THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Gift of Neil C. Needham Exotics and Retrospectives EXOTICS AND RETROSPECTIVES . BY LAFCADIO HEARN LECTURER ON ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY. TOKYO AUTHOR OF "OUT OF THE EAST." "GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN,"&e. BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1914 Copyright, 1898 BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND Ca AUrifhts rtttrvid 8. Jt r ABKHILL & Co., BOSTON, U.S.A. College Library PS AL but one of the papers composing this volume appear for the first time. The little essays, or rather fantasies, forming the second part of the book, deal with experiences in two hemispheres ; but their general title should explain why they have been arranged independ ently of that fact. To any really scientific im agination, the curious analogy existing between certain teachings of evolutional psychology and certain teachings of Eastern faith, particularly the Buddhist doctrine that all sense-life is Karma, and all substance only the phenomenal result of acts and thoughts, might have suggested some thing much more significant than my cluster of Retrospectives. These are offered merely as in- timations of a truth incomparably less difficult to recognize than to define. L.H. TOKYO, JAPAN, February 75, 1898. 882978 Contents EXOTICS: PAGE I. FUJI-NO-YAMA 3 II. INSECT-MUSICIANS 39 III. A QUESTION IN THE ZEN TEXTS 83 IV. THE LITERATURE OF THE DEAD 95 V. FROGS 157 VI. OF MOON-DESIRE 175 RETROSPECTIVES: I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS 187 II. BEAUTY is MEMORY 199 III. SADNESS IN BEAUTY 211 IV. PARFUM DE JEUNESSE 221 V. AZURE PSYCHOLOGY 227 VI. A SERENADE 241 VII. A RED SUNSET 251 VIII. FRISSON 263 IX. VESPERTINA COGNITIO 275 X. THE ETERNAL HAUNTER 293 List of Illustrations Full Page PAGB INSECT CAGES 51 1. A Form of Insect Cage. 2. Cage for Large Musical Insects. 3. Cage for Small Musical Insects. GATE OF KOBUDERA 97 TOMB IN KOBUDERA, showing Sotoba 102 TOMB IN KOBUDERA, sculptured with image of Bodhi- sattva Mahasthama 137 Illustrations in the Text KANETATAKI (" The Bell-Ringer "), natural size . . . 57 MATSUMUSHI, slightly enlarged 60 SUZUMUSHI, slightly enlarged 63 UMAOI, natural size 67 KIRIGIRISU, natural size 68 KUSA-HIBARI, natural size 69 YAMATO-SUZU ("Little-Bell of Yamato "), natural size 69 KIN-HIBARI, natural size 70 KURO-HIBARI, natural size 70 EMMA-KOROGI, natural size 71 EMMA-KOROGI 72 KUTSUWAMUSHI, natural size 73 KANTAN, natural size 75 Exotics " Even the worst tea Is sweet when first made from the new leaf." Japanese proverb. Hxotics and Retrospectives Fuji-no-Yama Kite mire"ba, Sahodo made nashi, Fuji no Yama ! Seen on close approach, the mountain of Fuji does not come up to expectation. Japanese proverbial philosophy. THE most beautiful sight in Japan, and cer tainly one of the most beautiful in the world, is the distant apparition of Fuji on cloudless days, more especially days of spring and autumn, when the greater part of the peak is covered with late or with early snows. You can seldom distinguish the snowless base, which remains the same color as the sky : you perceive only the white cone seeming to hang in heaven ; and the Japanese comparison of its shape to an inverted half -open fan is made wonderfully exact by the fine streaks that spread downward from the notched top, like shadows of fan-ribs. Even 4 Exotics and Retrospectives lighter than a fan the vision appears, rather the ghost or dream of a fan ; yet the material reality a hundred miles away is grandiose among the mountains of the globe. Rising to a height of nearly 12,500 feet, Fuji is visible from thirteen provinces of the Empire. Nevertheless it is one of the easiest of lofty mountains to climb ; and for a thousand years it has been scaled every summer by multitudes of pilgrims. For it is not only a sacred mountain, but the most sacred mountain of Japan, the holiest eminence of the land that is called Divine, the Supreme Altar of the Sun ; and to ascend it at least once in a life -time is the duty of all who reverence the ancient gods. So from every district of the Empire pilgrims annually wend their way to Fuji ; and in nearly all the provinces there are pilgrim-societies Fuji-Ko, organized for the purpose of aiding those desiring to visit the sacred peak. If this act of faith cannot be per formed by everybody in person, it can at least be performed by proxy. Any hamlet, however remote, can occasionally send one representative to pray before the shrine of the divinity of Fuji, and to salute the rising sun from that sublime eminence. Thus a single company of Fuji- Fuji-no-Yama !> pilgrims may be composed of men from a hun dred different settlements. By both of the national religions Fuji is held in reverence. The Shinto deity of Fuji is the beau tiful goddess Ko-no-hana-saku-ya-hime, she who brought forth her children in fire without pain, and whose name signifies " Radiant-bloom- ing-as-the-flowers-of -the -trees," or, according to some commentators, " Causing-the-flowers-to- blossom-brightly." On the summit is her temple ; and in ancient books it is recorded that mortal eyes have beheld her hovering, like a luminous cloud, above the verge of the crater. Her viewless servants watch and wait by the precipices to hurl down whomsoever presumes to approach her shrine with unpurified heart. . . . Buddhism loves the grand peak because its form is like the white bud of the Sacred Flower, and because the eight cusps of its top, like the eight petals of the Lotos, symbolize the Eight Intelligences of Perception, Purpose, Speech, Conduct, Living, Effort, Mindfulness, and Con templation. But the legends and traditions about Fuji, the stories of its rising out of the earth in a single night, of the shower of pierced -jewels once 6 Exotics and Retrospectives flung down from it, of the first temple built upon its summit eleven hundred years ago, of the Luminous Maiden that lured to the crater an Emperor who was never seen afterward, but is still worshipped at a little shrine erected on the place of his vanishing, of the sand that daily rolled down by pilgrim feet nightly reascends to its former position, have not all these things been written in books ? There is really very little left for me to tell about Fuji except my own experience of climbing it. I made the ascent by way of Gotemba, the least picturesque, but perhaps also the least diffi cult of the six or seven routes open to choice. Gotemba is a little village chiefly consisting of pilgrim-inns. You reach it from Tokyo in about three hours by the Tokaido railway, which rises for miles as it approaches the neighborhood of the mighty volcano. Gotemba is considerably more than two thousand feet above the sea, and therefore comparatively cool in the hottest season. The open country about it slopes to Fuji ; but the slope is so gradual that the table-land seems almost level to the eye. From Gotemba in per- fectly clear weather the mountain looks uncom fortably near, formidable by proximity, Fuji-no-Yama 7 though actually miles away. During the rainy season it may appear and disappear alternately many times in one day, like an enormous spectre. But on the grey August morning when I entered Gotemba as a pilgrim, the landscape was muffled in vapors; and Fuji was totally invisible. I arrived too late to attempt the ascent on the same day ; but I made my preparations at once for the day following, and engaged a couple of gortki (" strong-pull men "), or experienced guides. I felt quite secure on seeing their broad honest faces and sturdy bearing. They supplied me with a pilgrim-staff, heavy blue tabi (that is to say, cleft -stockings, to be used with sandals), a straw hat shaped like Fuji, and the rest of a pilgrim's outfit; telling me to be ready to start with them at four o'clock in the morning. What is hereafter set down consists of notes taken on the journey, but afterwards amended and expanded, for notes made while climbing are necessarily hurried and imperfect. 8 Exotics and Retrospectives 1 August 24th, 1897. From strings stretched above the balcony upon which my inn-room opens, hundreds of towels are hung like flags, blue towels and white, having printed upon them in Chinese characters the names of pilgrim -companies and of the divinity of Fuji. These are gifts to the house, and serve as advertisements. . . . Raining from a uniformly grey sky. Fuji always invisible. August 2$th. 3:30 a. m. No sleep ; tumult all night of parties returning late from the mountain, or arriving for the pilgrimage ; constant clapping of hands to summon servants ; banqueting and singing in the adjoining chambers, with alarming bursts of laughter every few minutes. . . . Breakfast of soup, fish, and rice. Goriki arrive in professional costume, and find me ready. Nevertheless they insist that I shall undress again and put on heavy underclothing ; warning me that even when it is Doyo (the period of greatest summer heat) at the foot of the mountain, it is Fuji-no-Yama 9 Daikan (the period of greatest winter cold) at the top. Then they start in advance, carrying provisions and bundles of heavy clothing. . . . A kuruma waits for me, with three runners, two to pull, and one to push, as the work will be hard uphill. By kuruma I can go to the height of five thousand feet. Morning black and slightly chill, with fine rain ; but I shall soon be above the rain-clouds. . . . The lights of the town vanish behind us ; the kuruma is rolling along a country -road. Outside of the swinging penumbra made by the paper-lantern of the foremost runner, nothing is clearly visible ; but I can vaguely distinguish silhouettes of trees and, from time to time, of houses, peasants' houses with steep roofs. Grey wan light slowly suffuses the moist air ; day is dawning through drizzle. . : . Gradually the landscape defines with its colors. The way lies through thin woods. Occasionally we pass houses with high thatched roofs that look like farmhouses ; but cultivated land is nowhere visible. . . . Open country with scattered clumps of trees, larch and pine. Nothing in the horizon but 10 Exotics and Retrospectives scraggy tree-tops above what seems to be the rim of a vast down. No sign whatever of Fuji. . . . For the first time I notice that the road is black, black sand and cinders apparently, volcanic cinders : the wheels of the kuruma and the feet of the runners sink into it with a crunching sound. The rain has stopped, and the sky becomes a clearer grey. . . . The trees decrease in size and number as we advance. What I have been taking for the horizon, in front of us, suddenly breaks open, and begins to roll smokily away to left and right. In the great rift part of a dark- blue mass appears, a portion of Fuji. Almost at the same moment the sun pierces the clouds behind us ; but the road now enters a copse covering the base of a low ridge, and the view is cut off. ... Halt at a little house among the trees, a pilgrims' resting- place, and there find the goriki, who have advanced much more rapidly than my runners, waiting for us. Buy eggs, which a goriki rolls up in a narrow strip of straw matting ; tying the matting tightly with straw cord between the eggs, so that the string of eggs has somewhat Fuji-no- Yama 11 the appearance of a string of sausages. . . . Hire a horse. Sky clears as we proceed; white sunlight floods everything. Road reascends; and we emerge again on the moorland. And, right in front, Fuji appears, naked to the summit, stupendous, startling as if newly risen from the earth. Nothing could be more beautiful. A vast blue cone, warm-blue, almost violet through the vapors not yet lifted by the sun, with two white streaklets near the top which are great gullies full of snow, though they look from here scarcely an inch long. But the charm of the apparition is much less the charm of color than of symmetry, a symmetry of beautiful bending lines with a curve like the curve of a cable stretched over a space too wide to allow of pulling taut. (This comparison did not at once suggest itself : The first impression given me by the grace of those lines was an impression of femininity ; I found myself thinking of some exquisite sloping of shoulders towards the neck.) I can imagine nothing more difficult to draw at sight. But the Japanese artist, through his mar vellous skill with the writing-brush, the skill 12 Exotics and Retrospectives inherited from generations of calligraphists, easily faces the riddle : he outlines the silhouette with two flowing strokes made in the fraction of a second, and manages to hit the exact truth of the curves, much as a professional archer might hit a mark, without consciously taking aim, through long exact habit of hand and eye. II I see the goriki hurrying forward far away, one of them carrying the eggs round his neck ! . . . Now there are no more trees worthy of the name, only scattered stunted growths resem bling shrubs. The black road curves across a vast grassy down ; and here and there I see large black patches in the green surface, bare spaces of ashes and scoriae ; showing that this thin green skin covers some enormous volcanic deposit of recent date. ... As a matter of history, all this district was buried two yards deep in 1 707 by an eruption from the side of Fuji. Even in far-off Tokyo the rain of ashes covered roofs to a depth of six teen centimetres. There are no farms in this region, because there is little true soil ; and there Fuji-no- Yama 13 is no water. But volcanic destruction is not eter nal destruction ; eruptions at last prove fertilizing ; and the divine " Princess-who-causes-the-flowers- to-blossom-brightly " will make this waste to smile again in future hundreds of years. . . . The black openings in the green surface become more numerous and larger. A few dwarf -shrubs still mingle with the coarse grass. . . . The vapors are lifting ; and Fuji is changing color. It is no longer a glowing blue, but a dead sombre blue. Irregularities previously hidden by rising ground appear in the lower part of the grand curves. One of these to the left, shaped like a camel's hump, represents the focus of the last great eruption. The land is not now green with black patches, but black with green patches; and the green patches dwindle visibly in the direction of the peak. The shrubby growths have disappeared. The wheels of the kuruma, and the feet of the runners sink deeper into the volcanic sand. . . . The horse is now attached to the kuruma with ropes, and I am able to advance more rapidly. Still the mountain seems far away; but we are really running up its flank at a height of more than five thousand feet. 14 Exotics and Retrospectives Fuji has ceased to be blue of any shade. It is black, charcoal-black, a frightful extinct heap of visible ashes and cinders and slaggy lava. . . . Most of the green has disappeared. Likewise all of the illusion. The tremendous naked black reality, always becoming more sharply, more grimly, more atrociously defined, is a stupefac tion, a nightmare. . . . Above miles above the snow patches glare and gleam against that blackness, hideously. I think of a gleam of white teeth I once saw in a skull, a woman's skull, otherwise burnt to a sooty crisp. So one of the fairest, if not the fairest of earthly visions, resolves itself into a spectacle of horror and death. . . . But have not all human ideals of beauty, like the beauty of Fuji seen from afar, been created by forces of death and pain ? are not all, in their kind, but composites of death, beheld in retrospective through the magical haze of inherited memory? Fuji-no- Yama ill The green has utterly vanished ; all is black. There is no road, only the broad waste of black sand sloping and narrowing up to those dazzling, grinning patches of snow. But there is a track, a yellowish track made by thou sands and thousands of cast-off sandals of straw (waraji) , flung aside by pilgrims. Straw sandals quickly wear out upon this black grit ; and every pilgrim carries several pair for the journey. Had I to make the ascent alone, I could find the path by following that wake of broken sandals, a yellow streak zigzagging up out of sight across the blackness. 6 : 40 a.m. We reach Tarobo, first of the ten stations, on the ascent : height, 6000 feet. The station is a large wooden house, of which two rooms have been fitted up as a shop for the sale of staves, hats, raincoats, sandals, every thing pilgrims need. I find there a peripatetic photographer offering for sale photographs of the mountain which are really very good as well as very cheap. . . . Here the goriki take 16 Exotics and Retrospectives their first meal; and I rest. The kuruma can go no further ; and I dismiss my three runners, but keep the horse, a docile and surefooted creature; for I can venture to ride him up to Ni-go-goseki, or Station No. 2>. Start for No. 2^ up the slant of black sand, keeping the horse at a walk. No. 2^ is shut up for the season. . . . Slope now becomes steep as a stairway, and further riding would be dan gerous. Alight and make ready for the climb. Cold wind blowing so strongly that I have to tie on my hat tightly. One of the goriki unwinds from about his waist a long stout cotton girdle, and giving me one end to hold, passes the other over his shoulder for the pull. Then he proceeds over the sand at an angle, with a steady short step, and I follow; the other guide keeping closely behind me to provide against any slip. There is nothing very difficult about this climb ing, except the weariness of walking through sand and cinders : it is like walking over dunes. . . . We mount by zigzags. The sand moves with the wind; and I have a slightly nervous sense the feeling only, not the perception ; for I keep my eyes on the sand, of height growing Fuji-no- Yama 17 above depth. . . . Have to watch my steps care fully, and to use my staff constantly, as the slant is now very steep. . . . We are in a white fog, passing through clouds! Even if I wished to look back, I could see nothing through this vapor; but I have not the least wish to look back. The wind has suddenly ceased cut off, perhaps, by a ridge ; and there is a silence that I remember from West Indian days : the Peace of High Places. It is broken only by the crunching of the ashes beneath our feet. I can distinctly hear my heart beat. . . . The guide tells me that I stoop too much, orders me to walk upright, and always in stepping to put down the heel first. I do this, and find it relieving. But climbing through this tiresome mixture of ashes and sand begins to be trying. I am perspiring and panting. The guide bids me keep my hon orable mouth closed, and breathe only through my honorable nose. We are out of the fog again. ... All at once I perceive above us, at a little distance, some thing like a square hole in the face of the mountain, a door ! It is the door of the third station, a wooden hut half -buried in black 18 Exotics and Retrospectives drift. . . . How delightful to squat again, even in a blue cloud of wood-smoke and under smoke-blackened rafters ! Time, 8 : 30 a. m. Height, 7,085 feet. In spite of the wood-smoke the station is com fortable enough inside ; there are clean mattings and even kneeling -cushions. No windows, of course, nor any other opening than the door; for the building is half -buried in the flank of the mountain. We lunch. . . . The station-keeper tells us that recently a student walked from Gotemba to the top of the mountain and back again in geta ! Geta are heavy wooden san dals, or clogs, held to the foot only by a thong passing between the great and the second toe. The feet of that student must have been made of steel ! Having rested, I go out to look around. Far below white clouds are rolling over the landscape in huge fluffy wreaths. Above the hut, and actually trickling down over it, the sable cone soars to the sky. But the amazing sight is the line of the monstrous slope to the left, a line that now shows no curve whatever, but shoots down below the clouds, and up to the gods only Fuji-no-Yama 19 know where (for I cannot see the end of it), straight as a tightened bowstring. The right flank is rocky and broken. But as for the left, I never dreamed it possible that a line so absolutely straight and smooth, and extending for so enor mous a distance at such an amazing angle, could exist even in a volcano. That stupendous pitch gives me a sense of dizziness, and a totally un familiar feeling of wonder. Such regularity ap pears unnatural, frightful; seems even artificial, but artificial upon a superhuman and demo niac scale. 1 imagine that to fall thence from above would be to fall for leagues. Absolutely nothing to take hold of. But the goriki assure me that there is no danger on that slope : it is all soft sand. IV Though drenched with perspiration by the exer tion of the first climb, I am already dry, and cold. ... Up again. . . . The ascent is at first through ashes and sand as before ; but presently large stones begin to mingle with the sand ; and the way is always growing steeper. ... I constantly slip. 20 Exotics and Retrospectives There is nothing firm, nothing resisting to stand upon : loose stones and cinders roll down at every step. . . . If a big lava-block were to detach itself from above ! ... In spite of my helpers and of the staff, I continually slip, and am all in perspi ration again. Almost every stone that I tread upon turns under me. How is it that no stone ever turns under the feet of the goriki? They never slip, never make a false step, never seem less at ease than they would be in walking over a matted floor. Their small brown broad feet always poise upon the shingle at exactly the right angle. They are heavier men than I ; but they move lightly as birds. . . . Now I have to stop for rest every half-a-dozen steps. . . . The line of broken straw sandals follows the zigzags we take. ... At last at last another door in the face of the mountain. Enter the fourth station, and fling myself down upon the mats. Time, 10:30 a.m. Height, only 7,937 feet; yet it seemed such a distance! Off again. . . . Way worse and worse. . . . Feel a new distress due to the rarefaction of the air. Heart beating as in a high fever. . . . Slope has become very rough. It is no longer soft ashes Fuji-no-Yama 21 and sand mixed with stones, but stones only, fragments of lava, lumps of pumice, scoriae of every sort, all angled as if freshly broken with a hammer. All would likewise seem to have been expressly shaped so as to turn upside-down when trodden upon. Yet I must confess that they never turn under the feet of the goriki. . . . The cast- ofT sandals strew the slope in ever-increasing num bers. . . . But for the goriki I should have had ever so many bad tumbles : they cannot prevent me from slipping ; but they never allow me to fall. Evidently I am not fitted to climb moun tains. . . . Height, 8,659 feet but the fifth station is shut up ! Must keep zigzaging on to the next. Wonder how I shall ever be able to reach it! ... And there are people still alive who have climbed Fuji three and four times, for pleasure / . . . Dare not look back. See noth ing but the black stones always turning under me, and the bronzed feet of those marvellous goriki who never slip, never pant, and never perspire. . . . Staff begins to hurt my hand. . . . Goriki push and pull : it is shameful of me, I know, to give them so much trouble. ... Ah ! sixth sta tion ! may all the myriads of the gods bless my goriki ! Time, 2 : 07 p. m. Height, 9,3 1 7 feet. 22 Exotics and Retrospectives Resting, I gaze through the doorway at the abyss below. The land is now dimly visible only through rents in a prodigious wilderness of white clouds; and within these rents everything looks almost black. . . . The horizon has risen fright fully, has expanded monstrously. ... My goriki warn me that the summit is still miles away. I have been too slow. We must hasten upward. Certainly the zigzag is steeper than before. . . . With the stones now mingle angular rocks ; and we sometimes have to flank queer black bulks that look like basalt. ... On the right rises, out of sight, a jagged black hideous ridge, an ancient lava-stream. The line of the left slope still shoots up, straight as a bow-string. . . . Wonder if the way will become any steeper ; doubt whether it can possibly become any rougher. Rocks dislodged by my feet roll down soundlessly; I am afraid to look after them. Their noiseless vanishing gives me a sensation like the sensation of falling in dreams. . . . There is a white gleam overhead the lower- most verge of an immense stretch of snow. . . . Now we are skirting a snow-filled gully, the Fuji-no-Yama 23 lowermost of those white patches which, at first sight of the summit this morning, seemed scarcely an inch long. It will take an hour to pass it. ... A guide runs forward, while I rest upon my staff, and returns with a large ball of snow. What curious snow ! Not flaky, soft, white snow, but a mass of transparent globules, exactly like glass beads. I eat some, and find it deliciously refreshing. . . . The seventh station is closed. How shall I get to the eighth? . . . Happily, breathing has become less difficult. . . . The wind is upon us again, and black dust with it. The goriki keep close to me, and advance with caution. ... I have to stop for rest at every turn on the path; cannot talk for weariness. . . . I do not feel ; I am much too tired to feel. . . . How I managed it, I do not know ; but I have actually got to the eighth station! Not for a thousand millions of dollars will I go one step further to-day. Time, 4: 40 p.m. Height, 10,693 feet. I 24 Exotics and Retrospectives It is much too cold here for rest without winter clothing ; and now I learn the worth of the heavy robes provided by the guides. The robes are blue, with big white Chinese characters on the back, and are padded thickly as bedquilts ; but they feel light ; for the air is really like the frosty breath of February. ... A meal is preparing ; I notice that charcoal at this elevation acts in a refractory manner, and that a fire can be maintained only by constant attention. . . . Cold and fatigue sharpen appetite : we consume a surprising quan tity of Zo-sui, rice boiled with eggs and a little meat. By reason of my fatigue and of the hour, it has been decided to remain here for the night. Tired as I am, I cannot but limp to the doorway to contemplate the amazing prospect. From within a few feet of the threshold, the ghastly slope of rocks and cinders drops down into a pro digious disk of clouds miles beneath us, clouds of countless forms, but mostly wreathings and fluffy pilings; and the whole huddling mass, Fuji-no-Yama 2$ reaching almost to the horizon, is blinding white under the sun. (By the Japanese, this tremendous cloud-expanse is well named Wata-no-Umi, " the Sea of Cotton.") The horizon itself enorm ously risen, phantasmally expanded seems half way up above the world : a wide luminous belt ringing the hollow vision. Hollow, I call it, be cause extreme distances below the sky-line are sky- colored and vague, so that the impression you receive is not of being on a point under a vault, but of being upon a point rising into a stu pendous blue sphere, of which this huge horizon would represent the equatorial zone. To turn away from such a spectacle is not possible. I watch and watch until the dropping sun changes the colors, turning the Sea of Cotton into a Fleece of Gold. Half-round the horizon a yellow glory grows and burns. Here and there beneath it, through cloudrifts, colored vaguenesses define : I now see golden water, with long purple head lands reaching into it, with ranges of violet peaks thronging behind it; these glimpses curiously resembling portions of a tinted topographical map. Yet most of the landscape is pure delusion. Even my guides, with their long experience and their eagle-sight, can scarcely distinguish the real from 26 Exotics and Retrospectives the unreal ; for the blue and purple and violet clouds moving under the Golden Fleece, exactly mock the outlines and the tones of distant peaks and capes: you can detect what is vapor only by its slowly shifting shape. . . . Brighter and brighter glows the gold. Shadows come from the west, shadows flung by cloud-pile over cloud- pile ; and these, like evening shadows upon snow, are violaceous blue. . . . Then orange -tones ap pear in the horizon ; then smouldering crimson. And now the greater part of the Fleece of Gold has changed to cotton again, white cotton mixed with pink. . . . Stars thrill out. The cloud-waste uniformly whitens ; thickening and packing to the horizon. The west glooms. Night rises; and all things darken except that wondrous unbroken world-round of white, the Sea of Cotton. The station-keeper lights his lamps, kindles a fire of twigs, prepares our beds. Outside it is bitterly cold, and, with the fall of night, becoming colder. Still 1 cannot turn away from that astound ing vision. . . . Countless stars now flicker and shiver in the blue-black sky. Nothing whatever of the material world remains visible, except the fuji-no-Yama 27 black slope of the peak before my feet. The enormous cloud-disk below continues white ; but to all appearance it has become a liquidly level white, without forms, a white flood. It is no longer the Sea of Cotton. It is a Sea of Milk, the Cosmic Sea of ancient Indian legend, and always self-luminous, as with ghostly quickenings. VI Squatting by the wood fire, I listen to the goriki and the station -keeper telling of strange happen ings on the mountain. One incident discussed I remember reading something about in a Tokyo paper : I now hear it retold by the lips of a man who figured in it as a hero. A Japanese meteorologist named Nonaka, at tempted last year the rash undertaking of passing the winter on the summit of Fuji for purposes of scientific study. It might not be difficult to win ter upon the peak in a solid observatory furnished with a good stove, and all necessary comforts-, but Nonaka could afford only a small wooden hut, in which he would be obliged to spend the cold season without fire! His young wife in- 28 Exotics and Retrospectives sisted on sharing his labors and dangers. The couple began their sojourn on the summit toward the close of September. In midwinter news was brought to Gotemba that both were dying. Relatives and friends tried to organize a rescue- party. But the weather was frightful ; the peak was covered with snow and ice ; the chances of death were innumerable; and the goriki would not risk their lives. Hundreds of dollars could not tempt them. At last a desperate appeal was made to them as representatives of Japanese courage and hardihood : they were assured that to suffer a man of science to perish, without making even one plucky effort to save him, would disgrace the country ; they were told that the national honor was in their hands. This appeal brought forward two volunteers. One was a man of great strength and daring, nick named by his fellow-guides, Oni-guma, " the Demon-Bear," the other was the elder of my goriki. Both believed that they were going to certain destruction. They took leave of their friends and kindred, and drank with their families the farewell cup of water, mid%u-no-saka%uki, in which those about to be separated by death pledge each other. Then, after having thickly Fuji-no-Yama 29 wrapped themselves in cotton-wool, and made all possible preparation for ice climbing, they started, taking with them a brave army -surgeon who had offered his services, without fee, for the rescue. After surmounting extraordinary diffi culties, the party reached the hut ; but the in mates refused to open! Nonaka protested that he would rather die than face the shame of failure in his undertaking; and his wife said that she had resolved to die with her husband. Partly by forcible, and partly by gentle means, the pair were restored to a better state of mind. The surgeon administered medicines and cordials ; the patients, carefully wrapped up, were strapped to the backs of the guides; and the descent was begun. My goriki, who carried the lady, believes that the gods helped him on the ice-slopes. More than once, all thought themselves lost ; but they reached the foot of the mountain without one serious mishap. After weeks of careful nursing, the rash young couple were pronounced out of danger. The wife suffered less, and recovered more quickly, than the husband. The goriki have cautioned me not to venture outside during the night without calling them. 30 Exotics and Retrospectives They will not tell me why ; and their warning is peculiarly uncanny. From previous experiences during Japanese travel, I surmise that the danger implied is supernatural ; but 1 feel that it would be useless to ask questions. The door is closed and barred. 1 lie down between the guides, who are asleep in a moment, as I can tell by their heavy breathing. I cannot sleep immediately ; perhaps the fatigues and the surprises of the day have made me somewhat nervous. I look up at the rafters of the black roof, at packages of sandals, bundles of wood, bundles of many indistinguishable kinds there stowed away or suspended, and making queer shadows in the lamplight. ... It is terribly cold, even under my three quilts ; and the sound of the wind outside is wonderfully like the sound of great surf, a constant succession of bursting roars, each followed by a prolonged hiss. The hut, half buried under tons of rock and drift, does not move ; but the sand does, and trickles down between the rafters ; and small stones also move after each fierce gust, with a rattling just like the clatter of shingle in the pull of a re treating wave. Fuji-no- Yama 31 , 4. a. m. Go out alone, despite last evening's warning, but keep close to the door. There is a great and icy blowing. The Sea of Milk is un changed : it lies far below this wind. Over it the moon is dying. . . . The guides, perceiving my absence, spring up and join me. I am reproved for not having awakened them. They will not let me stay outside alone : so I turn in with them. Dawn: a zone of pearl grows round the world. The stars vanish ; the sky brightens. A wild sky, with dark wrack drifting at an enormous height. The Sea of Milk has turned again into Cotton, and there are wide rents in it. The desolation of the black slope, all the ugliness of slaggy rock and angled stone, again defines. . . . Now the cotton becomes disturbed ; it is break ing up. A yellow glow runs along the east like the glare of a wind-blown fire. . . . Alas ! I shall not be among the fortunate mortals able to boast of viewing from Fuji the first lifting of the sun ! Heavy clouds have drifted across the horizon at the point where he should rise. . . . Now I know that he has risen; because the upper edges of those purple rags of cloud are burning like char coal. But I have been so disappointed ! 