as they. The Japanese enter-
prise in Corea is insignificant in comparison with
the Russian enterprise in Manchuria. This is the
stimulative point of action. Japan has until now
been little of a colonist and has only a meagre
power of expansion. She wishes to change this
state of things by force, and the basic motive of
the war is that she believes this occasion to be
favourable. She has imposed on herself heavy
sacrifices to obtain an army and navy of the first
rank, and is eager to profit by this advantage. The
sensibility of the nation has, above all, been wounded
by the form of the negotiations and by the indolence
of Russia in replying. This was a false step which
the Russians should have avoided in dealing with
the proudest and most sensitive of peoples.
Though the government makes no categorical
announcement, no one is deceived as to its inten-
tions. The newspapers assume the accent and
attitude of stirring days ; some exaggerate the tone
of their arguments and others exalt the lyric quality
of their patriotism.
The Asahi, the journal of business men, defines
the principal cause of war as the competition of the
Russians and the Japanese in Manchuria. To quote
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 81
its article : " If Russia had definitively occupied
Manchuria, Japan would have been deprived of a
territory suitable to receive the surplus of her
population and which would have offered them
admirable means to sustain life. We should have
been continually subjected to an artificial com-
pression and our fifty millions of compatriots would
have been reduced to the shameful necessity of
remaining confined to this small group of islands,
which can neither produce sufficient subsistence to
nourish them nor furnish them with enough space
for free elbow-room." The exaggeration of this is
evident. Of the fifty million Japanese of which
the Asahi speaks, a hundred and thirty thousand
alone reside in foreign countries, half of this number
in the Hawaian Islands. The Japanese is one of
the least emigrant of nations. In spite of the
density of its population Japan is not overcrowded,
and in all the northern portion of the country
there is ample space.
The Jiji, an anglophile sheet, subscribes, with
apparent innocence, to the English prejudices
against Russia. It avers that Japan will be fighting
for civilization and insists on the enthusiastic recep-
tion of this idea. " Supposing that by the grace
of heaven we emerge victorious from this difficult
struggle, we shall not only be in a condition to
fulfil our solemn duty, which is to carry the light
of civilization into the Far East, but we shall also
impose upon the world at large the necessity of
respecting us and we shall deserve, in the history
of the progress of humanity, a glorious chapter."
One admires an eloquence so separate from lower
interests ; but the Jiji concludes, more frankly :
" If she is fated to find a Trafalgar or a Waterloo in
G
82 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
the Far East, Japan can aspire to be the England
of the Eastern world." The formula has been
stated : Japan hopes for a Trafalgar.
Another paper reproaches the Russians, above
all else, with their delays and with their offensive
negligence. " So outrageous a treatment is con-
trary to those rules of justice which Japan has
observed since the most remote centuries." The
note of comment here is simpler and fairer. One
hears the echo of the Samurai who, stirred by a
slight failure of behaviour, makes out his vengeance
a sacred duty. The fact that the Russians have
broken the ancient code of courtesy seems to this
people to be their gravest provocation.
So far as the aspect of the streets goes or rather
of the roads it is necessary to remember, in order
to estimate the public manifestations, that Tokyo
is an immense village, stretching widely about the
moat of a huge palace. It is a village of two million
inhabitants, most of whom live at the mercy of the
free wind. The greater number of the houses,
which are low and open, resemble those of small
settlements. The different quarters are called
" hamlets." These " hamlets " are grouped on
hill-sides, among the trees, in the depth of valleys,
in the open plain, on the banks of the river and
of the various canals ; others are clustered in an
ancient park of the daimyo and still others about
an old temple. The form of life is almost rural.
The roads, which are without paving of any sort,
run along the flowering hedges, through the groves
of bamboo and under the awnings in front of the
shops. Even the few official buildings, in the vague
circumference about the palace, scarcely combine
to give the impression of a city such as the Western
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 83
eye is accustomed to see. One finds at times a street
which is more compact in its animation, and where
tea-houses and the wares of book-shops and print-
sellers are crowded together. From the south to
the north runs the high road lined with the kiosks
where newspapers are sold and with the modern
bazaars. In this vast unorganized village it is not
easy to observe any direct manifestation of public
opinion or activity. The people pursue desultorily
their small errands. The gogai are already in
circulation, that is to say, sheets of the most recent
news, printed as an " extra " on tiny squares of
paper. These are carried from hamlet to hamlet,
to the sound of a bell ; but the vendors do not
hurry, and there is no haste to seize the gogai from
them.
The reservists are gathered before the shops to
allow their uniforms, which they still wear with an
air of awkwardness, to be admired. They carry
their Japanese clothes in a bundle and seem a
little flustered to be in trousers. The people press
around, to compliment them and make them little
gifts, and there is a general atmosphere of good-will
and laughter.
The country people have led in their horses,
miserable, knock-kneed, hairy beasts, which are none
the less treasured by their owners. The State
ordinarily pays from 60 to 120 yen for them, but
on this occasion it is understood that they shall be
worth only from 20 to 30 yen. A poor North-
countryman has offered for no compensation an
excellent horse, equipped for mountain climbing,
and has led him in, carrying the animal's feed
himself.
The bazaars are already offering a print of the
84 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
expected naval victory, by Gakko, the first in his
trade. They also have for sale large maps, where
Corea appears coloured in the same tint as Japan.
A society has been formed for the purpose of
composing such poems as will amuse the soldiers
and stimulate their ardour.
At the South Station refugees from Vladivostok
have begun to arrive. They are for the most part
coolies and girls of the poorer class, who are full of
such stories as that the Russians tried to detain some
of the Japanese women, and of their indignant pro-
tests, in the manner of the heroines of Maupassant.
It appears that almost all the Russian babies there
had Japanese nurses, so these little creatures are the
first victims of the war.
At five o'clock there is a gogai : two Russian ships
are blocked by a Japanese squadron at Tchemulpo.
The news is entitled " Caught in the neck of a
bottle," with an evident reminiscence of Santiago
di Cuba.
At ten in the evening the little bells ring out the
arrival of graver tidings. Three Russian ships have
been torpedoed at Port Arthur and there is a general
engagement.
loth February. The official despatch from
Tchemulpo reads that after a fruitless attempt at
escape, and after Admiral Uryu's warning that they
were violating the neutrality of the port, the
Varyag and the Koreets brought on themselves their
own destruction. The despatch does not publish
the number of Japanese war-ships engaged, which
would scarcely be flattering to Japanese pride.
The news from Port Arthur is confirmed, but the
outcome of the battle is not yet known.
The Europeans here are indignant at this sudden
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 85
aggression on the part of Japan, without a declaration
of war and in neutral waters. I have been to see a
retired Japanese general, to ask his opinion in the
matter, and he surprised me by the following
question :
" And what is your opinion of these Russian
officers who do not die on their decks ? And of the
petty officers who go pleading to the consulates
that they should not be made prisoners ? Japanese
would never have done that. In the accident to
the Takaimaru, some months ago, the captain had
himself lashed to the main-mast and sank with his
boat. She was only a trading- vessel. At the battle
of Yalou, the Chinese admiral knew how to die on
board. I can assure you that if, by misfortune, a
Japanese war-ship were destroyed in this war, not
a sailor would wish to save himself."
I replied, with some astonishment, that it was
difficult to see why the suicide of the Russian sailors
should have been deemed necessary, and that the
Russian commandant had fulfilled his duty cate-
gorically. But the general did not enter into this
distinction. I could feel in him the old Japanese
code of suicide : "to have a trust, to fail in its
discharge, nothing remains but harakiri."
I ventured another question : would he not
regard Corea as neutral territory ?
" Not in the least. We do not admit this pre-
tension of neutrality. The war with China be-
queathed to us the right to Corean territory for the
passage of our troops."
" Is it, then, in conformity with the spirit of the
Samurai to attack Russia without warning ? "
" And why not ? "
His tone recalled the fact that in the histories of
86 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
heroism which one sees on the Japanese stage, cunning
and sudden attack are raised to an equal glory with
suicide. Whether one kills or dies, the facts and
the terms are equally unimportant. One is suddenly
aware, in the tests of war, of certain radical moral
divergences between Oriental and Occidental. We
have not the same definition of the noble and the
ignoble.
As I passed along the principal street I found the
print by Gakko for sale everywhere, together with
some old photographs of the battle of Yalou. The
gogai are issued on each other's heels ; but there is
still no statement of the result of the Port Arthur
engagement. The crowd showed neither anxiety
nor turbulence. Some street urchins had dragged
a Russian flag in a brook and heaped pebbles upon it,
but the people seemed as calm and as smilingly
polite as usual. One wonders whether it is their
habitual sense of deportment or an absolute con-
fidence in victory.
In the Kanda district several barbers have hung
out a sign that soldiers will be shaved at half-price.
The half-tariff applies also in the public baths. A
midwife advertises her services as free to the wives
of soldiers who have left for the war. A small
ovation was being given to a soldier of enormous
stature. It appears that men of this size have
framed a petition that they be sent to the front in a
single company. Each of them is able to do the
work of three coolies and can give the lie to whoever
sneers at the miniature size of the Japanese. A more
touching petition is that of the prisoners who are
nearing the expiration of their terms. Since they
are not eligible as soldiers, they beg to be admitted
to the lower ranks of the police. It gives a sense of
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 87
the unanimity of the country that, the moment
there is a patriotic necessity, the thieves should offer
to do police work.
A manifestation was organized by the Jiji for
this evening. Several hundred students met in
the new park of Hibiya, carrying red and white
paper lanterns and the national flag. The con-
stables respectfully asked them to maintain order ;
they, too, carried the regulation red and white
lantern, for in this unlit village the police do the
service of public lighting. The students marched
in good order to the outer gate of the palace ; they
were followed by a few girl scholars, walking on their
high clogs and seeming somewhat embarrassed and
shy in the crowd. Before the closed gates there
were shouts of " Banzai ! banzai ! " and the pro-
cession then wound off to repeat the ceremony
in the enclosure of the Admiralty. They parted
at last with many salutations, the lanterns separated
like fire-flies in the immensity of the night, and
peace dropped on the city; the moon whitened
the silent roads like hoar-frost, and gave it the fan-
tastic contours and values of Chinese ink ; and the
black sky was powdered with the silver of an
aventurine lacquer.
nth February. Last night the Emperor made a
public declaration of war ; from the point of view
of the Russians, who have been informed by such
definite acts, it must seem somewhat tardy.
The moment is scarcely a well-chosen one for the
citation of Russian brutalities ; the Jiji none the
less says : " It is entirely in the nature of things that
the Russians should provoke to the utmost, by their
inhuman actions, the magnanimity of our officers
and our men. But we may be confident that the
88 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Japanese will control themselves and will do nothing
contrary to the universally recognized laws of
civilization and of humanity. While the enemy,
stripped of his varnish of civilization, will show
himself in all his naked barbarity, the moderation
and humanity of our men will elicit, as a contrast,
the sympathy of the civilized world."
The Kokumin, a semi-official sheet, predicts a
long war. " We have not yet fought on land, and
we should not underestimate the enemy before the
exchange of some vital strokes. The comment of
certain Russians should serve us as a warning ; they
admit the superiority of Japan at every point except
one the capacity for endurance. We must of
necessity contradict this estimate, and we must
summon all our powers of firmness and of per-
severance."
The Asabi believes the day to be far distant when
Russia shall sue for peace. " The fact that she
hesitates to publish her defeat at Port Arthur
proves the obstinacy of her resolution." It is
ironic that so little does Russia hesitate to " publish
her defeat " that it is through the Alexeieff report,
sent back from Paris by M. Motono, that Japan has
to-day learned the details of her success.
To-day is a national fete : the anniversary of the
foundation of the Empire, at the time of Romulus,
by Jimmu Tenno, great-grandson of the Sun.
There is a great display of flags fewer, however,
than on New Year's Day. The Emperor gives a
breakfast to the various diplomats, after which he
is to receive the guardians of the sacred treasures.
These treasures, the possession of which designates
the Emperor, are : the mirror of the goddess, Sun,
the sabre of the god, Typhon, and a sacred jewel.
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 89
The day is further celebrated by a performance of
the No : five lyric dramas with chorus, orchestra
and dances.
I strolled into the theatre, to gossip about
Japanese matters with a friend. The public is
extraordinarily calm. The gogai are not dis-
tributed, and no one seems to attach any importance
to them. There is no atmosphere of war ; for that
matter, there is none throughout Tokyo, except in
the barracks and in the newspaper offices.
They were playing Sumidagawa, one of the most
celebrated of the No. A woman, who carries the
reed which indicates madness, learns from a boatman
that the child she is seeking was drowned, some years
since. The songs, the orchestra, and the lines of
the poem unite in the expression of this sorrow.
