I thought I saw the bronze god Asamra (he who may speak but once in a thousand years, and whose friendship I keep by making time stand still for him in the stopping of the clock and its turning back) shake his head in doubt as I put the manuscript into its wrappings and addressed it to the publisher.
"Well?" I inquired, testily.
"Suppose They do not like it?" sighed the god.
"Why should They not?" demanded I, loftily.
"It has, among other unusualities, (I hope you like the gentleness of the word!) those dashes which—You ought to have learned by this time that They don't like to read over dashes."
"Why not?" asked I, again. "I like them. And, they are my own!"
"Well, you know a dash necessitates lucubration. It stands for something which you trust your reader to supply. That is unfair. If you are writing a book and receiving an honorarium for it, do not expect him to do it. It is a bit like eating. One does not go to a restaurant, and pay for his food, then cook it himself."
"I have seen it done," cried I, "by particular people!"
"Ahem!" murmured the polite god: more polite on this day than I had recently observed him—which meant some sort of propaganda.
"It is not an ahem!" I went on in the unregenerate heat which the friction of the god often engendered in me. "Have you never seen it done?"
"I have," admitted the effigy, "seen a waiter sorely vexed to bring the materials for a salad—"
"Aha!" cried I, triumphantly.
"Gomen nasai," begged the deity, "I had not finished. I have seen a waiter, I say, sorely vexed to bring the materials for a salad which the maker has—spoiled!"
"Then," demanded I, with icy coldness, "you think that if I permit Them to supply a few thoughts to carry Them over the dashes They will—"
"Think something you did not think; perhaps something worse," the effigy finished, calamitously.
"Or better?" I suggested, bitterly.
"Or better," agreed the god. "There is a small number of people (but, extremely small) who like to supply in full what you suggest in dashes. It tickles Them tremendously to think that you couldn't have done it so well; that you trust Them to do it better. Often They are certain that They have helped you over a place you could not help yourself over—hence the dash."
"Sometimes," I mused, diffidently, "that is true."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the image, and our mood became more human.
"But, do you mean to say," I asked, "that if I leave John and Jane in the upper hall, and take them up again in the lower hall, I must acquaint Them with the fact that John and Jane have been obliged to traverse the stairway to get away from the one and to reach the other? Am I permitted no ellipsis in so patent a matter as that?"
"They will expect the stairway," sighed the god.
"And a page for each step, I suppose! How can They differ from me? What other thought can They have than that John and Jane descended the stairway to reach the lower hall?"
"There may be a back stairway, or a fire escape," chuckled the deity.
"Then, I suppose, I must spend some pages in telling Them not only that John and Jane descended the stair, but that they did not descend by the back stair or the fire escape!"
"It would be better," said the idol. "They can skip it. But They cannot deny that it is there, as They can if it is not. They would rather skip what you supply than supply what you skip. One is Their judgment of your mental caliber—usually too small—the other is your judgment of Theirs—usually too generous. Ahem! There is a golden mean."
"Besides, however bad for literature it may be," laughed I, "at so much a word, it is good for me!"
"Well," ventured god, in doubt, "are novels literature?"
"I am not the one to say," I retorted, with some asperity. "I manufacture them. But I can swear that they are better literature—if literature at all—than some of the criticisms of them—if literature at all."
"Have I touched a broken, perhaps often mended, place in your armor?" laughed the god.
"Well," I admitted, crustily, "I have read criticisms of English—no matter whose—the English of which was eminently criticisable. Here is one. The gentleman makes no distinction in the uses of 'which' and 'that,' and he has not a 'who' in his vocabulary."
"I have my eye on it," laughed the image, "and I admit that a few whiches and whos for thats, and—even—er—pardon!—a few of your dashes, would make its teaching more grateful."
"God," adjured I, happily, "thank you! Now do please stop and think! No speech, no thought, goes on without dashes. When we write the speech which flows mellifluous, we do violence to nature. And in all art the tendency is toward nature."
"Recently," began the deity, in that high tone which always meant checkmate to me, "I have seen the statue of an alleged athlete, in which his bunions were reproduced!"