22 Exotics and Retrospectives More and more luminous the hollow world. League-wide heapings of cottony cloud roll apart. Fearfully far-away there is a light of gold upon water: the sun here remains viewless, but the ocean sees him. It is not a flicker, but a burnished glow ; at such a distance ripplings are invisi ble. . . . Further and further scattering, the clouds unveil a vast grey and blue landscape ; hun dreds and hundreds of miles throng into vision at once. On the right I distinguish Tokyo bay, and Kamakura, and the holy island of Enoshima (no bigger than the dot over this letter " i ") ; on the left the wilder Suruga coast, and the blue- toothed promontory of Idzu, and the place of the fishing-village where I have been summering, the merest pin-point in that tinted dream of hill and shore. Rivers appear but as sun -gleams on spider-threads ; fishing-sails are white dust clinging to the grey-blue glass of the sea. And the picture alternately appears and vanishes while the clouds drift and shift across it, and shape themselves into spectral islands and mountains and valleys of all Elysian colors. . . Fuji-no- Yama 33 VII 6 : 40 a. m. Start for the top. . . . Hardest and roughest stage of the journey, through a wil derness of lava-blocks. The path zigzags be tween ugly masses that project from the slope like black teeth. The trail of cast-away sandals is wider than ever. . . . Have to rest every few minutes. . . . Reach another long patch of the snow that looks like glass-beads, and eat some. The next station a half -station is closed ; and the ninth has ceased to exist. ... A sudden fear comes to me, not of the ascent, but of the prospective descent by a route which is too steep even to permit of comfortably sitting down. But the guides assure me that there will be no diffi culty, and that most of the return -journey will be by another way, over the interminable level which I wondered at yesterday, nearly all soft sand, with very few stones. It is called the bashiri (" glissade ") ; and we are to descend at a run ! . . . All at once a family of field-mice scatter out from under my feet in panic ; and the goriki be hind me catches one, and gives it to me. I hold 3 34 Exotics and Retrospectives the tiny shivering life for a moment to examine it, and set it free again. These little creatures have very long pale noses. How do they live in this waterless desolation, and at such an alti tude, especially in the season of snow? For we are now at a height of more than eleven thousand feet! The goriki say that the mice find roots growing under the stones. . . . Wilder and steeper ; for me, at least, the climbing is sometimes on all fours. There are barriers which we surmount with the help of ladders. There are fearful places with Buddhist names, such as the Sai-no-Kawara, or Dry Bed of the River of Souls, a black waste strewn with heaps of rock, like those stone-piles which, in Buddhist pictures of the underworld, the ghosts of children build. . . . Twelve thousand feet, and something, the top ! Time, 8 : 20 a. m. . . . Stone huts ; Shinto shrine with torii ; icy well, called the Spring of Gold ; stone tablet bearing a Chinese poem and the design of a tiger ; rough walls of lava-blocks round these things, possibly for protection against the wind. Then the huge dead crater, probably between a quarter of a Fuji-no- Yama 35 mile and half-a-mile wide, but shallowed up to within three or four hundred feet of the verge by volcanic detritus, a cavity horrible even in the tones of its yellow crumbling walls, streaked and stained with every hue of scorching. I perceive that the trail of straw sandals ends in the crater. Some hideous over-hanging cusps of black lava like the broken edges of a monstrous cicatrix project on two sides several hundred feet above the opening ; but I certainly shall not take the trouble to climb them. Yet these, seen through the haze of a hundred miles, through the soft illusion of blue spring-weather, appear as the opening snowy petals of the bud of the Sacred Lotos ! ... No spot in this world can be more horrible, more atrociously dismal, than the cin dered tip of the Lotos as you stand upon it. But the view the view for a hundred leagues, and the light of the far faint dreamy world, and the fairy vapors of morning, and the marvellous wreathings of cloud: all this, and only this, consoles me for the labor and the pain. . . . Other pilgrims, earlier climbers, poised upon the highest crag, with faces turned to the tremendous East, are clapping their hands in Shinto prayer, saluting the mighty 36 Exotics and Retrospectives Day. . . . The immense poetry of the moment enters into me with a thrill. I know that the colossal vision before me has already become a memory ineffaceable, a memory of which no luminous detail can fade till the hour when thought itself must fade, and the dust of these eyes be mingled with the dust of the myriad million eyes that also have looked, in ages for gotten before my birth, from the summit supreme of Fuji to the Rising of the Sun. Insect-Musicians Insect-Musicians Mushi yo mushi, Natte" ingwa ga Tsukuru nara? "O insect, insect ! think you that Karma can be ex hausted by song ? " Japanese poem. I IP you ever visit Japan, be sure to go to at least one temple-festival, en-nichi. The festi val ought to be seen at night, when every thing shows to the best advantage in the glow of countless lamps and lanterns. Until you have had this experience, you cannot know what Japan is, you cannot imagine the real charm of queer- ness and prettiness, the wonderful blending of grotesquery and beauty, to be found in the life of the common people. In such a night you will probably let yourself drift awhile with the stream of sight-seers through 40 Exotics and Retrospectives dazzling lanes of booths full of toys indescribable dainty puerilities, fragile astonishments, laugh- ter-making oddities ; you will observe represen tations of demons, gods, and goblins ; you will be startled by mando immense lantern-trans parencies, with monstrous faces painted upon them; you will have glimpses of jugglers, acrobats, sword -dancers, fortune-tellers ; you will hear everywhere, above the tumult of voices, a ceaseless blowing of flutes and booming of drums. All this may not be worth stopping for. But presently, I am almost sure, you will pause in your promenade to look at a booth illuminated like a magic-lantern, and stocked with tiny wooden cages out of which an incomparable shrilling pro ceeds. The booth is the booth of a vendor of singing-insects ; and the storm of noise is made by the insects. The sight is curious; and a foreigner is nearly always attracted by it. But having satisfied his momentary curiosity, the foreigner usually goes on his way with the idea that he has been inspecting nothing more remark able than a particular variety of toys for children. He might easily be made to understand that the insect-trade of Tokyo alone represents a yearly value of thousands of dollars; but he would Insect-Musicians 41 certainly wonder if assured that the insects them- selves are esteemed for the peculiar character of the sounds which they make. It would not be easy to convince him that in the aesthetic life of a most refined and artistic people, these insects hold a place not less important or well -deserved than that occupied in Western civilization by our thrushes, linnets, nightingales and canaries. What stranger could suppose that a literature one thou sand years old, a literature full of curious and delicate beauty, exists upon the subject of these short-lived insect-pets ? The object of the present paper is, by elucidat ing these facts, to show how superficially our travellers might unconsciously judge the most interesting details of Japanese life. But such misjudgments are as natural as they are inevit able. Even with the kindest of intentions it is impossible to estimate correctly at sight any thing of the extraordinary in Japanese custom, because the extraordinary nearly always relates to feelings, beliefs, or thoughts about which a stranger cannot know anything. Before proceeding further, let me observe that the domestic insects of which I am going to 42 Exotics and Retrospectives speak, are mostly night-singers, and must not be confounded with the semi (cicadas), mentioned in former essays of mine. I think that the cicadas, even in a country so exceptionally rich as is Japan in musical insects, are wonderful melodists in their own way. But the Japanese find as much difference between the notes of night-insects and of cicadas as we find between those of larks and sparrows ; and they relegate their cicadas to the vulgar place of chatterers. Semi are therefore never caged. The national liking for caged insects does not mean a liking for mere noise ; and the note of every, insect in public favor must possess either some rhythmic charm, or some mimetic quality celebrated in poetry or legend. The same fact is true of the Japanese liking for the chant of frogs. It would be a mistake to suppose that all kinds of frogs are considered musical; but there are particular species of very small frogs having sweet notes ; and these are caged and petted. Of course, in the proper meaning of the word, insects do not sing ; but in the following pages I may occasionally employ the terms " singer " and " singing-insect," partly because of their convenience, and partly because of their corre- Insect-Musicians 43 spondence with the language used by Japanese insect-dealers and poets, describing the " voices " of such creatures. II There are many curious references in the old Japanese classic literature to the custom of keep ing musical insects. For example in the chapter entitled Nowaki 1 of the famous novel " Genji Monogatari," written in the latter part of the tenth century by the Lady Murasaki-Shikibu, it is stated : " The maids were ordered to descend to the garden, and give some water to the insects." But the first definite mention of cages for singing- insects would appear to be the following passage from a work entitled Cbomon-Shu : " On the twelfth day of the eighth month of the second year of Kaho [1095 A. D.], the Emperor ordered his pages and chamberlains to go to Sagano and find some insects. The Emperor gave them a 1 Nowaki is the name given to certain destructive storms usually occurring toward the end of autumn. All the chapters of the Genji Monogatari have remarkably poeti cal and effective titles. There is an English translation, bv Mr. Kencho Suyematsu, of the first seventeen chapters. 44 Exotics and Retrospectives cage of network of bright purple thread. All, even the head -chaplain and his attendants, taking horses from the Right and the Left Imperial Mews, then went on horseback to hunt for insects. Tokinori Ben, at that time holding the office of Kurando, 1 proposed to the party as they rode toward Sagano, a subject for poetical com position. The subject was, Looking for insects in the fields. On reaching Sagano, the party dismounted, and walked in various directions for a distance of something more than ten cho,* and seht their attendants to catch the insects. In the evening they returned to the palace. They put into the cage some bagi* and omina- mesbi [for the insects]. The cage was respect fully presented to the Empress. There was sake- drinking in the palace that evening; and many poems were composed. The Empress and her court-ladies joined in the making of the poems." This would appear to be the oldest Japanese record of an insect-hunt, though the amuse- 1 The Kurando, or Kurodo, was an official intrusted with the care of the imperial records. * A cbo is about one-fifteenth of a mile. Hagi is the name commonly given to the bush-clover. Ominanusbi is the common term for the valeriana offidnalis* Insect-Musicians 4 ment may have been invented earlier than the period of Kaho. By the seventeenth century it seems to have become a popular diversion; and night-hunts were in vogue as much as day- hunts. In the Teihoku Bunshu, or collected works of the poet Teikoku, who died during the second year of Showo (1653), there has been preserved one of the poet's letters which contains a very interesting passage on the subject. " Let us go insect -hunting this evening," writes the poet to his friend. " It is true that the night will be very dark, since there is no moon ; and it may seem dangerous to go out. But there are many people now going to the graveyards every night, because the Bon festival is approaching l ; therefore the way to the fields will not be lonesome for us. I have prepared many lanterns ; so the bata-ori, matsumushi, and other insects will probably come to the lanterns in great number." It would also seem that the trade of insect- seller (musbiya) existed in the seventeenth cen tury; for in a diary of that time, known as 1 That is to say, there are now many people who go every night to the graveyards, to decorate and prepare the graves before the great Festival of the Dead. 46 Exotics and Retrospectives the Diary of Kikaku, the writer speaks of his dis. appointment at not finding any insect-dealers in Yedo, tolerably good evidence that he had met such persons elsewhere. " On the thirteenth day of the sixth month of the fourth year of Teikyo [1687], I went out," he writes, "to look for kirigirisu-selkrs. I searched for them in Yot- suya, in Kojimachi, in Hong5, in Yushimasa, and in both divisions of Kanda-Sudamacho 1 ; but I found none." As we shall presently see, the hirigirisu was not sold in Tokyo until about one hundred and years later. But long before it became the fashion to keep singing-insects, their music had been celebrated by poets as one of the aesthetic pleasures of the autumn. There are charming references to singing-insects in poetical collections made dur ing the tenth century, and doubtless containing many compositions of a yet earlier period. And just as places famous for cherry, plum, or other blossoming trees, are still regularly visited every year by thousands and tens of thousands, merely 1 Most of these names survive in the appellations of well-known districts of the present TSkyS. Insect-Musicians 47 for the delight of seeing the flowers in their sea sons, so in ancient times city-dwellers made autumn excursions to country-districts simply for the pleasure of hearing the chirruping choruses of crickets and of locusts, the night-singers especially. Centuries ago places were noted as pleasure-resorts solely because of this melodious attraction ; such were Musashino (now Tokyo), Yatano in the province of Echizen, and Mano in the province of Omi. Somewhat later, probably, people discovered that each of the principal species of singing-insects haunted by preference some par ticular locality, where its peculiar chanting could be heard to the best advantage ; and eventually no less than eleven places became famous through out Japan for different kinds of insect-music. The best places to hear the matsumushi were : (1) Arashiyama, near Kyoto, in the province of Yamashiro ; (2) Sumiyoshi, in the province of Settsu ; (3) Miyagino, in the province of Mutsu. The best places to hear the su^umusM were : (4) Kagura-ga-Oka, in Yamashiro ; (5) Ogura-yama, in Yamashiro; 48 Exotics and Retrospectives (6) Suzuka-yama, in Ise ; (7) Narumi, in Owari. The best places to hear the kirigirisu were : (8) Sagano, in Yamashiro ; (9) Takeda-no-Sato, in Yamashiro ; (10) Tatsuta-yama, in Yamato ; (11) Ono-no-Shinowara, in Omi. Afterwards, when the breeding and sale of singing-insects became a lucrative industry, the custom of going into the country to hear them gradually went out of fashion. But even to-day city -dwellers, when giving a party, will sometimes place cages of singing-insects among the garden- shrubbery, so that the guests may enjoy not only the music of the little creatures, but also those memories or sensations of rural peace which such music evokes. HI The regular trade in musical insects is of comparatively modern origin. In Tokyo its beginnings date back only to the Kwansei era (1789-1800), at which period, however, the Insect-Musicians 49 capital of the Shogunate was still called Yedo. A complete history of the business was recently placed in my hands, a history partly compiled from old documents, and partly from traditions preserved in the families of several noted insect- merchants of the present day. The founder of the Tokyo trade was an itin, erant foodseller named Chuzo, originally from Echigo, who settled in the Kanda district of the city in the latter part of the eighteenth century. One day, while making his usual rounds, it oc curred to him to capture a few of the su^umusbi, or bell-insects, then very plentiful in the Negishi quarter, and to try the experiment of feeding them at home. They throve and made music in confinement ; and several of Chuzo's neighbors, charmed by their melodious chirruping, asked to be supplied with su^umusbi for a consideration. From this accidental beginning, the demand for su^umushi grew rapidly to such proportions that the foodseller at last decided to give up his former calling and to become an insect-seller. Chuzo only caught and sold insects : he never imagined that it would be more profitable to breed them. But the fact was presently discov- 4 JO Exotics and Retrospectives ered by one of his customers, a man named Kirayama, then in the service of the Lord Aoyama Shimodzuke-no-Kami. Kiriyama had bought from Chuzo several su^umushi, which were kept and fed in a jar half-filled with moist clay. They died in the cold season ; but during the following summer Kiriyama was agreeably surprised to find the jar newly peopled with a number of young ones, evidently born from eggs which the first prisoners had left in the clay. He fed them carefully, and soon had the pleasure, my chronicler says, of hearing them " begin to sing in small voices." Then he resolved to make some experiments ; and, aided by Chuzo, who furnished the males and females, he succeeded in breeding not only su^umusbi, but three other kinds of singing-insects also, kantan, matsu- musbi, and kutsuwamushi. He discovered, at the same time, that, by keeping his jars in a warm room, the insects could be hatched considerably in advance of the natural season. Chuzo sold for Kiriyama these home-bred singers ; and both men found the new undertaking profitable beyond expectation. The example set by Kiriyama was imitated by a tabiya, or stocking-maker named Yasubei (com- C " < UJ ^ o uJ (J O < ro U Insect-Musicians $1 monly known as Tabiya Yasubei by reason of his calling), who lived in Kanda-ku. Yasubei like wise made careful study of the habits of singing- insects, with a view to their breeding and nourish ment ; and he soon found himself able to carry on a small trade in them. Up to that time the insects sold in Yedo would seem to have been kept in jars or boxes: Yasubei conceived the idea of having special cages manufactured for them. A man named Kondo, vassal to the Lord Kamei of Honjo-ku, interested himself in the matter, and made a number of pretty little cages which delighted Yasubei, and secured a large order from him. The new invention found pub lic favor at once ; and Kondo soon afterwards established the first manufactory of insect-cages. The demand for singing-insects increased from this time so rapidly, that Chuzo soon found it impossible to supply all his would-be customers directly. He therefore decided to change his business to wholesale trade, and to sell to retail dealers only. To meet orders, he purchased largely from peasants in the suburbs and else where. Many persons were employed by him ; and Yasubei and others paid him a fixed annual sum for sundry rights and privileges. ?2 Exotics and Retrospectives Some time after this Yasubei became the first itinerant -vendor of singing-insects. He walked through the streets crying his wares ; but hired a number of servants to carry the cages. Tradition says that while going his rounds he used to wear a katabira * made of a much -esteemed silk stuff called sukiya, together with a fine Hakata-girdle ; and that this elegant way of dressing proved of much service to him in his business. Two men, whose names have been preserved, soon entered into competition with Yasubei. The first was Yasakura Yasuzo, of Honjo-ku, by previous occupation a sahainin, or property - agent. He prospered, and became widely known as Mushi-Yasu, " Yasu-the-Insect-Man." His success encouraged a former fellow-s0Jb0/m', Genbei of Uyeno, to go into the same trade. Genbei likewise found insect-selling a lucrative occupation, and earned for himself the sobriquet of Mushi-Gen, by which he is yet remembered. 1 Katabira is a name given to many kinds of light tex tures used for summer-robes. The material is usually hemp, but sometimes, as in the case referred to here, of fine silk. Some of these robes are transparent, and very beauti ful. Hakata, in Kyushu, is still famous for the silk girdles made there. The fabric is very heavy and strong. Insect-Musicians 3 His descendants in Tokyo to-day are flw^ 1 -manu facturers ; but they still carry on the hereditary insect-business during the summer and autumn months ; and one of the firm was kind enough to furnish me with many of the facts recorded in this little essay. Chuzo, the father and founder of all this curious commerce, died without children ; and sometime in the period of Bunsei (1818-1829) his business was taken over by a distant relative named Ya- masaki Sei'chirS. To Chuzo's business, Yamasaki joined his own, that of a toy-merchant. About the same time a law was passed limiting the number of insect-dealers in the municipality to thirty-six. The thirty-six then formed them selves into a guild, called the Oyama-K6 (" Oy- ama Society"), having for patron the divinity Sekison-Sama of the mountain Oyama in Sag- ami Province. 2 But in business the association 1 Ame is a nutritive gelatinous extract obtained from wheat and other substances. It is sold in many forms as candy, as a syrupy liquid resembling molasses, as a sweet hot drink, as a solid jelly. Children are very fond of it Its principal element is starch-sugar. 2 Oyama mountain in Sagami is a great resort of Pilgrims. There is a celebrated temple there, dedicated to Iwanaga-Hime' ("Long-Rock Princess"), sister of the 4 Exotics and Retrospectives was known as the Yedo-Mushi-K6, or Yedo Insect-Company. It is not until after this consolidation of the trade that we hear of the kirigirisu, the same musical insect which the poet Kikaku had vainly tried to buy in the city in 1687, being sold in Yedo. One of the guild known as Mushiya Kojiro (" Kojiro the Insect- Merchant "), who did business in Honjo-Ku, returning to the city after a short visit to his native place in Kadzusa, brought back with him a number of kirigirisu, which he sold at a good profit. Although long famous elsewhere, these insects had never before been sold in Yedo. "When Midzu Echizen-no-Kami," says the chronicle, "became macbi-bugyo (or chief mag istrate) of Yedo, the law limiting the number of insect-dealers to thirty-six, was abolished." Whether the guild was subsequently dissolved the chronicle fails to mention. Kiriyama, the first to breed singing- insects ar tificially, had, like Chuzo, built up a prosperous trade. He left a son, Kamejiro, who was adopted into the family of one Yumoto, living in Wase'da, beautiful Goddess of Fuji. Sekison-San is a popular name both for the divinity and for the mountain itself. Insect-Musicians $5 Ushigome'-ku. Kamejiro brought with him to the Yumoto family the valuable secrets of his father's occupation ; and the Yumoto family is still cele brated in the business of insect breeding. To-day the greatest insect-merchant in Tokyo is said to be Kawasumi Kanesaburo, of Samon- cho in Yotsuya-ku. A majority of the lesser dealers obtain their autumn stock from him. But the insects bred artificially, and sold in summer, are mostly furnished by the Yumoto house. Other noted dealers are Mushi-Sei, of Shitaya-ku, and Mushi-Toku, of Asakusa. These buy insects caught in the country, and brought to the city by the peasants. The wholesale dealers supply both insects and cages to multitudes of itinerant vendors who do business in the neighborhood of the parish- temples during the en-nicU, or religious festivals, especially after dark. Almost every night of the year there are en-nichi in some quarter of the capital ; and the insect-sellers are rarely idle dur ing the summer and autumn months. Perhaps the following list of current Tokyo prices 1 for singing-insects may interest the reader : Prices of the year 1897. 6 Exotics and Retrospectives Suzumushi .... 3 sen 5 rtn, to 4 sen. Matsumushi ....4". ...5" Kantan 10 .... 12 Kin-hibari 10 " .... 12 " Kusa-hibari 10 ". . . . 12 Kuro-hibari 8 " .... 12 " Kutsuwamushi . . . . 10 " . . . . 15 " Yamatosuzu .... 8 .... 12 Kirigirisu 12 " .... IS " Emma-korogi .... 5 " Kane"tataki 12 " Umaoi 10 These prices, however, rule only during the busy period of the insect trade. In May and the latter part of June the prices are high, for only artificially bred insects are then in the market. In July kirigirisu brought from the country will sell as low as one sen. The kantan, kusa-hibari, and Yamato-su^u sell sometimes as low as two sen. In August the Emma-korogi can be bought even at the rate of ten for one sen ; and in Sep tember the kuro-bibari, hanetatahi, and umaoi sell for one or one and a half sen each. But there is little variation at any season in the prices of sufumusbi and of matsumushi. These are never very dear, but never sell at less than three sen ; and there is always a demand for them. The sufumusbi is the most popular of all ; and the Insect-Musicians $7 greater part of the profits annually made in the insect-trade is said to be gained on the sale of this insect. IV As will be seen from the foregoing price-list, twelve varieties of musical insects are sold in Tokyo. Nine can be artificially bred, namely the su^umusbi, matsumusbi, kirigirisu, kantan, kutsuwamusbi, Emma-korogi, kin-bibari, kusa- bibari (also called Asa-su^u), and the Yamato- su%u, or Yoshino-su^u. Three varieties, I am KANETATAKI ("THE BELL-RINGER") (natural told, are not bred for sale, but captured for the market: these are the kanetataki, umaoi or bataori, and kuro-Ubari. But a considerable 8 Exotics and Retrospectives number of all the insects annually offered for sale, are caught in their native haunts. The night-singers are, with few exceptions, easily taken. They are captured with the help of lanterns. Being quickly attracted by light, they approach the lanterns ; and when near enough to be observed, they can readily be covered with nets or little baskets. Males and females are usually secured at the same time , for the creatures move about in couples. Only the males sing ; but a certain number of females are always taken for breeding purposes. Males and females are kept in the same vessel only for breeding : they are never left together in a cage, because the male ceases to sing when thus mated, and will die in a short time after pairing. The breeding pairs are kept in jars or other earthen vessels half-filled with moistened clay, and are supplied every day with fresh food. They do not live long : the male dies first, and the female survives only until her eggs have been laid. The young insects hatched from them, shed their skin in about forty days from birth, after which they grow more rapidly, and soon attain their full development. In their natural state these creatures are hatched a little before the Insect-Musicians 9 Doyo, or Period of Greatest Heat by the old calendar, that is to say, about the middle of July; and they begin to sing in October. But when bred in a warm room, they are hatched early in April ; and, with careful feeding, they can be offered for sale before the end of May. When very young, their food is triturated and spread for them upon a smooth piece of wood ; but the adults are usually furnished with unpre pared food, consisting of parings of egg-plant, melon-rind, cucumber-rind, or the soft interior parts of the white onion. Some insects, however, are specially nourished; the abura-kirigirisu, for example, being fed with sugar-water and slices of musk -melon. All the insects mentioned in the Tokyo price- list are not of equal interest ; and several of the names appear to refer only to different varieties of one species, though on this point I am not positive. Some of the insects do not seem to have yet been scientifically classed; and I am no entomologist. But I can offer some general 60 Exotics and Retrospectives notes on the more important among the little melodists, and free translations of a few out of the countless poems about them, beginning with the matsummU, which was celebrated in Japanese verse a thousand years ago : Matsumushi. 1 As ideographically written, the name of this creature signifies " pine-insect ; " but, as pro nounced, it might mean also " waiting-insect," since the verb " matsu," " to wait," and the noun " matsu" "pine," have the same sound. It is chiefly upon this double meaning of the word as uttered that a host of Japanese poems about the matsumushi are MATSUMUSHI (sligUly mlar ged). base( j Some of the$e are very old, dating back to the tenth century at least. Although by no means a rare insect, the matsu mushi is much esteemed for the peculiar clear- 1 Calyptotrypbiis Marmoratus. (?) Insect-Musicians 61 ness and sweetness of its notes (onomatopo- etically rendered in Japanese by the syllables chin-chirorm, cUn-chirorlri), little silvery shrillings which I can best describe as resembling the sound of an electric bell heard from a dis tance. The matsumushi haunts pine-woods and cryptomeria-groves, and makes its music at night. It is a very small insect, with a dark-brown back, and a yellowish belly. Perhaps the oldest extant verses upon the matsumushi are those contained in the Kokinshu, a famous anthology compiled in the year 905 by the court-poet Tsurayuki and several of his noble friends. Here we first find that play on the name of the insect as pronounced, which was to be repeated in a thousand different keys by a multitude of poets through the literature of more than nine hundred years : Aid no no ni Michi mo madoinu; Matsumushi no Koe suru kata ni Yadoya karamashi. " In the autumn-fields I lose my way ; perhaps I might ask for lodging in the direction of the 62 Exotics and Retrospectives cry of the waiting-insect ; " that is to say, " might sleep to-night in the grass where the insects are waiting for me." There is in the same work a much prettier poem on the matsu- mushi by Tsurayuki. With dusk begins to cry the male of the Waiting-insect ; I, too, await my beloved, and, hearing, my longing grows. The following poems on the same insect are less ancient but not less interesting : Forever past and gone, the hour of the promised advent ! Truly the Waiter's voice is a voice of sadness now ! Parting is sorrowful always, even the parting with autumn ! plaintive matsumushi, add not thou to my pain I Always more clear and shrill, as the hush of the night grows deeper, The Waiting-insect's voice ; and I that wait in the garden, Feel enter into my heart the voice and the moon together. name signifies " bell-insect ; " but the bell of which the sound is thus referred to is a very small bell, or a bunch of little bells such as a Shinto priestess uses in the sacred dances. The 1 Homeogrj>llt4sjaponicus. Insect-Musicians 63 suzumushi is a great favorite with insect-fanciers, and is bred in great numbers for the market. In the wild state it is found in many parts of Japan ; and at night the noise made by multitudes of su^umusbi in certain lonesome places might easily be mistaken, as it has been by myself more than once, for the sound of rapids. The Japanese de scription of the >* SuzUMUSHl (sUgbtly enlarged). insect as resem bling "a watermelon seed" the black kind is excellent. It is very small, with a black back, and a white or yellowish belly. Its tintinnabula tion ri-l-l-l-in, as the Japanese render the sound might easily be mistaken for the tink ling of a su^u. Both the matsumusbi and the suzumushi are mentioned in Japanese poems of the period of Engi (901-922). Some of the following poems on the suzumushi are very old ; others are of comparatively recent date : Yes, my dwelling is old : weeds on the roof are growing ; But the voice of the suzumushi that will never be old I 64 Exotics and Retrospectives To-day united in love, we who can meet so rarely! Hear how the insects ring ! their bells to our hearts keep time. The tinkle of tiny bells, the voices of suzumushi, I hear in the autumn-dusk, and think of the fields at home. Even the moonshine sleeps on the dews of the garden- grasses; Nothing moves in the night but the suzumushi's voice. Heard in these alien fields, the voice of the suzumushi, Sweet in the evening-dusk, sounds like the sound of home. Vainly the suzumushi exhausts its powers of pleasing, Always, the long night through, my tears continue to flow ! Hark to those tinkling tones, the chant of the suzumushi I If a jewel of dew could sing, it would tinkle with such a voice I Foolish-fond I have grown ; I feel for the suzumushi I In the time of the heavy rains, what will the creature do ? Hataori-musbi. The bataori is a beautiful bright-green grass hopper, of very graceful shape. Two reasons are given for its curious name, which signifies "the Weaver." One is that, when held in a particular way, the struggling gestures of the creature resemble the movements of a girl weav ing. The other reason is that its music seems to Insect-Musicians 6 imitate the sound of the reed and shuttle of a hand-loom in operation, Ji-l-l-l ebon-ebon! ji-i-i-i ebon-ebon ! There is a pretty folk-story about the origin of the hataori and the hirigirisu, which used to be told to Japanese children in former times. Long, long ago, says the tale, there were two very dutiful daughters who supported their old blind father by the labor of their hands. The elder girl used to weave, and the younger to sew. When the old blind father died at last, these good girls grieved so much that they soon died also. One beautiful morning, some creatures of a kind never seen before were found making music above the graves of the sisters. On the tomb of the elder was a pretty green insect, producing sounds like those made by a girl weaving, ji-i-l-i, ebon-ebon! ji-l-l-l, ebon-ebon/ This was the first bataori-mushi. On the tomb of the younger sister was an insect which kept crying out, " Tsu^ure sase, sase! t suture, t suture sase, sase, sase ! " (Torn clothes patch, patch them up! torn clothes, torn clothes patch up, patch up, patch up!) This was the first kirigirisu. Then everybody knew that the 5 66 Exotics and Retrospectives spirits of the good sisters had taken those shapes. Still every autumn they cry to wives and daugh ters to work well at the loom, and warn them to repair the winter garments of the household before the coming of the cold. Such poems as I have been able to obtain about the bataori consist of nothing more than pretty fancies. Two, of which I offer free renderings, are ancient, the first by Tsurayuki ; the second by a poetess classically known as " Akinaka's Daughter " : Weaving-insects I hear; and the fields, in their autumn- colors, Seem of Chinese-brocade : was this the weavers' work ? Gossamer-threads are spread over the shrubs and grasses : Weaving-insects I hear ; do they weave with spider-silk? Umaoi. The umaoi is sometimes confounded with the bataori, which it much resembles. But the true umaoi (called junta in Izumo) is a shorter and thicker insect than the hataori; and has at its tail a hook-shaped protuberance, which the weaver- insect has not. Moreover, there is some difference in the sounds made by the two crea- tures. The music of the umaoi is not "ji-i-i-i, Insect-Musicians 67 Si UMAOI (natural si^e). chon-chon," but, " ^u-l-in-t^o ! %u~i-in- t%o!" say the Japanese. Kirigirisu. 