The movement of river waves, the rustle of bamboos
and the stir of the wind murmur in concert the
prayer of the dead to Amida. By degrees the
strident and plaintive music grows vaster ; the
mother hears through it the voice of her child
invoking Amida. The child suddenly appears to
her, with the terrifying hair of a spirit ; twice
she tries to embrace it and twice it melts from
her grasp and disappears.
The story is profoundly impressive, and the
people around were moved to the point of tears.
Their openness to artistic impression is unfailing ;
it is difficult to realize that their sons and brothers
are at this moment on the high seas, fighting a great
battle.
Baron de Rosen, the Russian Minister, has left.
He was fated to learn here the reverses which have
come to his country. He has been surrounded
with sympathy ; the Court and the various Ministers
90 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
have sent representatives to take leave of him, and
all the foreign Ministers were present at his depar-
ture, except those of Corea and China. The
Empress gave Madame de Rosen some magnificent
gold and silver lacquers.
The newspapers have joined in this manifestation
of sympathy. " Baron de Rosen," says the Kokumin,
" is one of Japan's best friends and one who has most
intimately comprehended us. He has served his
government with an impeccable devotion and
loyalty and he has always shown us his good-will.
The Japanese preserve intact their friendly senti-
ments for the Court of Russia and its representative,
and they wish nothing better than that Baron de
Rosen should shortly find himself here again."
" It was beyond Baron de Rosen's power," says
the Asahi, " to prevent the present crisis ; indeed,
it was also beyond the power of the Tsar. We have
the highest personal regard and respect for Baron
de Rosen and for his master, the Tsar, both of whom
are above any prejudice of hostility of race or of
religion. Let us hope that, in fighting with equal
devotion to their relative causes and as honourable
enemies, the two belligerents will not lose their old
sense of personal esteem ; let us trust that they can
deal with each other like two friends placed in a
temporarily false position."
At this hour, and fugitive as it may be, one has
the tragic impression of a war at the base of which
lies no hatred.
Almost all the Russians have left with Baron de
Rosen ; there was a sad leave-taking at the station
between the Minister and the orthodox bishop of
Tokyo, Monsignor Nicolai. Baron de Rosen urged
him to accompany them, but the bishop could not
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 91
be prevailed upon to do so. His life work has been
here, and he has remained in his cathedral with the
golden minarets, surrounded by the twenty-five
thousand Japanese Christians who owe their con-
version almost solely to his ardour.
The French Minister, M. Harmand, is charged
with the protection of the remaining Russians, and
M. Andre, the first interpreter, will live in the
Russian Legation.
12th February. The Bank of Japan is about to
issue a war loan of a hundred million yen. It has
only a hundred million of gold in reserve. M.
Sonoda, one of the best speakers in Japan, has begun
a campaign through the country to prevent a
deterioration of value in the yen. He is urging his
compatriots to deposit all their gold and silver
objects in the Bank of Japan, in order to assure the
currency of paper money. The cost of the war
falls most heavily upon the poorer classes ; the rich,
on their part, are contributing their most priceless
possessions. These are in many cases treasures
inherited from generations of ancestors ; in the
Japanese view their beauty is only enhanced by the
sacrifice of them to patriotic necessity.
The geisha have been the first to respond to this
appeal : they have brought their jewels, and some-
times even the watch-chains of their friends.
The Japanese are generally supposed to have little
dependence on the forms of their belief ; but it is
none the less evident that they are anxious to know
if the gods are favourable to them. In the first
days of the war with China, a bird of prey which
had lit for a moment on the main-mast of the
Takachiho was captured. It was a fortunate
presage, for the Takachiho was the first to sink a
92 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Chinese boat. This time the same ship, according
to report, has cut a young whale in two. The
augurs claim that this foretells the definite separation
of the Russian fleet into two impotent masses.
The daily despatches give news of other forecasts.
While a man of Bitchu was smoking his pipe, he
saw an eagle fall from the sky ; this, to the popular
mind, symbolizes the Russian eagle. In Chikuzen,
at the temple of Hachimantaro, the Kokumin
announces that while the priests were praying for
Japan, the sacred pigeons, to the number of seven
hundred, flew out to the north-west and disappeared.
It is cited that in 1894, just before the battle of
Yalou, the birds took flight in the same manner and
only returned after the Japanese victory.
One gathers, from the space which these reports
occupy in the papers, that the public mind is far
from indifferent to them. Before he received his
appointment as admiral from the Emperor, Togo
had been chosen by popular acclaim because he had
fired the first cannon shot in the war with China.
Marquis Ito was to-day sent to the sanctuaries
of Ise, to make a solemn petition to the gods. He
penetrated to the depths of the sacred forest and,
in the little wooden temple, where since the origin
of things the mirror of the goddess, Sun, has rested,
and before the light silk veil which no one may raise,
he read the great invocation. This is the ceremony
which marks the days of national peril. It has been
fulfilled at strangely variant moments at the time
of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century,
and in the nineteenth on the arrival of the Americans
and Europeans.
The populace has learned with satisfaction that
the Tsar has not gone to Moscow to offer Jiis prayers ;
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 93
they are in any case convinced that the kami of
Moscow is not as puissant as Amaterasu.
A second envoy was sent by the Emperor to
announce the declaration of war to the ancestral
Manes. He declaimed his message in loud tones, at
Kudan, in the temple sacred to those soldiers who
have died for their country, and called the dead to
witness that the cause for which others were about
to die was just.
i$th February. Rumour has to-day signalled the
presence of a Russian squadron in northern Japanese
waters. First Fukuyama and then Aminato were
reported bombarded ; but all this stir was reduced
to the fact that a merchant vessel, the Nakanoura,
was sunk by the Russians.
The newspapers have treated with contumely
the atrocity of sinking an inoffensive boat, with her
crew, instead of capturing it. " Russia will pay,"
says the Jiji, " sooner or later, for this capricious
destruction. We merely draw the attention of
more civilized strangers to this crime, which is
contrary to the rules of war, and to the principles
of humanity." " An act of pure piracy," says the
Nichi-Nicbi. " The Russians have proved them-
selves complete barbarians," the Asahi states.
" They are the Goths and Vandals of the North,
insensible to shame and defiant of heaven." The
Kokumin remarks : " Our conduct in regard to
Russian merchant vessels has been entirely different.
We have refrained from inflicting the smallest
injury on the sailors ; indeed, they have been
surprised at our generosity. In regard to the
prisoners of war taken at Tchemulpo we have been
more than generous. We left them free to depart ;
more we allowed seventy-eight of them to enlist
94 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
in the volunteer corps for the care of the wounded
which was organized by our compatriots of
Tchemulpo. And Russia repays us with these
acts of horror. But Japan will none the less
absolutely spurn any idea of reprisals. She would
disdain to subject non-combatants to such shameful
treatment."
The Europeans here are, generally speaking,
united in their condemnation of this scarcely gallant
operation of war.
Togo is the name on all lips, and a legend is fast
crystallizing around it. " Togo " a Japanese
friend told me " is completely a hero. You
remember what he did during the war with China ?
He fired on his own men ! The Japanese admiral
was hesitating and the Chinese frankly did not want
to fight. Togo fired and every one believed it
to be the Chinese, and the battle was on." Every
one cites Togo's remarks. His appointment as
admiral was brought to him when he was ill in bed.
He instantly rose. " As soon as my foot touches
deck, I shall be cured." When the fleet sailed,
a friend asked what message he should convey to
the admiral's wife. " Nothing, except that I forbid
her to send me any news of herself." An attitude
sufficiently Roman, but scarcely to Occidental taste.
In his first battle, when he was told how badly the
enemy ships were damaged, his laconic comment
was : " We will mend them."
There is instanced a different kind of Roman
streak in another Japanese. Just as he left for the
war he divorced his wife. It is a matter easily
accomplished here ; but he was recently married
and the couple had been extremely devoted. His
sole reason for the action was that as he had neither
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 95
father nor mother, brother nor sister, he wished to
dedicate himself entirely to the service of his
country ; and he did not expect to return from the
war alive. His will bequeathed everything to the
State. The wife submitted without flinching ;
one wonders which of the two made the more vital
sacrifice.
i^tb February ; Sunday. To-day I have been to
the Greek church. The Russian Cathedral is by
far the largest Christian church in Tokyo, and it
dominates several quarters of the city. If Tokyo
were not so many worlds from Paris, one could
compare its position to that of the Sacre-Cceur.
It stands as a mute witness of the tolerance of the
Japanese and the energy of a single individual.
To my rickshaw man it is only necessary to say
" Nicolai," in order to have him understand my
destination. The Russian church and the Russian
faith are equally called by this name in Tokyo. In
twenty-three years the bishop, Nicolai, who has
never been able to accustom himself to the co-
operation of any Russian auxiliary, has created the
entire colony of churches, pastors and flocks. He
has converted by his own personal effort more than
all the united Catholic missionaries, and he had not
the advantage of building, as they did, on the
foundations laid amongst the old Christians of
Nagasaki. His proselytism has taken place against
the grain of the most unfavourable conditions, for
the inimical attitude of the Japanese to the Russians
is a rooted one.
In the enclosure of the iconostasis I could not
discern the white beard of the bishop. A Japanese
pope was officiating, in his heavy cope. One or
two hundred Japanese, men and women, were
96 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
grouped about, all the rigidity of their silence
seeming to hang on the priest and the flaming icons.
I heard that yesterday Nicolai called together the
most prominent amongst his parishioners. His
statement to them was the essence of simplicity.
He had been unable to decide, he said, to separate
himself from them and he would leave Japan only
at their own desire. But he was a subject of the
Tsar, and he would pray as faithfully for his Emperor
as they would pray for the Japanese country. If
they had news of a Japanese victory, it would be
only fitting since God required of them both
patriotism and loyalty that they should celebrate
their thanksgiving in their church. He left the
issue to a just Heaven, which would judge the cause
and permit those who deserved it to conquer.
There must have been a strange contradiction in
the thoughts of this gathering, and they must have
had a latent sense of the contradiction in a war
which opposed their spiritual chief to their legiti-
mate ruler, the thousand-year-old incarnation of
their country to the man who represents for them
the vicar of Christ. One's thoughts travelled to
the other little Christian communities, of diverse
names, scattered throughout Japan. It makes the
situation more touching that the converts have still
all the first warmth of the apostolic fervour ; they have
not yet hardened themselves to the habit of invoking
Sabaoth and singing ^e Deum after a massacre.
The Japanese have claimed the faculty to trans-
form and refine whatever they borrow from other
races. They have made of Buddhism, and particu-
larly of the Zen sect, a religion of happiness and
activity and of an equable attitude of soul, and they
have recognized and nourished in Confucianism a
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 97
doctrine of spiritual honour as sensitive as the
Castilian. One wonders what their quick artisan-
ship will make of Christianity, which as far back as
the sixteenth century inspired in them a new thirst
for social justice and a fierce desire for martyrdom.
There appeared to-day, in an English paper, some
reflections on the war by M. Uchimura, a Japanese
Christian. He cannot reconcile himself to the fact
that nations which call themselves Christian should
not treat each other as they themselves would be
treated, and he attributes to this falsity of individual-
istic pride the unapproachable attitude of Russia
pending the negotiations. The war, he says, cannot
terminate without Christians recognizing that a single
law exists for humanity at large, that respect is due
to man as man, and that it is a fundamental failure
to ignore this precept. He attributes the outbreak
of the conflict to the false patriotism of both
Russians and Japanese. " Are the Russian and
Japanese Chauvinists alone responsible ? Certainly
not. There are English, American and French
Chauvinists, who, detecting advantages to themselves
in a quarrel, are only too glad to see two neigh-
bouring peoples leap at each other's throats. What
they term their sympathy for Japan or their sympathy
for Russia is in reality only the product of their
egoism, and the ineffaceable stigma of their religion.
There is nothing more worthy of contumely than
such patriots who name themselves Christians and
who, to secure an open market for their produce,
encourage other nations to resort to arms."
For his own part, he frankly deplores the war.
He cites in a favourable sense the French proverb :
" Scratch the Russian and you will find a Tartar."
" Are not Russians half-Oriental, and are not
H
98 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Japanese half-Occidental ? Are their respective
missions in Asia not complementary rather than
contradictory ? Have peoples destined to a high
collaboration the right to make war on each other ?
Nothing is of a more frequent occurrence than
friction between brothers and friends ; the present
conflict is an additional instance, and we can only
pray that such a deplorable misunderstanding will be
shortly terminated."