"I saw it, too," I laughed. Indeed, the god and I had stared at it together.
"Well," the effigy went on, "that was certainly nature!"
"There is a golden mean," I re-quoted. "An artistic attitude toward all manifestations of art. If one has this one will appreciate—er—whether to reproduce the bunions. They may, of course, be picturesque bunions. Why, god, if one should reproduce human speech, as it is spoken, there would be a dash after every third word! Mine are quite within bounds."
"It would look queer," said the god, "and you would be called eccentric instead of original. Please don't do it! In fact stop it! Placate both your readers and your critics."
"Oh, as to that," said I, airily, "the labor would all be lost. Anything which is unusual to the superficial experience of the average person is glibly dubbed eccentric. You know how it is. A reader likes to find the dear old situations in advance of him so that he knows what he is approaching. There is the same fear of the terra incognita in literature that there is in nature. A book or a play which is too novel a tax upon the faculties of a client is not to his liking."
"Who, pray, do you write books for?" asked the effigy, with the suspicion of a yawn.
"The people who read them," said I, cockily.
"Do They include the critics?"
"Oh, no," said I, hastily.
"Aren't they 'people who read them'?"
"Why, they are critics," cried I. "How can they?"
"That is hard doctrine," said the god, dully. "If you write for the people who read, you must submit to their verdict. And the critics are a part of them."
"A small part. But they pretend to speak for the whole. Permit me to explain—"
The god politely waited.
"Your critic approaches a book as a lawyer does his case—temperamentally—not judicially—with an opinion of it in advance or upon the first pages, which the book must either justify or fail to justify. The result appears in his published estimate. He states his view as if it were the only one. And, being delivered ex cathedra, the multitude take it as they do their preaching—for the gospel of Literature! But how would you like that in your judge? Who is sworn to decide upon the evidence adduced alone?
"So it happens that every book is well cursed and well blessed, according to the humor of the dissector. And the cursing and blessing are usually about equal."
"There does seem to be something wrong about criticism which can be unanimous both ways," laughed the god.
"There ought to be some tribunal to which criticism could be referred upon appeal as lawsuits are," said I. "But," I went on, hastening a bit to my climax as the god seemed to doze, "the most terrible of all criticism is the modern humorous kind—"
"I have heard an odious term used to characterize those who make it," whispered the deity.
"The man who can do nothing else—and usually he can do nothing else—can poke fun. It is a peculiarly tasteful form of iconoclasm."
Said the god:—
"If I should sleep, do not forget to stop the clock."
He pretended to do so.
That is his way when I have tired him.
J. L. L.
Four times on earth and once elsewhere Shijiro Arisuga thought the happiest moment of his life had come.
But you are to be warned, in two proverbs, concerning the peril of the thing called happiness, in Japan. One has it that happiness is like the tai, the other that it has in it the note of the uguisu. Now, the tai is a very common fish, and the uguisu is a rare bird of one sad note, reputed to be sung only to O-Emma, god of death, in the night, most often when there is a solemn moon. Which, again, is much the same as saying that, in Japan, at least, happiness is the common lot, and easy to get as to catch the lazy perch; but that it has its sad note, which may have to be sung in the darkness, alone, to death.
For in the East one is taught to be no more prodigal with one's joy than with one's sorrow. The sum of both joy and sorrow, it is said, are immutably the same in the world from eternity. And of these each soul born is allotted its reasonable share as the gods adjudge it. So that if one takes too much joy out of the common lot, some one, perhaps many ones, must receive less than they ought.
Thus, one not only limits the rights of his fellow-men, who has no warrant to do so, but impiously exercises the prerogatives of the gods, than which nothing can be more heinous.
For this larceny of joy, therefore, the culprit must suffer more than his share of woe, until the heavenly balance is once more restored. And that may be in this life or another, in this world or another.
So you observe that in Japan, among those who yet believe in the old ways of the gods (and they are many!), it is perilous to be over-happy. For one is almost certain to pay for it with over-woe. And this is the happy catching of the tai and the melancholy note of the uguisu which wind through the carols of one's joy in the East.