1 There are different varieties of this much-prized insect. The abura-kirigirisu, a day-singer, is a delicate creature, and must be carefully nourished in confinement. The tacU-kirigirisu, a night- singer, is more commonly found in the market. Captured hirigirisu sold in Tokyo are mostly from the neighborhood of Itabashi, Niiso, and Todogawa; and these, which fetch high prices, are considered the best. They are large vigorous insects, uttering very clear notes. From Kujiukuri in Kadzusa other and much cheaper hirigirisu are brought to the capital ; but these have a dis agreeable odor, suffer from the attacks of a peculiar parasite, and are feeble musicians. 1 Locusta Japonica. (?) 68 Exotics and Retrospectives As stated elsewhere, the sounds made by the kirigirisu are said to resemble those of the Jap anese words, " Tsu^ure sase! sase/" (Torn clothes patch up ! patch up !) ; and a large pro portion of the many poems written about the KIRIGIRISU (natural st\t). insect depend for interest upon ingenious but untranslatable allusions to those words. I offer renderings therefore of only two poems on the kirigirisu, the first by an unknown poet in the Kokinsbu ; the second by Tadaf usa : O Kirigirisu ! when the clover changes color, Are the nights then sad for you as for me that cannot sleep ? O Kirigirisu 1 cry not, I pray, so loudly I Hearing, my sorrow grows, and the autumn-night is long I Insect-Musicians 69 KOSA-HIBARI (natural si Kusa-Ubari. The kma-Ubari, or " Grass-Lark," also called Asa-su^u, or "Morning-Bell;" Yabu- su^u, or "the Little Bell of the Bamboo- grove ; " Aki-ka^e, or "Autumn -Wind;" and Ko-su%u-mushi, or "the Child of the Bell- Insect," is a day -singer. It is very small, perhaps the smallest of the insect- choir, except the Ya- mato-su^u. YAMATO-SCZU (" LITTLE-BELL OF YAMATO ") (natural sf^e). 70 Exotics and Retrospectives Kin-bibari. The kin-bibari, or "Golden Lark " used to be found in great numbers about the neighbor hood of the well-known Shino- bazu-no-ike, the great lotos- pond of Uyeno in Tokyo; KIN-HIBARI natural but f Me ? earS * haS beCOme sip). scarce there. The kin-bibari now sold in the capital are brought from Todo- gawa and Shimura. Kuro-bibari. The kuro-bibari, or " Black Lark," is rather uncommon, and comparatively dear. It is caught in the country about Tokyo, but is never bred. KURO-HIBARI (natural Korogi. There are many varieties of this night-cricket, called korogi from its music : " kiri-kiri-kiri- kiri! horo-koro-hdro-kdro! gbi-i-i-i-i-i*i!" Insect-Musicians 71 One variety, the ebi-korogi, or " shrimp, korogi," does not make any sound. But the uma-korogi, or " horse-korogi ; " the y \ Oni-korogi, or " Demon - korogi ;" ^ \ and the Emma-korogi, or " Cricket- ? \ of-Emma l [King of the Dead]," are all good musicians. The color is blackish-brown, or EMMA-KOROGI (natural sip). black ; the best singing-varieties have curious wavy markings on the wings. An interesting fact regarding the korogi is that mention of it is made in the very oldest collec tion of Japanese poems known, the Manyosbu, probably compiled about the middle of the eighth 1 Sanscrit: Yama. Probably this name was given to the insect on account of its large staring eyes. Images of King Emma are always made with very big and awful eyes. 72 Exotics and Retrospectives century. The following lines, by an unknown poet, which contain this mention, are therefore considerably more than eleven hundred years old:- Niwa-kusa ni Murasam furitg Korogi no Naku oto kikeba Aki tsukinikeri. [" Showers have sprinkled the gar den-grass. Hear ing the sound of the crying of the korogi, I know that the autumn has come."] EMMA-KOROGI. Kutsuwamustt. There are several varieties of this extraordinary creature, also called onomatopoetically gatcba- gatcba, which is most provokingly described in dictionaries as " a kind of noisy cricket " ! The variety commonly sold in Tokyo has a green Insect-Musicians 73 back, and a yellowish-white abdomen ; but there are also brown and reddish varieties. The kut- suwamusbi is difficult to capture, but easy to breed. As the tsuhu-tsuku-bosU is the most wonderful musician among the sun-loving cicadas KOTSUWAMUSHI (natural or semi, so the kutsuwamusbi is the most won derful of night -crickets. It owes its name, which means " The Bridle-bit-Insect," to its noise, which resembles the jingling and ringing of the old- fashioned Japanese bridle-bit (kutsuwa). But 74 Exotics and Retrospectives the sound is really much louder and much more complicated than ever was the jingling of a single kutsuwa ; and the accuracy of the comparison is not easily discerned while the creature is storming beside you. Without the evidence of one's own eyes, it were hard to believe that so small a life could make so prodigious a noise. Certainly the vibratory apparatus in this insect must be very complicated. The sound begins with a thin sharp whizzing, as of leaking steam, and slowly strength ens; then to the whizzing is suddenly added a quick dry clatter, as of castanets ; and then, as the whole machinery rushes into operation, you hear, high above the whizzing and the clatter, a torrent of rapid ringing tones like the tapping of a gong. These, the last to begin, are also the first to cease ; then the castanets stop ; and finally the whizzing dies ; but the full orchestra may remain in operation for several hours at a time, without a pause. Heard from far away at night the sound is pleasant, and is really so much like the ringing of a bridle-bit, that when you first listen to it you cannot but feel how much real poetry belongs to the name of this insect, cele brated from of old as " playing at ghostly escort in ways where no man can pass." Insect-Musicians 75 The most ancient poem on the kutsuwamusU is perhaps the following, by the Lady Idzumi- Shikibu : Waga seko wa Koma ni makase'te' Kinikeri to, Kiku ni kikasuru Kutsuwamushi kanal which might be thus freely rendered : Listen ! his bridle rings; that is surely my husband Homeward hurrying now fast as the horse can bear him ! . . . Ah ! my ear was deceived I only the Kutsuwamushi 1 KANTAN (natural sty). 76 Exotics and Retrospectives Kantan. This insect also called kantan-gisu, and kantan-no-kirigirisu, is a dark-brown night- cricket. Its note " %i-i-i-i-in " is peculiar : I can only compare it to the prolonged twang of a bow-string. But this comparison is not satis factory, because there is a penetrant metallic qual ity in the twang, impossible to describe. VI Besides poems about the chanting of particular insects, there are countless Japanese poems, ancient and modern, upon the voices of night-insects in general, chiefly in relation to the autumn sea son. Out of a multitude I have selected and translated a few of the more famous only, as typical of the sentiment or fancy of hundreds. Although some of my renderings are far from literal as to language, I believe that they express with tolerable faithfulness the thought and feeling of the originals : Not for my sake alone, I know, is the autumn's coming; Yet, hearing the insects sing, at once my heart grows sad. KOKINSHU. Insect-Musicians 77 Faint in the moonshine sounds the chorus of insect-voices : To-night the sadness of autumn speaks in their plaintive tone. I never can find repose in the chilly nights of autumn, Because of the pain I hear in the insects' plaintive song. How must it be in the fields where the dews are falling thickly ! In the insect-voices that reach me I hear the tingling of cold. Never I dare to take my way through the grass in autumn : Should I tread upon insect-voices * what would my feel ings be ! The song is ever the same, but the tones of the insects differ, Maybe their sorrows vary, according to their hearts . IDZUMI-SHIKIBU. Changed is my childhood's home all but those insect- voices : 1 think they are trying to speak of happier days that were. These trembling dews on the grass are they tears for the death of autumn? Tears of the insect-singers that now so sadly cry? It might be thought that several of the poems above given were intended to express either a reaJ or an affected sympathy with imagined insect' pain. But this would be a wrong interpretation. ^ * Musbi no koefumu. 78 Exotics and Retrospectives In most compositions of this class, the artistic purpose is to suggest, by indirect means, various phases of the emotion of love, especially that melancholy which lends its own passional tone to the aspects and the voices of nature. The baroque fancy that dew might be insect-tears, is by its very exaggeration intended to indicate the extrav agance of grief, as well as to suggest that human tears have been freshly shed. The verses in which a woman declares that her heart has become too affectionate, since she cannot but feel for the bell- insect during a heavy shower, really bespeak the fond anxiety felt for some absent beloved, travel ling in the time of the great rains. Again, in the lines about " treading on insect-voices," the dainty scruple is uttered only as a hint of that intensifi cation of feminine tenderness which love creates. And a still more remarkable example of this indi rect double-suggestiveness is offered by the little poem prefacing this article, "O insect, insect! think you that Karma can be ex hausted by song?" The Western reader would probably suppose that the insect-condition, or insect-state-of-being, is here referred to; but the real thought of the Insect-Musicians 79 speaker, presumably a woman, is that her own sorrow is the result of faults committed in former lives, and is therefore impossible to alleviate. It will have been observed that a majority of the verses cited refer to autumn and to the sen sations of autumn. Certainly Japanese poets have not been insensible to the real melancholy inspired by autumn, that vague strange annual revival of ancestral pain : dim inherited sorrow of millions of memories associated through mil lions of years with the death of summer ; but in nearly every utterance of this melancholy, the veritable allusion is to grief of parting. With its color-changes, its leaf -whirlings, and the ghostly plaint of its insect-voices, autumn Buddhistically symbolizes impermanency, the certainty of be- reavement, the pain that clings to all desire, and the sadness of isolation. But even if these poems on insects were pri marily intended to shadow amorous emotion, do they not reflect also for us the subtlest influences of nature, wild pure nature, upon imagina tion and memory ? Does not the place accorded to insect-melody, in the home-life as well as in the literature of Japan, prove an esthetic sensi- 80 Exotics and Retrospectives bility developed in directions that yet remain for us almost unexplored ? Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night-festival pro claim even a popular and universal comprehen sion of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets : the pleasure-pain of autumn's beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy -swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical, their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness ; but in the knowledge of the natural, in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth, they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilized their paradise, substituting every where for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous, that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to compre hend the charm of that which we destroyed. A Question in the Zen Texts A Question in the Zen Texts i MY friend opened a thin yellow volume of that marvellous text which proclaims at sight the patience of the Buddhist en graver. Movable Chinese types may be very useful; but the best of which they are capable is ugliness itself when compared with the beauty of the old block'-printing. " I have a queer story for you," he said. " A Japanese story ? " " No, Chinese." " What is the book ? " " According to Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters of the title, we call it Mu- Mon-Kwan, which means ' The Gateless Barrier.' It is one of the books especially studied by the Zen sect, or sect of DhySna. A peculiarity of some of the DhySna texts, this being a good example, is that they are not explanatory. 84 Exotics and Retrospectives They only suggest. Questions are put ; but the student must think out the answers for himself. He must think them out, but not write them. You know that Dhyana represents human effort to reach, through meditation, zones of thought beyond the range of verbal expression ; and any thought once narrowed into utterance loses all Dhyana quality. . . . Well, this story is supposed to be true ; but it is used only for a Dhytna question. There are three different Chinese ver sions of it ; and I can give you the substance of the three." Which he did as follows : II The story of the girl Ts'ing, which is told in the Lui-sbwo-li-hwan-ki, cited by the Ching- tang-luh, and commented upon in the Wu-mu- kwan (called by the Japanese Mu-Mon-Kwan), which is a book of the Zen sect : There lived in Han-yang a man called Chang- Kien, whose child- daughter, Ts'ing, was of peer less beauty. He had also a nephew called Wang-Chau, a very handsome boy. The A Question in the Zen Texts 85 children played together, and were fond of each other. Once Kien jestingly said to his nephew : "Some day I will marry you to my little daughter." Both children remembered these words; and they believed themselves thus be trothed. When Ts'ing grew up, a man of rank asked for her in marriage ; and her father decided to com ply with the demand. Ts'ing was greatly troubled by this decision. As for Chau, he was so much angered and grieved that he resolved to leave home, and go to another province. The next day he got a boat ready for his journey, and after sunset, without bidding farewell to any one, he proceeded up the river. But in the middle of the night he was startled by a voice calling to him, " Wait ! it is I ! " and he saw a girl running along the bank towards the boat. It was Ts'ing. Chau was unspeakably delighted. She sprang into the boat ; and the lovers found their way safely to the province of Chuh. In the province of Chuh they lived happily for six years ; and they had two children. But Ts'ing could not forget her parents, and often longed to see them again. At last she said to her husband : " Because in former time I could 86 Exotics and Retrospectives not bear to break the promise made to you, I ran away with you and forsook my parents, al though knowing that I owed them all possible duty and affection. Would it not now be well to try to obtain their forgiveness ? " " Do not grieve yourself about that," said Chau; "we shall go to see them." He ordered a boat to be prepared ; and a few days later he returned with his wife to Han-yang. According to custom in such cases, the husband first went to the house of Kien, leaving Ts'ing alone in the boat. Kien, welcomed his nephew with every sign of joy, and said : " How much I have been longing to see you ! I was often afraid that something had happened to you." Chau answered respectfully : " I am distressed by the undeserved kindness of your words. It is to beg your forgiveness that I have come." But Kien did not seem to understand. He asked : " To what matter do you refer ? " " I feared," said Chau, " that you were angry with me for having run away with Ts'ing. I took her with me to the province of Chuh." A Question in the Zen Texts 87 " What Ts'ing was that ? " asked Kien. " Your daughter Ts'ing," answered Chau, be- ginning to suspect his father-in-law of some malevolent design. " What are you talking about ? " cried Kien, with every appearance of astonishment. "My daughter Ts'ing has been sick in bed all these years, ever since the time when you went away." "Your daughter Ts'ing," returned Chau, be coming angry, " has not been sick. She has been my wife for six years ; and we have two children; and we have both returned to this place only to seek your pardon. Therefore please do not mock us ! " For a moment the two looked at each other in silence. Then Kien arose, and motioning to his nephew to follow, led the way to an inner room where a sick girl was lying. And Chau, to his utter amazement, saw the face of Ts'ing, beau tiful, but strangely thin and pale. " She cannot speak," explained the old man ; "but she can understand." And Kien said to her, laughingly : " Chau tells me that you ran away with him, and that you gave him two children." 88 Exotics and Retrospectives The sick girl looked at Chau, and smiled ; but remained silent. " Now come with me to the river," said the bewildered visitor to his father-in-law. " For I can assure you, in spite of what I have seen in this house, that your daughter Ts'ing is at this moment in my boat." They went to the river; and there, indeed, was the young wife, waiting. And seeing her father, she bowed down before him, and besought his pardon. Kien said to her : " If you really be my daughter, I have nothing but love for you. Yet though you seem to be my daughter, there is something which I cannot understand. . . . Come with us to the house." So the three proceeded toward the house. As they neared it, they saw that the sick girl, who had not before left her bed for years, was coming to meet them, smiling as if much de lighted. And the two Ts'ings approached each other. But then nobody could ever tell how they suddenly melted into each other, and be came one body, one person, one Ts'ing, even more beautiful than before, and showing no sign of sickness or of sorrow. A Question in the Zen Texts 89 Kien said to Chau : " Ever since the day of your going, my daughter was dumb, and most of the time like a person who had taken too much wine. Now I know that her spirit was absent." Ts'ing herself said : " Really I never knew that I was at home. I saw Chau going away in silent anger; and the same night I dreamed that 1 ran after his boat. . . . But now I cannot tell which was really I, the I that went away in the boat, or the I that stayed at home." Ill " That is the whole of the story," my friend observed. " Now there is a note about it in the Mu-Mon-Kwan that may interest you. This note says : ' The fifth patriarch of the Zen sect once asked a priest, " In the case of the sepa ration of the spirit of the girl Ts'ing, which was the true Ts'ing? " ' It was only because of this question that the story was cited in the book. But the question is not answered. The author only remarks: 'If you can decide which was 90 Exotics and Retrospectives the real Ts'ing, then you will have learned that to go out of one envelope and into another is merely like putting up at an inn. But if you have not yet reached this degree of enlighten ment, take heed that you do not wander aim- lessly about the world. Otherwise, when Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind shall suddenly be dissi pated, you will be like a crab with seven hands and eight legs, thrown into boiling water. And in that time do not say that you were never told about the Thing.' . . . Now the Thing " " I do not want to hear about the Thing," I interrupted, " nor about the crab with seven hands and eight legs. I want to hear about the clothes." " What clothes ? " " At the time of their meeting, the two Ts'ings would have been differently dressed, very dif ferently, perhaps ; for one was a maid, and the other a wife. Did the clothes of the two also blend together ? Suppose that one had a silk robe and the other a robe of cotton, would these have mixed into a texture of silk and cotton ? Suppose that one was wearing a blue girdle, and the other a yellow girdle, would the result have been a green girdle ? ... Or did one Ts'ing simply slip out A Question in the Zen Texts 91 of her costume, and leave it on the ground, like the cast-off shell of a cicada ? " "None of the texts say anything about the clothes," my friend replied : " so I cannot tell you. But the subject is quite irrelevant, from the Bud dhist point of view. The doctrinal question is the question of what I suppose you would call the personality of Ts'ing." " And yet it is not answered," I said. "It is best answered,'' my friend replied, "by not being answered." " How so ? " " Because there is no such thing as person ality." The Literature of the Dead The Literature of the Dead Shindarlba koso ikitare. " Only because of having died, does one enter into life." Buddhist proverb, I BEHIND my dwelling, but hidden from view by a very lofty curtain of trees, there is a Buddhist temple, with a cemetery at tached to it. The cemetery itself is in a grove of pines, many centuries old ; and the temple stands in a great quaint lonesome garden. Its religious name isji-sbo-in ; but the people call it Kobudera, which means the Gnarled, or Knobby Temple, be cause it is built of undressed timber, great logs of hinoki, selected for their beauty or strangeness of shape, and simply prepared for the builder by the removal of limbs and bark. But such gnarled and knobby wood is precious : it is of the hardest and most enduring, and costs far more than com- 96 Exotics and Retrospectives mon building-material, as might be divined from the fact that the beautiful alcoves and the choicest parts of Japanese interiors are finished with wood of a similar kind. To build Kobudera was an undertaking worthy of a prince ; and, as a matter of history, it was a prince who erected it, for a place of family worship. There is a doubtful tradition that two designs were submitted to him by the architect, and that he chose the more fantastic one under the innocent impression that undressed timber would prove cheap. But whether it owes its existence to a mistake or not, Kobudera remains one of the most interesting temples of Japan. The public have now almost forgotten its existence; but it was famous in the time of lyemitsu; and its appellation, Ji- sho-in, was taken from the kaimyo of one of the great Shogun's ladies, whose superb tomb may be seen in its cemetery. Before Meiji, the temple was isolated among woods and fields ; but the city has now swallowed up most of the green spaces that once secluded it, and has pushed out the ugliest of new streets directly in front of its gate. This gate a structure of gnarled logs, with a tiled and tilted Chinese roof is a fitting pref GATE OF KOBUDERA The Literature of the Dead 97 ace to the queer style of the temple itself. From either gable-end of the gate-roof, a demon-head, grinning under triple horns, looks down upon the visitor. 1 Within, except at the hours of prayer, all is green silence. Children do not play in the 1 Such figures are really elaborate tiles, and are called onigawara, or "demon-tiles." It may naturally be asked why demon-heads should be ever placed above Buddhist gate-ways. Originally they were not intended to represent demons, in the Buddhist sense, but guardian-spirits whose duty it was to drive demons away. The onigawara were introduced into Japan either from China or Korea not improbably Korea; for we read that the first roof-tiles made in Japan were manufactured shortly after the intro duction of the new faith by Korean priests, and under the supervision of Shotoku Taishi, the princely founder and supporter of Japanese Buddhism. They were baked at Koizumi-mura, in Yamato; but we are not told whether there were any of this extraordinary shape among them. It is worth while remarking that in Korea to-day you can see hideous faces painted upon house-doors, even upon the gates of the royal palace; and these, intended merely to frighten away evil spirits, suggest the real origin of the demon-tiles. The Japanese, on first seeing such tiles, called them demon-tiles because the faces upon them resembled those conventionally given to Buddhist demons ; and now that their history has been forgotten, they are popularly supposed to represent demon-guardians. There would be nothing contrary to Buddhist faith in the fancy ; for there are many legends of good demons. Besides, in the eternal order of divine law, even the worst demon must at last become a Buddha. 98 Exotics and Retrospectives court perhaps because the temple is a private one. The ground is everywhere hidden by a fine thick moss of so warm a color, that the brightest foliage of the varied shrubbery above it looks sombre by contrast ; and the bases of walls, the pedestals of monuments, the stonework of the bell-tower, the masonry of the ancient well, are muffled with the same luminous growth. Maples and pines and cryptomerias screen the facade of the temple ; and, if your visit be in autumn, you may find the whole court filled with the sweet heavy perfume of the mokusei ^blossom. After having looked at the strange temple, you would find it worth while to enter the cemetery, by the black gate on the west side of the court. I like to wander in that cemetery, partly be cause in the twilight of its great trees, and in the silence of centuries which has gathered about them, one can forget the city and its turmoil, and dream out of space and time, but much more because it is full of beauty, and of the poetry of great faith. Indeed of such poetry it possesses riches quite exceptional. Each Buddhist sect has 1 Osmantbus fragrans. This is one of the very few Japanese plants having richly-perfumed flowers. The Literature of the Dead 99 its own tenets, rites, and forms ; and the special character of these is reflected in the iconography and epigraphy of its burial-grounds, so that for any experienced eye a Tendai graveyard is readily distinguishable from a Shingon graveyard, or a Zen graveyard from one belonging to a Nichiren congregation. But at Kobudera the inscriptions and the sculptures peculiar to several Buddhist sects can be studied side by side. Founded for the Hokke, or Nichiren rite, the temple never- theless passed, in the course of generations, under the control of other sects the last being the Tendai; and thus its cemetery now offers a most interesting medley of the emblems and the epitaphic formularies of various persuasions. It was here that I first learned, under the patient teaching of an Oriental friend, something about the Buddhist literature of the dead. No one able to feel beauty could refuse to con- fess the charm of the old Buddhist cemeteries, with their immemorial trees, their evergreen mazes of shrubbery trimmed into quaintest shapes, the carpet -softness of their mossed paths, the weird but unquestionable art of their monu ments. And no great knowledge of Buddhism is 100 Exotics and Retrospectives needed to enable you, even at first sight, to under- stand something of this art. You would recog nize the lotos chiselled upon tombs or water-tanks, and would doubtless observe that the designs of the pedestals represent a lotos of eight petals, though you might not know that these eight petals symbolize the Eight Intelligences. You would recognize the manji, or svastika, figuring the Wheel of the Law, though ignorant of its relation to the MahaySna philosophy. You tvould perhaps be able to recognize also the images of certain Buddhas, though not aware of the meaning of their attitudes or emblems in relation to mystical ecstasy or to the manifesta tion of the Six Supernatural Powers. And you would be touched by the simple pathos of the offerings, the incense and the flowers before the tombs, the water poured out for the dead, even though unable to divine the deeper pathos of the beliefs that make the cult. But unless an excellent Chinese scholar as well as a Buddhist philosopher, all book -knowledge of the great religion would still leave you helpless in a world of riddles. The marvellous texts, the exqui site Chinese scriptures chiselled into the granite of tombs, or limned by a master-brush upon the The Literature of the Dead 101 smooth wood of the sotoba, will yield their secrets only to an interpreter of no common powers. And the more you become familiar with their aspect, the more the mystery of them tantalizes, especially after you have learned that a literal translation of them would mean, in the majority of cases, exactly nothing ! What strange thoughts have been thus re corded and yet concealed ? Are they complex and subtle as the characters that stand for them ? Are they beautiful also like those characters, with some undreamed-of, surprising beauty, such as might inform the language of another planet ? II As for sublety and complexity, much of this mortuary literature is comparable to the Veil of Isis. Behind the mystery of the text in which almost every character has two readings there is the mystery of the phrase ; and again behind this are successions of riddles belonging to a gnosticism older than all the wisdom of the Occi dent, and deep as the abysses of Space. Fortu nately the most occult texts are also the least 102 Exotics and Retrospectives interesting, and bear little relation to the purpose of this essay. The majority are attached, not to the sculptured, but to the written and imperma nent literature of cemeteries, not to the stone monuments, but to the sotoba : those tall narrow laths of unpainted wood which are planted above the graves at fixed, but gradually increasing inter vals, during a period of one hundred years. 1 The uselessness of any exact translation of these inscriptions may be exemplified by a word-for- word rendering of two sentences written upon the sotoba used by the older sects. What mean ing can you find in such a term as " Law-sphere- substance-nature-wisdom," or such an invocation as " Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth ! " for an invocation it really is? To understand these 1 The word "sotoba" is identical with the Sanscrit "stQpa." Originally a mausoleum, and later a simple monument commemorative or otherwise, the stQpa was introduced with Buddhism into China, and thence, perhaps by way of Korea, into Japan. Chinese forms of the stone stQpa are to be found in many of the old Japa nese temple-grounds. The wooden sotoba is only a symbol of the stQpa ; and the more elaborate forms of it plainly suggest its history. The slight carving along its upper edges represents that superimposition of cube, sphere, crescent, pyramid, and body-pyriform (symbolizing the Five Great Elements), which forms the design of the most beautiful funeral monuments. . - The Literature of the Dead 102 words one must first know that, in the doctrine of the mystical sects, the universe is composed of Five Great Elements which are identical with Five Buddhas ; that each of the Five Buddhas contains the rest ; and that the Five are One by essence, though varying in their phenomenal man ifestations. The name of an element has thus three significations. The word Fire, for example, means flame as objective appearance ; it means flame also as the manifestation of a particular Buddha ; and it likewise means the special quality of wisdom or power attributed to that Buddha. Perhaps this doctrine will be more easily under stood by the help of the following Shingon clas sification of the Five Elements in their Buddhist relations : I. Ho-kai-tai-slo-cbi (Sansc. Dharma-dhatu-prakrit-gRana), or " Law-sphere- substance-nature-wisdom," signifying the wisdom that becomes the substance of things. This is the element Ether. Ether personified is Dai-Nichi-Nyorai, the " Great Sun-Bud dha " (Mahavairokana Tathagata), who " holds the seal of Wisdom." II. Dai-cn-hyo-chi (Xdarsana-gfSStna), or " Great-round-mirror-wisdom," that is to say the divine power making images manifest. This is the element Earth. Earth personified is Ashuku Nyorai, the " Immovable TathSgata " (Akshobhya). 104 Exotics and Retrospectives III. Byo-do-sbo-cbi (Samatt-gh'tna), " Even-equal-nature-wisdom," that is, the wisdom making no distinction of persons or of things. The element Fire. Personified, Fire is H6-sho Nyorai, or "Gem-Birth" Buddha (Ratnasambhava Tathlgata), presid ing over virtue and happiness. IV. Myo-kwan-^atsu-cbi (Pratyavekshana-gfiana), " Wondrously-observing-con- sidering-wisdom ; " that is, the wisdom distinguishing clearly truth from error, destroying doubts, and presiding over the preaching of the Law. The element Water. Water personified is Amida Nyorai, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light (Amitabha TathSgata). V. Jo-sbo-sa-cbi (Krityanushthana-gfiana), the " Wisdom-of-accomplish- ing-what-is-to-be-done ; " that is to say, the divine wis dom that helps beings to reach Nirvana. The element Air. Air personified is Fu-ku-jo-ju, the " Unfailing-of-Accom- plishment," more commonly called Fuku-Nyorai (Amo- ghasiddhi, or Sakyamuni). 