In countless ways one can trace, in this country,
the germs of a reconciliation with Russia.
i$th February. The actor Kawakami, well known
by Parisians as the Antoine of Japan, and the husband
of Sada Yakko, has gone to the front with all his
troupe and with Sada Yakko herself ; not as a soldier,
but as an artist who wishes to make certain studies
from nature. They are going to witness a drama
which they themselves will reproduce later. Mean-
while, they will act their heroic plays for the soldiers
and will install in the front lines their mirrors and
their rouge-pots.
The time is opportune for the infusion of a new
life into theatric art. A theatre at Yokohama has
already announced a performance of " The Battle
of Port Arthur." The play had been written before
the action ; one feels as if this were imagination
pushed too far.
Since his disillusions in the political world,
Kawakami has devoted himself to the reform of the
heroic theatre. In the future this will necessarily
also be the realistic theatre. Last year the troupe
played " Othello," with Othello as a Japanese
officer and the scene set in Formosa.
A pickpocket slipped amongst those of his com-
patriots who entertained Kawakami at Osaka
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 99
stole the actor's watch. It appears that this was a
present made to him by the Tsar, during his Russian
tour. Kawakami announced this fact to the press
and that he was glad to be relieved of such a souvenir.
The people of Osaka state that the following day a
small parcel was left at the actor's house and that the
thief, having seen the imperial crest on the watch,
returned it with contempt.
The reality of the war is now perceptible. At
every step one meets the little carts which serve as
furniture-vans. Two or three coverings, a tiny
wardrobe, a lamp, a brazier, a clock ; this is all.
Japanese life is lived without furniture. Once the
head of the household is gone, his family looks for a
more modest dwelling-place. I fell into talk with a
woman. She carried a baby on her back and led
two little girls by the hand ; and on the shoulders
of the older another little head nodded. She and
her husband, who is a maker of tiles, had gone as
colonists to the Hokkaido. They met with poor
luck, and returned to Tokyo ; now that her husband
is summoned to the ranks, the woman scarcely knows
how to live. Some one has been found to take
charge of her mother-in-law. She herself plans to
get her bread by making match-boxes, and the old
woman will earn a pittance by playing the guitar
in the streets. There seems to be no pressure of
anxiety in their minds ; indeed, the solidarity of the
poorer people is one of the most impressive traits of
Japanese life. In all quarters of the city there have
been formed societies to care for the families of
soldiers. The subscriptions to some of these already
amount to four or five million yen. Ten yen are
paid to a family for its installation in a new home, and
in addition four yen for each person above fifteen
ioo JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
and two yen for each child ; and in addition to this
there is a service of constant kindness and politeness.
The patriotism of the poorest is the most fervent
of all. I saw an old woman bring into the cabin
which serves as a police station two hundred yen
as an offering to the government. She explained
to the sergeant that this represented her savings for
her old age, but that her days of infirmity were not
worth so much consideration. Economy, too, can
scarcely be said to be one of the Japanese virtues.
It is astonishing that malefactors, with no apparent
possessions, can give a hundred yen. A special
office to receive these contributions has been opened
at the War Office. More than two millions have
already been deposited there, in great part in
donations from the very poor. Those who have no
money bring their mattresses and all they possess
for the use of the military. Others have only their
services to give. The rickshaw men carry the
soldiers without charge ; the men and women
workers in a great oil refinery have united in the
decision to work an additional hour each day and
to give the extra pay they receive to the State.
The most striking fact of all is the simplicity and
inevitability with which every Japanese fulfils his
conception of duty.
Strangers arouse little resentment ; at Kobe, one
hears, there is some hostility to the foreigner, but
here there is definitely apparent an attitude of
kindness. The foreigners, on their side, have
contributed to the various war works, and some have
offered to lodge soldiers. An obscure community
of sentiment has arisen as a result of the stir of the
times. Japanese life and thought have a social
intimacy which are conducive to such sympathy
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 101
and there is no country where opinion and enthusiasm
blend more freely.
Two typical personages fill the pages of the
popular gazette : a hero of the war with China and
a Russian spy. The first is famous for having
dynamited a fort or saved a gun. He is to-day in
the territorials, and he fills the recruiting offices
with his clamorous advice to the enlisted men to
insist that they shall be sent to the front at once. In
view of his popularity, the administration has to
appease his ardour with promises of immediate
action ; and while he waits for his orders, his friends
offer him sake and listen once again to the tale of
his exploits. The Russian spy is a Japanese of
unprepossessing demeanour ; whenever the sus-
picions concerning him take precise form, he is
expelled from his quarter of the town and his
neighbours take upon themselves the maintenance
of his family.
1 6th February. We have heard that on the night
of the 1 4th two Japanese torpedo boats, in a whirl-
wind of snow, penetrated to the entrance to Port
Arthur. They torpedoed two vessels, were dis-
covered, made good their escape, and came back
safe and whole.
This kind of audacity is sympathetic to the
Japanese temperament. They are proud to cite
the fact that the captain who commanded the
principal torpedo boat is already famous for his
taciturnity and his temerity. On the 8th of
February he reconnoitred the waters at Dalny, to
search out the Russian fleet, and sailed up almost to
the edge of the quay.
The Emperor has set the note of sacrifice for the
greatest families in the kingdom by depositing in
102 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
the Bank of Japan his collection of coins and medals.
He is leaving Tokyo and will take up his residence at
Kyoto " To change the action of spirits," as a
Japanese said to me. This is a recognition of the
subtle mystic ritual which this people so closely
observes. Like the families of his soldiers, the
Emperor will reduce his style of living and disavow
all luxury. During the war with China he lived
in a cottage at Hiroshima.
He will have no part in tactical operations or in
the direction of his armies. He is essentially a
statesman, whose eminent qualities are discretion,
tact and good sense, and he is entirely willing that
his subjects should freely question his capacities as a
commander. At the last manoeuvres, an official
report frankly criticized those operations which he
conducted.
ijtb February. The annual festival of the fall
of the first snow. During the night the flakes were
heavy and thick, but they are dissolving before the
power of a brilliant sun. The popular mind sees in
this an image of the dissolution of white Russia's
strength before the flag with the red orb. From
the heights of Atagoyama, crowds have been watch-
ing the fragile grace of the country shining under
its white veils ; the more fortunate have chanced
to surprise the miracle of February a flowering
plum branch beneath the snow, or a nightingale
stirring into flight with the tip of its wing a flake as
perfect as a petal.
iSth February. The popular journals publish
daily caricatures which can scarcely be called
artistic. Japan has no longer a Kyosai. Some of
the drawings are alive, however, with the vivid
Japanese spirit.
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 103
The yose are the little public rooms where people
gather, each evening, to sit about on mats, sip their
tea, and listen to the most popular reciters. The
speaker kneels on a raised platform. He makes at
the outset his profound salutation, crouched like a
frog and leaning on his outspread palms. The
movement of the tale he tells flows to the ceaseless
movement of his fan. There are both serious and
comic speakers, but all have an admirable art of
mimicry. They weave for the audience a fabric of
brilliant diversity, history flavoured with tart
personalities, old tales, romances whose rich re-
dundancies spread over the course of several even-
ings, accounts of travel accented with the oddity of
burlesque, stories full of a sly suggestiveness or of the
gaiety of impossible exaggeration, and embroideries
of comment on the happenings of the day.
To-night the Amanosetsu who fought in the war
with China told with an easy art an episode of that
war. At the end of the silence which followed
his final bow he announced, in another tone, that
he was about to leave for the present front, in order
to bring back impressions of it to his faithful public.
There was a flattering murmur and one foresaw
that the laurels of Kawakami would be divided.
iqtb February. The sailors of the English and
Italian warships which have just arrived have had
the most cordial of receptions. For the first time
I saw Tokyo swayed by a popular demonstration.
One's thoughts went back to a reception of Russian
sailors in Paris, eleven years ago ; except that, since
the kiss is unknown as a salutation in Japan, the
mousmes did not show the same gaiety of enthusiasm
as the French girls did in greeting the sailors. The
Japanese people are at one of those periods of crisis
104 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
where they feel the need to express affection.
Every stranger was hailed with the cry of " Banzai !
banzai ! " and all were taken for English or Italians
indiscriminately. The smallest shopkeeper has hung
out his flags in their honour.
An essentially Japanese spectacle was arranged for
the visitors in the park of Hibiya. This was a
wrestling match, of no ordinary character. The
champions of the East and the West, Hitachi-Yama
and Megatani, gave such an exhibition as one
ordinarily sees only once a year. They looked more
than ever monstrous, as they stood naked side by
side, and seemed more than ever an enigma amongst
the delicate Japanese. Megatani was a mountain of
reddish flesh, with a face scarcely human ; Hitachi-
Yama, hardly less inhuman, his skin blotched and
his eyes bloodshot. Before the match they stood
tensely bowed over each other, in a motionless
salute, and when, at the signal, the gigantic strain
of effort began, their breath came with sharp sound
of whistles. Megatani, by his actual immensity of
weight, conquered his adversary ; and one felt that
the sailor lads crouched in the front lines had taken
away with them a singularly brutal vision of so fine
a race.
In the splendid evening sky there are flashing the
fireworks which, as they burst into stars, scatter on
Tokyo the flags of three nations. The crowd is so
closely packed that it flows with the smooth move-
ment of water. When a petard falls in its midst,
the people neither flinch nor cry out, and the smoke
of the powder rises harmlessly above their heads.
This mastery of the nerves, at even the unimportant
moments, stands out as an essential quality of the
Japanese.
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 105
2otb February. The Emperor has received the
first trophy a Russian flag from the Varyag^
captured at Tchemulpo, and the fruit of a scarcely
glorious action. It has been given to the Military
Museum, and to-day it is hung at the great door,
in view of all the city. The crowd passes, as serious
and as perfect in deportment as usual, in spite of
its ardour. Every one pauses to read the inscription
and to comment politely, wanders for a moment
into the park, and then gravely returns to admire
the blue cross of St. Andrew on a white ground and
the holes torn by the explosion of the Varyag.
In the park itself, and beneath the cherry-trees
where the idle divert themselves, the air has already
the melodious suavity of spring. The vendors are
peddling their tempting delicacies tiny cakes
moulded by hand and sea-weeds of all colours,
clinging to scraps of rock. Every now and then a
man approaches the temple sacred to the memory
of fallen soldiers and bends his head in a brief
prayer. Here and there is the bright red of the
imperial guard, which has imitated the French red
trousers. On the platform reserved for women who
have taken religious vows, a priest dressed in white is
striking, in a grotesque rhythm, a painted drum, to
the delight of an audience of children. A sense of
the perpetual exclusion of the foreigner comes over
one once more : is this a vulgarized liturgy, or a
cheap show raised to the rank of a ritual ?
21 st February. There is a story current that at
Tchemulpo a Japanese torpedo boat has been
penetrated by shot ; but no paper mentions it.
It appears that the funnel was pierced and that
during the night the Japanese sawed it off.
22nd February. M. Inoue Tetsujiro, the doyen
106 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
of the Faculty of Letters, is at once a scientist, a
philosopher and the founder of a new form of
religion. He has studied in Paris with Jules Simon,
Vacherot, Caro, Ravaisson and Paul Janet. He is
no less conversant with the minds of contemporary
philosophers in Germany, England and the United
States, and in this country which is in reality a vast
library he is noted as the man whose reading has
been the most extensive and the most diverse. One
would define him as one of the authorized exponents
of Japanese thought. Against the walls of the vast
room where he received me there were piled stacks
of thin Japanese volumes, and ranged amongst them
the heavy bindings of the West. The chief furnish-
ing of the room was a long table on trestles, and the
air was full of the charm of the austerity of erudition.
In spite of his doctoral frock coat, M. Inoue is as
instinct with vitality as a hawk. He was entirely
willing to talk of the war. It would be, he averred,
a great moral lesson, and first of all for Russia.
Russia had violated a solemn pact to which she had
freely consented. She would have to learn, and to
her cost, that good faith is obligatory even in dealing
with the nations of Far Asia.
I ventured to suggest that this seemed scarcely to
dispose of the present instance. But he took me up :
" But this is an instance of international morality.
If a contract is violated to the hurt of one race, it
is violated to the hurt of all. This war may have
superficial causes of superficial interests, but it is
based on a clear case of justice and injustice. Japan
has it keenly on her conscience that she is protecting
international right. For us, too, the war will be a
lesson in political morality. If we are victorious,
as we hope, it will be because of the vital force of
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 107
our liberal institutions. We owe more to the
propulsive power of their ideas than to our armies.
