Soseki Natsume

“ However, the world happens to have its poet and artist, who feed on the essence of this world of relativity, and knows the absolute principle of purity. They dine on heaven’s haze and quench their thirst with dew. They talk of purple and discuss crimson, and no regret detains them when death comes for them. Their pleasures are not to become attached to things, but to become themselves part of things. When they have become things themselves, they find no room for their ego though they may explore the remotest confines of the earth. ”

“ Since poetry and a picture, no thought occurs to you of getting possession of this home of nature, nor a desire to make a scoup of money by making it accessible by building a railway. Nothing darkens this scenery, to rob it of its charms, which help neither to fill your belly, nor add something to your salary, as long as it gladdens your heart merely as scenery, so long shall you feel no pain, no weight on you. So great is the power of nature that it intoxicates you, transports you, in an instant, to the world of poetry. ”

“ Picture your hard-to-live-in-world, turned into one of bliss and thankfulness, with all its disagreeableness taken away, and you have poetry, a painting, or music, or sculpture. Nor need you produce it actually; when you fancy you see it before your eyes, poetry springs into life and songs arise. You hear the ringing of a silver bell within you, even though you have not written a line of your verse on paper, and your mind’s eye drinks of the beauties of the rainbow without paint on the canvas. ”

“ Ordinary mortals laugh at them as idiotic, as lunatic; but they are no more unbalanced, from the point of view of having their own artistic ground to stand on, than those who go into the ecstacy of living in a world of their own by creating scenery that nowhere exists.
Looked at in this light, artists as such are, compared with common people, idiots, lunatics—whatever be their qualification in their daily life. When by themselves they never cease complaining, from morn till night, of the hardships of their pedestrian journeys in search of fit subjects for their canvas or for their pen. ”

“ The figure gradually rose out of the water, and I feared that a step more would make it a thing of this fallen world. But just in the nick of time, the black hair shook like a magician’s wand calling for wind, and the snowy vision swept through the whirling cloud of steam and flew up the steps to the door-way. A moment later a woman’s ringing chuckle sounded on the other side of the door, leaving dying echoes behind in the still quiet of the bath room. The agitated water of the tank washing over my face, I stood on my feet, and its waves beat me about my chest. ”

“ I may look to have brought with me my colour-box, merely to satisfy a whim, and people may laugh at me as an imitation. Let them laugh; I am none the less a real artist, a sterling artist. It is not that one on this psychological height necessarily produces great works; but I hold that an artist who can turn out a worthy painting must have passed through that stage.
Thus I thought as I drew at a cigarette after breakfast. The sun had mounted high above the haze, and I saw the green of the trees standing out in relief with uncommon clearness in the back mountain when I opened the shoji. ”

“ 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 [12] 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. ”

“ The drenching figure of myself, running through a grey expanse of space, with innumerable [18] silver shafts beating at it slantingly will make poetry, an ode, when I look at it as not my own. I make a beautiful harmony with a natural scenery, as a figure in a picture, when I forget my material self completely and take a purely objective view of myself. Only, I cease to be a figure in poetry, or in a picture, the moment I feel vexed with the falling rain and take to heart the tiredness of the stamp, stamp of my feet. ”

“ I never look at camellia flowers in a deep forest or mountain without wishing that I had not seen them; their red is not a common red, but a red with something weird in it like a she-demon in a fair woman’s mask, who fascinates you with her black eyes and beauty and breathes poison into your pores before you know it. The pear blossoms in rain never fail to arouse a sentiment of pity; the aronia in pale moon light awakens love ”

“ Climbing the mountain, I was caught up into a train of thought.
Work with your brains, and you are liable to be harsh. Punt in the stream of sentiment, and you may be carried away. Pride stiffens you to discomfort. Heigh-ho, this is a disagreeable world to live in. When the disagreeableness deepens, you wish to move to a world where life is less uneasy. It is precisely when you awake to the truth, that move where you will, it will be hard to live, that poetry is born and art creates.
This human world of ours is the making neither of God nor of the Devil ”

“ I am an artist given over wholly to tastes and sentiments, and mingling with others in this mundane world as I may, I am loftier than my vulgar and prosaic neighbours. As a member of society I hold a position from which I may well teach others. I can act more beautifully than those who have no poetry, no painting, no artistic culture. In this man’s world a beautiful act is right, just and upright, and he who translates justice, righteousness and uprightness into his doings is a model citizen. ”

“ You attain your end as soon as you soar to the height of taking this view of the human life you live in and see the soiled and turbid latter-day world purified and beautified in your soul’s camera obscura. Thus a poet may not have a single uttered verse and a painter not a solitary sweep of the brush; but they are happier than a social lion ”

“ He may be called an artist, then, who lives in a triangle, built by knocking off a corner called common-sense of the four-angled world.
Be it in nature or in the world of man, artists thus discover countless gems and stones of inestimable value, in places which the multitude dare not approach. The secret of such a discovery is commonly called beautifying. But in reality there is no beautification about it at all, light and colour having in their brilliancy always existed in this mundane world; but because flowers fall from the sky in vain for common eyes ”