1 Now the doctrine that each of the Five Buddhas contains the rest, and that all are essentially One, 1 These relations of the elements to the Buddhas named are not, however, permanently fixed in the doctrine, for obvious philosophical reasons. Sometimes Sakyamuni is identified with Ether, and AmitSbha with Air, etc., etc. In the above enumeration I have followed the order taken by Professor Bunyiu Nanjio, who nevertheless suggests that this order is not to be considered perpetual. The Literature of the Dead is symbolized in these texts by an extraordinary use of characters called Bon-ji, which are rec ognizably Sanscrit letters. The name of each element can be written with any one of four characters, all having for Buddhists the same meaning, though differing as to sound and form. Thus the characters standing for Fire would read, according to Japanese pronunciation, Ra, Ran, Ra'dn, and Raku ; and the characters signifying Ether, Kya, Ken, Keen, and Kyaku. By different combinations of the twenty characters making the five sets, different supernatural powers and dif ferent Buddhas are indicated ; and the indica tion is further helped by an additional symbolic character, called Shu-ji or " seed-word," placed immediately after the names of the elements. The reader will now comprehend the mean ing of the invocatory " Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth ! " and of the strange names of divine wisdom written upon sotoba; but the enigmas offered by even a single sotoba may be much more complicated than the foregoing examples suggest. There are unimaginable acrostics; there are rules, varying according to sect, for the position of texts in relation to the points of the compass ; and there are kabalisms 106 Exotics and Retrospectives based upon the multiple values of certain Chinese ideographs. The whole subject of esoteric inscrip tions would require volumes to explain ; and the reader will not be sorry, I fancy, to abandon it at this point in favor of texts possessing a simpler and a more humane interest. The really attractive part of Buddhist cemetery- literature mostly consists of sentences taken from the sutras or the sastras; and the attraction is due not only to the intrinsic beauty of the faith which these sentences express, but also to the fact that they will be found to represent, in epitome, a complete body of Buddhist doctrine. Like the mystical inscriptions above-mentioned, they belong to the sotoba, not to the grave stones ; but, while the invocations usually occupy the upper and front part of the sotoba, these sutra-texts are commonly written upon the back. In addition to scriptural and invocatory texts, each sotoba bears the name of the giver, the kaimyo of the dead, and the name of a com memorative anniversary. Sometimes a brief prayer is also inscribed, or a statement of the pious purpose inspiring the erection of the sotoba. Before considering the scripture-texts proper, in relation to their embodiment of doctrine, I sub- The Literature of the Dead 107 mit examples of the general character and plan of sotoba inscriptions. They are written upon both sides of the wood, be it observed ; but I have not thought it necessary to specify which texts belong to the front, and which to the back of the sotoba, since the rules concerning such position differ according to sect : I. SOTOBA OF THE NICHIREN SECT. (Invocation.) Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth! Hail to the Sutra of the Lotos of the Good Law ! (Commemorative text.) To-day, the service of the third year has been performed in order that our lay-brother [kaimyo] may be enabled to cut off the bonds of illusion, to open the Eye of Enlighten ment, to remain free from all pain, and to enter into bliss. (Sastra text) MYO-HO-KYO-RIKI-SOKU-SHIN-JO-BUTSU ! Even this body [of flesh] by the virtue of the Sutra of the Excellent Law, enters into Buddhahood. II. SOTOBA OF THE NICHIREN SECT. (Invocation.) Hail to the Sutra of the Lotos of the Good Law! 108 Exotics and Retrospectives (Commemorative text.) The rite of feeding the hungry spirits having been fuV- filled, and the service for the dead having been performed, this sotoba is set up in commemoration of the service and the offerings made with prayer for the salvation of Buddha on behalf of (kainyd follows). (Prayer with English translation.) Gan i shi hudohu Fu-gyu o issai Gatoyo shujo Kai-gujo butsudo. By virtue of this good action I beseech that the merit of it may be extended to all, and that we and all living beings may fulfil the Way of Buddha. 1 The fifth day of the seventh month of the thirtieth year of Meiji, by , this sotoba has been set up. III. SOTOBA OF THE JODO SECT. (Invocation.) Hail to the Buddha Amida / (Commemorative mention.) This for the sake of (here kaimyo follows). 1 The above prayer is customarily said after having read a sutra, or copied a sacred text, or caused a Buddhist ser vice to be performed. The Literature of the Dead 109 (Sutra text.) The Buddha of the Golden Mouth, who pos sesses the Great-Round-Mirror-Wisdom, 1 has said: "The glorious light of Amida illumi nates all the worlds of the Ten Directions, and takes into itself and never abandons all living beings who fix their thoughts upon that Buddha!" IV. SOTOBA OF THE ZEN SECT. (Sastra text.) The Dai-en-hyo-chi-hyo declares : " By en tering deeply into meditation, one may behold the Buddhas of the Ten Directions" (Commemorative text.) That the noble Elder Sister 2 Chi-Sho-In-Ko-Un-Tei-MyS,' now dwelling in the House of Shining Wisdom, may in stantly attain to Bodhi.* 1 Dai-en-ky5-chi (Adarsana-gfiana). Amida is the Japa nese form of the name Amitlbha. 2 " Great (or Noble) Elder Sister " is the meaning of the title dai-sbi affixed to the kaimyd of a woman. In the rite of the Zen sect dai-sbi always signifies a married woman; sbin-nyo, a maid. 3 This kaimyo, or posthumous name, literally signifies: Radiant-Chastity-Beaming-Through-Luminous-Clouds. 4 The Supreme Wisdom ; the state of Buddhahood. 110 Exotics and Retrospectives (Prayer.) Let whomsoever looks upon this sotoba be forever delivered from the Three Evil Ways. 1 (Record.) In the thirtieth year of Meiji, on the first day of the fifth month, by the house of Inouye, this sotoba has been set up. The foregoing will doubtless suffice as speci mens of the ordinary forms of inscription. The Buddha praised or invoked is always the Buddha especially revered by the sect from whose sutra or sastra the quotation is chosen ; sometimes also the divine power of a Bodhisattva is extolled, as in the following Zen inscription : " The Sutra of Kwannon says : 'In all the provinces of all the countries in the Ten Directions, there is not even one temple where Kwannon is not self -revealed.'" Sometimes the scripture text more definitely assumes the character of a praise-offering, as the following juxtaposition suggests : 1 San-j4kttdO, the three unhappy conditions of Hell, of the World of Hungry Spirits (Pretas), and of Animal Existence. The Literature of the Dead 111 " The Buddha of Immeasurable Light illu minates all worlds in the Ten Directions of Space." This for the sake of the swift salvation into Buddhahood of our lay-brother named the Great-Secure-Retired-Scholar. Sometimes we also find a verse of praise or an invocation addressed to the apotheosized spirit of the founder of the sect, a common example being furnished by the sotoba of the Shingon rite : " Hail to the Great Teacher Haijo- Kongo ! " 1 Rarely the little prayer for the salvation of the dead assumes, as in the following beautiful ex ample, the language of unconscious poetry : " This for the sake of our noble Elder Sister . May the Lotos of Bliss by virtue of these prayers be made to bloom for her, and to bear the fruit of Buddhahood ! " 2 But usually the prayers are of the simplest, and differ from each other only in the use of peculiar Buddhist terms : 1 "Haijo Kongo" means "the Diamond of Universal Enlightenment : " it is the honorific appellation of Kukai or Kobodaishi, founder of the Shingon-Shu. 2 From a Zen sotoba. 112 Exotics and Retrospectives " This for the sake of the true happiness of our lay- brother [kaimyo], that he may obtain the Supreme Perfect Enlightenment." " This tower is set up for the sake of , that he may obtain complete Sambodhi." 1 " This precious tower and these offerings for the sake of , that he may obtain the /tnattra-Samnyah- Sambodbi." a One other subject of interest belonging to the merely commemorative texts of sotoba remains to be mentioned, the names of certain Buddhist services for the dead. There are two classes of such services : those performed within one hun dred days after death, and those celebrated at fixed intervals during a term of one hundred years, on the 1st, 2d, 7th, 13th, 17th, 24th, 33d, 50th, and 100th anniversaries of the death. In the Zen rite these commemorative services (perhaps we might call them masses) have singular mystical names by which they are recorded upon the sotoba of the sect, such 1 In Japanese " Sanbodai." The term " tower " refers of course to the sotoba, the symbol of a real tower, or at least of the desire to erect such a monument, were it possible. 2 In Japanese, /Inuka-tara-sanmaku-sanbodai, the su preme form of Buddhist enlightenment The Literature of the Dead as Lesser Happiness, Greater Happiness, Broad Repose, The Bright Caress, and The Great Caress. But we shall now turn to the study of the scripture-texts proper, those citations from sutra or sastra which form the main portion of a sotoba-writing ; expounding the highest truth of Buddhist belief, or speaking the deepest thought of Eastern philosophy. Ill At the beginning of my studies in the Kobudera cemetery, I was not less impressed by the quiet cheerfulness of the sotoba-texts, than by their poetry and their philosophy. In none did I find even a shadow of sadness : the greater number were utterances of a faith that seemed to me wider and deeper than our own, sublime proc lamations of the eternal and infinite nature of Thought, the unity of all mind, and the cer tainty of universal salvation. And other surprises awaited me in this strange literature. Texts or fragments of texts, that at first rendering ap peared of the simplest, would yield to learned 8 114 Exotics and Retrospectives commentary profundities of significance absolutely startling. Phrases, seemingly artless, would sud denly reveal a dual suggestiveness, a two-fold idealism, a beauty at once exoteric and mys tical. Of this latter variety of inscription the following is a good example : " The flower having bloomed last night, the World has become fragrant." * In the language of the higher Buddhism, this means that through death a spirit has been re leased from the darkness of illusion, even as the perfume of a blossom is set free at the breaking of the bud, and that the divine Absolute, or World of Law, is refreshed by the new presence, as a whole garden might be made fragrant by the blooming of some precious growth. But in the popular language of Buddhism, the same words signify that in the Lotos-Lake of Paradise another magical flower has opened for the Ap- paritional Rebirth into highest bliss of the being loved and lost on earth, and that Heaven rejoices for the advent of another Buddha. But I desire rather to represent the general result of my studies, than to point out the special 1 From a sotoba of the Jodo sect. The Literature of the Dead 11 beauties of this epitaphic literature : and my pur pose will be most easily attained by arranging and considering the inscriptions in a certain doctrinal order. A great variety of sotoba-texts refer, directly or indirectly, to the Lotos- Flower Paradise of Amida, or, as it is more" often called, the Para dise of the West. The following are typical : " The Amida-Kyo says : ' All who enter into that country enter likewise into that state of "virtue from which there can he no turning back: " 1 "The Text of Gold proclaims: 'In that world they receive bliss only : therefore that world is called Gokuraku, exceeding bliss: " a \ From a sotoba of the Jodo sect. The Amida-Kyo, or SQtra of Amida, is the Japanese [Chinese] version of the smaller Sukhavati-VyQha SQtra. 2 Gokuraku is the common word in Japan for the Bud dhist heaven. The above inscription, translated for me from a sotoba of the Jodo sect, is an abbreviated form of a verse in the Smaller Sukhavati-VyQha (see Buddhist Mahayana. Texts : " Sacred Books of the East"), which Max MUller has thus rendered in full: " In that world SukhSvati, O Sari- putra, there is neither bodily nor mental pain for living beings. The sources of happiness are innumerable there For that reason is that world called Sukhlvati, the happy." 116 Exotics and Retrospectives "Hail unto the Lord Amida Buddha! The Golden Mouth has said, ' All living beings that fix their thoughts upon the Buddha shall be re ceived and welcomed into his Paradise; never shall they be forsaken.' " 1 But texts like these, though dear to popular faith, make no appeal to the higher Buddhism, which admits heaven as a temporary condition only, not to be desired by the wise. Indeed, the MahSytna texts, describing SukhSvatf, themselves suggest its essentially illusive character, a world of jewel-lakes and perfumed airs and magical birds, but a world also in which the voices of winds and waters and singers perpetually preach the unreality of self and the impermanency of all things. And even the existence of this Western Paradise might seem to be denied in other sotoba- texts of deeper significance, such as this : "Originally there is no East or West : where then can South or North be?" 2 " Originally," that is to say, in relation to the Infinite. The relations and the ideas of the Con ditioned cease to exist for the Unconditioned. Yet 1 From a sotoba of the Jodo sect a Sotoba of the Jodo sect. The Literature of the Dead 117 this truth does not really imply denial of other worlds of relation, states of bliss to which the strong may rise, and states of pain to which the weak may descend. It is a reminder only. All conditions are impermanent, and so, in the pro- founder sense, unreal. The Absolute, the Su preme Buddha, is the sole Reality. This doctrine appears in many sotoba-inscriptions : " The Blue Mountain of itself remains eter nally unmoved: the White Clouds come of themselves and go." 1 By "the Blue Mountain" is meant the Sole Reality of Mind; by "the White Clouds," the phenomenal universe. Yet the universe exists but as a dream of Mind : " If any one desire to obtain full knowledge of all the Buddhas of the past, the present, and the future, let him learn to comprehend the true nature of the World of Law. Then will he per ceive that all things are hut the production of Mind." 3 " By the learning and the practice of the True 1 Sotoba of the Jodo sect. * Sotoba of the Zen sect. 118 Exotics and Retrospectives Doctrine, the Non-Apparent becomes [for us] the only Reality." 1 The universe is a phantom, and a phantom likewise the body of man, together with all emo tions, ideas, and memories that make up the complex of his sensuous Self. But is this evanes cent Self the whole of man's inner being ? Not so, proclaim the sotoba : "All living beings have the nature of Buddha. The Nyorai* eternally living, is alone un changeable." 8 " The Kegon-Kyo 4 declares : ' In all living creatures there exists, and has existed from the beginning, the Real-Law Nature : all by their nature contain the original essence of Buddha.' " Sharing the nature of the Unchangeable, we share the Eternal Reality. In the highest sense, man also is divine : " The Mind becomes Buddha : the Mind itself is Buddha." 6 Sotoba of the Zen sect. 2 Tathlgata. 8 From a sotoba of the Zen sect. * Avatamsaka SQtra. This text is also from a Zen sotoba. 6 From a tombstone of the Jodo sect. The text is evi dently from the Chinese version of the Amitayur-Dhy- The Literature of the Dead 119 "In the Engaku-Kyo 1 it is written: 'Now for the first time I perceive that all living beings have the original Buddha-nature, wherefore Birth and Death and Nirvana have become for me as a dream of the night that is gone.' " Yet what of the Buddhas who successively melt into Nirvana, and nevertheless "return in their order " ? Are they, too, phantoms ? is their individuality also unreal? Probably the question admits of many different answers, since there is a Buddhist Realism as well as a Buddhist Idealism ; but, for present purposes, the following famous text is a sufficient reply : NAMU ITSU SHIN SAN-ZE" SHO BUTSU! "Hail to all the Buddhas of the Three Exist ences? who are but one in the One Mind! " * Sna-SOtra (see Buddhist Mahay ana Texts: " Sacred Books of the East"). It reads in the English version thus: "In fine, it is your mind that becomes Buddha; nay, it is your rru'nd that is indeed Buddha." 1 Pratyeka-Buddha sastra ? From a sotoba of the Zen sect. 2 San-^e, or mitsu-yo, the Past, Present, and Future. 8 "Mind" is here expressed by the character shin or kokoro. The text is from a Zen sotoba, but is used also, I am told, by the mystical sects of Tendai and Shingon. 120 Exotics and Retrospectives In relation to the Absolute, no difference exists even between gods and men : " The Golden Verse of the Jo-sho-sa-chi J says: ' This doctrine is equal and alike for all ; there is neither superior nor inferior, neither above nor below.' " Nay, according to a still more celebrated text, there is not even any difference of personality : Jl TA HO KAI BYO DO RI YAKU. " The ' I' and the ' Not-/' are not different in the World of Law : both are favored alike." * And a still more wonderful text (to my thinking, the most remarkable of all Buddhist texts) declares that the world itself, phantom though it be, is yet not different from Mind : SO MOKU KOKU DO SHITSU KAI JO BUTSU. " Grass, trees, countries, the earth itself, all these shall enter wholly into Buddhahood." 8 1 KritySnushthSna-gBSna. The text is from a sotoba of the Shingon sect. 8 More literally, " Self and Other : " i. e., the Ego and the Non-Ego in the meaning of " I " and " Thou." There is no "I" and "Thou" in Buddhahood. This text was copied from a Zen sotoba. From a Zen sotoba. The Literature of the Dead 121 Literally, " shall become Buddha ; " that is, they shall enter into Buddhahood or Nirvana. All that we term matter will be transmuted therefore into Mind, Mind with the attributes of Infinite Sentiency, Infinite Vision, and Infinite Knowledge. As phenomenon, matter is unreal ; but transcendentally it belongs by its ultimate nature to the Sole Reality. Such a philosophical position is likely to puzzle the average reader. To call matter and mind but two aspects of the Ultimate Reality will not seem irrational to students of Herbert Spencer. But to say that matter is a phenomenon, an illusion, a dream, explains nothing; as phenomenon it exists, and having a destiny attributed to it, must be considered objectively. Equally unsatisfying is the statement that phenomena are aggregates of Karma. What is the nature of the particles of the aggregate ? Or, in plainest language, what is the illusion made of ? Not in the original Buddhist scriptures, and still less in the literature of Buddhist cemeteries, need the reply be sought. Such questions are dealt with in the sastras rather than in the sutras ; also in various Japanese commentaries upon both. A friend has furnished me with some 122 Exotics and Retrospectives very curious and unfamiliar Shingon texts con taining answers to the enigma. The Shingon sect, 1 may observe, is a mystical sect, which especially proclaims the identity of mind and substance, and boldly carries out the doctrine to its furthest logical consequences. Its founder and father Ku-kai, better known as Kobo- daishi, declared in his book Hi^pki that matter is not different in essence from spirit. "As to the doctrine of grass, trees, and things non -sentient becoming Buddhas " he writes, " I say that the refined forms [ultimate nature] of spiritual bodies consist of the Five Great Elements ; that Ether * consists of the Five Great Elements ; and that the refined forms of bodies spiritual, of ether, of plants, of trees, consequently pervade all space. This ether, these plants and trees, are themselves spiritual bodies. To the eye of flesh, plants and trees appear to be gross matter. But to the eye 1 The Chinese word literally means " void," as in the expression " Void Supreme," to signify the state of Nirvana. But the philosophical reference here is to the ultimate sub stance, or primary matter ; and the rendering of the term by "Ether" (rather in the Greek than the modern sense, of course) has the sanction of Bunyiu Nanjio, and the ap proval of other eminent Sanscrit and Chinese scholars. The Literature of the Dead 12$ of the Buddha they are composed of minute spir itual entities. Therefore, even without any change in their substance, there can be no error or impropriety in our calling them Buddhas." The use of the term " non-sentient " in the foregoing would seem to involve a contradiction ; but this is explained away by a dialogue in the book SU-man-gi : Q. Are not grass and trees sometimes called sentient ? A. They can be so called. Q. But they have also been called non-sentient : how can they be called sentient ? A. In all substance from the beginning exists the im press of the wisdom-nature of the Nyorai (Tatbagata) : therefore to call such things sentient is not error. " Potentially sentient," the reader might con clude ; but this conclusion would be wrong. The Shingon thought is not of a potential sentiency, but of a latent sentiency which although to us non-apparent and non-imaginable, is nevertheless both real and actual. Commenting upon the words of Kobodaishi above cited, the great priest Yu-kai not only reiterates the opinion of his master, but asserts that it is absurd to deny that plants, trees, and what we call inaminate objects, can practise virtue ! " Since Mind," he declares, 124 Exotics and Retrospectives " pervades the whole World of Law, the grasses, plants, trees, and earth pervaded by it must all have mind, and must turn their mind to Buddha- hood and practise virtue. Do not doubt the doc trine of our sect, regarding the Non- Duality of the Pervading and the Pervaded, merely because of the distinction made in common parlance be tween Matter and Mind." As for bow plants or stones can practise virtue, the sutras indeed have nothing to say. But that is because the sutras, being intended for man, teach only what man should know and do. The reader will now, perhaps, be better able to follow out the really startling Buddhist hypothe sis of the nature of matter to its more than start ling conclusion. (It must not be contemned because of the fantasy of five elements ; for these are declared to be only modes of one ultimate.) All forms of what we call matter are really but aggregates of spiritual units; and all apparent differences of substance represent only differences of combination among these units. The differ ences of combination are caused by special ten dencies and affinities of the units ; the tendency of each being the necessary result of its particular evolutional history (using the term " evolu- The Literature of the Dead tional " in a purely ethical sense). All integra tions of apparent substance, the million suns and planets of the universe, represent only the affinities of such ghostly ultimates ; and every human act or thought registers itself through enormous time by some knitting or loosening of forces working for good or evil. Grass, trees, earth, and all things seem to us what they are not, simply because the eye of flesh is blind. Life itself is a curtain hiding reality, somewhat as the vast veil of day con ceals from our sight the countless orbs of Space. But the texts of the cemeteries proclaim that the purified mind, even while prisoned within the body, may enter for moments of ecstasy into union with the Supreme : " The One Bright Moon illuminates the mind in the meditation called Zenjo." 1 The "One Bright Moon" is the Supreme Buddha. By the pure of heart He may even be seen : 1 Literally, "illuminates the Zenjo-mind." ZenjS is the Sanscrit Dhyana. It is believed that in real Dhyana the mind can hold communication with the Absolute. From a sotoba of the Zen sect. 126 Exotics and Retrospectives " Hail unto the Wondrous Law! By attain ing to the state of single-mindedness we behold the Buddha." * Greater delight there is none : " Incomparable the face of the Nyorai, sur passing all beauty in this world! " a But to see the face of one Buddha is to see all: " The Dai-en-kyo-cbi-kyo* says : ' By enter ing deeply into the meditation Zenjo, one may see all the Buddhas of the Ten Directions of Space.' " " The Golden Mouth has said: ' He whose mind can discern the being of one Buddha, may easily behold three, four, five Buddhas, nay, all the Buddhas of the Three Existences.' " * Which mystery is thus explained : 1 From a sotoba of the Tendai sect. 2 From a Jodo sotoba. Literally, "the Great-Round-Mirror- Wisdom-SOtra." Sansc., Adarsana-gnana. From a Zen sotoba. * Sotoba of the Zen sect. The Literature of the Dead 127 " The Myo-kwan-satsu-cbi-kyo l has said : Tbe mind tloat detaches itself from all things becomes the very mind of Buddha." 3 Visitors to the older Buddhist temples of Japan can scarcely fail to notice the remarkable char acter of the gilded aureoles attached to certain images. These aureoles, representing circles, disks, or ovals of glory, contain numbers of little niches shaped like archings or whirls of fire, each enshrining a Buddha or a Bodhisattva. A verse of the Amitlyur-Dhya'na Sutra might have sug gested this symbolism to the Japanese sculptors : "In the halo of that Buddba there are Bud- dbas innumerable as the sands of the Ganga." * Icon and verse alike express that doctrine of the One in Many suggested by the foregoing sotoba- texts; and the assurance that he who sees one Buddha can see all, may further be accepted as signifying that he who perceives one great truth fully, will be able to perceive countless truths. But even to the spiritually blind the light must come at last. A host of cemetery texts proclaim 1 Pratyaveksbana-gnana. * From a Zen sotoba. 8 Buddbist Mabayana Texts : " Sacred Books of the East," vol. xlix. p. 180. 128 Exotics and Retrospectives the Infinite Love that watches all, and the cer tainty of ultimate and universal salvation : "Possessing all the Virtues and all the Powers, the Eyes of the Infinite Compassion be hold all living creatures." 1 " The Kongd-takara-td-mei* proclaims : ' All living beings in the Six States of Existence* shall he delivered from the bonds of attachment ; their minds and their bodies alike shall be freed from desire ; and they shall obtain the Supreme Enlightenment.' " " The Sutra says : ' Changing the hearts of all beings, I cause them to enter upon the Way of Buddbabood:" 4 Yet the supreme conquest can be achieved only by self -effort : " Through the destruction of the Three Poisons * 1 From a sotoba of the Zen sect. 8 Lit.: "the Inscription of the Tower of Diamond," name of a Buddhist text. 8 The Six States of Existence are Heaven, Man, Demons, Hell, Hungry Spirits (Pretas), and Animals. The above is from a Zen sotoba. 4 Sotoba of the Nichiren sect. * San-doku or Mitsu-no-doku, viz. : Anger, Ignorance, and Desire. From a Zen sotoba. The Literature of the Dead 129 one may rise above the Three States of Exist ence." The Three Existences signify time past, present, and future. To rise above (more literally, to " emerge from ") the Three Existences means therefore to pass beyond Space and Time, to become one with the Infinite. The conquest of Time is indeed possible only for a Buddha ; but all shall become Buddhas. Even a woman, while yet a woman, may reach Buddhahood, as this Nichiren text bears witness, inscribed above the grave of a girl : KAI YO KEN PI RYO-NYO JO BUTSU. " All bebeld from afar the Dragon Maiden become a Buddha." The reference is to the beautiful legend of SSgara, the daughter of the N2ga-king, in the Myd-bo-renge-kyo. 1 1 Japanese title of the Saddharma-Pundarika SQtra. See, for legend, chap. xi. of Kern's translation in the Sacred Books of the East series. 130 Exotics and Retrospectives IV Though not representing, nor even suggesting, the whole range of sotoba-literature, the forego ing texts will sufficiently indicate the quality of its philosophical interest. The inscriptions of the haka, or tombs, have another kind of interest; but before treating of these, a few words should be said about the tombs themselves. I cannot attempt detail, because any description of the various styles of such monuments would require a large and profusely illustrated volume ; while the study of their sculptures belongs to the enor mous subject of Buddhist iconography, foreign to the purpose of this essay. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of different forms of Buddhist funeral monu ments, ranging from the unhewn boulder, with a few ideographs scratched on it, of the poorest village-graveyard, to the complicated turret (hage- hioi) enclosing a shrine with images, and sur mounted with a spire of umbrella-shaped disks or parasols (Sanscrit: tcbdtras), possibly repre senting the old Chinese stQpa. The most common class of baka are plain. A large number of the The Literature of the Dead 131 better class have lotos-designs chiselled upon some part of them : either the pedestal is sculptured so as to represent lotos-petals ; or a single blossom is cut in relief or intaglio on the face of the tablet ; or (but this is rare) a whole lotos-plant, leaves and flowers, is designed in relief upon one or two sides of the monument. In the costly class of tombs symbolizing the Five Buddhist Elements, the eight-petalled lotos-symbol may be found repeated, with decorative variations, upon three or four portions of their elaborate structure. Occasionally we find beautiful reliefs upon tomb stones, images of Buddhas or Bodhisattvas ; and not unfrequently a statue of Jizo may be seen erected beside a grave. But the sculptures of this class are mostly old ; the finest pieces in the Kobudera cemetery, for example, were exe cuted between two and three hundred years ago. Finally I may observe that the family crest or mon of the dead is cut upon the front of the tomb, and sometimes also upon the little stone tank set before it. The inscriptions very seldom include any texts from the holy books. On the front of the mon ument, below the chiselled crest, the kaimyo is 132 Exotics and Retrospectives graven, together, perhaps, with a single mystical character Sanscrit or Chinese ; on the left side is usually placed the record of the date of death ; and on the right, the name of the person or family erecting the tomb. Such is now, at least, the ordinary arrangement ; but there are numer ous exceptions ; and as the characters are most often disposed in vertical columns, it is quite easy to put all the inscriptions upon the face of a very narrow monument. Occasionally the real name is also cut upon some part of the stone, to gether, perhaps, with some brief record of the memorable actions of the dead. Excepting the kaimyo, and the sect-invocation often accompany ing it, the inscriptions upon the ordinary class of tombs are secular in character ; and the real in terest of such epigraphy is limited to the kaimyo. By kai-myo (s/7#-name) is meant the Buddhist name given to the spirit of the dead, according to the custom of all sects except the Ikko or Shinshu. In a special sense the term kai, or sila, refers to precepts of conduct J ; in a general sense it might 1 There is a great variety of sf/a ; five, eight, and ten for different classes of laity ; two hundred and fifty for priests ; five hundred for nuns, etc., etc. Beit here observed that the posthumous Buddhist name given to the dead must not be studied as referring always to conduct in this world, The Literature of the Dead 133 be rendered as " salvation by works." But the Shinshu allows no kai to any mortal ; it does not admit the doctrine of immediate salvation by works, but only by faith in Amida ; and the posthumous appellations which it bestows are therefore called not kai-myo, but bo-myo, or " Law-names." Before Meiji the social rank occupied by any one during life was suggested by the kaimyo. The use, with a kaimyo, of the two characters reading in den, and signifying " temple-dweller," or " mansion-dweller," or of the more com mon single character in, signifying " temple " or " mansion," was a privilege reserved to the nobil ity and gentry. Class -distinctions were further indicated by suffixes. Koji, a term partly cor- responding to our " lay-brother," and Daishi, " great elder-sister," were honorifically attached to the kaimyo of the samurai and the aristocracy ; while the simpler appellations of Shinsbi and Shinnyo, respectively signifying "faithful [be lieving] man," " faithful woman," followed the but rather as referring to sila in another world. The kai myo is thus a title of spiritual initiation. Some Japanese Buddhist sects hold what are called Ju-Kai-E (" st/a-giving assemblies"), at which the initiated are given kaimyo of an other sort, st/a-names of admission as neophytes. Exotics and Retrospectives kaimyo of the humble. These forms are still used ; but the distinctions they once maintained have mostly passed away, and the privilege of the knightly " in den," and its accompaniments, is free to any one willing to pay for it. At all times the words Doji and Donyo seem to have been attached to the kaimyo of children. Do, alone, means a lad, but when combined with ji or nyo it means " child " in the adjectival sense ; so that we may render Doji as " Child-son," and Donyo as " Child-daughter.'' Children are thus called who die before reaching their fifteenth year, the majority-year by the old samurai code; a lad of fifteen being deemed fit for war-service. In the case of children who die within a year after birth, the terms Gaini and Gainyo occasion ally replace Doji and Donyo. The syllable Gai here represents a Chinese character meaning " suckling." Different Buddhists sects have different form ulas for the composition of the kaimyo and its addenda ; but this subject would require a whole special treatise ; and I shall mention only a few sectarian customs. The Shingon sect some times put a Sanscrit character the symbol of a Buddha before their kaimyo; the Shin The Literature of the Dead head theirs with an abbreviation of the holy name Sakyamuni; the Nichiren often preface their inscriptions with the famous invocation, Namu myo ho renge kyo ( " Hail to the Sutra of the Lotos of the Good Law ! " ), sometimes followed by the words Sen^o daidai ("fore fathers of the generations " ) ; the Jodo, like the Ikko, use an abbreviation of the name Sakya muni, or, occasionally, the invocation Namu Amida Butsu ! and they compose their four- character kaimyo with the aid of two ideographs signifying " honour " or " fame ; " the Zen sect contrive that the first and the last character of the kaimyo, when read together, shall form a particular Buddhist term, or mystical phrase, except when the kaimyo consists of only two characters. Probably the word " mansion " in kaimyS- in scriptions would suggest to most Western readers the idea of heavenly mansions. But the fancy would be at fault. The word has no celestial signification ; yet the history of its epitaphic use is curious enough. Anciently, at the death of any illustrious man, a temple was erected for the special services due to his spirit, and also for the conservation of relics or memorials of him. Con- 136 Exotics and Retrospectives fucianism introduced into Japan the ibai, or mor tuary tablet, called by the Chinese sbin-sbu ; l and a portion of the temple was set apart to serve as a chapel for the ibai, and the ancestral cult. Any such memorial temple was called in, or " man sion," doubtless because the august spirit was believed to occupy it at certain periods ; and the term yet survives in the names of many celebrated Buddhist temples, such as the Chion- In, of Kyoto. With the passing of time, this custom was necessarily modified ; for as privileges were extended and aristocracies multiplied, the erection of a separate temple to each notable presently became impossible. Buddhism met the difficulty by conferring upon every individual of distinction the posthumous title of in-den, and affixing to this title the name of an imaginary temple or "mansion." So to-day, in the vast majority of kaimyo, the character in refers only to the temple that would have been built had cir cumstance permitted, but now exists only in the pious desire of those who love and reverence the departed. Nevertheless the poetry of these in- names does 1 That is, according to the Japanese reading of the Chinese characters. TOMB IN KOBUDERA CEMETERY (The relief represents Seishi 'Jiosatsu BoJhisatt-va Mahasthaina in meditation. It is i8j years old. The white patches on the surface are lichen growths) The Literature of the Dead 137 possess some real meaning. They are nearly all of them names such as would be given to real Buddhist temples, names of virtues and sancti ties and meditations, names of ecstasies and powers and splendors and luminous immeasurable unfoldings, names of all ways and means of escape from the Six States of Existence and the sorrow of "peopling the cemeteries again and again." The general character and arrangement of kaimyo can best be understood by the aid of a few typical specimens. The first example is from a beautiful tomb in the cemetery of Kobudera, which is sculptured with a relief representing the Bodhisattva Maha'sthama (Seishi Bosatsu) meditat ing. All the text in this instance has been cut upon the face of the monument, to left and right of the icon. Transliterated into Romaji it reads thus: (Kaimyo.) Tei-Sho-In, Ho-so MYO-SHIN, Daisbi. (Record.) Sh6toku Ni, Jin shin Shimotsuki, jiu-ku nichi. 