I have come through my thirty years enough, indeed more than enough, of wallowing in the mud of troubles, of fuming in anger; of being in rows; or of sinking in sorrows; all which are indivorcible from human life. I want poetry that lifts me above the dust and noise of the world. I know, of course, there can be no drama, however great a masterpiece, that is absolutely transcendental of human sentiment, or scarcely a novel that can rise completely above all sense of right and wrong, this being especially the case with Western poetry of which the stock paraphernalia are Sympathy, Love, Justice, Freedom, and so forth, the staple goods in the bazaar of human life. It is no wonder that the lark made Shelly heave a deep sigh. To my joy, poets of the Orient can, some of them, soar above this earthly atmosphere. Let Tao Yuan-ming of ancient China recite his lines:
“Chrysanthemum I pick from the Eastern hedge,
On the Southern hill leisurely I cast my eyes.”
Not that there is a charming one on the other side of the hedge, nor a dear friend on the hill; but the two lines take you with Tao into a sphere beyond the reach of the worries and cares of the world. Or listen to Wang Wei of the same land:
“Softly I harp and sing alone,
In the quietude of wooded bamboo;
Not a soul into deep solitude, but the
Telltale moon comes, and speaks its heart.”
A world looms up from the four verses, the charm of which is not that of popular novels, but a good you feel from a sound and all-forgetting sleep you have had, after being thoroughly tired of steamers, railways, rights and duties, morals and formalities. Sleep? Yes, and if sleep be necessary even in the Twentieth century, equally indispensable to the Twentieth century is this super-earthly poetical sentiment. Unfortunately poetry makers and poetry readers are nowadays all enamoured of the Westerners, and none seem to care to take a boat and float to the land of the immortals. I am not a poet by profession, and am interested in no way whatever in spreading propaganda for the kind of life led by Wang Wei and Tao Yuan-ming, in the present world. Only to me it appears that such inspired feelings as are sung by the Chinese poets are more powerful in remedying the ills and evils of the day than theatricals and dancing parties. They are, at all events far more agreeable to me than Faust or Hamlet. I come into the mountain with a colour-box and a tripod for my sole companions, all because I yearn to drink direct from nature of the poetical wine of Tao Yuan-ming and Wang Wei; to be away from the world-smelling and world-sounding world, nay, to breathe and live in an unhuman atmosphere, even for a brief while. It is a weakness of mine if you like to call it so.
I am at any rate, a living block of humanity, and however fond I may be of unhumanity, my love of it cannot go so very far. I do not suppose that even Tao Yuan-ming had his eye on the Southern hill, year in and year out; nor is it imaginable that Wang Wei slept in his bamboo jungle without a mosquito net. In all likelihood Tao sold his chrysanthemums to a florist after keeping what he wanted, and Wang his bamboo sprouts to a greengrocer. I myself am not unhuman enough to live under the blue sky in the mountain, just because the lark and golden rape captivate my fancy. Such as the place is, human beings are not a rarity—men with their heads wrapped in a towel and their kimono tucked up at the back; country lasses in red skirts and so on, and sometimes also even long faced horses. Breathing the mountain air, hundreds of feet above the sea level, surrounded by a million cypresses, I could not still be rid of human smell. Nay, I was crossing the mountain to reach the hot spring hotel of Nakoi as my destination for the night.
However, things assume shapes or colour as you will, according to the way you look at them. In the words of Leonardo Da Vinci to a pupil of his “the bell is one; but listen, and its sound may be heard in all sorts of ways.” Opinions may differ in a man or a woman, all depending upon how you look at him or her. I had come out in my present tour to indulge in unhumanity and people would appear different from what they did when I was living round the corner in the crowded Mud-and-Dust Lane, if I looked at them now, I thought, bearing in mind my unhumanity idea. Impossible as entirely getting away from humanity may be, I should be able to bring myself up or down to suit the frame of mind, in which one finds oneself at a Noh1 play. The Noh has its humanity or sentimental side. Who can be sure not to be moved to tears by the Shichikiochi or by the Sumidagawa? But the Noh performance is seven-tenth art and three-tenth sentiment. The attractions of Noh do not come from the lifelike presentation of things human in this mundane world; because the lifelike in it appears only from under many, many layers of art, which give it an air of extreme tranquility and halcyon serenity, never to be met in the world of reality.
How would it do to interpret all the events