The thesis of the military order defends, as a rule,
an absolutism of power ; we know, on the contrary,
that only a principle of liberty can create the
conscious unanimity of a nation. Because our
opinions circulate as freely as air, we have no internal
revolt to fear. In 1894 the Chinese Minister
informed his government that, since Japan was torn
by parliamentary dissensions, it was the propitious
moment for an attack. The futility of his conclu-
sion was proven. The spirit of the entire country
rose in a flame such as even our ancient shoguns
never saw. To-day it is the same. Thanks to our
recognition of liberty and eliminating a very
restricted group of neo-Christians and socialists
the same unanimity exists at present. Liberty is
with us " M. Inoue made the allusion to the
" Marseillaise " with a smile " and she will fight
with her defenders."
" But if Japan vanquishes a European power,
will she be as likely to wish to draw her inspiration
from Europe ? "
" Unfailingly so. Neither our religions nor our
traditional doctrines can throw up a barrier against
progress. Our Shintoism is too summary, our
Buddhism is fading into superstition, our Con-
fucianism is incompatible with a liberal regime.
We do not need Europe's Christianity, but we do
need her scientific methods and the new social ideal
which she is elaborating."
And the professor, arrived at last at his favourite
thesis, wandered delightfully into an exposition of
the future religion of humanity.
26th February. A day of false rumours. An
108 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
official Russian despatch announces that four
Japanese armoured cruisers and two transports have
been destroyed at Port Arthur. I strolled through
the principal streets to see the impression which
this announcement of disaster had produced. The
gogai, without commentary, was posted on the shop
doors and on the telegraph poles. The passers-by
read it with no break in the surface of their habitual
serenity, and with their perpetual smile. Is it that
they totally lack the sensitiveness of nerves, or that
they have a self-confidence which is impregnable ?
At eight in the evening there arrived a corrected
version of the story. Five transports, in imitation
of the Merrimac which was sunk to block the Gulf
of Santiago, sank themselves, or were sunk, in an
attempt to block the approach to Port Arthur,
which the Japanese squadron has bombarded. This
gogai is posted above that of this morning ; and,
as this morning, the people read it calmly, without
any manifest feeling, and with the same eternal
quality in their smile.
Seventy-seven men were called for to navigate
the ships to be sunk and the torpedo boats charged
with the work of rescue. More than two thousand
volunteered, and one deliberately cut his finger
and wrote the application with his blood.
2jth February. The benevolent society of my
neighbourhood has posted the following notice :
1. This will be the longest war Japan has ever
known. It is, therefore, essential that every possible
economy shall be practised.
2. No matter how many successive Japanese
victories are announced, do not permit yourself any
rejoicing. There will be no veritable victory until
the war is won.
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 109
3. Except for war expenses, deprive yourselves of
everything.
4. No houses should be built and there should
be no money spent on marriages, funerals or other
ceremonies.
5. If a contagious malady should appear, it would
require a heavy cost to arrest its progress ; it is,
therefore, essential that every one shall take the
requisite care of his health.
2yth February. The prints of war subjects are
making the shop windows brilliant. About a
hundred have already been published. On the
tossed violet of waves a burning ship smoulders,
and in the long rose streak of its reflection a black
torpedo boat slinks away. Another shows a blind-
ing snow, composed of particles of shattered plaster,
and a group of blue blouses crowding about a
cannon ; the faces grimace in their excitement and
in the background, in a pale vermilion light, a boat
is on fire. The theme of the imaginative treat-
ment of a naval combat is varied in countless ways.
The crowds gather before these prints and
examine them in a silence of concentration. The
artists fulfil the part of educators. One of the
newspapers has complained that the depiction is
too flattering to the Japanese, and demands a more
realistic respect of truth.
.ist March. The new war romances have ap-
peared, in their bright bindings. They arrest the
eye literally at every step, for there are more book-
shops in a Tokyo street than in the length and
breadth of Spain. The titles are displayed every-
where : " In the Mists of Tchemulpo," " Let us
die for our Country," " The Old Officer," " The
Offering to the Dead," " The House of Admiral
i io JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Yamanaka." These stories appear in instalments,
and the plots will be modified according to the
course of events. Some publishers have their cor-
respondents with the armies at the front. One
sees the war legend develop, in all the fire and heat
of actuality.
2nd March. It is the culminating moment of
the exquisiteness of the plum-trees. A group of
poets and enthusiasts scatters like flowers in the
orchards of Kameido. This year the appreciation
of the beauty of blossoms and scents is heightened
by the pride of civic emotion. The fervent de-
votees are more numerous, and they tell me that
the movable tea equipages have rented twice as
dearly as last year.
Wrinkled old men, with wisdom in their seared
faces, and floating geishas are seated side by side
on the gold-coloured mats. Since all the young
men are at the war, the looks of tenderness from
the women's dark eyes rise and lose themselves in
the clouds. One fancies that this surplus of feeling
without direction saturates the delicate air and
lingers in the intoxicating spring odour.
In a frame of dark surrounding pines are crouched
a knot of bent, worm-eaten plum-trees, shining in
their brief radiance. They are broken and blackened,
and crutches have been arranged to support their
infirmity. But all the length of their old inter-
twined arms the white flowers ripple, so that the
dark branches seem saturated in a sparkling mist.
Each tree has its degrees of whiteness, from snow to
ivory, and the clinging scent which they breathe
out impregnates one's clothes.
Some strange incongruity struck me in a geisha
with a magnificent sash : suddenly I realized that
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM in
she wore her hair in a European knot, instead of in
the high Japanese fashion. The girl with whom
she talked and all her neighbours did the same.
On inquiry I was told that they had given up their
usual head-dress as too costly, and that the economy
thus achieved was to go as a subscription to the
war fund. There was something peculiarly poignant
in this sacrifice of personal beauty for the love of
country.
yd March. To-day is a festival consecrated to
little girls. The tiny mousmes make a grave effort
at sacrifice, since their brothers and their friends
are subjected to the dangers of war. They have
been instructed not to give way to laughter. Their
dolls must wear their last year's dresses, and the
contents of their little savings banks will be given
to the Society of Nurses.
At the top of three elevations of red lacquer, on
a mat bound in silk, are placed images of the Emperor
and Empress ; a little lower, a prince and a princess,
and lower still five musicians. Between them
stand some porcelain jars, some plates of sweets
and a minute set of furniture. Lanterns, on their
slim, tall pedestals; complete the decoration. Two
young girls advanced with a slowly measured grace,
carrying flowering branches, while the little children,
in their sumptuous dresses, fixedly watched them,
and I and a Japanese friend, crouched in a corner,
discussed the war and heated our fingers over the
brazier. Mademoiselle Suzu, the eldest daughter,
was directly in front of the little shrine. She made
her reverential bow, struck her hands gently to-
gether and began her prayer ; the altar was so low
that she had to kneel, and in the act the whiteness
of her bare leg shone underneath her robe.
ii2 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
There is no Japanese family so poor that they
have not to-day celebrated, before these clay images,
this rite which is immemorial.
^th March. All of the theatrical spectacles of
Tokyo are based on the war, from those in the
important theatres to those in the rough wooden
booths where one can see a Russian shot for a penny.
My interpreter recommended to me a certain
popular theatre where, as he said, the public was
as dramatic as the actors. Huddled in our little
box, we found ourselves surrounded by voluble
patriots, who gorged themselves plentifully, and
who, in the intervals of their noisy laughter, gulped
down their sake and worked up their enthusiasm
to excite the actors. The warmed flagons followed
each other in quick succession, as their contents
disappeared into the little round cups, and wand-
like sticks were used to eat from the lacquer boxes
which are full of rice and fried eels.
There is no attempt to present a consecutive
story, but rather a review which represents the
various daily happenings recorded in the news-
papers. I was particularly struck by the fact that
the spectacle turned so often on many of those
instances of the selective action of conscience which
the Japanese so like to discuss, subtle moralists as
they are. A publisher recently announced a forth-
coming treatise on casuistry, as inspired by the
war : he could have gathered many of its elements
here.
A Japanese woman of Manchuria, for instance, is
supposed to be the " femme des yeux" or mekake,
of a Russian officer. She explains her case to the
audience ; the officer has showered on her count-
less kindnesses, he loves her, she loves him, and he
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 113
has every confidence in her. In a bureau of her
house there are certain secret maps of the general
staff ; can she, and should she, steal them ? Does
patriotism nullify the personal duties ? The
audience shouts to her its affirmation : she opens
the bureau and flees with the maps. In three or
four other scenes spying is glorified in this same
manner ; and I recollected, as I watched them, a
woman who was asked, some months since, for news
of her son and who responded, with a simplicity of
pride : " He is a spy in Manchuria."
Another little human problem was represented
by the meeting of two soldiers. The one accuses
the other of wearing a torn and soiled shirt ; the
second retorts that it is good enough to attract a
Russian ball. This reply was greeted with applause,
but more still follows. The first speaker reminds
his friend that after a battle the dead are rifled and
that it is the pride of a Japanese soldier to be found
with clean linen. At this the enthusiasm was
unbounded.
Everyday happenings were pictured, naturally
and without ornamentation, without too accentu-
ated an imagination, and with a highly picturesque
realism. At the call of the reservists, one saw a
pedlar of boiled vegetables receive his marching
orders in the street. He dropped the two wooden
saws he carried and ran to the barracks, crying,
" Banzai ! " The prefect of police approached,
in his black overcoat and his white gloves, and
asked why the saws had been left to obstruct the
street ; and, when the passers-by explained the
matter, he picked them up and walked off balancing
them on his shoulder.
In a neighbouring house, a carpenter who was
i
ii 4 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
going off was grieved to leave his wife at the point
of childbirth. The neighbours all assured him of
their care of her, in his absence ; but when the
moment of departure struck the woman began to
feel the first pains. The wildest confusion was
represented ; every one ran here and there, seeking
for the grandfather, the grandmother and the mid-
wife. The birth of the child was supposed to take
place behind a partition of paper. The old grand-
father tremulously hurried to bring hot water and
the grandmother livened the coals of the fire by
blowing on them through a pipe and exhaling the
smoke through her nostrils. The detail was as
fine as that of a Dutch picture. All the populace
of the street is gathered at the door, while the
poor husband drags on his uniform and calls out
to know if the child is born ; and just as he is on
the doorstep a cry comes from behind the screen
and the grandfather runs out to him with the tiny
bundle of pink flesh. There are tears and laughter,
and all the audience shouts : " Banzai ! "
Another scene showed another street of Tokyo
and a lodging-house for soldiers. Here there
passed changing pictures of every form of Japanese
life. One saw children playing at war ; the pur-
veyor of military supplies, who made his rations too
scant ; the coolie who had brought a soldier in his
cart and who refused to accept a fee ; the villager
leading his horse and whispering in his ear so that
he should not shy; the hero of the Civil War,
bringing to his son the family sabre. A bonze came
to offer the soldiers medals of good fortune ; there
was a gossipy old countrywoman, searching for her
son without knowing where he lodged. The car-
penter's wife hurried up with her new-born child,
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 115
and was stopped by an officer, correct and cold in
manner ; but as she dropped on her knees, holding
out the infant, he made a grimace to -wink away a
tear, took the child and let her pass.
The setting then changed to represent the in-
terior of the house and the common-room of the
soldiers. Seated or curled up on the floor, they
were smoking and drinking, chatting or drawing,
while the sergeant read aloud the daily papers.
In a whining voice he declaimed the Tsar's declara-
tion of war, interrupted by flashes of laughter and
by quips, most of which flew back to the performers
from the audience. On the introduction of the
word " God," every one rocked with amusement.
Then the soldiers rose and stood in line, with their
heads bent, and to the solemn chant of the No the
sergeant recited the declaration of war of the
Japanese Emperor. After the tensity of silence,
all the spectators burst into the cry of " Banzai ! "
and then dissolved again into gaiety. A soldier
who is a fishmonger exhibited the knife which is
the weapon of his trade and with which he ex-
pected to cut Russian noses and ears. Leaping
from one end of the stage to the other, he made
use of his comrades to give a startling demonstra-
tion. The laughter had a sudden sound of ferocity : I
wondered into what wasp's nest I had thrust myself.
Then the tone of feeling happily changed. A
soldier had composed a poem, and he sang it in a
voice still full of the uncertainty of adolescence ;
another soldier seized a fan and executed a war
dance ; and the audience whispered that this was
a real reservist and that the uniform which the
actor wore was rightfully his.
The remainder of the spectacle represented the
n6 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
naval battle. There were reproduced the episode
of the soldier whose hand was torn off and who
picked it up, and of the officer who, mortally
wounded, refused to allow his boots to be removed,
so that he might be ready to resume his post.
The scene darkened and on a white curtain the
cinema flung the picture of the half-sunk Varyag.