138 Exotics and Retrospectives [Translation : Great Elder-Sister, WONDERFUL-REALITY- APPEARING-AT-THE-WlNDOW-OF-LAW, dwelling in the Mansion of the Pine of Chastity. The nineteenth day of the Month of Frost, 1 second year of Shotoku, 2 the year being under the Dragon of Elder Water.] For the sake of clearness, I have printed the posthumous name proper (Ho-so Myo-shin) in small capitals, and the rest in italics. The first three characters of the inscription, Tei-Sbo-In, form the name of the temple, or " mansion." The pine, both in religious and secular poetry, is a symbol of changeless conditions of good, be cause it remains freshly-green in all seasons. The use of the term " Reality " in the kaimyo indicates the state of unity with the Absolute ; by " Win- dow-of-Law " (Law here signifying the Buddha- state) must be understood that exercise of virtue through which even in this existence some percep- 1 By the old calendar, the eleventh month was the Month of Frost. 2 The second year of the period ShStoku corresponds to 1712 A. D. (For the meaning of the phrase "Dragon of Elder Water " the reader will do well to consult Professor Rein's Japan, pp. 434-436.) ^ The Literature of the Dead 139 tion of Infinite Truth may be obtained. I have already explained the final word, Daishi (" great elder-sister "). Less mystical, but not less beautiful, is this Nichiren kaimyo sculptured upon the grave of a young samurai: Ko-shin In, Ken-do Nichi-ki, Koji. [Koji- Bright-Sun-on-the-Way-of-the-Wise, in the Mansion of Luminous Mind.} 1 On the same stone is carven the kaimyo of the wife: Shin-hyo In, Myo-en Nichi-ho, Daishi. [Daishi, Spherically-Wondrous-Sunheam, in the Man sion of the Mirror of the Heart.} Perhaps the reader will now be able to find interest in the following selection of kaimyo, translated for me by Japanese scholars. The inscriptions are of various rites and epochs ; but I have arranged them only by class and sex : 1 This beautiful kaimyo is identical with that placed upon the monument of my dear friend Nishida, buried in the Nichiren cemetery of Chomanji, in Matsud 140 Exotics and Retrospectives [MASCULINE KAIMYO.] Koji, Law-Nature-Eternally-Complete, in the Man sion of the Mirror of Light. Koji, Lone-Moon-above-Snowy-Peak, in the Man sion of Quiet Light. Koji, Wonderful-Radiance-of-Luminous-Sound, in the Mansion of the Day-dawn of Mind. Koji, Pure-Lotos-bloom-of-the-Heart , in the Mansion of Shining Beginnings. Koji, Real-Earnest ness-Self -sufflcing-within, in the Mansion of Mystery-Penetration. Koji, Wonderful - Brightness-of-the-Clouds-of-Law t in the Mansion of Wisdom-Illumination. Koji, Law- Echo-proclaiming- Truth, in the Mansion of Real Zeal. Koji, Ocean-of- Reason-Calmly- Full, in the Mansion of Self-Nature. The Literature of the Dead 141 Koji, Effective - Benevolence - Hearing - with - Pure- Heart-the-Supplications-of-the-Poor, dwelling in the Mansion of the Virtue of Pity. Koji, Perfect - Enlightenment - beaming - tranquil - Glory, in the Mansion of Supreme Compre hension. Koji, Autumnal-Prospect-Clear-of-Cloud, of the Household of Sakyamuni, in the Mansion of the Obedient Heart. Koji, Illustrious- Brightness, of the Household of the Buddha, in the Mansion of Conspicuous Virtue. Koji, Daily-Peace-Home-Prospering, in the Mansion of Spherical Completeness. Shinshi, Prosperity - wide - shining -as- the - Moon - of- Autumn. Shinshi, Vow-abiding-wondrously-without-fault. 142 Exotics and Retrospectives Shinshi, Vernal-Mount ain-bathed-in-the - Light - of- the Law. Shinshi, Waking-to-Dhyana-at-the- Bell - Peal -of - the Wondrous- Dawn. Shinshi, Winter-Mountain-Chastity-Mind. 1 [FEMININE KAIMYO] Daishi, Moon-Dawn-of-the-Mountain-of-Light, dwell ing in the August Mansion of Self -witness* 1 Signifying : " believing man of mind as chastely pure as the snow upon a peak in winter." 3 This is the kaimyo of the lady for whose sake the temple of Kobudera was built ; and the words " Mansion of Self- witness " here refer to the temple itself, which is thus named (Ji-Sho In). The Chinese text reads: Ji-Sho- In den, Kwo-zan Kyo-kei, Daishi," literally, " Great Elder - Sister, Dawn-Katsura-of-Luminous-Mountain, dwell ing in the August Mansion of Self-witness." The katsuraj (olea fragrans) is a tree mysteriously connected, in Japan- j ese poetical fancy, with the moon ; and its name is often I; used, as here, to signify the moon. Katsura-no-hana, or " katsura-flower " is a poetical term for moonlight. / This kaimyd is remarkable in having the honorific term " August " prefixed to the name of the mansion or temple, a sign of the high rank of the dead lady. The full date The Literature of the Dead 143 DaisU, Wondrous-Lotos-of - Fleckless ~ Light, in the Mansion of the Moonlihe Heart. Daishi, Wonderful -Chastity- Responding - with - Pure- Mind-to-the-Summons-of-Duty, in the Man sion of the Great Sea of Compassion. Daishi, Lotos-Heart-of- Wondrous - Apparition, in the Mansion of Luminous Perfume. Daishi, Clear -Light -of -the- Spotless-Moon, in the Man sion of Spring-time- Eve. Kaishi, Pure- Mind- as-a- Sun- of -Compassion, in the Mansion of Real Light. Daishi, Wondrous-Lotos-of-Fragrance-Etherial, in the Mansion of Law-Nature. Shinnyo, Rejoicing-in-the-Way-of-the-Infinite. inscribed is "twenty-eighth day of Mid-Autumn" (the old eighth month) "of the seventeenth year of Kwansei" ' (1640 A. D.) 144 Exotics and Retrospectives Sbinnyo, Excellent - Courage - to-follow-Wisdom-to-the- End. Shinnyo, Winter-Moon-shedding-purest-Light. Shinnyo, Luminous - Shadow - in - the-Plumflower-Cham- ber. Shinnyo, Virtue-fragrant-as-the-Odor-of-the-Lotos. [CHILDREN'S KAIMYO. MALE.] Dai-Ddji, 1 Instantly - Attaining -to- the - Perfect - Peace, dwelling in the August Mansion of Purity. Dai-Ddji? . Permeating-Lucidity-of-the-Pure- Grove, dwel ling in the August Mansion of Blossom- Fragrance. 1 The prefix dai (great) before the ordinary term doji (male child) is of rare occurrence. Probably the lad was of princely birth. The grave is in a reserved part of the Kobu- dera cemetery ; and the year-date of death is " the fourth of Enky5 " corresponding to 1747. 2 The tomb bearing this kaimyo is set beside that in scribed with the kaimyo preceding. Probably the boys' The Literature of the Dead 145 Gaini, Frost-Glimmer. Doji, Dewy-Light. Doji, Dream-of-Spring. Doji, Spring-Frost. Doji, Ethereal-Nature. Doji, Rain-of-the-Law-from-translucent-Cloud$. [CHILDREN'S KAIMYO. FEMALE.] Dai-Donyo, * Bright- Shining- Height-of-Wisdom, dwelling in the August Mansion of Fragrant Trees. were brothers. In both instances we have the honorific prefix "dai," and the term "August " qualifying the man sion-name. The year-date of death is " the second of Kwan-en "(1749). 1 Probably a princely child, sister apparently of the highborn boys before referred to. She is buried beside them in Kobudera. Observe here again the use of the pre fix dai, this time before the term donyo, " child-girl " at 10 146 Exotics and Retrospectives Gainyo, Snowy-Bubble. Gainyo, Shining-Phantasm . Donyo f Plumflower-Ligbt. Donyo, Dream-Phantasm. Donyo, Chaste-Spring. Ddny* Wisdom-Mirror-of-Flawless-Appearing. Donyo, Wondrous-Excellence-of -Fragrant -Snow. After having studied the sotoba-texts previously cited, the reader should be able to divine the meaning of most of the kaimyo above given. At all events he will understand such frequently. " child-daughter." Perhaps the dai here would be better rendered by "grand" than by "great." Notice that the term " August " precedes the mansion-name in this case also. The date of death is given as " the sixth year of Horeki " (1756). The Literature of the Dead 147 repeated terms as " Moon," " Lotos," " Law." But he may be puzzled by other expressions ; and some further explanation will., perhaps, not be unwelcome. Besides expressing a pious hope for the higher happiness of the departed, or uttering some assurance of special conditions in the spiritual world, a great number of kaimyo also refer, directly or indirectly, to the character of the van ished personality. Thus a man of widely-recog nized integrity and strong moral purpose, may like my dead friend be not unfitly named : " Bright-Sun-on-the-Way-of-the-Wise." The child- daughter or the young wife, especially re membered for sweetness of character, may be com memorated by some such posthumous name as " Plumflower-Light," or " Luminous- Shadow-of- the-Plumflower-Chamber ; " the word "plum- flower " in either case at once suggesting the quality of the virtue of the dead, because this blossom in Japan is the emblem of feminine moral charm, more particularly faithfulness to duty and faultless modesty. Again, the memory of any person noted for deeds of charity may be honoured by such a kaimyS as, " Effective- Benevolence Listening - with - Pure- Heart-to-the- 148 Exotics and Retrospectives Supplications - of - the - Poor." Finally I may observe that the kaimyd-terms expressing alti tude, luminosity, and fragrance, have most often a moral-exemplary signification. But in all countries epitaphic literature has its conventional hypocrisies or extravagances. Buddhist kaimyo frequently contain a great deal of religious flattery; and beautiful posthumous names are often given to those whose lives were the reverse of beautiful. When we find among feminine kaimyo such appellations as " Wondrous-Lotos," or " Beautiful- as-the-Lotos-of-the-Dawn," we may be sure in the generality of cases that the charm, to which reference is so made, was ethical only. Yet there are exceptions ; and the more remarkable of these are furnished by the kaimyo of children. Names like " Dream-of-Spring," " Radiant-Phantasm," "Snowy-Bubble," do actually refer to the lost form, or at least to the supposed parental idea of vanished beauty and grace. But such names also exemplify a peculiar consolatory application of the Buddhist doctrine of Impermanency. We might say that through the medium of these kaimyo the bereaved are thus soothed in the loftiest language of faith : " Beautiful and brief The Literature of the Dead 149 was the being of your child, a dream of spring, a radiant passing vision, a snowy bubble. But in the order of eternal law all forms must pass ; material permanency there is none : only the divine Absolute dwelling in every being, only the Buddha in the heart of each of us, forever endures. Be this great truth at once your com fort and your hope ! " Extraordinary examples of the retrospective significance sometimes given to posthumous names, are furnished by the kaimyo of the Forty -Seven Ronin buried at Sengakuji in Tokyo. (Their story is now well-known to all the English-reading world through Mitford's eloquent and sympathetic version of it in the "Tales of Old Japan.") The noteworthy pe culiarity of these kaimyo is that each contains the two words, " dagger " and " sword," used in a symbolic sense, but having also an appro priate military suggestiveness. Oishi Kuranosuke Yoshiwo, the leader, is alone styled Koji ; the kaimyo of his followers have the humbler suffix Shinshi. Oishi's kaimyo reads : " Dagger-of- Emptiness-and-stainless-Sword, in the Mansion of Earnest Loyalty" I need scarcely call atten- Exotics and Retrospectives tion to the historic meaning of the mansion- name. Three of the kaimyo of his followers will serve as examples of the rest. That of Mase Kyudayu Masaake is : " Dagger-of-Fame-and-Sword-of- tbe-Way [or Doctrine.} " The kaimyo of Oishi Sezayemon Nobukiyo is : " Dagger- of -Mag nanimity - and- Sword- of- Virtue" And the kaimyo of Horibei Yasubei is: " Dagger -of - Cloud-and Sword-of- Brightness." The first and the last of these four kaimyo will be found obscure ; and several more of the forty - seven inscriptions are equally enigmatic at first sight. Usually in a kaimyo the word " Empti ness," or " Void," signifies the Buddhist state of absolute spiritual purity, the state of Uncondi tioned Being. But in the kaimyo of Oishi Kuranosuke the meaning of it, though purely Buddhist, is very different. By "emptiness" here, we must understand " illusion," " unreal ity," and the full meaning of the phrase " dag ger-emptiness " is : " Wisdom that, seeing the emptiness of material forms, pierces through illusion as a dagger." In Horibei Yasubei's kai myo we must similarly render the word " cloud " by illusion ; and " Dagger-of- Cloud " should be interpreted, " Illusion-penetrating Dagger ofWis- The Literature of the Dead dom" The wisdom that perceives the emptiness of phenomena, is the sharply-dividing, or dis tinguishing wisdom, is Myd-kwan-^atsu-cbi (Pratyavekshana-gnSna). Possibly I have presumed too much upon the patience of my readers ; yet I feel that these stud ies can yield scarcely more than the glimpse of a subject wide and deep as a sea. If they should arouse any Western interest in the philosophy and the poetry of Buddhist epitaphic literature, then they will certainly have accomplished all that I could reasonably hope. Not improbably I shall be accused, as I have been on other occasions, of trying to make Bud dhist texts " more beautiful than they are." This charge usually comes from persons totally igno rant of the originals, and betrays a spirit of disingenuousness with which I have no sympathy. Whoever confesses religion to have been a devel oping influence in the social and moral history of races, whoever grants that respect is due to Exotics and Retrospectives convictions which have shaped the nobler courses of human conduct for thousands of years, whoever acknowledges that in any great religion something of eternal truth must exist, will hold it the highest duty of a translator to interpret the concepts of an alien faith as generously as he would wish his own thoughts or words interpreted by his fellow-men. In the rendering of Chinese sentences this duty presents itself under a peculiar aspect. Any attempt at literal translation would result in the production either of nonsense, or of a succession of ideas totally foreign to far- Eastern thought. The paramount necessity in treating such texts is to discover and to expound the thought conveyed to Oriental minds by the original ideographs, which are very different things indeed from " written words." The trans lations given in this essay were made by Japanese scholars, and, in their present form, have the approval of competent critics. As I write these lines a full moon looks into my study over the trees of the temple-garden, and brings me the recollection of a little Buddhist poem: The Literature of the Dead " From the foot oj tbe mountain, many are the paths ascending in shadow ; but from the cloudless summit all who climb behold the self same Moon" The reader who knows the truth shrined in this little verse will not regret an hour passed with me among the tombs of Kobudera. Frogs Frogs "With hands resting upon the floor, reverentially you repeat your poem, frog I " Ancient Poem. I FEW of the simpler sense- impressions of travel remain more intimately and vividly associated with the memory of a strange land than sounds, sounds of the open country. Only the traveller knows how Nature's voices voices of forest and river and plain vary ac cording to zone ; and it is nearly always some local peculiarity of their tone or character that appeals to feeling and penetrates into memory, giving us the sensation of the foreign and the far-away. In Japan this sensation is especially aroused by the music of insects, hemiptera uttering a sound -language wonderfully different from that of their Western congeners. To a lesser degree the exotic accent is noticeable also in the chanting of Japanese frogs, though the sound impresses itself upon remembrance rather Exotics and Retrospectives by reason of its ubiquity. Rice being cultivated all over the country, not only upon mountain- slopes and hill -tops, but even within the limits of the cities, there aft flushed levels everywhere, and everywhere frogs. No one who has travelled in Japan will forget the clamor of the ricefields. Hushed only during the later autumn and brief winter, with the first wakening of spring waken all the voices of the marsh-lands, the infinite bubbling chorus that might be taken for the speech of the quickening soil itself. And the universal mystery of life seems to thrill with a peculiar melancholy in that vast utterance heard through forgotten thousands of years by forgotten generations of toilers, but doubtless older by myriad ages than the race of man. Now this song of solitude has been for cen turies a favorite theme with Japanese poets ; but the Western reader may be surprised to learn that it has appealed to them rather as a pleasant sound than as a nature-manifestation. Innumerable poems have been written about the singing of frogs ; but a large proportion of them would prove unintelligible if understood as referring to common frogs. When the general Frogs chorus of the ricefield finds praise in Japanese verse, the poet expresses his pleasure only in the great volume of sound produced by the blending of millions of little croakings, a blending which really has a pleasant effect, well compared to the lulling sound of the falling of rain. But when the poet pronounces an individual frog-call melo. dious, he is not speaking of the common frog of the ricefields. Although most kinds of Japanese frogs are croakers, there is one remarkable excep tion (not to mention tree-frogs), the kajika, or true singing-frog of Japan. To say that it croaks would be an injustice to its note, which is sweet as the chirrup of a song-bird. It used to be called kawa^u ; but as this ancient appellation latterly became confounded in common parlance with kaeru, the general name for ordinary frogs, it is now called only kajika. The kajika is kept as a domestic pet, and is sold in Tokyo by several insect-merchants. It is housed in a peculiar cage, the lower part of which is a basin containing sand and pebbles, fresh water and small plants; the upper part being a framework of fine wire-gauze. Sometimes the basin is fitted up as a ko-niwa, or model landscape-garden. In these times the kajika is considered as one of the singers of spring 160 Exotics and Retrospectives and summer; but formerly it was classed with the melodists of autumn ; and people used to make autumn-trips to the country for the mere pleasure of hearing it sing. And just as various places used to be famous for the music of par ticular varieties of night-crickets, so there were places celebrated only as haunts of the kajika. The following were especially noted : Tamagawa and Osawa-no-Ike, a river and a lake in the province of Yamashiro. Miwagawa, Asukagawa, Sawogawa, Furu-no- Yamada, and Yoshinogawa, all in the province of Yamato. Koya-no-Ike, in Settsu. Ukinu-no-Ike, in Iwami. Ikawa-no-Numa, in Kozuke. Now it is the melodious cry of the kajika, or kawazu, which is so often praised in far-Eastern verse ; and, like the music of insects, it is men tioned in the oldest extant collections of Japanese poems. In the preface to the famous anthology called Kokinshu, compiled by Imperial Decree during the fifth year of the period of Engi (A. D. 905), the poet Ki-no-Tsurayuki, chief editor of the work, makes these interesting obser vations : Frogs 161 " The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart, and thence has grown into a multi form utterance. Man in this world, having a thousand millions of things to undertake and to complete, has been moved to express his thoughts and his feelings concerning all that he sees and hears. When we hear the uguisu 1 singing among flowers, and the voice of the kawazu which inhabits the waters, what mortal [lit. : ' who among the living that lives '] does not compose poems ? " The kawazu thus referred to by Tsurayuki is of course the same creature as the modem kajika : no common frog could have been men tioned as a songster in the same breath with that wonderful bird, the uguisu. And no common frog could have inspired any classical poet with so pretty a fancy as this : Te* wo tsuit^ Uta moshi-aguru, Kawazu kana ! " With hands resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog ! " The charm of this little verse can best be understood by those familiar with the far- Eastern etiquette of posture 1 Cettia cantans, the Japanese nightingale. ii 162 Exotics and Retrospectives while addressing a superior, kneeling, with the body respectfully inclined, and hands resting upon the floor, with the fingers pointing outwards. 1 It is scarcely possible to determine the an tiquity of the custom of writing poems about frogs ; but in the Manyosbu, dating back to the middle of the eighth century, there is a poem which suggests that even at that time the river Asuka had long been famous for the singing of its frogs : Ima mo ka mo Asuka no kawa no Yu sarazu Kawazu naku s no Kiyoku aruran. " Still clear in our day remains the stream of Asuka, where the kawazu nightly sing." We find also in the same anthology the following curious reference to the singing of frogs: Omoboyezu Kimaseru kimi wo, Sasagawa no Kawazu kikasezu Kayeshi tsuru kamo 1 1 Such, at least, is the posture prescribed by the old eti quette for men. But the rules were very complicated, and varied somewhat according to rank as well as to sex. Women usually turn the fingers inward instead of outward when assuming this posture. Frogs 163 " Unexpectedly I received the august visit of my lord. . . . Alas, that he should have returned without hearing the frogs of the river Sawa ! " And in the Rokujoshu, another ancient compi lation, are preserved these pleasing verses on the same theme : Tamagawa no Hito wo mo yogizu Naku kawazu, Kono yu kikba Oshiku ya wa aranu ? " Hearing to-night the frogs of the Jewel River [or Tamagawa], that sing without fear of man 1 how can I help loving the passing moment ? " II Thus it appears that for more than eleven hundred years the Japanese have been making poems about frogs ; and it is at least possible that verses on this subject, which have been preserved in the Manyoshu, were composed even earlier than the eighth century. From the oldest classical period to the present day, the theme has never ceased to be a favorite one with poets of all 164 Exotics and Retrospectives ranks. A fact noteworthy in this relation is that the first poem written in the measure called bokku, by the famous Basho, was about frogs. The triumph of this extremely brief form of verse (three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables re spectively) is to create one complete sensation- picture; and Basho's original accomplishes the feat, difficult, if not impossible, to repeat in English : Furu ike ya, Kawazu tobikomu, Midzu no oto. ("Old pond frogs jumping in sound of water.") An immense number of poems about frogs were subsequently written in this measure. Even at the present time professional men of letters amuse themselves by making short poems on frogs. Distinguished among these is a young poet known to the Japanese literary world by the pseudonym of " Roseki," who lives in Osaka and keeps in the pond of his garden hundreds of sing ing frogs. At fixed intervals he invites all his poet-friends to a feast, with the proviso that each must compose, during the entertainment, one poem about the inhabitants of the pond. A collection of the verses thus obtained was privately printed Frogs in the spring of 1897, with funny pictures of frogs decorating the covers and illustrating the text. But unfortunately it is not possible through English translation to give any fair idea of the range and character of the literature of frogs. The reason is that the greater number of com positions about frogs depend chiefly for their lit erary value upon the untranslatable, upon local allusions, for example, incomprehensible outside of Japan ; upon puns ; and upon the use of words with double or even triple meanings. Scarcely two or three in every one hundred poems can bear translation. So I can attempt little more than a few general observations. That love-poems should form a considerable proportion of this curious literature will not seem strange to the reader when he is reminded that the lovers' trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is in full cry, and that, in Japan at least, the memory of the sound would be associated with the memory of a secret meeting in almost any solitary place. The frog referred to in such poems is not usually the kajika. But frogs are introduced into love-poetry in countless 166 Exotics and Retrospectives clever ways. I can give two examples of modern popular compositions of this kind. The first con tains an allusion to the famous proverb, I no naha no kawa^u daihai wo shira^u : " The frog in the well knows not the great sea." A person quite innocent of the ways of the world is com pared to a frog in a well ; and we may suppose the speaker of the following lines to be some sweet-hearted country-girl, answering an ungen erous remark with very pretty tact: Laugh me to scorn if you please ; call me your "frog-in-the-well" : Flowers fall into my well ; and its water mirrors the moon / The second poem is supposed to be the utterance of a woman having good reason to be jealous : Dull as a stagnant pond you deemed the mind of your mistress ; But the stagnant pond can speak : you shall hear the cry of the frog ! Outside of love-poems there are hundreds of verses about the common frogs of ponds or rice- fields. Some refer chiefly to the volume of the sound that the frogs make: Frogs 167 Hearing the frogs of the ricefields, methinks that the water sings. As we flush the ricefields of spring, the frog- song flows with the water. From ricefleld to ricefleld they call : unceas ing the challenge and answer. Ever as deepens the night, louder the chorus of pond-frogs. So many the voices of frogs that I cannot but wonder if the pond be not wider at night than by day ! Even the rowing boats can scarce proceed, so thick the clamor of the frogs of Horiel The exaggeration of the last verse is of course intentional, and in the original not uneffective. In some parts of the world in the marshes of Florida and of southern Louisiana, for example, the clamor of the frogs at certain seasons resembles the roaring of a furious sea; and whoever has heard it can appreciate the fancy of sound as obstacle. 168 Exotics and Retrospectives Other poems compare or associate the sound made by frogs with the sound of rain: The song of the earliest frogs, fainter than falling of rain. What I took for the falling of rain is only tbe singing of frogs. Now I shall dream, lulled by tbe patter of rain and the song of the frogs. Other poems, again, are Intended only as tiny pictures, thumb-nail sketches, such as this hokku, Path between ricefields ; frogs jumping away to right and left ; or this, which is a thousand years old : Where the flowers of the yamabuhi are imaged in the still marsh-water, the voice of the ha- wa%u is heard ; or the following pretty fancy : Now sings the frog, and the voice of the frog is perfumed ; for into the shining stream the cherry-petals fall. Frogs 169 The last two pieces refer, of course, to the true singing frog. Many short poems are addressed directly to the frog itself, whether kaeru or kajika. There are poems of melancholy, of affection, of humor, of religion, and even of philosophy among these. Sometimes the frog is likened to a spirit resting on a lotos- leaf ; sometimes, to a priest repeating sutras for the sake of the dying flowers ; some times to a pining lover; sometimes to a host receiving travellers ; sometimes to a blasphemer, " always beginning " to say something against the gods, but always afraid to finish it. Most of the following examples are taken from the re cent book of frog-poems published by Roseki ; each paragraph of my prose rendering, it should be remembered, represents a distinct poem : Now all the guests being gone, why still thus respectfully sitting, Ofrog ? So resting your bands on the ground, do you welcome the Rain, O frog ? You disturb in the ancient well the light of the stars, O frog! 170 Exotics and Retrospectives Sleepy the sound of the rain ; but your voice makes me dream, Ofrog I Always beginning to say something against the great Heaven, Ofrog ! You have learned that the world is void : you never look at it as you float, Ofrog/ Having lived in clear-rushing mountain- streams, never can your voice become stagnant, Ofrog! The last pleasing conceit shows the esteem in which the superior vocal powers of the kajika are held. Ill I thought it strange that out of hundreds of frog-poems collected for me I could not discover a single mention of the coldness and clamminess of the frog. Except a few jesting lines about the queer attitudes sometimes assumed by the crea ture, the only reference to its uninviting qualities that I could find was the mild remark, Seen in the daytime, bow uninteresting you are, O frog / Frogs 171 While wondering at this reticence concerning the chilly, slimy, flaccid nature of frogs, it all at once occurred to me that in other thousands of Japan ese poems which I had read there was a total absence of allusions to tactual sensations. Sensa tions of colors, sounds, and odors were rendered with exquisite and surprising delicacy; but sen sations of taste were seldom mentioned, and sensations of touch were absolutely ignored. I asked myself whether the reason for this reticence or indifference should be sought in the particular temperament or mental habit of the race ; but I have not yet been able to decide the question. Remembering that the race has been living for ages upon food which seems tasteless to the Western palate, and that impulses to such action as hand -clasping, embracing, kissing, or other physical display of affectionate feeling, are really foreign to far-Eastern character, one is tempted to the theory that gustatory and tactual sensations, pleasurable and otherwise, have been less highly evolved with the Japanese than with us. But there is much evidence against such a theory ; and the triumphs of Japanese handicraft assure us of an almost incomparable delicacy of touch devel oped in special directions. Whatever be the 172 Exotics and Retrospectives physiological meaning of the phenomenon, its moral meaning is of most importance. So far as I have been able to judge, Japanese poetry usually ignores the inferior qualities of sensation, while making the subtlest of appeals to those superior qualities which we call aesthetic. Even if repre senting nothing else, this fact represents the healthiest and happiest attitude toward Nature. Do not we Occidentals shrink from many purely natural impressions by reason of repulsion devel oped through a morbid tactual sensibility ? The question is at least worth considering. Ignoring or mastering such repulsion, accepting naked Nature as she is, always lovable when understood, the Japanese discover beauty where we blindly imagine ugliness or formlessness or loathsomeness, beauty in insects, beauty in stones, beauty in frogs. Is the fact without significance that they alone have been able to make artistic use of the form of the centipede ? . . . You should see my Kyoto tobacco-pouch, with centipedes of gold running over its figured leather like ripplings of fire! Of Moon-Desire Of Moon-Desire I HE was two years old when as ordained in the law of perpetual recurrence he asked me for the Moon. Unwisely I protested, " The Moon 1 cannot give you because it is too high up. I cannot reach it." He answered : " By taking a very long bamboo, you probably could reach it, and knock it down." I said, " There is no bamboo long enough." He suggested : " By standing on the ridge of the roof of the house, you probably could poke it with the bamboo." Whereat I found myself constrained to make some approximately truthful statements concern ing the nature and position of the Moon. 176 Exotics and Retrospectives This set me thinking. I thought about the strange fascination that brightness exerts upon living creatures in general, upon insects and fishes and birds and mammals, and tried to account for it by some inherited memory of brightness as related to food, to water, and to freedom. I thought of the countless generations of children who have asked for the Moon, and of the generations of parents who have laughed at the asking. And then I entered into the follow ing meditation : Have we any right to laugh at the child's wish for the Moon ? No wish could be more natural ; and as for its incongruity, do not we, children of a larger growth, mostly nourish wishes quite as innocent, longings that if realized could only work us woe, such as desire for the continu ance after death of that very sense-life, or indi viduality, which once deluded us all into wanting to play with the Moon, and often subsequently deluded us in far less pleasant ways ? Now foolish as may seem, to merely empirical reasoning, the wish of the child