The great beauty of Japan is in the spots that you and I, if we be mere passersby, never really glimpse.
It is the beauty which moves the veriest coolie, after a day of crushing labor, to throw aside his carrying pole, and after a bit of fish and rice, to dig and plant in his garden the size of a pocket handkerchief. There he works, absorbed, delighted; his whole being resting in the joy of creating beauty for himself and his family, who cluster about him to admire. No one is without a garden. If fate has denied a poor man a foot of ground, he buys a big plot for a penny and slowly, after hours of labor pleasant and painstaking, he constructs a miniature park, with a rockery, a tiny summerhouse, a pool, with bits of moss for lawns and grass heads for trees and toy ferns tucked into crevices for shrubbery.
It is the quality of beauty, too, which moves a Japanese host to place in his guestroom each day for the delight of his guest one single exquisite note. From his precious store he selects today a watercolor, in black and white, of a bird clinging to a reed, painted with charming reserve. Tomorrow it will be a dull blue vase with one spray of snowy pear bloom arranged in such a way as to be a living invitation to meditation. Sometimes it is a piece of old tapestry, with a quaint procession of lantern bearers marching across its faded length.
I hear a deal of talk about Japan these days. There are those who begrudge them the possession of even quite ordinary human qualities. As for me, after hearing such tales, I reserve judgment until someone can reconcile these two qualities for me: utter depravity and the gentle love of all beauty which is to be found almost universally in rich and poor alike in Japan. Where there is such a willingness to spend oneself for beauty, often without any thought of money value, must not a little truth be hid? If it be true at all that beauty is truth?
Now the dainty loveliness which is so apparent in Japan is certainly not to be seen spread about in China. I really cannot blame those friends of mine who at first glance proclaim her ugliness. Doubtless it has been the economic urge which has driven the poor to think first and last and always of their stomachs and the wherewithal to fill them completely. Certainly there is an appalling lack of beauty in the lives of the ordinary folk.
Said I to my coolie gardener one day as he was digging and delving upon my perennial flower border: “Now, wouldn’t you like some of these flower seeds to plant in the plot in front of your house?”
He eyed me distrustfully and hoed vigorously. “Poor people have no use for flowers,” he answered briefly. “These things are for the rich to play with.”
“Yes, but it won’t cost you anything,” I persisted. “See, I will give you several kinds, and if the land is poor, you may take fertilizer from the compost heap, and I will give you the time to take care of them for the good of your soul.”
He shook his head. He is a conservative creature. None of his ancestors had planted flowers for pleasure and he couldn’t imagine himself at it. Besides, what would he do with the flowers when he had them?
He stooped to throw out a stone. “I’ll plant cabbage,” he said briefly.
The poorer Chinese does without doubt place a financial value on all his possessions. In one interior spot where I had lived for a time, I asked a farmer’s wife how they spent or saved the money surplus of a good year’s crops.
She smiled at the recollection. “We eat more!” she exclaimed, ecstatically.
In lieu of a trustworthy savings bank, they deposited their bits of reserve fund in the safest place possible in a land of banditry and transformed it into extra flesh. At least no one could rob them of that! And heaven knows their bones were the better for it.
In wandering through Chinese cities one is struck with their ugliness — the lack of sanitation, the congestion, the foul streets, the filthy and diseased beggars showing their vile stock-in-trade and whining parasitically, the mangy dogs skulking about. A glance into the small shops and homes depresses one with the strictly utilitarian aspect of life. Bare tables, stools apparently designed for discomfort, boxes, beds, and rubbish, the primitive cooking apparatus — all are crowded into an unbelievably small space, and the result is one of utter lack of repose or of any attempt after spiritual values to be expressed in beauty.
The other day I stood on a mountain top in Kiangsi. I looked over a hundred miles of lovely Chinese country. Streams glittered in the sunshine; the Yangtse wound its leisurely way along, a huge yellow roadway to the sea; clusters of trees cuddled cosily about little thatched villages; the rice fields were clear jade green and laid as neatly as patterns in a puzzle. It seemed a scene of peace and beauty.
Yet I knew my country well enough to know that if I could have dropped into the midst of that fair land I should have found the streams polluted, the river’s edge crowded with little wretched, mat-covered boats, the only homes of millions of miserable, underfed waterfolk. The villages under the trees would be crowded and filthy with flies and garbage rotting in the sun, and the ubiquitous yellow curs would have snarled at my coming. There, with all that sweet air free for all, the homes would be small and windowless and as dark within as caverns. The children would be dirty and unkempt, and their noses would be unspeakable, for they always are! Not a flower anywhere, not a single spot of beauty made by man to relieve the dreariness of life. Even the bits of ground in front of the cottages would be beaten into threshing floors, hard and glaring in the sunlight. Poverty? Partly, of course, but often laziness and ignorance, too.
Where then, is the beauty of China? Not on the surface of things, anyway. But I bide my time. For it is here.
Some of the rarest bits of beauty in the world I have found in this old country, so reserved, so indolent for centuries, so careless of what the world thinks of her.
For China does not express herself in show places. Even in Peking, that bourne of all tourists to the Far East, the things that one sees are not show places. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple — these and a host of the others were built up slowly out of the life of the people, for the people themselves, with no thought originally of tourist eyes and dollars. Indeed, for decades, no amount of money could purchase a glimpse of them.
The Chinese have naturally little idea of exhibition and advertising. Go into any one of the great silk shops in Hangchow and you will find a decorous, dark, quiet interior, with shelves and shelves of neat packages folded away, each with its price tag symmetrically arranged. There are no pedestals with gorgeous satins folded cunningly to catch the light and entice the buyer. But a clerk comes forward, and when you have made known your wishes, he selects carelessly half a dozen packages from the shelves and tears off the paper wrappers. Suddenly before your eyes bursts the splendor of stuffs whereof kings’ robes are made. Brocaded satins and velvets, silk of marvellous brilliance and delicacy of shades are massed before you in a bewildering confusion. It is like a crowd of magnificently hued butterflies released from dull cocoons. You make your choice and the glory is all shut away again into the dark.
That is China.
Her beauties are those of old things, old places carefully fashioned with the loftiest thought and artistic endeavor of generations of aristocrats, and now like their owners, falling gently into decay.
Behind this high wall, which looms so grey and foreboding upon the streets, one may step, if one has the proper key, into a gracious courtyard, paved with great square old tiles, worn away by the feet of a hundred centuries. There is a gnarled pine tree, a pool of goldfish, a carven stone seat whereon is seated a white-haired grandfather, dignified and calm as an old Buddha in his gown of cream-colored silk. In his pale, withered hand he holds a long pipe of polished black wood, tipped with silver. If you are his friend, he will rise with deep bows and escort you with a most perfect courtesy into the guest hall. There in a high chair of a carved teak you may sip his famous tea and marvel at the old paintings hung in silken scrolls upon the walls, and meditate upon the handwrought beams of the ceiling, thirty feet above. Beauty, beauty everywhere, stately and reserved with age.