A great wave flowed over the wreckage, and the
patriotic intoxication reached its height. And, as
an ending, one saw the dynamiting of a tunnel on
the Vladivostok line, which was this morning's
news : if this is not authenticated to-day, it will
perhaps shortly be accomplished.
$th March. The Japanese Socialists deserve some
analysis. With three or four neo-Christians, they
form what is up to now the sole group frankly
hostile to the war. The excellent notation con-
cerning them in the bulletin of the Ecole d'Extreme-
Orient, edited for Japan by M. Cl.-E. Maitre,
reports that the socialistic doctrine was imported,
some years since, from San Francisco. It was at
first a literary and philosophic movement, but the
organization of workmen's syndicates gave it a
practical base of action. During all of the im-
mediately preceding year (1903) the Socialists have
carried on active propaganda by means of meetings
and of publications, and there has been ceaseless
friction between them and the police. They have
sought to establish international socialistic relations.
In Japan they have the co-operation of several
influential neo-Christians, notably Schimada Saburo,
the deputy from Yokohama, and Takahashi Goro,
the author of a text -book of Socialism. They have
their Thomas Morus and their Bellamy, in the person
of Yano Fumio, whose Utopian book, The New
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 117
Society, made a wide stir ; they will possibly
find their Blanqui in Oi Kentaro, a man of swift
decisive action, who, with twenty companions, tried
as early as 1885 to instigate revolution in Corea and
was imprisoned by the Japanese government. The
principal socialistic leader is Katayama Sen, the
author of two books, Municipal Socialism and Our
Socialism, and director of the Socialistic Review,
Sbakwai Sbugi.
I chanced to buy the last issue of this publication.
Its exposition of principles is intermixed, as one
expects, with personal polemics. An article en-
titled " Reflections on the War " contends that
Japan has not a single original idea to disseminate
throughout the world ; that neither its religion
nor its morality, nor its material civilization, are
of such a quality that they are worthy to be im-
posed by force, and that conquest for the sake of
conquering is not an achievement. The present
war is claimed to be without basic justification and
without the inspiration of an aim : " The Japanese,
we admit, are powerfully developed in the art of
war. They destroy large vessels and even small
ones. They are exceedingly brave. All Japan has
yielded to the insidious charm of victory. If,
however, we compare the Russians and the Japanese,
we must compute not only their relative accomplish-
ment in the military art, but also their accomplish-
ment in scientific and general fields. One cannot
claim that Japan is great, merely because of the
courage of her army. Some higher quality than
this must exist to assure a domination of the world.
This quality might well be religion ; but the
Japanese religion is decayed and practically dead.
It might also be an economic system; but, while
ii8 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
progressive industrial men should have no concern
with Ministers or Kings, ours are subservient to
the government. Nor can we claim that our
morality is fit for imposition on other peoples. The
spirit of fraternity, formerly so powerful amongst
us, grows poorer day by day, and this is the single
human sentiment which can conquer the world.
We have seen many reservists part from their wives
an act intrinsically against nature ; they feigned
bravery in order to win applause. To summarize,
our priests, our industrial leaders and our soldiers
think only of pleasing the crowd, and Japan has
not a single great principle to show the world."
One must admit that there is a touch of force, of
generosity and of courage in these contentions.
Another Socialist Review, the Heimin Sbimbun
a paper more for the crowd declares, in good
Japanese and with an English translation, what
attitude the Socialist Party will take in regard to
the war : " We Socialists have maintained a firm
opposition to the general clamour in favour of the
war and we have done our best to make known our
attitude by speech and by publication. To-day,
with the people losing their heads over the naval
victories, this attitude remains unchanged. The
enthusiasm grows from day to day and every one
is now prepared to give the government all the
money it needs. No one thinks of the disastrous
consequences which will inevitably follow. Even
the labouring classes refuse to see how deplorable
the war is for them : they persist in their vision
that some undefined amelioration of their lives will
come out of the present ominous crisis. It seems
as if they were stupefied by an intoxicant. A man
who is suffering from cold can warm himself for an
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 119
instant with whisky; but his suffering returns as
soon as the effect of the alcohol has passed. It is
the duty of Socialists to remain dispassionate and
to judge matters impartially. Was the Russo-
Japanese war really inevitable ? Is it actually true
that the independence of Japan is menaced if the
Russian forces are not expelled from Manchuria ?
Is it not always the case that war brings profit to a
small number of capitalists, while it is sheer loss to
the proletariat ? As long as these queries remain
unanswered, we cannot justify the conflict in which
we are engaged."
jth March. A condemned man who was hanged
the day before yesterday had hoarded two yen.
The jailer urged him to spend them in a final feast,
but the good fellow, in his patriotism, left the two
yen to the government which decreed his death.
The situation presents many opportunities for
citing the philosophy of history. Uchimura Kanzo
has stated the following as the philosophy of Japan's
political action : " In a word, it must be that of
the Hungarians and not of the Turks. We are
Mongols, a detached branch of the Altaic tribes ;
we have no need to deprecate this origin, for we
know that no ethnic past can disbar either a man
or a nation from the attainment of the highest
ideals. It is civilization and not heredity which is
determinant in the destiny of peoples." M. Uchi-
mura is a Christian and a man of powerful mentality.
He knows that he himself came originally from
Central Asia ; and he does not believe himself
descended from Amaterasu and does not contend
that the other nations are issue of the excrement of
Susanowo.
" Japan, in her position as representative of the
120 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Orient, should not seek to orientalize the world.
The Turk tried it, and in spite of his initial suc-
cesses he remains the sick man of the East. The
Hungarian, also of Oriental origin and a cousin of
the Turk, has done otherwise ; and to-day his
prosperity attests his wisdom. John Hunyade fought
his Turkish brothers in defence of European civiliza-
tion ; and he thus saved Europe and Hungary itself.
If the Hungarians were traitors to their race, they
were faithful to the civilization which they had
adopted. Their case is one of those in which it is
necessary to desert one's parents in order to enter
into the kingdom of progress.
" The Yellow Peril of which certain Europeans
speak springs from their fear that Japan may play,
on a larger scale, the same part essayed by Turkey.
Millions of Chinese, armed by Japan, dance before
their terrified vision, and they hasten to prepare to
defend themselves against this danger. The futility
of their effort is apparent, since if such an incursion
were to come to pass no European nation could
resist it. A Gengis-Khan, with his soldiers armed
with Murata guns, would oversweep everything.
But " the tone of the statement changed in a way
that relieved what had been, I admit, my fear
" this is exactly illustrative of the responsibilities
of Japan and of her need of a noble self-control.
As the vigilant guardian of the East, it is her task
to forbid any encroachment by a barbaric power ;
but as the author of European civilization in the
Orient she should never permit a revulsion, in her
associate nations or in herself, against that civiliza-
tion, which is the life of humanity. In the midst
of the future glories that await her, she must never
forget that her present glory is due to the civiliza-
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 121
tion which she received from the West ; that if her
geographical situation is Oriental, her actual affinities
are with the West, and that a nation is made of
spirit and not of flesh."
Three weeks ago M. Uchimura was hostile to
the war. He regarded the Russians as Mongol
brothers. To-day he differentiates and distinguishes
the living elements of the struggle, but his generous
spirituality remains the same.
2$th March. The extreme apprehension of the
first month has almost disappeared. One news-
paper gives the name of hysterics to the people
who sacrifice their family treasures to the cause
and who live in an ascetic frugality. The most
ardent patriots have no longer so combative an air,
nor do they seem keyed up to so keen an anxiety.
Little by little the music of the guitars sounds less
muffled.
It is remarkable that the single uncertainty ap-
parent in Japan since the outbreak of the war has
to do with the question of finance. The eventuality
of defeat has never been mentioned and it seems
never to have suggested itself to the majority of the
Japanese. It is because of the universal certitude
of victory that the country seems so perfectly
united.
One of the two principal factions, the Seiya-Kai or
constitutional party, announced that it could not
reconcile itself with the Cabinet, whose interior
and foreign policy and whose absolutist tendencies
it condemned ; but that in the name of the un-
animity of the nation it would not force any active
opposition. The second party, the Shimpoto or
the progressive group, declared its position on the
same basis. The parliamentary sessions, which began
122 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
five days ago, have thus been exempt from discus-
sion and occupied almost entirely by votes of
approbation.
The perfection of this discipline has been achieved,
it is true, by mutual concessions. The opening of
the Chambers was preceded by a series of confer-
ences between the members of the Cabinet and the
party leaders, and there were sharp debates before
a compromise was reached. The Cabinet was
forced to forego several features of its programme.
It was able to impose the monopoly on tobacco,
but the monopoly on salt a vexatious tax which
produced little revenue was rejected. The great
tobacco dealers defended their case hotly ; the
press has carried on an enthusiastic campaign in
their favour, and they have succeeded in augment-
ing the indemnity accorded to them. The agri-
culturalists have forced a reduction in the proposed
increase of the land tax ; the silk manufacturers
have managed to evade a new tax on silk. At the
cost of great effort the party leaders have obtained
a ruling from the government that extraordinary
taxes shall not be conserved for more than a year
after the war ; but it was only on the night of the
2Oth of March, after the solemn opening of Parlia-
ment by the Emperor, that definite accord was
established on all these points.
With such prearrangements the official sessions,
which are short meetings of an hour before a selected
public, have reflected the " unanimity of the nation."
The Ministers read academic discourses and con-
gratulations were sent to the fleet. The various
articles of the budget were arbitrarily voted ; and,
to crown the patriotic enthusiasm, a deputy accused
one o* his colleagues of having sold himself to
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 123
Russia. No serious accusation could be furnished
against the pretended spy, but such is the mental
sensibility of public assemblies in war time that he
was immediately proscribed, with imprecations.
2tyh March. Lieutenant Hirose, who tried to
block the entrance to Port Arthur, was to come
here to give, concerning his exploit, a lecture
which now will never take place. He renewed his
attempt and was killed. The papers publish his
biography and cite him as a national hero. It
appears that he was a lover of art and spoke English,
French and Russian. In this cultured man it is
surprising to find a certain mystical veneration of
monarchy. At an official ceremony the Empress
once shook hands with him, in the Occidental
fashion ; and he preserved the gloves he had worn
and wished to die, as he said, wearing them.
$ist March. .Japanese officials and American
residents here have celebrated the fiftieth anni-
versary of the landing from American ships on the
Japanese coast, an event which determined the
advent of Western civilization. Imposing speeches
have been made on the subject. One of the
deputies, M. Shimada, declared in the heat of
his ardour that Japan had definitely adopted the
Anglo-Saxon type of civilization, characterized by
the love of liberty, equality and progress. Count
Okuma, who is more attached to the old Japan,
analysed in a subtle speech the proportionate in-
fluences of the interaction of American ideas. He
defended the policy of a closed door, established by
Seyasu at a time when Europe ceased her religious
wars only long enough to dismember herself in the
Thirty Years' War. " This policy assured to Japan
a peace of more than two centuries, in the security
124 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
of which there developed a renascence of the literary
art, a progressive commercial growth, and a marvel-
lous increase of public prosperity." He recalled
the fact that long before the arrival of Commodore
Perry, medicine, botany, astronomy and other
branches of Western science had been introduced
by the Dutch of Nagasaki. From the beginning
to the end of his speech he combated the idea that
a mystical stroke by a magic wand had been given
to Japan by the West.
Since this legend has become common property
in its misapprehension and will be repeated to the
point of satiety during the present war, it is well
to recollect how much exaggeration it contains.
In 1854 J a P an was inferior, in general culture, to
no European country; it was superior to most of
them. At this time Europe had the advantage
only in a certain number of practical inventions,
made in the previous thirty years, and in the fact
that some nations had established constitutional
government. Japan had her first railway in 1874;
France had had hers thirty-seven years earlier. The
difference is scarcely a formidable one ; and if the
new method of transportation seemed strange to
Japan, it was no less so to the France of Louis-
Philippe. The Japanese government was made
constitutional in 1889; this can hardly be called
an excessive delay in progress, as compared with
that of other nations ; and the country was not
less prepared for this form of administration than
the France of Louis XV or the Austria of Metter-
nich. In a word, Japan, with her civilization equal
to, and of older origin than, European civilization,
consistently ignored Europe as long as she con-
sidered that Europe had nothing important to
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 125
teach her. She adopted European innovations
almost as soon as they appeared. This does not
seem extraordinary. The new Japan and the old
are not in a more marked opposition than the new
and old phases of any given European country.