for the Moon, I have an idea that the highest wisdom commands us to wish for very much more than the Moon, Of Moon-Desire 177 even for more than the Sun and the Morning- Star and all the Host of Heaven. II I remember when a boy lying on my back in the grass, gazing into the summer blue above me, and wishing that 1 could melt into it, become a part of it. For these fancies I believe that a religious tutor was innocently responsible : he had tried to explain to me, because of certain dreamy questions, what he termed "the folly and the wickedness of pantheism," with the result that I immediately became a pantheist, at the tender age of fifteen. And my imaginings presently led me not only to want the sky for a playground, but also to become the sky ! Now I think that in those days I was really close to a great truth, touching it, in fact, with out the faintest suspicion of its existence. I mean the truth that the wish to become is reasonable in direct ratio to its largeness, or, in other words, that the more you wish to be, the wiser you are ; while the wish to have is apt to be foolish in proportion to its largeness. Cosmic law permits 178 Exotics and Retrospectives us very few of the countless things that we wish to have, but will help us to become all that we can possibly wish to be. Finite, and in so much feeble, is the wish to have : but infinite in puis sance is the wish to become ; and every mortal wish to become must eventually find satisfaction. By wanting to be, the monad makes itself the elephant, the eagle, or the man. By wanting to be, the man should become a god. Perhaps on this tiny globe, lighted only by a tenth-rate yel low sun, he will not have time to become a god ; but who dare assert that his wish cannot project itself to mightier systems illuminated by vaster suns, and there reshape and invest him with the forms and powers of divinity ? Who dare even say that his wish may not expand him beyond the Limits of Form, and make him one with Omnipotence ? And Omnipotence, without ask ing, can have much brighter and bigger play things than the Moon. Probably everything is a mere question of wish ing, providing that we wish, not to have, but to be. Most of the sorrow of life certainly exists because of the wrong kind of wishing and because of the contemptible pettiness of the wishes. Even to wish for the absolute lordship and possession Of Moon-Desire 179 of the entire earth were a pitifully small and vulgar wish. We must learn to nourish very much bigger wishes than that ! My faith is that we must wish to become the total universe with its thousands of millions of worlds, and more than the universe, or a myriad universes, and more even than Space and Time. Ill Possibly the power for such wishing must depend upon our comprehension of the ghostli- ness of substance. Once men endowed with spirit all forms and motions and utterances of Nature: stone and metal, herb and tree, cloud and wind, the lights of heaven, the murmur ing of leaves and waters, the echoes of the hills, the tumultuous speech of the sea. Then becom ing wiser in their own conceit, they likewise be came of little faith ; and they talked about " the Inanimate" and "the Inert," which are non existent, and discoursed of Force as distinct from Matter, and of Mind as distinct from both. Yet we now discover that the primitive fancies were, after all, closer to probable truth. We can- 180 Exotics and Retrospectives not indeed think of Nature to-day precisely as did our forefathers ; but we find ourselves obliged to think of her in very much weirder ways; and the later revelations of our science have revitalized not a little of the primitive thought, and infused it with a new and awful beauty. And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage Nature that spring from the deepest sources of our being, always growing with our growth, strengthen ing with our strength, more and more unfolding with the evolution of our higher sensibilities, would seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical emotion expanding and responding to infinitude. Have you never thought about those imme morial feelings? . . . Have you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of fire ? never unconsciously coveted the crumb ling, splitting, iron -wrenching, granite -cracking force of its imponderable touch ? never de lighted in the furious and terrible splendor of its phantasmagories, the ravening and bickering of its dragons, the monstrosity of its archings, the ghostly soaring and flapping of its spires ? Of Moon-Desire 181 Have you never, with a hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like a ghost, to scream round the peaks with it, to sweep the face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers, have you felt no im pulse kindred to that giant motion, no longing to leap with that wild white tossing, and to join in that mighty shout ? . . . And all such an cient emotional sympathies with Nature's familiar forces do they not prelude, with their modern aesthetic developments, the future growth of rarer sympathies with incomparably subtler forces, and of longings to be limited only by our power to know? Know ether shivering from star to star ; comprehend its sensitivities, its penetran- cies, its transmutations ; and sympathies ethe real will evolve. Know the forces that spin the suns ; and already the way has been reached of becoming one with them. And furthermore, is there no suggestion of such evolvement in the steady widening through all the centuries of the thoughts of their world-priests and poets? in the later sense of Life-as-Unity absorbing or transforming the ancient childish sense of life-personal ? in the tone of the new 182 Exotics and Retrospectives rapture in world -beauty, dominating the elder worship of beauty-human ? in the larger mod ern joy evoked by the blossoming of dawns, the blossoming of stars, by all quiverings of color, all shudderings of light ? And is not the thing- in-itself, the detail, the appearance, being ever less and less studied for its mere power to charm, and ever more and more studied as a single character in that Infinite Riddle of which all phenomena are but ideographs ? Nay ! surely the time must come when we shall desire to be all that is, all that ever has been known, the past and the present and the future in one, all feeling, striving, thinking, joying, sorrowing, and everywhere the Part, and everywhere the Whole. And before us, with the waxing of the wish, perpetually the Infinities shall widen. And I even I ! by virtue of that wish, shall become all forms, all forces, all conditions : Ether, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, all motion visible or viewless, all vibration named of light, of color, of sonority, of torref action, all thrill- ings piercing substance, all oscillations picturing in blackness, like the goblin-vision of the X-rays. Of Moon-Desire 183 By virtue of that wish I shall become the Source of all becoming and of all ceasing, the Power that shapes, the Power that dissolves, creating, with the shadows of my sleep, the life that shall vanish with my wakening. And even as phos- phor-lampings in currents of midnight sea, so shall shimmer and pulse and pass, in mine Ocean of Death and Birth, the burning of billions of suns, the whirling of trillions of worlds. . . . IV " Well," said the friend to whom I read this revery, " there is some Buddhism in your fancies though you seem to have purposely avoided several important points of doctrine. For in stance, you must know that Nirvana is never to be reached by wishing, but by not wishing. What you call the ' wish-to-become ' can only help us, like a lantern, along the darker portions of the Way. As for wanting the Moon I think that you must have seen many old Japanese pictures of apes clutching at the reflection of the Moon in water. The subject is a Buddhist parable : the water is the phantom -flux of sensations and ideas ; 184 Exotics and Retrospectives the Moon not its distorted image is the sole Truth. And your Western philosopher was really teaching a Buddhist parable when he proclaimed man but a higher kind of ape. For in this world of illusion, man is truly still the ape, trying to seize on water the shadow of the Moon." " Ape indeed," I made answer, " but an ape of gods, even that divine Ape of the Ramayana who may clutch the Sun!" Retrospectives Murmurs and scents of the Infinite Sea." MATTHEW ARNOLD. First Impressions I I WONDER why the emblematical significance of the Composite Photograph has been so little considered by the philosophers of evo lution. In the blending and coalescing of the shadows that make it, is there no suggestion of that bioplasm ic chemistry which, out of the in termingling of innumerable lives, crystallizes the composite of personality ? Has the superimposi- tion of images upon the sensitized plate no like ness to those endless superimpositions of heredity out of which every individuality must shape it self ? . . . Surely it is a very weird thing, this Composite Photograph, and hints of things weirder. Every human face is a living composite of countless faces, generations and generations of faces superimposed upon the sensitive film of Life 188 Exotics and Retrospectives for the great cosmic developing process. And any living face, well watched by love or by hate, will reveal the fact. The face of friend or sweet heart has a hundred different aspects; and you know that you want, when his or her " likeness " is taken, to insist upon the reflection of the dearest of these. The face of your enemy, no matter what antipathy it may excite, is not in variably hateful in itself : you must acknowledge, to yourself at least, having observed in it mo ments of an expression the reverse of unworthy. Probably the ancestral types that try to re produce themselves in the modulations of facial expression, are nearly always the more recent ; the very ancient having become metamorphosed, under weight of superimposition, into a blank underlying vagueness, a mere protoplasmic background out of which, except in rare and monstrous cases, no outline can detach itself. But in every normal face whole generations of types do certainly, by turns of mood, make flit ting apparition. Any mother knows this. . Study ing day by day the features of her child, she finds in them variations not to be explained by simple growth. Sometimes there is a likeness to one parent or grandparent ; sometimes a likeness First Impressions 189 to another, or to remoter kindred ; and at rarer intervals may appear peculiarities of expression that no member of the family can account for. (Thus, in darker centuries, the ghastly supersti tion of the " changeling," was not only possible, but in a certain sense quite natural.) Through youth and manhood and far into old age these mutations continue, though always more slowly and faintly, even while the general character- istics steadily accentuate; and death itself may bring into the countenance some strange expres sion never noticed during life. II As a rule we recognize faces by the modes of expression habitually worn, by the usually prevalent character-tones of them, rather than by any steady memory of lines. But no face at all moments remains exactly the same ; and in cases of exceptional variability the expression does not suffice for recognition : we have to look for some fixed peculiarity, some minute superficial detail independent of physiognomy. All expression has but a relative permanency: even in faces the 190 Exotics and Retrospectives most strongly marked, its variations may defy estimate. Perhaps the mobility is, within certain limits, in direct ratio to irregularity of feature ; any approach to ideal beauty being also an ap proach to relative fixity. At all events, the more familiar we become with any common face, the more astonishing the multitude of the transfor mations we observe in it, the more indescrib able and bewildering its fugitive subtleties of expression. And what are these but the ebb and flow of life ancestral, under-ripplings in that well-spring unfathomable of personality whose flood is Soul. Perpetually beneath the fluid tis sues of flesh the dead are moulding and moving not singly (for in no phenomenon is there any singleness), but in currents and by surgings. Sometimes there is an eddying of ghosts of love ; and the face dawns as if a sunrise lighted it. Sometimes there is a billowing up of ghosts of hate ; and the face darkens and distorts like an evil dream, and we say to the mind behind it, " You are not now your better self" But that which we call the self, whether the better or the worse, is a complexity forever shifting the order of its combinations. According to stimulus of hope or fear, of joy or pain, there must vibrate First Impressions 191 within every being, at differing rhythms, with varying oscillation, incalculable tremulosities of ancestral life. In the calmest normal existence slumber all the psychical tones of the past, from the lurid red of primal sense-impulse to the vio let of spiritual aspiration, even as all known colours sleep in white light. And over the sensi tive living mask, at each strong alternation of the psychical currents, flit shadowy resurrections of dead expression. Seeing faces and their changes, we learn in tuitively the relation to our own selves of the selves that confront us. In very few cases could we even try to explain how this knowledge comes, how we reach those conclusions called, in common parlance, " first impressions." Faces are not read. The impressions they give are only felt, and have much of the same vague character as impressions of sound, making within us mental states either pleasant or un pleasant or somewhat of both, evoking now a sense of danger, now a melting sympathy, oc casionally a gentle sadness. And these impres sions, though seldom at fault, cannot be very well explained in words. The reasons of their accuracy are likewise the reasons of their mys- 192 Exotics and Retrospectives tery, reasons not to be discovered in the nar row range of our personal experience, reasons very, very much older than we. Could we remember our former lives, we should know more exactly the meaning of our likes and our dislikes. For the truth is that they are superin- dividual. It is not the individual eye that per ceives everything perceived in a face. The dead are the real seers. But as they remain unable to guide us otherwise than by touching the chords of mental pleasure or pain, we can feel the rela tive meaning of faces only in a dim, though powerful way. Instinctively, at least, superindividuality is com monly recognized. Hence such phrases as " force of character," " moral force/' " personal fascina tion," " personal magnetism, "and others showing that the influence exerted by man upon man is known to be independent of mere physical condi tions. Very insignificant bodies have that within them by which formidable bodies are mastered and directed. The flesh-and-blood man is only the visible end of an invisible column of force reaching out of the infinite past into the momen tary present, only the material Symbol of an immaterial host. A contest between even two First Impressions 192 wills is a contest of phantom armies. The dom ination of many personalities by the simple will of one, hinting the perception by the compelled of superior viewless powers behind the compeller, is never to be interpreted by the old hypothesis of soul-equality. Only by scientific psychology can the mystery of certain formidable characters be even partly explained; but any explanation must rest upon the acceptance, in some form or other, of the immense evolutional fact of psychi cal inheritance. And psychical inheritance signi fies the super-individual, pre-existence revived in compound personality. Yet, from our ethical standpoint, that super- individuality which we thus unconsciously allow in the very language used to express psychical domination, is a lower manifestation. Though working often for good, the power in itself is of evil ; and the recognition of it by the subjugated is not a recognition of higher moral energy, but of a higher mental energy signifying larger evo lutional experience of wrong, deeper reserves of aggressive ingenuity, heavier capacities for the giving of pain. Called by no matter what eu phemistic name, such power is brutal in its origin, and still allied to those malignities and ferocities '3 194 Exotics and Retrospectives shared by man with lower predatory creatures. But the beauty of the superindividual is revealed in that rarer power which the dead lend the living to win trust, to inspire ideals, to create love, to brighten whole circles of existence with the charm and wonder of a personality never to be described save in the language of light and music. Ill Now if we could photographically decompose a composite photograph so as to separate in order inverse all the impressions interblended to make it, such process would clumsily represent what really happens when the image of a strange face is telegraphed back like a police- photograph from the living retina to the mysterious offices of inherited memory. There, with the quickness of an electric flash, the shadow -face is decomposed into all the ancestral types combined in it ; and the resulting verdict of the dead, though rendered only by indefinable sensation, is more trustworthy than any written certificate of character could ever be. But its trustworthiness is limited to the potential relation of the individual seen to the First Impressions individual seeing. Upon different minds, ac cording to the delicate balance of personality, according to the qualitative sum of inherited experience in the psychical composition of the observer, the same features will make very different impressions. A face that strongly repels one person may not less strongly attract another, and will produce nearly similar impres sions only on groups of emotionally homogeneous natures. Certainly the fact of this ability to discern in the composition of faces that indefin able something which welcomes or which warns, does suggest the possibility of deciding some laws of ethical physiognomy; but such laws would necessarily be of a very general and simple kind, and their relative value could never equal that of the uneducated personal intuition. How, indeed, should it be otherwise ? What science could ever hope to measure the infinite possibilities of psychical combination ? And the present in every countenance is a recombination of the past ; the living is always a resurrection of the dead. The sympathies and the fears, the hopes and the repulsions that faces inspire, are but revivals and reiterations, echoes of sen- tiency created in millions of minds by immeasur- 196 Exotics and Retrospectives able experience operating through immeasurable time. My friend of this hour, though no more identical with his forefathers than any single ripple of a current is identical with all the ripples that ever preceded it, is nevertheless by soul- composition one with myriads known and loved in other lands and in other lives, in times recorded and in times forgotten, in cities that still remain and in cities that have ceased to be, by thousands of my vanished selves. Beauty is Memory Beauty is Memory I WHEN you first saw her your heart leaped, and a tingling shocked through all your blood like a gush of electricity. Simultaneously your senses were changed, and long so remained. That sudden throb was the awakening of your dead ; and that thrill was made by the swarm ing and the crowding of them ; and that change of sense was wrought only by their multitudinous desire, for which reason it seemed an intensifi cation. They remembered having loved a num ber of young persons somewhat resembling her. But where, or when, they did not recollect. They (and They, of course, are You) had drunk of Lethe many times since then. The true name of the River of Forgetfulness is the River of Death though you may not find authority for the statement in classical dictionaries. 200 Exotics and Retrospectives But the Greek story, that the waters of Lethe bring to weary souls oblivion of the past, is not quite true. One draught will indeed numb and becloud some forms of memory, will efface the remembrance of dates and names and of other trifling details ; but a million draughts will not produce total oblivion. Even the destruction of the world would not have that result. Nothing is absolutely forgotten except the non-essential. The essential can, at most, only be dimmed by the drinking of Lethe. It was because of billions of billions of memo ries amassed through trillions of lives, and blended within you into some one vague delicious image, that you came to believe a certain being more beautiful than the sun. The delusion signified that she happened to resemble this composite, mnemonic shadowing of all the dead women related to the loves of your innumerable lives. And this first part of your experience, when you could not understand, when you fancied the beloved a witch, and never even dreamed that the witchery might be the work of ghosts, was the Period of Wonder. Beauty is Memory 201 II Wonder at what ? At the power and mystery of beauty. (For whether only within yourself, or partly within and partly outside of yourself, it was beauty that you saw, and that made you wonder.) But you will now remember that the beloved seemed lovelier than mortal woman really could be ; and the how and the why of that seeming are questions of interest. With the power to see beauty we are born somewhat, though not altogether, as we are born with the power to perceive color. Most human beings are able to discern something of beauty, or at least of approach to beauty though the volume of the faculty varies in different indivi duals more than the volume of a mountain varies from that of a grain of sand. There are men born blind ; but the normal being inherits some ideal of beauty. It may be vivid or it may be vague ; but in every case it represents an accu mulation of countless impressions received by the race, countless fragments, of prenatal remem brance crystallized into one composite image 202 Exotics and Retrospectives within organic memory, where, like the viewless image on a photographic plate awaiting develop ment, it remains awhile in darkness absolute. And just because it is a composite of numberless race-memories of individual attraction, this ideal necessarily represents, in the superior mind, a something above the existing possible, some thing never to be realized, much less surpassed, in the present state of humanity. And what is the relation of this composite, fairer than human possibility, to the illusion of love ? If it be permissible to speak one's imag ining of the unimaginable, 1 can dare a theory. When, in the hour of the ripeness of youth, there is perceived some objective comeliness faintly corresponding to certain outlines of the inherited ideal, at once a wave of emotion ances tral bathes the long-darkened image, defines it, illuminates it, and so deludes the senses ; for the sense-reflection of the living objective becomes temporarily blended with the subjective phan tasm, with the beautiful luminous ghost made of centillions of memories. Thus to the lover the common suddenly becomes the impossible, because he really perceives blended with it the superindividual and superhuman. He is much Beauty is Memory 203 too deeply bewitched by that supernatural to be persuaded of his illusion, by any reasoning. What conquers his will is not the magic of anything living or tangible, but a charm sinuous and fugitive and light as fire, a spectral snare prepared for him by myriads unthinkable of generations of dead. So much and no more of theory I venture as to the how of the riddle. But what of the why, the reason of the emotion made by this ghostly beauty revived out of the measureless past? What should beauty have to do with a superin- dividual ecstasy older than all aesthetic feeling ? What is the evolutional secret of the fascination of beauty ? I think that an answer can be given. But it will involve the fullest acceptance of this truth : There is no such thing as beauty -in -it self. All the riddles and contradictions of our aesthetic systems are natural consequences of the delusion that beauty is a something absolute, a transcen dental reality, an eternal fact. It is true that the appearance we call beauty is the symbol of a fact, is the visible manifestation of a develop ment beyond the ordinary, a bodily evolution 204 Exotics and Retrospectives more advanced than the existing average. In like manner what we call grace is a real manifestation of the economy of force. But since there can be no cosmic limit to evolutional possibilities, there never can be any standards of grace or of beauty that are not relative and essentially transitory; and there can be no physical ideals, not even Greek ideals, that might not in the course of human evolution or of superhuman evolution be so much more than realized as to become vulgar ities of form. An ultimate of beauty is incon ceivable and impossible ; no term of aesthetics can ever represent more than the idea of a phase of the perpetual becoming, a temporary relation in comparative evolution. Beauty-in-itself is only the name of a sensation, or complex of sensation, mistaken for objectivity much as sound and light and color were once imagined to be realities. Yet what is it that attracts ? what is the mean ing of the resistless emotion which we call the Sense of Beauty ? Like the sensing of light or color or perfume, the recognition of beauty is a recognition of fact. But that fact bears to the feeling evoked no more likeness than the reality of five hundred billions of ether-shiverings per second bears to the sensation Beauty is Memory 20|> of orange. Still in either case the fact is a mani festation of force. Representing higher evolution, the phenomenon termed beauty also represents a relatively superior fitness for life, a higher ability to fulfil the conditions of existence ; and it is the non- conscious perception of this representation that makes the fascination. The longing aroused is not for any mere abstraction, but for greater complete- ness of faculty as means to the natural end. To the dead within each man, beauty signifies the presence of what they need most, Power. They know, in despite of Lethe, that when they lived in comely bodies life was usually made easy and happy for them, and that when prisoned in feeble or in ugly bodies, they found life miserable or difficult. They want to live many times again in sound young bodies, in shapes that assure force, health, joy, quickness to win and energy to keep the best prizes of life's contest. They want, if possible, conditions better than any of the past, but in no event conditions worse. 206 Exotics and Retrospectives in And so the Riddle resolves itself as Memory, immeasurable Memory of all bodily fitness for the ends of life : a Composite glorified, doubtless, by some equally measureless inherited sense of all the vanished joys ever associated with such fitness. Infinite, may we not term it this Composite ? Aye, but not merely because the multitudes of dead memories that make it are unspeakable. Equally unspeakable the width and the depth of the range of them throughout the enormity of Time. . . . O lover, how slender the beautiful witch, the ghost within the ghost of you ! Yet the depth of that ghost is the depth of the Nebu lous Zone bespanning Night, the luminous Shadow that Egypt figured of old as Mother of the Sun and the Gods, curving her long white woman's-body over the world. As a vapor of phosphorus, or wake of a ship in the night, only so with naked eye can we behold it. But pierced by vision telescopic, it is revealed as the further side of the Ring of the Cosmos, dim belt of millions of suns seemingly massed together like Beauty is Memory 207 the cells of a living body, yet so seeming only by reason of their frightful remoteness. Even thus really separated each from each in the awfulness of the Night of Time, by silent profundities of centuries, by interspaces of thousands and of myriads of years, though collectively shaping to love's desire but one dim soft sweet phantom, are those million-swarming memories that make for youth its luminous dream of beauty. Sadness in Beauty Sadness in Beauty THE poet who sang that beautiful things bring sadness, named as beautiful things music and sunset and night, clear skies and transparent waters. Their sadness he sought to explain by vague soul-memories of Paradise. Very old-fashioned this explanation ; but it con tains a shadowing of truth. For the mysterious sadness associated with the sense of beauty is certainly not of this existence, but of countless anterior lives, and therefore indeed a sadness of reminiscence. Elsewhere 1 try to explain why certain qualities of music, and certain aspects of sunset produce sadness, and even more than sadness. As for impressions of night, however, I doubt if the emotion that night evokes in this nineteenth cen tury can be classed with the sadness that beauty brings. A wonderful night, a tropical night, for instance, lucent and lukewarm, with a new moon in it, curved and yellow like a ripe banana, may inspire, among other minor feelings 212 Exotics and Retrospectives something of tenderness ; but the great dominant emotion evoked by the splendor of the vision is not sadness. Breaking open the heavens to their highest, night widens modern thought over the bounds of life and death by the spectacle of that Infinite whose veil is day. Night also forces remembrance of the mystery of our tether, the viewless force that holds us down to this wretched little ball of a world. And the result is cosmic emotion vaster than any sense of the sublime, drowning all other emotion, but nowise akin to the sadness that beauty causes. Anciently the emotion of night must have been incomparably less voluminous. Men who be lieved the sky to be a solid vault, never could have felt, as we feel it, the stupendous pomp of darkness. And our ever-growing admiration of those awful astral questions in the Book of Job, is mainly due to the fact that, with the prog ress of science, they continue to make larger and larger appeal to forms of thought and feeling which never could have entered into the mind of Job. But the sadness excited by the beauty of a per fect day, or by the charm of nature in her brightest moods, is a fact of another kind, and Sadness in Beauty 213 needs a different explanation. Inherited the feel ing must be, but through what cumulation of ancestral pain ? Why should the tenderness of an unclouded sky, the soft green sleep of sum mered valleys, the murmurous peace of sun- flecked shadows, inspire us with sadness ? Why should any inherited emotion following an aesthetic perception be melancholy rather than joyous ? ... Of course I do not refer to the sense of vastness or permanence or power aroused by the sight of the sea, or by any vision of sea- like space, or by the majesty of colossal ranges. That is the feeling of the sublime, always related to fear. /Esthetic sadness is related rather to desire. " All beautiful things bring sadness," is a state ment as near to truth as most general statements ; but the sadness and its evolutional history must vary according to circumstances. The melan choly awakened by the sight of a beautiful face cannot be identical with that awakened by the sight of a landscape, by the hearing of music, or by the reading of a poem. Yet there should be some one emotional element common to aesthetic sadness, one general kind of feeling 214 Exotics and Retrospectives which would help us to solve the riddle of the melancholy inspired by the sight of beauty in Nature. Such a common element, I believe, is , inherited longing, inherited dim sense of loss, shadowed and qualified variously by interrelated feelings. Different forms of this inheritance would be awakened by different impressions of the beautiful. In the case of human beauty, the aesthetic recognition might be toned or shadowed by immemorial inheritance of pain pain of longing, and pain of separation from numberless forgotten beloved. In the case of a color, a melody, an effect of sunshine or of moonlight, the sense-impressions appealing to aesthetic feeling might equally appeal to various ancestral memo ries of pain. The melancholy given by the sight of a beautiful landscape is certainly a melancholy of longing, a sadness massive as vague, because made by the experience of millions of our dead. " The aesthetic feeling for nature in its purity," declares Sully, " is a modern growth ... the feel ing for nature's wild solitudes is hardly older than Rousseau." Perhaps to many this will seem rather a strong statement in regard to the races of the West ; it is not true of the races of the Far East, whose art and poetry yield ancient proof to the Sadness in Beauty 21 contrary. But no evolutionist would deny that the aesthetic love of nature has been developed through civilization, and that many abstract sen timents now involved with it are of very recent origin. Much of the sadness made in us by the sight of a beautiful landscape would therefore be of comparatively modern growth, though less modern than some of the higher qualities of aesthetic pleasure which accompany the emotion. I surmise it to be mainly the inherited pain of that separation from Nature which began with the building of walled cities. Possibly there is blended with it something of incomparably older sorrow such as the immemorial mourning of man for the death of summer ; but this, and other feelings inherited from ages of wandering, would revive more especially in the great vague melan choly that autumn brings into what we still call our souls. Ever as the world increasing its wisdom in. creases its sorrow, our dwellers in cities built up to heaven more and more regret the joys of hu manity's childhood, the ancient freedom of forest and peak and plain, the brightness of mountain water, the cool keen sweetness of the 216 Exotics and Retrospectives sea's breath and the thunder-roll of its eternal epic. And all this regret of civilization for Na ture irretrievably forsaken, may somehow revive in that great soft dim sadness which the beauty of a landscape makes us feel. In one sense we are certainly wrong when we say that the loveliness of a scene brings tears to the eyes. It cannot be the loveliness of the scene ; it is the longing of generations quickening in the hearts of us. The beauty we speak of has no real existence : the emotion of the dead alone makes it seem to be, the emotion of those long-buried millions of men and women who loved Nature for reasons very much simpler and older than any aesthetic emotion is. To the windows of