“ A form, a figure, a look, floating in sweet painlessness, as it were, whether on the surface, or under water or floating and sinking, is indisputably æsthetic. With wild flowers judiciously sprinkled on the banks and the water, the floating one, and the floating one’s dress, making a harmonious and well arranged ensemble of colours, it will without fail make a picture. But if the floating one’s expression were nothing but peace itself, the picture would almost make only a mythology or an allegory, while convulsive pain will, on the other hand, destroy the whole effect. ”

“ Twenty years of life taught me that this is a world worth living in; at twenty-five I saw that light and darkness are but the face and back of a thing, there being a shadow where the sun shines. My thoughts, today, at thirty, are these: When full of joys sorrows are as deep, and the more pain the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make an end of the world. Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up, even in sleep, when it accumulates. Love is sweet ”

“ Resting my head, with face upward, on the back of my hands which held on to the slightly raised side of the tank, I let my body rise up to the point of least resistance and I felt my soul float buoyantly like the jelly-fish. Life is easy in this state of existence. You unlock the door of prudence and cast all desires to the Four Winds, and become part of the hot water, leaving it completely to the hot water to make what it likes of you. The more floating, the less is the pain to live for that which floats. ”

“ My imagination took another turn, bringing before me a vision of a beautiful person, beautifully sleeping. Sleeping, alive she breathes herself away into death, without ever awakening. This must break the heart of those watching anxiously around the bed. If struggling in pain and agony, the dear ones attending might think it merciful that death came at once, to say nothing of the wish of the patient to whom life had become not worth living. ”

“ As for myself, I shall never be a true artist as long as I cannot get over my annoyance with being sniffed at by detectives. I may sit before my easel and take up my palette, but that will [165] not make me an artist. I can assume myself to be a real artist only when I come to a mountainous country-side like Nakoi and drink full of the joys of Spring. Once in this state of emancipation, all the beauties of nature become mine and I have made myself a first-class artist, even though I may not paint the smallest picture. ”

“ I do not know much about Christ; but I shall not hesitate to pronounce that the priest, Daitetsu of Kaikanji, is full well-qualified for an appreciation of this kind. Not that he takes much interest in art, nor that he is well versed in such things. He is enviably content with a production which can hardly be called a picture, and is innocent enough to think that there should be the Doctor of Painting! Nevertheless, he is well-qualified to be an artist. He is like a bag without a bottom: everything passes through him freely. ”

“ Many people came out and many went in, Kyuichi being one of the latter. The old gentleman, Nami-san’s brother, Nami-san, and I, all stood near the edge of the platform.
Once the wheels turned, Kyuichi-san would no more be one of “our” world, but would be going to far, far away country, where men are struggling among the fumes of smoke and powder, and slipping and rolling unreasonly in something red and the sky is screeching with detonations. Kyuichi-san, who was going to a world of that weird sort, stood motionless in his car, gazing at us in silence. ”

“ A few scales in a spread of inky cloud, make one see in fancy the horned monster of a dragon behind the canvas; such is the power of art and spirit behind it. The vision before me, was perfect, as art would have it in its atmosphere, geniality and phantasmality. If it be true that painting carefully [120] six times six, thirty-six scales of a dragon can only end in a ludicrousness, there is a psychic charm in gazing not too clearly at the stark nakedness of a body. ”

“ I was traversing this borderland of dreamy consciousness when the “karakami” (16) of my room opened, as if of its own accord, and in the opening appeared the figure of a woman, like a phantom. The apparition did not cause me surprise, nor did it frighten me: I simply looked at it with easy pleasant sensation. Perhaps I put it too strongly to say I “looked at”; for the truth was, the shadowy thing slid with no permission of mine behind the lids of my eyes, which were closed. The phantom slowly came into my room, with the smoothness of a fairy queen walking across a placid surface of water. ”

“ I want poetry that [10] 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. ”

“ I could not cast aside humanity altogether. To be poetical at the bottom of my whole venture, I should like to let unhumanity carry me into a “Noh” atmosphere, by doing away with humanity as much as possible. Different in nature from the “Southern hill” or the “bamboo grove,” nor identifiable with the lark or blossoming rapes, I still would see people from a point of view as near those objects as possible. The man Basho (2) saw something poetical and made a “hokku” (3) even of a horse stalling near his head! ”

“ I wondered next, how it would work to make a picture of my fancy. I doubted not for a moment that it would not make an ordinary picture. An every-day painting is a mere reproduction, on a piece of silk or canvas of what one sees around, as it is, or else after filtering it [99] through an æsthetic eye. A picture has done its part, when a flower looks the flower it is, the water as it reflects in the eye, and human characters animate as in life. ”

“ Besides, it is no ordinary thread, but is like the rainbow spanning the sky; like the haze screening horizon; and like the spider-web sparkling with dew. It may break at any moment if wanted to be broken; but it is exquisitely beautiful while it remains and is seen. But what if the thread should, all of a sudden, grow thick and stout as a halyard? No fear: I am an artist and she is not of a common kind. ”

“ The vision stopped before a cupboard in the rear of the room. A karakami screening the cupboard was pushed open and a slim arm visible in the dark came out of a sleeve. The screen closed then and the phantom sailed noiselessly back to the opening, which, in the next moment, closed of itself. Sleep now gathered faster and faster on me. The dead must feel as I did then, I obscurely imagined, before being reborn into a horse or an ox. ”