Yet, when one is always happy, as Shijiro Arisuga was before we knew him, it seems difficult to say that here or there was a happier moment.
Therefore, you are to learn of each of these five occasions in their order, according to your patience, and, quite at the end, you are to be left to judge for yourself, which was, indeed, the happiest moment of Shijiro Arisuga's life. There will come a time, too,—at the end,—when you will know nothing of Shijiro Arisuga's own views upon the subject: he will not be there to tell them. I shall try to interpret for him. But you are not to be prejudiced by this judgment of mine, since you cannot know Shijiro Arisuga as well as I do until the end is reached—quite the end.
And it is nothing—the little story—you are, further, warned, until the woman enters. Indeed; nothing is anything—no story—until woman enters. Try to fancy Eden without Eve!
Not that Star-Dream is another Eve; nor that this is like the first love story. But there is a Garden and a Serpent; an Apple and a Woman. And, from that Garden, Shijiro Arisuga is driven with a sword which flames. But here my story differs entirely from that of the first love story. For the woman is left in the garden—alone! And it is eternal night. And she can hardly stay there alone. For the uguisu sings. I wonder if Eve could have been happy in Eden alone? With the singing of the death-bird? You will remember that though they were driven forth, it was together: comrades in misfortune as in joy—yet comrades!
Now, the first of these five great occasions was that day Shijiro was accepted in the haughty Imperial Guards, most of whom had genealogies which would best impress us by the yards of illuminated mulberry paper they covered. Arisuga had many of such yards himself. That was not a question. But his inches raised many questions. The Guards were tall. Shijiro Arisuga was small. Though he was a samurai of the samurai, his ancestors kugé, it seemed impossible to admit him until Colonel Zanzi spoke.
"He is a samurai," said Zanzi, gruffly. "Of course all Japanese fight. But the rest, the commoners, are new to it. It is possible in a pinch for them to run away. It happened once to my knowledge. But a samurai goes only in the one direction when he is before an enemy. You all know what direction that is. The commoner may be as good as the samurai in a century. But the samurai is always dependable now. I wish the whole of the Guards were shizoku. His uncles, the Shijiro of Aidzu, though they were shiro men at Kyoto, and so against the emperor, in that old time, were, nevertheless, kugé by rank. I do not see how we can keep him out of the Guards. I don't want to, whether he is tall or small."
Now Zanzi was an autocrat who constantly pretended that he was not. He had an iron temper which he nearly always concealed under courteous persistence, until his men understood what must be without his ever having precisely said that it must be. So, in this matter, he pretended to have left it to them. But he had decided upon Shijiro's final admission to the regiment, even though it was a time of peace, when one's qualifications were more strictly scanned than in time of war, simply because he was of the samurai, whom he adored.
"Nevertheless," warned Nijin, the recruiting major, "he is considerably below the physical standard."
"He is not the stuff for the Guards," alleged Yasuki.
And Matsumoto said:—
"I have heard him called 'Onna-Jin.'"
"Girl-Boy!" laughed Jokichi. "So have I."
"He used to carry a samisen about with him when he was a child—he and little Yoné, Baron Mutsu's daughter."
This came from Kitsushima, who added:—
"I have seen them at Mukojima, wandering under the cherry-boughs, hand in hand, and singing childish songs!"
"I have seen him doing that later, where the lanterns shine in Geisha street, and the little girl was not Yoné."
They all laughed. This was not seriously against him.
"Having settled it that he practises the art of music, I will surprise you with the information that he also pretends to the sister art of poesy," laughed Asami. "He is the author of 'The Great Death'!"
"What!"
From half a dozen of them.
And they broke into the song: hoarse, iron, clanging, mongolian! Within the six notes of the old Japanese scale!