the house of life their phantoms crowd, like prisoners toward some vision of bright skies and flying birds, free hills and glim mering streams, beyond the iron of their bars. They behold their desire of other time, the vast light and space of the world, the wind swept clearness of azure, the hundred greens of wold and plain, the spectral promise of summits far away. They hear the shrilling and the whirr of happy winged things, the chorus of cicada and bird, the lisping and laughing of water, the under- Sadness in Beauty 217 tone of leafage astir. They know the smell of the season all sharp sweet odors of sap, scents of flower and fruitage. They feel the quicken ing of the living air, the thrilling of the great Blue Ghost. But all this comes to them, filtered through the bars and veils of their rebirth, only as dreams of home to hopeless exile, of child-bliss to deso late age, of remembered vision to the blind ! Parfum de Jeunesse Parfum de Jeunesse " T REMEMBER," said an old friend, telling me the romance of his youth, " that 1 could always find her cloak in the cloak room without a light, when it was time to take her home. I used to know it in the dark, because it had the smell of sweet new milk. ..." Which set me somehow to thinking of English dawns, the scent of hayfields, the fragrance of hawthorn days; and cluster after cluster of memories lighted up in succession through a great arc of remembrance that flashed over half a lifetime even before my friend's last words had ceased to sound in my ears. And then recollec tion smouldered into revery, a revery about the riddle of the odor of youth. That quality of the parfum de jeunesse which my friend described is not uncommon, though I fancy that it belongs to Northern rather than to 222 Exotics and Retrospectives Southern races. It signifies perfect health and splendid vigor. But there are other and more delicate varieties of the attraction. Sometimes it may cause you to think of precious gums or spices from the uttermost tropics ; sometimes it is a thin, thin sweetness, like a ghost of musk. It is not personal (though physical personality certainly has an odor) : it is the fragrance of a season, of the springtime of life. But even as the fragrance of spring, though everywhere a passing delight, varies with country and climate, so varies the fragrance of youth. Whether it be of one sex more than of another were difficult to say. We notice it chiefly in girls and in children with long hair, probably because it dwells especially in the hair. But it is always independent of artifice as the sweetness of the wild violet is. It belongs to the youth of the savage not less than to the youth of the civilized, to the adolescence of the peasant not less than to that of the'prince. It is not found in the sickly and the feeble, but only in perfect joyous health. Perhaps, like beauty, it may have some vague general relation to conditions ethical. Individual odors assuredly have, as the discrimination of the dog gives witness. Parfum de Jeunesse 223 Evolutionists have suggested that the pleasure we find in the perfume of a flower may be an emo tional reflection from aeons enormously remote, when such odor announced, to forms of ancestral life far lower than human, the presence of savory food. To what organic memory of association might be due, upon the same hypothesis, our pleasure in the perfume of youth? Perhaps there were ages in which that perfume had significances more definite and special than any which we can now attach to it. Like the pleasure yielded by the fragrance of flowers, the pleasure given by the healthy fragrance of a young body may be, partly at least, a survival from some era in which odorous impressions made direct appeal to the simplest of life-serving impulses. Long dissociated from such possible primitive relation, odor of blossom and odor of youth alike have now become for us excitants of the higher emotional life, of vague but volu minous and supremely delicate aesthetic feeling. Like the feeling awakened by beauty, the plea sure of odor is a pleasure of remembrance, is the magical appeal of a sensation to countless memories of countless lives. And even as the scent of a blossom evokes the ghosts of feelings 224 Exotics and Retrospectives experienced in millions of millions of unrecorded springs, so the fragrance of youth bestirs within us the spectral survival of sensations associated with every vernal cycle of all the human existence that has vanished behind us. And this fragrance of fresh being likewise makes invocation to ideal sentiment, to paren tal scarcely less than to amorous tenderness, because conjoined through immeasurable time with the charm and the beauty of childhood. Out of night and death is summoned by its necromancy more than a shadowy thrill from the rapture of perished passion, more than a phan tom-reflex from the delight of countless bridals ; even something also of the ecstasy of pressing lips of caress to the silky head of the first-born, faint refluence from the forgotten joy of myriad millions of buried mothers. Azure Psychology tl Azure Psychology * i LEAST common of the colors given by na ture to bird, insect, and blossom is bright .pure blue. Blue flowers are believed to proclaim for the plant that bears them a longer history of unchecked development than flowers of any other primary color suggest; and the high cost of the tint is perhaps hinted by the inability of the horticulturist to produce blue roses or blue chrysanthemums. Vivid blue appears in the plumage of some wonderful birds, and on the wings of certain amazing butterflies especially tropical butterflies ; but usually under condi tions that intimate a prodigious period of evolu tional specialization. Altogether it would seem that blue was the latest pure color developed in the evolution of flower and scale and feather ; and there is reason to believe that the power of per ceiving blue was not acquired until after the power 228 Exotics and Retrospectives of distinguishing red and green and yellow had already been gained. Whether the hypothesis be true or false, it is certainly noteworthy that, of the primary colors, blue alone has remained, up to the present time, a color pleasurable in its purest intensity to the vision of highly civilized races. Bright red, bright green, bright orange, yellow, or violet, can be used but sparingly incur nineteenth -century attire and decoration. They have become offensive in their spectral purity because of the violence of the sensations that they give; they remain grate ful only to the rudimentary aesthetic feeling of children, of the totally uncultivated, or of savages. What modern beauty clothes herself in scarlet, or robes herself in fairy green ? We cannot paint our chambers violet or saffron the mere idea jars upon our nerves. But the color of heaven has not ceased to delight us. Sky-blue can still be worn by our fairest ; and the luminous charm of azure ceilings and azure wall-surfaces under certain conditions of lighting and dimension is still recognized. " Nevertheless," some one may say, " we do not paint the outside of a building skyblue ; and a skyblue facade would be even more disagree- Azure Psychology 229 able than an orange or a crimson fagade." This is true, but not because the effect of the color upon large surfaces is necessarily displeasing. It is true only because vivid blue, unlike other bright colors, is never associated in our experience of nature with large and opaque solidity. When mountains become blue for us, they also become ghostly and semi-transparent. Upon a housefront the color must appear monstrous, because giving the notion of the unnatural, of a huge blue dead solidity tangibly proximate. But a blue ceiling, a blue vault, blue walls of corridors, may suggest the true relation of the color to depth and transparency, and make for us a grateful illusion of space and summer-light. Yellow, on the other hand, is a color well adapted to facades, because associated in memory with the beautiful effect of dying sunlight over pale broad surfaces. But although yellow remains, after blue, the most agreeable of the primary colors, it cannot often be used for artistic purposes, like blue, in all its luminous strength. Pale tones of yellow, especially creamy tones, are capable of an im mense variety of artistic employment ; but this is not true of the brilliant and burning yellow. Only blue is always agreeable in its most vivid 2}0 Exotics and Retrospectives purity providing that it be not used in massive displays so as to suggest the anomaly of blue hardness and blue opacity. 1 In Japan, which may still be called the land of perfect good taste in chromatics notwithstand ing the temporary apparition of some discords due to Western influence, almost any ordinary street-vista tells the story of the race-experience with color. The general tone of the vista is given by bluish greys above and dark blues be low, sharply relieved by numerous small details of white and cool yellow. In this perspective the bluish-greys represent the tiling of roofs and awnings ; the dark blues, shop-draperies ; the bright whites, narrow strips of plastered sur face ; the pale yellows, mostly smooth naked wood, and glimpses of rush -mattings. The broader stretches of color are furthermore relieved and softened by the sprinkling of countless ideo graphs over draperies and shop-signs black, (and sometimes red) against white; white or 1 Blue jewels, blue eyes, blue flowers delight us ; but in these the color accompanies either transparency or visible softness. It is perhaps because of the incongruity between hard opacity and blue that the sight of a book in sky-blue binding is unendurable. I can imagine nothing more atrocious. Azure Psychology 231 gold on blue. Strong yellows, greens, oranges, purples are invisible. In dress also greys and cool blues rule: when you do happen to see robes or bakama all of one brilliant color, worn by children or young girls, that color is either a sky-blue, or a violet with only just enough red in it to kindle the azure, a rainbow-violet of exquisite luminosity. 1 II But I wish to speak neither of the aesthetic value of blue in relation to arts and industries, nor of the optical significance of blue as the pro duct of six hundred and fifty billion oscillations of the luminous ether per second. I only want to say something about the psychology of the color, about its subjective evolutional history. Certainly the same apparition of blue, will bestir 1 This essay was written several years ago. During 180? I noticed for the first time since my arrival in Japan a sprinkling of dark greens and light-yellows in the fashions of the season ; but the general tone of costume was little affected by these exceptions to older taste. The light- yellow appeared only in some girdles of children. 232 Exotics and Retrospectives in different minds different degrees of feeling, and will set in motion, through memory -revival of unlike experiences, totally dissimilar operations of fancy. But independently of such psychological variation -j- mainly personal and superficial, there can be no doubt that the color evokes in the general mind one common quality of plea surable feeling, a vivacious thrill, a tone of emotional activity unmistakably related to the higher zones of sentiency and of imagination. In my own case the sight of vivid blue has always been accompanied by an emotion of vague delight more or less strong according to the luminous intensity of the color. And in one experience of travel, sailing to the American tropics, this feeling rose into ecstasy. It was when I beheld for the first time the grandest vision of blue in this world, the glory of the Gulf-Stream : a magical splendor that made me doubt my senses, a flaming azure that looked as if a million summer skies had been condensed into pure fluid color for the making of it. The captain of the ship leaned over the rail with me ; and we both watched the marvellous sea for a long time in silence. Then he said : Azure Psychology 233 " Fifteen years ago I took my wife with me on this trip just after we were married, it was ; and she wondered at the water. She asked me to get her a silk dress of the very same color. I tried in ever so many places ; but I never could get just what she wanted till a chance took me to Canton. I went round the Chinese silk -shops day after day, looking for that color. It was n't easy to find ; but I did get it at last. Was n't she glad, though, when I brought it home to her ! ... She 's got it yet. . . ." Still, at times, in sleep, I sail southward again over the wonder of that dazzling surging azure ; then the dream shifts suddenly across the world, and I am wandering with the Captain through close dim queer Chinese streets, vainly seeking a silk of the Blue of the Gulf-Stream. And it was this memory of tropic days that first impelled me to think about the reason of the delight inspired by the color.* 234 Exotics and Retrospectives 11! Possibly the wave of pleasurable emotion ex cited by a glorious vision of blue is not more com plex than the feeling aroused by any massive display of any other pure color ; but it is higher in the quality of its complexity. For the ideational elements that blend in the volume of it include not a few of the noblest, not a few of those which also enter into the making of Cosmic Emotion. Being the seeming color of the ghost of our planet, of the breath of the life of the world, blue is likewise the color apparent of the enormity of day and the abyss of the night. So the sen sation of it makes appeal to the ideas of Altitude, of Vastness, and of Profundity ; Also to the idea of Space in Time ; for blue is the tint of distance and of vagueness ; Also to the idea of Motion; for blue is the color of Vanishing and of Apparition. Peak and vale, bay and promontory, turn blue as we leave them; and out of blue they grow and define again as we glide homeward. Azure Psychology 23 !> And therefore in the volume of feeling awak ened in us by the sensation of blue, there should be something of the emotion associated with ex perience of change, with countless ancestral sorrows of parting. But if there indeed be any such dim survival, it is utterly whelmed and lost in that all-radiant emotional inheritance related to Summer and Warmth, to the joy of past humanity in the light of cloudless days. Still more significant is the fact that although blue is a sacred color, the dominant tones of the feeling it evokes are gladness and tenderness. Blue speaks to us of the dead and of the gods, but never of their awfulness. Now when we reflect that blue is the color of the idea of the divine, the color pantheistic, the color ethical, thrilling most deeply into those structures of thought to which belong our senti ments of reverence and justice, of duty and of aspiration, we may wonder why the emotion it calls up should be supremely gladsome. Is it be cause that sensuous race-experience of blue skies, that measureless joy of the dead in light and warmth, which has been transmitted to each of us in organic memory, is vastly older than the 236 Exotics and Retrospectives religious idea, and therefore voluminous enough to drown any ethical feeling indirectly related to the color-sensation ? Partly so, no doubt ; but I will venture another, and a very simple ex planation : All moral pulsations in the wave of inherited feeling which responds to the impression of blue, belong only to the beautiful and tender aspects of faith. And thus much having been ventured, I may presume a little further. I imagine that for many of us one of the most powerful elements in this billow of pleasurable feeling evoked by the vision of blue, is spiritual, in the fullest ethical meaning of the word ; that under the fleeting surf ace -plexus of personal emo tion empirically associated with the color, pulses like a tide the transmitted religious emotion of unnumbered ages; and that, quickening and vivifying all inherited sense of blue as beauty, is the inherited lucent rapture of blue as the splendor mystical, as the color of the everlasting Peace. Something of all human longing for all the Para- dises ever imagined, of all pre-existent trust in the promise of reunion after death, of all ex- Azure Psychology 237 pired dreams of unending youth and bliss, may be revived for us, more or less faintly, in this thrill of the delight of azure. Even as through the jewel- radiance of the Tropic Stream pass un dulations from the vaster deep, with their sob bings and whisperings, their fugitive drift and foam, so, through the emotion evoked by the vision of luminous blue, there may somehow quiver back to us out of the Infinite (multitu dinous like the billion ether-shiverings that make the blue sensation of a moment) something of all the aspirations of the ancient faiths, and the power of the vanished gods, and the passion and the beauty of all the prayer ever uttered by lips of man. A Serenade A Serenade i BROKEN " were too abrupt a word. My sleep was not broken, but suddenly melted and swept away by a flow of music from the night without, music that filled me with expectant ecstasy by the very first gush of its sweetness : a serenade, a playing of flutes and mandolines. The flutes had dove-tones ; and they cooed and moaned and purled ; and the mandolines throbbed through the liquid plaint of them, like a beating of hearts. The players I could not see : they were standing in heavy shadows flung into the street by a tropical moon, shadows of plantain and of tamarind. Nothing in all the violet gloom moved but that music, and the fire-flies, great bright slow sparks of orange and of emerald. The warm air held its breath; the plumes of the palms were 16 242 Exotics and Retrospectives still ; and the haunting circle of the sea, blue even beneath the moon, lay soundless as a circle of vapor. Flutes and mandolines a Spanish melody nothing more. Yet it seemed as if the night it self were speaking, or, out of the night some pas sional life long since melted into Nature's mystery, but continuing to haunt the tepid, odorous, spark ling darkness of that strange world, which sleeps under the sun, and wakens only to the stars. And its utterance was the ghostly reiteration of rapture that had been, and never again could be, an utterance of infinite tenderness and of im measurable regret. Never before had I felt how the simplest of music could express what no other art is able even to suggest ; never before had I known the as tonishing possibilities of melody without orna ment, without artifice, yet with a charm as bewildering, as inapprehensible, as the Greek perception of the grace supreme. Now nothing in perfect art can be only volup tuous; and this music, in despite of its caress, was immeasurably, ineffably sad. And the exqui site blending of melancholy with passion in a A Serenade 243 motive so simple, one low long cooing motive, over and over again repeated, like a dove's cry, had a strangeness of beauty like the musical thought of a vanished time, one rare survival, out of an era more warmly human than our own, of some lost art of melody. II The music hushed, and left me dreaming, and vainly trying to explain the emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured, that the mystery was of other existences than mine. For the living present, I reflected, is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution, vast complexities of sentiency created by experience of vanished beings more countless than the sands of a myriad seas. All personality is recombination; and all emotions are of the dead. Yet some seem to us more ghostly than others, partly because of their greater relative mystery, partly because of the immense power of the phantom waves com posing them. Among pleasurable forms, the ghostliest are the emotion of first love, the emo- 244 Exotics and Retrospectives tion following the perception of the sublime in nature of terrible beauty, and the emotion of music. Why should they so be ? Probably because the influences that arouse them thrill furthest into our forgotten past. Frightful as the depth of the abyss of Space is the depth of one thinking life, measureless even by millions of ages ; and who may divine how profoundly in certain personalities the mystery can be moved. We only know that the deeper the thrilling, the heavier the wave responding, and the weirder the result, until those profundities are reached of which a single surge brings instant death, or makes perpetual ruin of the delicate structures of thought. Now any music that makes powerful appeal to the emotion of love, awakening the passional latency of the past within us, must, inevitably revive dead pain not less than dead delight. Pain of the conquest of will by a mystery resistless and pitiless, the torture of doubt, the pangs of rivalry, the terror of impermanency, shadows of these and many another sorrow have had their part in the toning of that psychical inheritance which makes at once love's joy and love's anguish, and grows forever from birth to birth. A Serenade 24 And thus it may happen that a child, innocent of passion or of real pain, is moved even to tears by music uttering either. Unknowingly he feels in that utterance a shadowing of the sorrow of numberless vanished lives. Ill But it seemed to me that the extraordinary emotion awakened by that tropical melody needed an explanation more qualitative than the explana tion above attempted. I felt sure that the dead past to which the music had made appeal must have been a special past, that some particular class or group of emotional memories had been touched. Yet what class ? what group? For the time being, I could not even venture a guess. Long afterwards, however, some chance hap pening revived for me with surprising distinctness the memory of the serenade; and simulta neously, like a revelation, came the certainty that the whole spell of the melody all its sadness and all its sweetness had been supremely and uniquely feminine. 246 Exotics and Retrospectives " Assuredly," I reflected, as the new convic tion grew upon me, " the primal source of all human tenderness has been the Eternal Feminine. ... Yet how should melody uttering only the soul of woman have been composed by man, and bestir within man this innominable quicken ing of emotional reminiscence?" The answer shaped itself at once, " Every mortal man has been many millions of times a woman." Undoubtedly in either sex survives the sum of the feelings and of the memories of both. But some rare experience may appeal at times to the feminine element of personality alone, to one half only of the phantom-world of Self, leav ing the other hemisphere dormant and unillumed. And such experience had found embodiment in the marvellous melody of the serenade which I had heard. That tremulous sweetness was never masculine ; that passional sadness never was of man : uni sexual both and inseparably blended into a single miracle of tone -beauty. Echoing far into the mystery of my own past, the enchantment of that tone had startled from their sleep of ages count- A Serenade 247 less buried loves, and set the whole delicate swarm fluttering in some delicious filmy agony of revival, set them streaming and palpitating through the Night of Time, like those myriads eddying forever through the gloom of the vision of Dante. They died with the music and the moon, but not utterly. Whenever in dream the memory of that melody returns, again I feel the long soft shuddering of the dead, again I feel the faint wings spread and thrill, responsive to the cooing of those spectral flutes, to the throbbing of those shadowy mandolines. And the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakes me; but always with my wakening the delight passes, and in the dark the sadness only lingers, unutterable, infinite. . . ! A Red Sunset A Red Sunset i THE most stupendous apparition of red that I ever saw was a tropical sunset in a cloud less sky, a sunset such as can be wit- nessed only during exceptional conditions of atmosphere. It began with a flaming of orange from horizon to zenith ; and this quickly deepened to a fervid vermilion, through which the crimson disk glared like the cinder of a burnt-out star. Sea, peak, and palm caught the infernal glow ; and 1 became conscious of a vague strange horror within myself, a sense of distress like that which precedes a nightmare. I could not then explain the feeling ; I only knew that the color had aroused it. But how aroused it ? I later asked myself. Common theories about the ugly sensation of bright red could not explain for me the weirdness 2^2 Exotics and Retrospectives of that experience. As for the sanguine associa tions of the color, they could interpret little in my case ; for the sight of blood had never affected my nerves in the least. I thought that the theory of psychical inheritance might furnish some expla nation ; but how could it meet the fact that a color, which the adult finds insufferable, continues to delight the child? All ruddy tones, however, are not unpleasant to refined sensibility : some are quite the reverse, as, for example, the various tender colors called pink or rose. These appeal to very agreeable kinds of sensuous experience : they suggest deli cacy and softness ; they awaken qualities of feeling totally different from those excited by vermilion or scarlet. Pink, being the tint of the blossoming of flowers and the blossoming of youth, of the ripeness of fruit and the ripe ness of flesh, is ever associated with impressions of fragrance and sweetness, and with memories of beautiful lips and cheeks. No : it is only the pure brilliant red, the fervid red, that arouses sinister feeling. Experience with this color seems to have been the same even in societies evolved under conditions utterly unlike those of our own history, Japan being a signifi- A Red Sunset cant example. The more refined and humane a civilization becomes, the less are displays of the color tolerated in its cultivated circles. But how are we to account for that pleasure which bright red still gives to the children of the people who detest it ? II Many sensations which delighted us as children, prove to. us either insipid or offensive in adult life. Why ? Because there have grown up with our growth feelings which, though now related to them, were dormant during childhood ; ideas now associated with them, but undeveloped dur ing childhood ; and experiences connected with them, never imagined in childhood. For the mind, at our birth, is even less devel oped than the body ; and its full ripening demands very much more time than is needed for the per fect bodily growth. Both by his faults and by his virtues the child resembles the savage, because the instincts and the emotions of the primitive man are the first to mature within him ; and they are the first to mature in the individual because they were the first evolved in the history of the 2">4 Exotics and Retrospectives race, being the most necessary to self -maintenance. That in later adult life they take a very inferior place is because the nobler mental and moral qualities comparatively recent products of social discipline and civilized habit have at last gained massiveness enough to dominate them under normal conditions ; have become like powerful new senses upon which the primitive emotional nature learns to depend for guidance. All emotions are inheritances ; but the higher, because in evolutional order the latest, develop only with the complete unfolding of the brain. Some, ethically considered the very loftiest, are said to develop only in old age, to which they impart a particular charm. Other faculties also of a high order, chiefly aesthetic, would seem in the average of cases to mature in middle life. And to this period of personal evolution probably belongs the finer sense of beauty in color, a much simpler faculty than the ethical sense, though possibly related to it in ways unsuspected. Vivid colors appeal to the rudimentary aesthetic sense of our children, as they do to the aesthetic sense of savages; but the civilized adult dis likes most of the very vivid colors : they exasper ate his nerves like an excessive crash of brass and A Red Sunset drums during a cheap orchestral performance. Cultured vision especially shrinks from a strong blaze of red. Only the child delights in vermil ion and scarlet. Growing up he gradually learns to think of what we call " loud red " as vulgar, and to dislike it much more than did his less deli cate ancestors of the preceding century. Educa tion helps him to explain why he thinks it vulgar, but not to explain why he feels it to be unpleas ant, independently of the question whether it tires his eyes. Ill And now 1 come back to the subject of that tropical sunset. Even in the common aesthetic emotion excited by the spectacle of any fine sunset, there are ele ments of feeling ancient as the race, dim mel ancholy, dim fear, inherited from ages when the dying of the day was ever watched with sadness and foreboding. After that mighty glow, the hours of primeval horror, the fear of black ness, the fear of nocturnal foes, the fear of ghosts. These, and other weird feelings, in dependently of the physical depression following Exotics and Retrospectives the withdrawal of sunlight, would by inheri- tance become emotionally related to visions of sundown ; and the primitive horror would at last be evolutionally transmuted to one elemental tone of the modern sublime. But the spectacle of a vast crimson sunset would awaken feelings less vague than the sense of the sublime, feel ings of a definitely sinister kind. The very color itself would make appeal to special kinds of inherited feelings, simply because of its rela tion to awful spectacles, the glare of the vol cano-summit, the furious vermilion of lava, the raging of forest-fires, the overglow of cities kind ling in the track of war, the smouldering of ruin, the blazing of funeral-pyres. And in this lurid race-memory of fire as destroyer, as the " raven ing ghost" of Northern fancy, there would mingle a vague distress evolved through ances tral experience of crimson heat in relation to pain, an organic horror. And the like tre mendous color in celestial phenomena would re vive also inherited terror related of old to ideas of the portentous and of the wrath of gods. Probably the largest element of the unpleasant feeling aroused in man by this angry color has A Red Sunset been made by the experience of the race with fire. But in even the most vivid red there is always some suggestion of passion, and of the tint of blood. Inherited emotion related to the sight of death must be counted among the ele ments of the sinister feeling that the hue excites. Doubtless for the man, as for the bull, the emo tional wave called up by displays of violent red, is mostly the creation of impressions and of ten dencies accumulated through all the immense life of the race ; and, as in the old story of Thomas the Rhymer, we can say of our only real Fairy land, our ghostly past, . . . " A' the blude that 's shed on earth Rins through the springs o' that Countrie." But those very associations that make burning red unbearable to modern nerves must have already been enormously old when it first became the color of pomp and luxury. How then should such associations affect us unpleasantly now ? I would answer that the emotional suggestions of the color continued to be pleasurable for the adult, as they still are for the child, only while they remained more vague and much less volu minous than at present. Becoming intensified in '7 2 8 Exotics and Retrospectives the modern brain, they gradually ceased to yield pleasure, somewhat as warmth increased to the degree of heat ceases to be pleasurable. Still later they became painful ; and their actual painfulness exposes the fundamentally savage nature of those sensations of splendor and power which the color once called into play. And the intensification of the feeling evoked by red has not been due merely to later accumulation of inherited impres sions, but also to the growth and development of emotions essentially antithetical to ideas of violence and pain, and yet inseparable from them. The moral sensibility of an era that has condemned not a few of the amusements of our forebears to the limbo of old barbarities, the humanity of an age that refuses to believe in a hell of literal fire, that prohibits every brutal sport, that com pels kindness to animals, is offended by the cruel suggestiveness of the color. But within the slowly-unfolding brain of the child, this modern sensibility is not evolved ; and until it has been evolved, with the aid of experience and of educa tion, the feeling aroused by such a color as vivid scarlet will naturally continue to be pleasurable rather than painful. A Red Sunset 259 IV While thus trying to explain why a color dig nified as imperial in other centuries should have become offensive in our own, I found myself wondering whether most of our actual refinements might not in like manner become the vulgarities of a future age. Our standards of taste and our ideals of beauty can have only a value relative to conditions which are constantly changing. Real and ideal alike are transitory, mere apparitional undulations in the flux of the perpetual Becoming. Perhaps the finest ethical or aesthetical sentiment of to-day will manifest itself in another era only as some extraordinary psychological atavism, some rare individual reversion to the conditions of a barbarous past. What in the meantime would be the fate of sensations that are even now becoming intoler able ? Any faculty, mental or physical, however previously developed by evolutional necessities, would have a tendency to dwindle and disappear from the moment that it ceased to be either use ful or pleasurable. Continuance of the power to perceive red would depend upon the possible 260 Exotics and Retrospectives future usefulness of that power to the race. Not without suggestiveness in this connection may be the fact that it represents the lowest rate of those ether-oscillations which produce color. Perhaps our increasing dislike to it indicates that power to distinguish it will eventually pass away pass away in a sort of Daltonism at the inferior end of the color-scale. Such visual loss would prob ably be more than compensated by superior co incident specializations of retinal sensibility. A more highly organized generation might enjoy wonders of color now unimaginable, and yet never be able to perceive red, not, at least, that red whose sensation is the spectral smouldering of the agonies and the furies of our evolutional past, the haunting of a horror innominable, immeasurable, enormous phantom -menace of expired human pain. Frisson Frisson SOME there may be who have never felt the thrill of a human touch ; but surely these are few! Most of us in early childhood discover strange differences in physical contact; we find that some caresses soothe, while others irritate ; and we form in consequence various un reasoning likes and antipathies. With the ripen ing of youth we seem to feel these distinctions more and more keenly, until the fateful day in which we learn that a certain feminine touch communicates an unspeakable shiver of de light, exercises a witchcraft that we try to account for by theories of the occult and the supernatural. Age may smile at these magical fancies of youth; and nevertheless, in spite of much science, the imagination of the lover is probably nearer to truth than is the wisdom of the disillusioned. 