Osaka, 2nd April. The castle of Osaka is re-
markable for its mass. It is noteworthy that while
most things in Japan are small and on a small
scale, when they are large they reach the pro-
portions of the gigantic. An entire quarter of the
town is contained in the first enclosure. The
massive walls, with their deep projecting angles,
recall the fever of enthusiasm for such construction
which beset the Japanese when they had learned
from the Portuguese the art of building fortresses.
Stone buildings were then a complete innovation to
them. Yet this colossal citadel was raised in two
years one wonders how.
The scale of the castle evokes the people who
lived in it and the master mind which ordered its
construction. In the sixteenth century the nation
was energetic, adventurous, brutal, rich in blood
and muscle, worthy of the praise of Stendhal or
of Taine. From Osaka there set out the great
expedition to invade Corea, the single one made
by the Japanese before 1894 outside of their own
territory. Three hundred thousand men were
launched in the adventure, as many, it may be, as
will be involved in this Russo-Japanese war. There
was no real motive for the invasion. Neither
Corea nor China threatened Hideyoshi. The war
was a direct consequence of the acquisition of new
armaments, and was necessitated by the frenzied
prodigality of the times. Each New Year's Day
the daimyo were required to transport to Osaka
126 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
mounds of gold, and Hideyoshi, on his part, main-
tained the fidelity of his followers only by a cease-
less distribution of fiefs and of goods. " Their
desire for gain was limitless," says a Japanese his-
torian, " but the power to satisfy it was circum-
scribed by the size of the country. Thus, Hide-
yoshi was forced to award to his generals recom-
penses to be conquered in foreign lands." The
Japanese conquistadores flung themselves upon the
peninsula at the time when the pillaging soldiers of
Spain were sacking all of their known world. But
they were confronted by what to-day the Russians
supremely lack by an admiral of genius. The
Corean admiral invented to combat them those
famous tortoise-like boats, covered with iron plates
and able to advance from either end, which were
the first armoured ships. He succeeded in cutting
the communications of the would-be conquerors ;
and the expedition to Corea terminated like Bona-
parte's expedition to Egypt.
To-day the enormous fortress is again sending
forth soldiers for the conquest of the continent.
The very stir of the horses in their stalls sounds as
if they were restless to be off and across Siberia.
The same nervous energy runs throughout the
men, and one feels that its inspiration comes from
that old land of carnage, Europe.
yd April. The festival of the apotheosis of the
first Emperor, the founder of Japan. To-night a
Russian boat was burnt in effigy. From the window
of my inn I could see the rapid passage of lanterns,
as fleeting as the sound of guitars, on the black
water. They are the geisha boats, and each lantern
cast on the water a bar of tremulous gold. When
the fire of the supposed Russian ship burst forth,
JAPANESE PATRIOTISM 127
all the river flamed into light and on the other
bank a great shout rose from a vast invisible crowd.
jtb-Sth April. One can go from Osaka to
Hiroshima by water through the Japanese archi-
pelago ; the boat drops down the river, between
the hedges of high caravels, and then stops, one by
one, at every little port. The inner sea of Japan
is like our Mediterranean set in a garden. Even
at night one traces the wonders and surprises of
the coast and its beauty penetrates one's sleep.
At dawn new islands emerge in the light, some
leafy and some arid. The morning mist suspends
the mountains in the sky, as they appear in the
kakemono. Little by little each village, each beach,
and each watering-place grows precise in detail and
the extravagant lines of the twisted pines dis-
sociate themselves from the grey rocks. At every
loveliest point there is a temple. Here and there
rises from the sea a flowery cluster of trees, clinging
to a frail islet of sand ; and we floated past the
dreaming fishing-boats where entire families spend
their lives, crouched about a tiny fire.
At one place the sea narrows to the dimensions
of a wide river and one can see the tomb of that
Kiyomori who, in the twelfth century, was tyrant
of the archipelago. The incessant warfare between
the pirates of these islands once created here a
great naval power, which was the rival of the feudal
power established in the north in the plain of
Kamalura. Sailors fought against archers and Taira
against Minamoto. The victory was won by the
North ; but to-day the people of the South have
their advantage again and fill almost all the high
grades of the navy and the army.
April. Everything has united, in the last
128 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
two months, to deepen the profound impression
of that upheaval which attends the commencement
of a conflict. War seizes a people as a passion
seizes a man : both experiences are of a basic force
before which everything else is effaced. Sacrifice,
suffering and death exact no cost and life has no
intrinsic price apart from the momentous emotion.
The circumstances are always regarded as unique
and unparalleled ; yet the individual is only one
more man touched by the eternal genius of life,
and the nation is, with equal completeness, in the
hands of the god of destruction, the irresistible
Siva.
Those actively engaged in a war can never explain
its causes. At the root of these is an instinct not
of hate but of pride. The sonorous old word glory
is still the same motive of combats ; and, when a
people fling themselves into carnage, it is above
all because of their idea of this idealism. In this
war almost all the Japanese believe themselves bent
on the ruin of Russia ; only a few of them know
that what they hope to conquer is her esteem.
CONFUCIUS
CONFUCIUS
E had left the train which, in recent
years, has run from Tsinan-fou to
Nankin, through the most ancient
China ; the holy mountain of T'ai-
chan, at the base of which we had
crept, was gone from the horizon.
In the vast plain the shimmering
harvest was ripening in the July sun ; its golden
riches, swollen by the last rain, seemed, in their dry
brilliancy, to be already thirsting for the next.
We took our places in the Chinese cart, one of
us bent to suffocation beneath the dark canopy, the
other half protected by the awning stretched above
the horse. The wheels slipped into ruts older than
time, and with its accustomed lurch the cart swung
into the long slow movement of the horse and the
driver who walked beside him.
We found ourselves in the immeasurably ancient
district of Lou, two hours' journey from the juris-
diction of K'iu-feou, the city where Confucius was
for more than thirty years a functionary, which he
quitted, dissatisfied with the trend of public action,
to travel for fourteen years in neighbouring countries,
to which he returned to die and where he has his
tomb. In honour of this tomb there exists the
132 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
temple which China, in an increasing ardour of
faith, has enlarged from age to age. One is per-
petually dumb before the enigma of this man whose
doctrine has united a vaster multitude of faithful
than that of any god and who has to-day more
temples than Buddha or than Allah. What genius
is enclosed in this commandment founded solely
upon reason, and that modest form of reason which
is the operation of good sense ? It is an incredible
departure from the usual premises to have to recog-
nize that this kind of practical wisdom can work
as great prodigies as faith ; that a people can cease-
lessly, from generation to generation, honour reason
rather than a divinity. The admission is a difficult
one for the Occidental soul still saturated with
mysticism.
Our cart made its slow way between the hedges
of slim reeds which waved above it their plumed
crests, bursting with grain. This is a kind of
millet, which provides the Chinese peasant with
the mats for his house and with a broth for him-
self and his live-stock. When the high interlaced
walls opened, long fields of flax and wheat stretched
beyond ; farther still a vast multitude of swollen
gourds crept across the ground. The cart wheels
dropped into sand, and suddenly a river cut the
plain in two. Our driver stripped himself to his
waist and we passed over a shallow spot, with the
water murmuring about the axles.
One has the sense that these customs have altered
but little since the beginning of the world. Our
cart is like that of the most primitive scripture, with
its body balanced on long axles which protrude fan-
tastically beyond the wheels. Confucius made his
journeys in such a vehicle. The width between the
CONFUCIUS 133
wheels, and the consequent width of the ruts in the
road, is to-day, as it was in his time, peculiar to each
region ; so particularly and so invariably that a
definition of this measurement is also a definition
of the province from which a man hails.
Our driver showed us in the distance a long wall,
with innumerable trees beyond it. This is the
tomb, or rather, as they term it, the " forest " of
Confucius. Half an hour later we had entered the
city.
There is nothing to recall to one either a Mecca
or a Jerusalem ; no shops with religious objects, no
wares for tourists, and no hostel for the reception
of pilgrims. It was with difficulty that we found
a bookseller who had a description of the temple,
and this he refused to sell because he did not want
our silver piastres and we had not enough sous.
We engaged our lodging in the inn, which is neither
better nor larger than those in the usual villages.
They gave us two rooms, whose floors were of
trodden earth ; on the wall was a portrait of the
Sage and some of his inscriptions. Our fellow-
lodgers were some carters, a few merchants and
two actresses from Tsinan-fou, who had been driven
out as the result of brawls.
Close by some triumphant arches, a vast enclosure
and monumental gates announce the presence of a
great temple. This is the sacred edifice of Yen-tseu,
the favourite disciple ; the temple of Confucius is
farther off ; in itself it occupies half of the city and
a street runs through its precincts. As one ap-
proaches it, one passes under a belfry, on the
summit of which an enormous drum, framed in a
lovely kiosk, strikes the hour, twice each day. The
" forest " is still distant, beyond the walls.
134 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
The city is filled with a curious peace. In spite
of the filthy mud of its streets, the sordidness of
its hovels and its clamorous troops of naked children,
it has an air of serenity and quietude. From the
high ramparts one's eye rests on the long placid
flow of harvests. In every public square there is a
small stone mill, and the people pass in turn, to
grind their millet and their wheat. Tiny cages
holding grasshoppers hang before the shops ; and
each time the carts pass the insects supplement the
shrill creak of the wheels with a still shriller cry.
The palace of the governor is guarded by soldiers
with long braids, whose air is scarcely martial ; its
dignity is further signalized by its lovely beams of
blue and gold. The men seem relaxed and without
muscle, and have a touch of effeminacy. The
women sway on their tortured feet, which give
them the air of wounded hinds ; but the faces of
many of them have a fine purity and an- expression
of deep sweetness.
Like all Chinese cities, this malodorous one exhales
the very perfume of literature. Not a house and not
a door is without a literary inscription. Ordinarily
this takes the form of the expression of a good wish,
to which is given a metaphorical or poetic turn.
Sometimes it is a delicate phrase or a classic allusion
for the relish of a subtle intelligence. The very
shop signs are composed to flatter the perspicacity
of the literarily minded.
A knot of people, as we approached, proved to
be listening to a blind man. He held a kind of
long tube, covered with a serpent skin and sealed
with another tightly drawn skin, for resonance ; and
while he struck this, at regular intervals, he recited
an old epic plaint. It was touching to see the
CONFUCIUS 135
respect with which he was surrounded and the
frequent request for a repetition of the loveliest
passages. Elsewhere some people were seated or
standing about a public scribe who, with his spec-
tacles on his nose, was reading a romance for which
he furnished the mimicry, the variations of intona-
tion and a running commentary. As his chapters
ended, those who were pleased with his performance
gave him one or two coins.
This rustic city is again like other Chinese cities
in that it is haunted by genii. Everywhere a sense
of their presence is evident ; and, what is more,
everything indicates that most of them are impor-
tunate. In front of or behind the apertures of each
house a screen is placed to prevent them from
entering. The terrifying images of the Taoist gods
whom the genii most fear are pasted against the
doors ; and on the roof -trees are placed porcelain
statuettes of those animals whose influence is
exorcising dogs and lions, fish and unicorns, repre-
sented in the most hostile postures. As one finds
everywhere in China, the summit of each roof is
carefully slanted upwards. There have been various
reasons offered for this slant, which is so typical
and so strange ; it has been suggested that it is a
surviving form of the construction of the tents of
nomadic ancestors ; but investigation has established
the fact that the most ancient Chinese houses have
roofs which drop uniformly. The roof which is
bent upwards appears at the same time as the cult
of Taoist exorcisms. It is, therefore, probable that
this architectural movement was an attempt to
facilitate the flight of genii from the house and to
prevent them from striking against the roof itself
and falling.
136 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
If Confucius returned to-day, he would find the
morality of his city little changed. His fellow-
citizens still profess two of his most rooted doctrines
a taste for literature and a careful avoidance of
supernatural beings.
The temple of Confucius is an entire city, or rather
a vast palace, with large and small apartments, high
ceremonial chambers, light kiosks, parks, courts,
galleries, common-rooms and dependencies. The
spirit of Confucius has a princely lodging, sur-
rounded by his four associates, the twelve great
philosophers who followed him and his seventy-two
principal disciples. In addition to his spiritual
family, his terrestrial relatives are given a place near
him. One palace is reserved for his wife, one for
his father, another for his mother, and a fourth for
his ancestors. Wide parks open out through
triumphal arches and beyond magnificent mono-
liths which have been erected by his worshippers.
Space has not been spared ; there is everywhere
evidenced the sense that this immense monument,
which represents the unity and the moral con-
tinuity of China, should be expressive of the
grandeur of that unity and the majesty of that
continuity.
In the temple-palace itself nothing is mystical ;
nor is anything religious, in the usual sense of the
word. The atmosphere differs totally from that of
a church, a mosque or even of a Buddhist temple.