(Do not be surprised at this. The Japanese army is full of poets. Indeed, the Japanese land is full of them. They will spin you a complete comedy or tragedy between seventeen or thirty-seven syllables. And, to practise poetry is not there as here, heinous to one's friends. I know of a gunner who sat cross-legged under his gun behind Poutuloff and wrote a poem concerning The-Moon-in-a-Moat. It was finished as the Russians got his range and dropped a covey of shrapnel upon him. After the smoke cleared they found him dead. And he is forgotten. But his poem was also found and lived on.)
This was "The Great Death" of Shijiro Arisuga.
"Yell of metal, |
Strake of flame! |
Death-wound spurting |
In my face! |
Hail Red Death!" |
"Banzai!" cried Jokichi.
"Teikoku Banzai!" yelled Asami.
And, after the tumult, Yasuki, the reserved, himself said:—
"By Shaka, it is the very Yamato Damashii itself! The spirit of young Japan."
"Nippon Denji!" laughed jolly Kitsushima.
"Yes! The Boys in Blue—as they called them in America in 1864."
Matsumoto had been to Princeton. But the thought of war—giving his soul for his emperor—made him as mad as they who had never left their native soil.
"I take all back," cried Nijin, into the tumult.
"And I," yelled Yasuki, who had agreed with him.
"Let him in!" shrilled Matsumoto and Jokichi together. "If he can write songs—"
"And let him sing! Let him sing war-songs!" adjured Kitsushima!
Still, the happy Nijin, out of propriety of his office, as recruiting-major, pretended to wish to stem the current started by the song.
"One moment!" he cried.
But they laughed him down and again started the war-song.
"I will have a moment!"
"Take two!" shouted Jokichi.
"Singing and fighting are two very different occupations."
"No, they are precisely the same," laughed Kitsushima.
"I deny it!"
It was a fierce yell from Nijin, who was happiest, to pretend tremendous anger.
"I affirm it!" laughed Jokichi, into his face.
"Pretender!" cried Asami, shaking a happy fist at his superior.
Asami and Nijin stood with Zanzi for his admission.
Still, Nijin said in thunder:—
"Remember! poets never practise their preaching."
Nevertheless, if he had entered then, Arisuga would have been chosen, by acclaim, because of his song.
But enthusiasm cools rapidly, and these stoical orientals could be moved to enthusiasm by but this one thing—war.
So that after a month—two—it required another word from grizzled Zanzi, who had been in the war of the Restoration, to let Shijiro in.
"Jokoji!" That was the word. "His father is at Jokoji!"
And they demanded, and he told, the story of Jokoji—which, pardon me, I do not mean to tell. Save this little, so that you may understand, that it was that last terrible stand of Saigo behind the hills of Kagoshima, where the Shogunate perished and the empire was born again in 1868. And the shoguns you may care to know were that mighty line of feodal chieftains who had usurped the throne from the time of Yoritomo, to that of Keiki. For all these years the imperial power had rioted at Yedo, in the hands of two generals, while the emperor, a prisoner in his palace-hermitage in Kyoto, had been but the high priest of his people.
They are there yet, at Jokoji, to the last man, Saigo and his gallant rebels, in a great trench, without their heads, a warning to future rebels.
After that other word—Jokoji—Arisuga was chosen.
Observe that they finally took him because of his father—though he died a rebel. Indeed, those old insurgents, of 1868, are gradually being canonized with crimson death-names, because they neither knew dishonor, no, nor suffered it.
There was a time, of course, when Shijiro was too young to think of being a soldier—save of the tin-sworded and cocked-hatted kind. And it must be confessed, nay, it was confessed, by his uncles with profound sorrow, that he cared little enough for even that. It is quite true that lighted paper lanterns gleaming in the night, and morning glories with first sun on them, and his small samisen, pleased him more. All this was quite heinous to his samurai uncles and they did what they could to correct it and instil into the little mind of the boy that love for the glory of combat which they had. But, as often happens, their care and their prayers availed them nothing, while their carelessness and their repinings availed much. Of that I shall stop and tell: the picture—the flying of the carp—how all the life of the little boy was changed in one night,—so that he thought no more of Yoné, the lanterns and the flowers, but only of being a soldier.