264 Exotics and Retrospectives We seldom permit ourselves in mature life to think very seriously about such experiences. We do not deny them ; but we incline to regard them as nervous idiosyncrasies. We scarcely notice that even in the daily act of shaking hands with persons of either sex, sensations may be received which no physiology can explain. I remember the touch of many hands, the quality of each clasp, the sense of physical sym pathy or repulsion aroused. Thousands 1 have indeed forgotten, probably because their con tact told me nothing in particular ; but the strong experiences I fully recollect. 1 found that their agreeable or disagreeable character was often quite independent of the moral relation: but in the most extraordinary case that I can recall (a strangely fascinating personality with the strangest of careers as poet, soldier, and refugee) the moral and the physical charm were equally powerful and equally rare. " Whenever I shake hands with that man," said to me one of many who had yielded to his spell, " I feel a warm shock go all through me, like a glow of sum mer." Even at this moment when I think of that dead hand, I can feel it reached out to me over the space of twenty years and of many Frisson 265 a thousand miles. Yet it was a hand that had killed. . . . These, with other memories and reflections, came to me just after reading a criticism on Mr. Bain's evolutional interpretation of the thrill of pleasure sometimes given by the touch of the human skin. The critic asked why a satin cushion kept at a temperature of about 98 would not give the same thrill ; and the question seemed to me unfair because, in the very passage criticised, Mr. Bain had sufficiently suggested the reason. Taking him to have meant as he must have meant, not that the thrill is given by any kind of warmth and softness, but only by the peculiar warmth and softness of the human skin, his interpretation can scarcely be contested by a sarcasm. A satin cushion at a temperature of about 98 could not give the same sensation as that given by the touch of the human skin for reasons even much more simple than Mr. Bain implied, since it is totally different from the human skin in substance, in texture, and in the all-important fact that it is not alive, but dead. Of course warmth and softness in themselves are not enough to produce the thrill of pleasure con- 266 Exotics and Retrospectives sidered by Mr. Bain : under easily imaginable cir cumstances they may produce something of the reverse. Smoothness has quite as much to do with the pleasure of touch as either softness or warmth can have; yet a moist or a very dry smoothness may be disagreeable. Again, cool smoothness in the human skin is perhaps even more agreeable than warm smoothness ; yet there is a cool smoothness common to many lower forms of life which causes a shudder. Whatever be those qualities making pleasurable the touch of a hand, for example, they are probably very many in combination, and they are certainly peculiar to the living touch. No possible artificial combi nation of warmth and smoothness and softnesss combined could excite the same quality of pleasure that certain human touches give, although, as other psychologists than Mr. Bain have observed, it may give rise to a fainter kind of agreeable feeling. A special sensation can be explained only by special conditions. Some philosophers would ex plain the conditions producing this pleasurable thrill, or frisson, as mainly subjective ; others, as mainly objective. Is it not most likely that either view contains truth; that the physical cause Frisson 267 must be sought in some quality, definable or inde finable, attaching to a particular touch ; and that the cause of the coincident emotional phenomena should be looked for in the experience, not of the individual, but of the race ? Remembering that there can be no two tan gible things exactly alike, no two blades of grass, or drops of water, or grains of sand, it ought not to seem incredible that the touch of one person should have power to impart a sensa tion different from any sensation producible by the touch of any other person. That such dif ference could neither be estimated nor qualified would not necessarily imply unimportance or even feebleness. Among the voices of the thou sands of millions of human beings in this world, there are no two precisely the same ; yet how much to the ear and to the heart of wife or mother, child or lover, may signify the unspeakably fine difference by which each of a billion voices varies from every other ! Not even in thought, much less in words, can such distinction be specified ; but who is unfamiliar with the fact and with its immense relative importance ? That any two human skins should be abso- 268 Exotics and Retrospectives lutely alike is not possible. There are individual variations perceptible even to the naked eye, for has not Mr. Galton taught us that the visible finger-marks of no two persons are the same? But in addition to differences visible whether to the naked eye, or only under the microscope, there must be other differences of quality de pending upon constitutional vigor, upon ner vous and glandular activities, upon relative chemical composition of tissue. Whether touch be a sense delicate enough to discern such dif ferences, would be, of course, a question for psycho-physics to decide, and a question not simply of magnitudes, but of qualities of sensa tion. Perhaps it is not yet even legitimate to suppose that, just as by ear we can distinguish the qualitative differences of a million voices, so by touch we might be able to distinguish qualita tive differences of surface scarcely less delicate. Yet it is worth while here to remark that the tingle or shiver of pleasure excited in us by cer tain qualities of voice, very much resembles the thrill given sometimes by the touch of a hand. Is it not possible that there may be recognized, in the particular quality of a living skin, something not less uniquely attractive than the indeter- Frisson 269 minable charm of what we call a bewitching voice ? Perhaps it is not impossible. But in the char acter of the frisson itself there is a hint that the charm of the touch provoking it may be due to something much more deeply vital than any physical combination of smoothness, warmth and softness, to something, as Mr. Bain has suggested, electric or magnetic. Human elec tricity is no fiction : every living body, even a plant, is to some degree electrical ; and the electric conditions of no two organisms would be exactly the same. Can the thrill be partly accounted for by some individual peculiarity of these conditions? May there not be electrical differences of touch appreciable by delicate ner vous systems, differences subtle as those in finitesimal variations of timbre by which every voice of a million voices is known from every other ? Such a theory might be offered in explanation of the fact that the slightest touch of a particular woman, for example, will cause a shock of plea sure to men whom the caresses of other and fairer women would leave indifferent. But it could not serve to explain why the same contact should 270 Exotics and Retrospectives produce no effect upon some persons, while caus ing ecstasy in others. No purely physical theory can interpret all the mystery of the frisson. A deeper explanation is needed; and I imagine that one is suggested by the phenomenon of " love at first sight." The power of a woman to inspire love at first sight does not depend upon some attraction visible to the common eye. It depends partly upon something objective which only certain eyes can see ; and it depends partly upon some thing which no mortal can see, the psychical composition of the subject of the passion. No- body can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy, namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited in dividual susceptibility to special qualities of femi* nine influence, and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition, a sudden wak ening of that inherited composite memory which is more commonly called " passional affinity." Certainly if first love be evolutionally explicable, it means the perception by the lover of some thing differentiating the beloved from all other women, something corresponding to an in- Frisson 271 herited ideal within himself, previously latent, but suddenly lighted and defined by result of that visual impression. And like sight, though perhaps less deeply, do other of our senses reach into the buried past. A single strain of melody, the sweetness of a single voice what thrill immeasurable will either make in the fathomless sleep of ancestral mem ory ! Again, who does not know that speechless delight bestirred in us on rare bright days by something odorous in the atmosphere, en chanting, but indefinable? The first breath of spring, the blowing of a mountain breeze, a south wind from the sea may bring this emotion, an emotion overwhelming, yet nameless as its cause, an ecstasy formless and transparent as the air. Whatever be the odor, diluted to very ghostliness, that arouses this delight, the delight itself is too weirdly voluminous to be explained by any memory-revival of merely individual ex perience. More probably it is older even than human life, reaches deeper into the infinite blind depth of dead pleasure and pain. Out of that ghostly abyss also must come the thrill responding within us to a living touch, touch electrical of man, questioning the heart, 272 Exotics and Retrospectives touch magical of woman, invoking memory of caresses given by countless delicate and loving hands long crumbled into dust. Doubt it not ! the touch that makes a thrill within you is a touch that you have felt before, sense-echo of forgotten intimacies in many unremetubered lives! Vespertina Cognitio Vespertina Cognitio I I DOUBT if there be any other form of terror that even approaches the fear of the super natural, and more especially the fear of the supernatural in dreams. Children know this fear both by night and by day; but the adult is not likely to suffer from it except in slumber, or under the most abnormal conditions of mind produced by illness. Reason, in our healthy wak ing hours, keeps the play of ideas far above those deep-lying regions of inherited emotion where dwell the primitive forms of terror. But even as known to the adult in dreams only, there is no waking fear comparable to this fear, none so deep and yet so vague, none so unutterable. The indefiniteness of the horror renders verbal expression of it impossible; yet the suffering is so intense that, if prolonged beyond a certain term of seconds, it will kill. And the reason 276 Exotics and Retrospectives is that such fear is not of the individual life : it is infinitely more massive than any personal experience could account for; it is prenatal, ancestral fear. Dim it necessarily is, because compounded of countless blurred millions of in herited fears. But for the same reason, its depth is abysmal. The training of the mind under civilization has been directed toward the conquest of fear in gen- eral, and excepting that ethical quality of the feeling which belongs to religion of the super natural in particular. Potentially in most of us this fear exists ; but its sources are well-guarded ; and outside of sleep it can scarcely perturb any vigorous mind except in the presence of facts so foreign to all relative experience that the imagina tion is clutched before the reason can grapple with the surprise. Once only, after the period of childhood, I knew this emotion in a strong form. It was re markable as representing the vivid projection of a dream -fear into waking consciousness ; and the experience was peculiarly tropical. In tropical countries, owing to atmospheric conditions, the oppression of dreams is a more serious suffering than with us, and is perhaps most common dur- Vespertina Cognitio 277 ing the siesta. All who can afford it pass their nights in the country; but for obvious reasons the majority of colonists must be content to take their siesta, and its consequences, in town. The West- Indian siesta does not refresh like that dreamless midday nap which we enjoy in Northern summers. It is a stupefaction rather than a sleep, beginning with a miserable feeling of weight at the base of the brain : it is a helpless surrender of the whole mental and physical being to the overpressure of light and heat. Often it is haunted by ugly visions, and often broken by violent leaps of the heart. Occasionally it is disturbed also by noises never noticed at other times. When the city lies all naked to the sun, stripped by noon of every shadow, and empty of wayfarers, the silence becomes amazing. In that silence the papery rustle of a palm -leaf, or the sudden sound of a lazy wavelet on the beach, like the clack of a thirsty tongue, comes im- ' mensely magnified to the ear. And this noon, ' with its monstrous silence, is for the black people the hour of ghosts. Everything alive is senseless with the intoxication of light ; even the woods drowse and droop in their wrapping of lianas, drunk with sun. . . . 278 Exotics and Retrospectives Out of the siesta I used to be most often star- tied, not by sounds, but by something which I can describe only as a sudden shock of thought. This would follow upon a peculiar internal com motion caused, I believe, by some abnormal effect of heat upon the lungs. A slow suffocating sensa tion would struggle up into the twilight-region be tween half-consciousness and real sleep, and there bestir the ghastliest imaginings, fancies and fears of living burial. These would be accom panied by a voice, or rather the idea of a voice, mocking and reproaching : " ' Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun. 1 . . . Outside it is day, tropical day, primeval day ! And you sleep ! ! . . . ' Though a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet ' . . . Sleep on ! all this splendor will be the same when your eyes are dust ! . . . ' Yet let him remember the days of darkness; FOR THEY SHALL BE MANY!'" How often, with that phantom crescendo in my ears, have I leaped in terror from the hot couch, to peer through the slatted shutters at the enor mous light without silencing, mesmerizing; then dashed cold water over my head, and stag- Vespertina Cognitio 279 gered back to the scorching mattress, again to drowse, again to be awakened by the same voice, or by the trickling of my own perspiration a feeling not always to be distinguished from that caused by the running of a centipede ! And how I used to long for the night, with its Cross of the South ! Not because the night ever brought cool ness to the city, but because it brought relief from the weight of that merciless sunfire. For the feeling of such light is the feeling of a deluge of something ponderable, something that drowns and dazzles and burns and numbs all at the same time, and suggests the idea of liquified electricity. There are times, however, when the tropical heat seems only to thicken after sunset. On the mountains the nights are, as a rule, delightful the whole year round. They are even more delight ful on the coast facing the trade-winds ; and you may sleep there in a seaward chamber, caressed by a warm, strong breeze, a breeze that plays upon you not by gusts or whiffs, but with a steady ceaseless blowing, the great fanning wind-current of the world's whirling. But in the towns of the other coast nearly all situated at the base of wooded ranges cutting off the trade- 280 Exotics and Retrospectives breeze, the humid atmosphere occasionally be comes at night something nameless, something worse than the air of an overheated conservatory. Sleep in such a medium is apt to be visited by nightmare of the most atrocious kind. My personal experience was as follows: II I was making a tour of the island with a half- breed guide ; and we had to stop for one night in a small leeward -coast settlement, where we found accommodation at a sort of lodging-house kept by an aged widow. There were seven persons only in the house that night, the old lady, her two daughters, two colored female-servants, my- self and my guide. We were given a single- windowed room upstairs, rather small, otherwise a typical, Creole bedroom, with bare clean floor, some heavy furniture of antique pattern, and a few rocking-chairs. There was in one corner a bracket supporting a sort of household shrine what the Creoles call a cbapelle. The shrine contained a white image of the Virgin before which a tiny light was floating in a cup of oil Vespertina Cognitio 281 By colonial custom your servant, while travelling with you, sleeps either in the same room, or before the threshold; and my man simply lay down on a mat beside the huge four-pillared couch assigned to me, and almost immediately began to snore. Before getting into bed, I satis fied myself that the door was securely fastened. The night stifled ; the air seemed to be coag ulating. The single large window, overlooking a garden, had been left open, but there was no movement in that atmosphere. Bats very large bats, flew soundlessly in and out; one act ually fanning my face with its wings as it circled over the bed. Heavy scents of ripe fruit nau seously sweet rose from the garden, where palms and plantains stood still as if made of metal. From the woods above the town stormed the usual night-chorus of tree-frogs, insects, and nocturnal birds, a tumult not to be accurately described by any simile, but suggesting, through numberless sharp tinkling tones, the fancy of a wide slow cataract of broken glass. I tossed and turned on the hot hard bed, vainly trying to find one spot a little cooler than the rest. Then I rose, drew a rocking-chair to the window and lighted a 282 Exotics and Retrospectives cigar. The smoke hung motionless; after each puff, I had to blow it away. My man had ceased to snore. The bronze of his naked breast shin- ing with moisture under the faint light of the shrine-lamp, showed no movement of respira tion. He might have been a corpse. The heavy heat seemed always to become heavier. At last, utterly exhausted, I went back to bed, and slept. It must have been well after midnight when I felt the first vague uneasiness, the suspicion, that precedes a nightmare. 1 was half -conscious, dream -conscious of the actual, knew myself in that very room, wanted to get up. Immedi ately the uneasiness grew into terror, because I found 'that I could not move. Something un utterable in the air was mastering will. I tried to cry out, and my utmost effort resulted only in a whisper too low for any one to hear. Simultane ously I became aware of a Step ascending the stair, a muffled heaviness ; and the real night mare began, the horror of the ghastly magnet ism that held voice and limb, the hopeless will-struggle against dumbness and impotence. The stealthy Step approached, but with lentor malevolently measured, slowly, slowly, as if Vespertina Cognitio 28} the stairs were miles deep. It gained the thresh- old, waited. Gradually then, and without sound, the locked door opened; and the Thing entered, bending as it came, a thing robed, feminine, reaching to the roof, not to be looked at! A floor-plank creaked as It neared the bed; and then with a frantic effort I woke, bathed in sweat ; my heart beating as if it were going to burst. The shrine-light had died : in the blackness I could see nothing ; but I thought I heard that Step retreating. I certainly heard the plank creak again. With the panic still upon me, I was actually unable to stir. The wisdom of striking a match occurred to me, but I dared not yet rise. Presently, as I held my breath to listen, a new wave of black fear passed through me; for I heard moanings, long nightmare moanings, moanings that seemed to be answer ing each other from two different rooms below. And then, close to me, my guide began to moan, hoarsely, hideously. I cried to him : " Louis ! Louis ! " We both sat up at once. I heard him panting, and I knew that he was fumbling for his cutlass in the dark. Then, in a voice husky with fear, he asked : 284 Exotics and Retrospectives " Missie, ess ou tanne ? " [Monsieur, est-ce que vous entendez ? ] The moaners continued to moan, always in crescendo: then there were sudden screams, " Madame / " " Man^ell ! " and running of bare feet, and sounds of lamps being lighted, and, at last, a general clamor of frightened voices. I rose, and groped for the matches. The moans and the clamor ceased. "Missie" my man asked again, "ess ou te ouey? " [Monsieur, est-ce que vous 1'avez vue ?] " ou le di ? " [Qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire ?] I responded in bewilderment, as my fingers closed on the match-box. " Fenm-Id?" he answered. . . . THAT WOMAN ? The question shocked me into absolute immo bility. Then I wondered if I could have under- stood. But he went on in his patois, as if talking to himself : " Tall, tall high like this room, that Zombi. When She came the floor cracked. I heard I saw." After a moment, I succeeded in lighting a can dle, and I went to the door. It was still locked, double-locked. No human being could have entered through the high window. Vespertina Cognitio 28$ " Louis ! " I said, without believing what I said, "you have been only dreaming." "Missie," he answered, " it was no dream. She has been in all the rooms, touching people 1 " I said, " That is foolishness ! See ! the door is double-locked." Louis did not even look at the door, but responded : "Door locked, door not locked, Zombi comes and goes. . . . I do not like this house. . . . Missie, leave that candle burning ! " He uttered the last phrase imperatively, with out using the respectful souple just as a guide speaks at an instant of common danger ; and his tone conveyed to me the contagion of his fear. Despite the candle, I knew for one moment the sensation of nightmare outside of sleep! The coincidences stunned reason; and the hideous primitive fancy fitted itself, like a certitude, to the explanation of cause and effect. The similarity of my vision and the vision of Louis, the creak ing of the floor heard by us both, the visit of the nightmare to every room in succession, these formed a more than unpleasant combination of evidence. I tried the planking with my foot in 286 Exotics and Retrospectives the place where I thought I had seen the figure : it uttered the very same loud creak that I had heard before. " fa pa ka sam reve," said Louis. No ! that was not like dreaming. I left the candle burning, and went back to bed not to sleep, but to think. Louis lay down again, with his hand on the hilt of his cutlass. I thought for a long time. All was now silent below. The heat was at last lifting ; and occa sional whiffs of cooler air from the garden an nounced the wakening of a land-breeze. Louis, in spite of his recent terror, soon began to snore again. Then I was startled by hearing a plank creak quite loudly, the same plank that I had tried with my foot. This time Louis did not seem to hear it. There was nothing there. It -creaked twice more, and I understood. The intense heat first, and the change of temperature later, had been successively warping and unwarp- ing the wood so as to produce those sounds. In the state of dreaming, which is the state of im perfect sleep, noises may be audible enough to affect imagination strongly, and may startle into motion a long procession of distorted fancies. At the same time it occurred to me that the al- Vespertina Cognitio 287 most concomitant experiences of nightmare in the different rooms could be quite sufficiently ex plained by the sickening atmospheric oppression of the hour. There still remained the ugly similitude of the two dreams to be accounted for; and a natural solution of this riddle also, I was able to find after some little reflection. The coincidence had certainly been startling; but the similitude was only partial. That which my guide had seen in his nightmare was a familiar creation of West- Indian superstition probably of African origin. But the shape that I had dreamed about used to vex my sleep in childhood, a phantom created for me by the impression of a certain horrible Celtic story which ought not to have been told to any child blessed, or cursed, with an imagination. m Musing on this experience led me afterwards to think about the meaning of that fear which we call "the fear of darkness," and yet is not really fear of darkness. Darkness, as a simple 288 Exotics and Retrospectives condition, never could have originated the feel ing, a feeling that must have preceded any definite idea of ghosts by thousands of ages. The inherited, instinctive fear, as exhibited by children, is not a fear of darkness in itself, but of indefinable danger associated with darkness. Evolutionally explained, this dim but voluminous terror would have for its primal element the im pressions created by real experience experience of something acting in darkness ; and the fear of the supernatural would mingle in it only as a much later emotional development. The prime val cavern-gloom lighted by nocturnal eyes; the blackness of forest-gaps by river-marges, where destruction lay in wait to seize the thirsty ; the umbrages of tangled shores concealing horror; the dusk of the python's lair; the place of hasty refuge echoing the fury of fam ished brute and desperate man; the place of burial, and the fancied frightful kinship of the buried to the cave-haunters : all these, and countless other impressions of the relation of darkness to death, must have made that an- cestral fear of the dark which haunts the imagi nation of the child, and still betimes seizes the adult as he sleeps in the security of civilization. Vespertina Cognitio 289 Not all the fear of dreams can be the fear of the immemorial. But that strange nightmare- sensation of being held by invisible power ex erted from a distance is it quite sufficiently explained by the simple suspension of will-power during sleep? Or could it be a composite in heritance of numberless memories of having been caught? Perhaps the true explanation would suggest no prenatal experience of monstrous mesmerisms nor of monstrous webs, nothing more startling than the evolutional certainty that man, in the course of his development, has left behind him conditions of terror incomparably worse than any now existing. Yet enough of the psychological riddle of nightmare remains to tempt the question whether human organic memory holds no record of extinct forms of pain, pain related to strange powers once ex- erted by some ghastly vanished life. The Eternal Haunter The Eternal Haunter THIS year the Tokyo color-prints Nishiki-& seem to me of unusual interest. They reproduce, or almost reproduce, the color- charm of the early broadsides ; and they show a marked improvement in line-drawing. Certainly one could not wish for anything prettier than the best prints of the present season. My latest purchase has been a set of weird studies, spectres of all kinds known to the Far East, including many varieties not yet discovered in the West. Some are extremely unpleasant; but a few are really charming. Here, for example, is a delicious thing by " Chikanobu," just pub lished, and for sale at the remarkable price of three sen I Can you guess what it represents ? . . . Yes, a girl, but what kind of a girl ? Study it a little. . . . Very lovely, is she not, with that shy sweetness in her downcast gaze, that light and dainty grace, as of a resting butterfly ? . . . No, 294 Exotics and Retrospectives she is not some Psyche of the most Eastern East, in the sense that you mean but she is a soul. Observe that the cherry-flowers falling from the branch above, are passing through her form. See also the folds of her robe, below, melting into blue faint mist. How delicate and vapory the whole thing is ! It gives you the feeling of spring ; and all those fairy colors are the colors of a Japanese spring-morning. . . . No, she is not the personification of any season. Rather she is a dream such a dream as might haunt the slumbers of Far-Eastern youth ; but the artist did not intend her to represent a dream . . . You cannot guess ? Well, she is a tree-spirit, the Spirit of the Cherry-tree. Only in the twilight of morning or of evening she appears, gliding about her tree ; and whoever sees her must love her. But, if approached, she vanishes back into the trunk, like a vapor absorbed. There is a legend of one tree-spirit who loved a man, and even gave him a son ; but such conduct was quite at variance with the shy habits of her race. . . . You ask what is the use of drawing the Impos sible ? Your asking proves that you do not feel the charm of this vision of youth, this dream of spring. / hold that the Impossible bears a The Eternal Haunter much closer relation to fact than does most of what we call the real and the commonplace. The Impossible may not be naked truth ; but I think that it is usually truth, masked and veiled, per haps, but eternal. Now to me this Japanese dream is true, true, at least, as human love is. Considered even as a ghost it is true. Whoever pretends not to believe in ghosts of any sort, lies to his own heart. Every man is haunted by ghosts. And this color-print reminds me of a ghost whom we all know, though most of us (poets excepted) are unwilling to confess the acquaintance. Perhaps for it happens to some of us you may have seen this haunter, in dreams of the night, even during childhood. Then, of course, you could not know the beautiful shape bending above your rest : possibly you thought her to be an angel, or the soul of a dead sister. But in waking life we first become aware of her presence about the time when boyhood begins to ripen into youth. This first of her apparitions is a shock of ecstasy, a breathless delight ; but the wonder and the pleasure are quickly followed by a sense of 296 Exotics and Retrospectives sadness inexpressible, totally unlike any sadness ever felt before, though in her gaze there is only caress, and on her lips the most exquisite of smiles. And you cannot imagine the reason of that feeling until you have learned who she is, which is not an easy thing to learn. Only a moment she remains ; but during that luminous moment all the tides of your being set and surge to her with a longing for which there is not any word. And then suddenly! she is not ; and you find that the sun has gloomed, the colors of the world turned grey. Thereafter enchantment remains between you and all that you loved before, persons or things or places. None of them will ever seem again so near and dear as in other days. Often she will return. Once that you have seen her she will never cease to visit you. And this haunting, ineffably sweet, inexplicably sad, may fill you with rash desire to wander over the world in search of somebody like her. But however long and far you wander, never will you find that somebody. Later you may learn to fear her visits because of the pain they bring, the strange pain that you cannot understand. But the breadth of zones The Eternal Haunter 297 and seas cannot divide you from her; walls of iron cannot exclude her. Soundless and subtle as a shudder of ether is the motion of her. Ancient her beauty as the heart of man, yet ever waxing fairer, forever remaining young. Mortals wither in Time as leaves in the frost of autumn ; but Time 01 Jy brightens the glow and the bloom of her endless youth. All men have loved her ; all must continue to love her. But none shall touch with his lips even the hem of her garment. All men adore her; yet all she deceives, and many are the ways of her deception. Most often she lures her lover into the presence of some earthly maid, and blends herself incomprehensibly with the body of that maid, and works such sud den glamour that the human gaze becomes divine, that the human limbs shine through their rai ment. But presently the luminous haunter de taches herself from the mortal, and leaves her dupe to wonder at the mockery of sense. No man can describe her, though nearly all men have some time tried to do so. Pictured she can not be, since her beauty itself is a ceaseless be coming, multiple to infinitude, and tremulous with perpetual quickening, as with flowing of light. 298 Exotics and Retrospectives There is a story, indeed, that thousands of years ago some marvellous sculptor was able to fix in stone a single remembrance of her. But this doing became for many the cause of sorrow supreme ; and the Gods decreed, out of compas sion, that to no other mortal should ever be given power to work the like wonder. In these years we can worship only ; we cannot portray. But who is she? what is she? ... Ah! that is what I wanted you to ask. Well, she has never had a name; but I shall call her a tree- spirit. The Japanese say that you can exorcise a tree- spirit, if you are cruel enough to do it, simply by cutting down her tree. But you cannot exorcise the Spirit of whom I speak, nor ever cut down her tree. For her tree is the measureless, timeless, billion- branching Tree of Life, even the World -Tree, Yggdrasil, whose roots are in Night and Death, whose head is above the Gods. Seek to woo her she is Echo. Seek to clasp her she is Shadow. But her smile will haunt you into the hour of dissolution and beyond, through numberless lives to come. And never will you return her smile, never, The Eternal Haunter 299 because of that which it awakens within you, the pain that you cannot understand. And never, never shall you win to her, be cause she is the phantom light of long-expired suns, because she was shaped by the beating of infinite millions of hearts that are dust, be cause her witchery was made in the endless ebb and flow of the visions and hopes of youth, through countless forgotten cycles of your own incalculable past. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES TTJTJ ATJV Jill AUB2 University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. Library Book Slip- College UCLA-College Library PS 1917 E96 L 005 702 106 5 'S 917 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 001 313027 3