Everywhere there is testimony to the deference,
respect and veneration which surround the wisdom
of the men who are honoured here ; but at no
CONFUCIUS 137
moment does the freedom of the human spirit
seem bent by the oppressive consciousness of con-
cealed power. There is no reserved area, no
darkened sanctuary, no Holy of holies. Everything
is open, gracious and light. The guardians are
neither priests nor sacristans. If you observe the
laws of natural decorum you may go anywhere and
do whatever pleases you, without the risk of violating
a rule or profaning a sacred precinct. You are
visiting a prince of the mind, who is not a Buddha
and still less a god.
Taken as a whole, it is one of the great monuments
of the world. The height of the vision it conveys
and its architectural beauty come from its plan and
its proportion. Spaces and masses, parks and build-
ings, supplement each other and subordinate them-
selves harmoniously to the principal edifice, which
dominates them without dwarfing them. Logic,
rhythm and balance are everywhere ; reason is
satisfied before the eye is satisfied. Each court has
its particularities of dimension ; each pavilion has
an original form ; but the pervasive order and
symmetry hold them in the relation to which they
are proportionately suited. The great gates through
which one successively passes are placed at calculated
distances, the terrace on which is raised the main
pavilion is neither too high nor too low, and a
harmony flows throughout all the detail. Once
there is established in one's mind the sense of this
sureness and strength and of grave balance, one is
prepared to savour the comparative relation between
a stela and the pavilion which covers it, between
the pavilion and the court which surrounds it,
between one of the columns and the roof which it
supports ; and from the outer park to the innermost,
138 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
one sees a thousand repetitions of the thuya, a tree
with the sombreness and rigidity of the cypress,
which in its architectural lines and its V-shaped
branches adds to the classic regularity of the whole.
This regularity would border on severity if the
men who designed it had not foreseen the admirable
collaboration of nature. The essentially Chinese
negligence of the guardians of the temple has added
to the art of its architects. Almost without excep-
tion the parks have been overrun not only by weeds
but by a thick jungle ; a jungle alive with perfumes
and noises, dense with every kind of bush and
plant, where partridges scuttle to and fro and
grasshoppers cry. Only the great paved court
which precedes the central terrace is free from
other invasion than that of mosses and lichens.
The alignment of the thuyas has been just enough
broken ; and the effect is marvellous. Against the
clear deep green of the jungle, the two beautiful
colours used by the architects the imperial yellow
of the lacquered roofs and the vermilion of the
walls spring into vigorous contrast ; and in the
surrounding frame of these vital colours, which are
everywhere present, all the other colours glow with
life and harmony. The grey of the thuyas takes
on the delicacies of a softened silver ; the poly-
chromy of the under roofs a blue symphony touched
with green and gold becomes a festival of beauty.
The smallest object which passes in the distance, the
blue of a cotton drapery, the pallor of flesh or the
rose of a silk robe, surprises and enchants the eye.
Once one has felt the organized grandeur of this
Chinese monument, one feels that it rivals the
greatest magnificences of Asia. The unforgettable
temples of Japan have a romantic beauty. They are
CONFUCIUS 139
subordinated to Nature, and they show her in
aspects perpetually new, always moving and always
rare. But they do not unfold themselves into space.
They rather concentrate one's view on a single spot
where the human heart can lift itself in peace. Their
appeal is to feeling, to all feeling, and it is couched
in a magic and persuasive tongue. But none of
them speak the solemn universal language which
one hears here. Indian monuments have the quality
of splendour. Their beauty consists in an infinite
multiplicity, on foundations which are summary
and often poor, of everything which can startle and
stimulate the imagination. Only the Musulman
architecture of India can be compared to this
grandeur of plan and this balance of proportion.
Yet an intrinsic element must always separate these
two. Musulman architecture is equally sublime for
its perfection of taste and for its indigence of
thought. Nothing must distract the spirit of the
worshipper from the pure and simple affirmation
of the existence of Allah ; here, on the contrary,
everything is prepared by minds which are both
selective and wise.
Each part of the temple of Confucius has a
literary signification, and its name is inscribed in
gold on ultramarine, upon a tablet placed so as to
summon the attention. Every one of these names,
as well as the order of their precedence, has been
carefully chosen. The spirit is led, by a gradation
of allusions and of memories, to the summit of the
highest thoughts ; and the temple has thus not
only the perfection of arrangement, but is also a
visual rule of life, in which the preface precedes
the development of subject and is followed by the
peroration.
140 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
As one returns to the temple, day after day, it
acquires a charming familiarity, from the great
drum beneath the belfry to the soldiers on guard,
in their straw hats, who no longer turn their heads
to watch us pass.
Every day we pay our duty to the Perfect One,
whose heavy lips have a delicate smile, behind his
jade pendants, and who seems to greet us with an
infinite wisdom and an infinite beneficence. Then
we wander into the oldest portions of the palace,
where he lived. The eternal thuyas have allowed
a few other better-known trees to penetrate here,
of the same kind, so legend says, as those which
grew in his day. The well which belonged to his
family still holds water from the same source as
that which supplied it before it reflected his face.
An Emperor who came to drink from it composed
a poem which is engraved on a stela, under a tiny
roof, set in the wild grasses.
There is a little wall, built on the site of a
similar wall in which were found inurned some
priceless books, containing the most ancient text
of the master's teaching. But what seems to make
the Sage most present is the sight, just behind the
temple enclosure, of the curved roof of the palace
of Duke K'ong, his lineal descendant and the
present head of the Confucian house. He is a city
magistrate, as all his ancestors have been since that
greatest ancestor who dispensed justice here. The
line of his nobility, which is older by centuries than
almost all other descendance, is established on the
unbroken testimony of Chinese history. China has
CONFUCIUS 141
never suffered a usurpation of this claim. In the
thick foliage a stela covered with moss traces this
genealogical tree of twenty centuries up to the
fourteenth century; beyond this, everything in
China is practically contemporary. The fact of
this unbroken line of functionaries lays an extra-
ordinary touch on one's imagination. To see side
by side the dwellings of the Ancient One and of
his successor, and to shift one's eye from the well
of the one to the palace of the other, is to witness
in material terms the miracle of Chinese perpetuity.
There is an open chamber, a sort of finished
outbuilding, erected on the site of a similar structure
where Confucius had with his son two interviews
whose history has been preserved. One of the
disciples was in constant fear that the master was
not imparting to him all his knowledge. He
therefore asked the son of Confucius if his father
had given him any special wisdom, and received
the following answer : " One day when my father
was alone, and while I was passing quickly and
silently through the room " this was a mark of
respect " he said to me, * Have you read the
Book of Odes ? If you have not read it, you will
not be an accomplished man.' I read it. On
another such occasion he arrested me as I passed
by saying, * Have you read the Book of Rites ? If
not, your virtue will lack a firm foundation.' I
went apart by myself and I read it. This is the
wisdom I have received from my father." The
disciple was overjoyed and said : " I asked for one
answer and I received three. One concerns poetry,
one concerns rites, and the third is that the Sage
gives no secret instruction to his son." If Cicero
could have known this citation of poetry and rites
I 4 2 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
as supremely important, one feels how he would
have felt its charm.
The originality of Confucius lay in the fact that
he gave no new rule, but that he instituted a
school for the practice of the highest virtue. Its
method was of a mutual moral development.
The master corrected his pupils with vigour but
with an equable humour ; at times he was corrected
himself. His weakness was that he was at once too
courteous and too sensitive ; and his followers
blamed him equally for his exaggerated politeness
in calling upon a lady of the oldest of the pro-
fessions and for his exaggerated grief at the death
of his favourite disciple.
He submitted all his acts to the freest criticism.
His thesis was to form man not by doctrine but by
his contact with man. This practice of a practical
virtue so enchanted him that he lost, as he has
said, all need of food, that he forgot all care, and
that he did not feel the advent of age. He and
his followers held contests in the cause of goodness,
in which the effort of each one was to imagine the
most perfect actions ; he expressed his opinion
freely, concerning people and things, events and
ideas, the heroes of the past and the politicians of
the day, and it was difficult to know which trait
in his wisdom to admire most the firmness of his
character, the suppleness of his wit or the generosity
of his heart. As he says of himself : " No know-
ledge is born in me, but I love the past and I have
learned to learn. Am I wise ? I know not. But
whatever it may be to cultivate virtue without
ever experiencing distaste and to teach without ever
knowing lassitude, that I do."
It was in this world of composite beauty, with
CONFUCIUS 143
its colours, its verdure and its silences, that so many
just and profound maxims came from him :
" The wise man does not grieve because men
know him not, but because he knows not men.
" The wise man does not spurn a good word
because it is spoken by the wicked.
" Have I a science ? I have no science ; but
when the humblest man questions me, no matter
what his ignorance, I answer him fully.
" Not to correct an involuntary fault is to commit
a real one.
" It is more difficult to guard oneself from
bitterness in poverty than from arrogance in riches.
" One can carry off a general from the midst of
his army ; one cannot deprive a man of his resolve
to practise virtue.
" That which one knows, to know that one knows
it, that which one knows not, to know that one
knows it not, is the true knowledge."
' Confucius practised this last maxim, the negation
of which has cost humanity so many illusions and
deceptions. Concerning matters of which nothing
is known he made no pronouncements. He avoided
any talk of spirits and of phenomena ; he spoke,
indeed, very little of celestial providence. When
a disciple interrogated him concerning death, his
answer was : " You who know not what is life, how
can you know what is death ? " This abstention
has a rare and touching quality. On the approach
of his end, when the wisdom of most sages weakens,
and when his disciples asked if they should pray to
spirits for him, he refused, despite his love for his
rites and ceremonies, and replied briefly : " My life
is my prayer." Socrates, in his enigmatic sacrifice
of a cock to uEsculapius, was less firm.
144 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
His explanation of his rule excels in its simplicity.
" There are matters which a wise spirit does not
study; but those which he studies, he never quits
until he knows them. There are matters on which
he does not meditate ; but if he meditates, he does
not cease until he has made his discovery. There
are matters concerning which he asks no question ;
but if he questions, he never rests until he has
understood. There are matters which he does not
attempt to differentiate ; but those which he differ-
entiates he never leaves without having seen all their
differences."
His art was to subordinate each thing to its end.
What one perpetually admires in him is his balance,
his fineness and his justice. He detested antithesis
and emphasis, as he distrusted sublimities. The
conduct of life and the conduct of public affairs
were the domain of his operation. If he loved
power it was because he preferred action to specula-
tion. Like a Cicero or a Leibnitz he was most a
philosopher when he had to console himself for not
being a minister. His programme was simply to
apply his mind to public affairs and to deal with
them ceaselessly. He did not consider that to
despise preferment was an absolute testimony of
virtue. " When the State is well governed," he
said, " the wise man will be ashamed to possess
neither honours nor riches." One of his disciples
cited to him with admiration a minister who, when
he was three times raised to power, showed no joy,
and when he was three times stripped of it showed
no regret. The master praised him, but with
reserve, since he considered that indifference towards
the responsibilities of office is not perfection.
CONFUCIUS
'45
A charming portion of the temple is the pavilion
of metal and of silk, which is also the pavilion of
music. No corner of this vast solitude is more
deserted. The tangle of thorns and roots is thick
around it, and it is replete with a thousand scents
and with the cries of a thousand insects. Passing
through the surrounding wilderness of weeds, of
odours and of sounds, one comes upon the long
half-ruined pavilion, whose proportions carry the
universal beauty. Here is preserved if one can
apply the word the collection of musical instru-
ments.
The objects in this collection are broken and
incomplete, and this gives to it the added charm
of surprising lapses and unevennesses. The lutes
have lost their silken cords ; the flutes are gone ; it
must be that they are preserved elsewhere. In the
octaves of sonorous stones or of bells, one or two
notes are missing. But some ancient instruments
of great loveliness remain : a flattened bell which
emits a sound of extreme purity, a resounding stone
cut in the form of a square, the timbre of which
is exquisite, and drums of all sorts. These instru-
ments are used for the celebrations in honour of
Confucius. He himself was passionately fond of
music. He played melodies on the lute and on the
musical stones, and whenever he fell in with good
choristers he delighted to sing with them. In the
country of Ts'i, it is said, he heard songs of such
beauty that for three months he lost his sense of
taste. On his return to his own province his first
care was to restore the cult of music. The masters
146 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
of the art had been scattered ; he gathered them
together and raised to honour again the loveliest
of the old odes ; and his tender respect for the
chief musician who was blind clings always to one's
memory.
His favourite songs were those of a soft beauty,
such as the songs of the Emperor Chouen. The
warrior songs of the Emperor Ou seemed to him
too strident. He detested the music of Tcheng as
at once too sensual and too brilliant. He compared
it to the deep purple which he disliked and which
he regretted to see substituted for the rich red of
his forefathers. There was no separation in his
mind between music and rites ; the latter expressed
the complete and sensible form of duty ; the former
expressed the symbol of duty and represented its
soul. By this he always meant that this spiritual
quality was chiefly carried in music executed in
concert. The attitude of the musician in a concert
resumed, according to his idea, the attitude of the
citizen in his obligation to society. In this con-
summation he affirmed that participation in music
perfected character, and to one of his followers who
mourned the fact that his virtue was not yet
perfect he replied that his lute was not yet per-
fectly tuned. His followers have used this tendency
of his taste to define his relation to the immense
number of his faithful. They compare the reson-
ances of his doctrine to a harmony which per-
petuates itself from century to century. Seen in
this light, he is neither a saviour nor a prophet, a
legislator nor a hero, but the master of a universal
choir.
CONFUCIUS 147
5
After we left the music pavilion we were invited
to visit the School of Rites ; this is the college of
those benevolent officials who, on fete days, direct
the ceremonial. We passed through the wild
gardens, the museums of epigraphy, beneath the
solemnly beautiful doors and the triumphal arches,
and at. the other end of the immense temple we
came upon a small silent court. A great thuya has
dropped towards earth there, to grow horizontally,
and no one has disturbed it. On three sides there
open out three very simple chambers, with their
doors thrown wide. We were offered a stool and
a bowl of tea, and we found ourselves surrounded
by some thirty youths and men.
They are a hundred in all, under the direction
of four monitors, and they meet here to rehearse
the ceremonials. Their service in the temple is
entirely voluntary and gratuitous ; they receive no
recompense of any sort and pay for their own food.
One cannot call them priests ; their mission is not
divine and they are not part of a sacred hierarchy.
When an old monitor, who was trying to explain
their functions to us, alluded to himself as a pro-
fessor, they interrupted him gaily to ask if he was
trying to pass them off as scholars. They com-
pletely lack the ecclesiastical tinge, that indescrib-
able mixture of insinuation and reserve which the
service of any doctrine so frequently brings. But
their office is far more than figurative. They are
the human means for the conservation of a tradition
which is extremely ancient and extremely minute ;
148 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
and one has the sense that if they freely apply
themselves, with so exact a devotion, to the study
of these ceremonies, the ceremonies themselves must
be beautiful.
As we followed the rehearsal which they were
good enough to give us of the principal of these
rituals, the one which takes place each year in the
name of the State, one realized this beauty and the
high qualities of both its age and its simplicity.
An important dignitary is the chief functionary,
with sixty-two assistants. He makes his entry to
music ; and in the religious silence which succeeds
this he approaches the statue before which the
offerings are made. At this moment the bells
commence their melody. The choirs and the
stringed instruments follow them, and the resonant
stones terminate and hold the sound until the
second strophe. There is thus executed, in cadence,
a very slow hymn. It consists of six strophes which
correspond to six periods of the ceremony. Each
strophe is made up of eight verses and each verse
of four majestic monosyllables, carried by four full
notes. The hymn is not only sung ; it is traced,
as it were, on the ground by two groups of dancers
who hold long pens and short flutes and who
follow, by their movements, the caligraphic character
of each syllable as it is sung, and thus embellish the
spiritual idea.
One does not feel that this ceremony corresponds
to an effusion of soul. It rather expresses, by its
simultaneous appeal to the eye and the ear, the
rite which is being fulfilled and the sentiment
which it should awaken. The first offering is that
of wine and of fruits, the hymn for which flows
somewhat as follows :
CONFUCIUS 149
My spirit rests in the clarity of virtue.
Jade breaks the long echoes of metal.
Among the living none could approach him.
His word has swept over the stars.
Here are the vases aged a thousand years.
Each year, on the sacred days,
The limpid wine flows into them,
Its perfume rises to the sky.
This ritual and this cult evoke in the French
mind a strange memory of those ceremonies of the
Revolution which were prescribed by David, and
of which Marie-Joseph Chenier was the poet and
Michelet the musician. Seen from the temple of
Confucius, there is a thread of logic in them.
What they lacked was a past of a thousand years.
The cult of which Auguste Gomte dreamed has
been dreamed in China, and when we honour
Michelet or Rousseau at the Pantheon, we are to
some extent participating in one of those feasts of
reason which are so essentially Confucian. In the
West the more laic rites are still in demand, and
the worship of reason and of humanity is still
unformed. It exists, however, and since any
assemblage of men turns to ritual and ceremonial
one can imagine that, if religions weaken, it will
grow and that in a few centuries the celebrations
at the Pantheon might have their definite form,
each part of which would testify to a sensibility
and a tradition and to collective emotions.
Since the dawn of history China has trained
herself to honour reason. We may teach her the
application of it, as we teach her a hundred thousand
inventions and a thousand forms of science. What
we can learn from her is a lesson of respect. She
can prove to us that this cult is neither difficult
150 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
nor of precarious tenure, and that no faith which
deals entirely with the supernatural has yet equalled
it in its extension or in its longevity.
The temple of Yen-tseu is also a palace, with
special dwellings for the disciple and for the various
members of his family, with verdant parks and walls
of vermilion, with lacquered roofs and blue doors,
and a whole aligned army of thuyas. But the
surroundings of the follower have a more intimate
air than the surroundings of the Sage.
It was Yen whom Confucius most loved and of
whom he said : " Yen hears me in silence through-
out the day, as if he had no mind to object or to
question. But when he has gone from me I see
all my teaching sanctified in his conduct " ; and it
was Yen who wrote : " The more I study the
doctrine of the master, the higher I find it. I see
it before me, and suddenly it is behind me. If I
wish to cease my progress in it, I am unable to ;
and after I have spent all my strength, there is
always something new in front of me, like an
inaccessible mountain."
When Yen died, in his thirty-second year, the
grief of Confucius was so extreme that he said that
heaven had taken his life and annihilated him. The
disciple had come of a very poor family, and,
faithful to his love of the fitting, Confucius wished
for him a simple funeral such as he had had for
his own son. The other followers disobeyed and
he was interred with great splendour. Their love
for him became part of their faith, and when the
Sage spoke of him it was with that depth of feeling,
CONFUCIUS 151
at once passionate and extravagant, which only the
heart inspires.
To look at the gentle young face of the young
disciple brings one nearer to his master and lends
an intimacy to the respect he evokes. Two qualities
are eminent in Confucius his intellectual method
and his social conception ; but there is a third, the
freshness of his sensibility. It is recorded that when
he found himself eating beside a man who was
dejected at the loss of a near relative, the infection
of grief so overcame him that he himself could
scarcely eat ; and when he went to weep for one
of his own dead, his sorrow prevented him from
singing throughout the entire day.
This spontaneity and this sincerity of feeling
explain what he has said concerning ritual. In his
view, it was not an insignificant gesture or a lifeless
form. He penetrated the sense of ceremonial and
infused it with a soul. Mourning was to him the
sensible form of bereavement. He exemplified in
himself the profound grief of old races a profundity
which too often escapes us in our day. His rites
were the beautiful vessels in which he enclosed, for
preservation and transmission, that most subtle and
precious of essences sentiment. Those ancient
usages which he wished to retain were not such as
claimed the adherence of a temporary fashion, but
those which preserved and codified a deep feel-
ing, like saluting at the foot of a stairway, rising
before the blind and before persons in sorrow, and
changing nothing in the house of one's dead parents
for the immediate years after their death. In a
case where there was a choice in the matter of
behaviour, a sureness of instinct always indicated
to him the more noble and the more exquisite.
152 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
Confucius would never hear of the fact that
virtue was in itself enough without politeness. He
viewed them as inseparable ; he saw courtesies as
coming from the heart, and that when they were
practised with all the heart a moral elevation
ensued.
His own instinct was distinctly sociable. There
was always a light raillery in his opinion of those
fierce sages who, to escape the spectacle of human
injustice, fled to the mountains and the deserts and
sought the society of animals. For his part, he
regarded his fellows with np such rigour and he
could imagine no disillusion which would tempt
him to renounce the charm of human intercourse.
Once when his courage was at a low ebb he
exclaimed : " If I fled to a raft in the midst of
the sea, who would follow me ? Yen, I suppose."
And when he saw Yen's joy at this comment he
added charmingly : " Yen is more courageous than
I, but he needs a little cleverness."
He had in the largest sense that greatest quality,
humanity. Long before the Stoics he taught charity
to one's kind, and far in advance of the Christians
he humanized all its elements. It was he who first
said : " Do as you would be done by ; do unto
others as you would that they should do unto you ;
love thy neighbour as thyself." And the immor-
tality of these words assures him, in the world at
large, the rank which China has given him.
7
We spent our last morning in a visit to the tomb
of Confucius.
In formef days it stood at the gates of the city ;
CONFUCIUS 153
but K'iu-feou has expanded disproportionately in
another direction, and now the lengthy walk of old
trees which leads one to it passes out of the gates
and through monotonous fields. The sudden appa-
rition, across the path, of a triumphal arch interrupts
one's reverie. The trees grow more and more
closely until they are contracted between two walls
of vermilion ; a little farther and one passes through
a door into the " forest."
It is a strange spot, overrun by the wildest
nature, so tangled and so isolated that it would
seem part of the primeval world if the regularity
of the cypresses did not give warning that it was
the approach to a tomb. A stream flows amongst
the bushes ; there is no monument visible, but
only an altar for the ritual offerings. The wide
walk is bordered with sculptured stones which date
from the second century of our era. First there
are two octagonal columns, then two pairs of
fantastic animals, and finally the statues of two
functionaries, one of the military class, carrying his
long sabre, the other of the civilian, with his ivory
tablets ready to note the orders of the prince.
Beyond the altar the walk continues ; it passes on
the left the tomb of the grandson of Confucius,
Tseu-sen, the second of the Associates and the
author of one of the four Confucian books. There
is another stone to the right, commemorating the
son of Confucius. The path turns, and a little
farther, in front of a green mound, in the completest
solitude, stands a final stela.
The three tiny vessels of bronze placed before it
are the sole marks of its sanctity; but one has the
sense that the grandeur of space and silence is
alone equal to the grandeur of this dead. The
154 JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS
forest about exhales its rumours and its odours, and
the cypresses stand with the languor of grief.
Scattered amongst the undergrowth are little seats
which commemorate the fact that Emperors have
come here to meditate.
One's impression, as one confronts the spot, has
all the quality of a vision. The universality of this
teaching raises the wonder, in one's mind, whether
the future may not see a universal temple ; whether,
in a few centuries and in this scale of measurement
what do centuries count ? the three great conti-
nents may not unite to raise an edifice twice as
vast as the one we have just left, and in which the
Greek perfection shall be combined with the Chinese
amplitude a building as final in its beauty as the
Parthenon and as majestic in its spaces as the plan
of Peking.
Confucius would there be venerated side by side
with that other sage who, on the other side of the
world and at a date almost as early as his own,
taught the subtle use of reason ; he and Socrates,
the ceremonious Chinese and the ironic Greek,
would be regarded as the founders of this moral
science, as those first to recognize the warmth of
charity and the clear flame of reason, and to fulfil
their part as spiritual fathers of the State.
With these two would be honoured their asso-
ciates in thought. Confucius would have his four
companions, his twelve philosophers and his seventy-
two disciples ; Socrates would have beside him
memorials to Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle and
Epicurus. It would be difficult to extend to the
West the list of those whose accomplishment was
to be commemorated, since there reason has been
too long neglected ; but Descartes would be placed
CONFUCIUS 155
beside Seneca, Spinoza would follow them, and
there would be noted Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
Kant, Goethe and Auguste Comte.
To the Orient and to the Occident, the uniting
of these names would certify the universality of
reason ; and, whether this monument existed in
actuality or in the cult of a common veneration, it
would mean a recognition of our common thought,
of its perpetual struggle towards clarity and of the
peace of its ultimate achievement.
Confucius has said that the way to honour the
dead was to keep them present in one's mind. His
own presence is so perpetuated that it conquers
those who come here as curious travellers and lays
upon them the vivid touch of his philosophy. The
quiet of good judgment has never before appeared
so exquisite and so intimate. Before this tomb the
future of the more mystic religions seems less assured.
What they teach is also taught here, and taught
both more efficaciously and simply. It is in this
age-long silence that one learns something of the
necessity to free one's mind from the chimerical,
to maintain in the face of the unknown a dis-
passionate and fearless attitude, and to live in the
society of one's fellow-men with an incorruptible
measure and harmony.
THE END
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