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MORNING-GLORY
CERTAINLY it was Korin's adventurous turn of artistic mind
to strikingly introduce the morning-glory, the blushing
flower lasses by the bamboo fences of the countryside almost
too shy to call attention, into the six-folded screen of
gold (what an aristocratic world) in pigments of red, white,
purple and green; while, far from deeming Korin a true
artist of flowers, I always agree with him in the point of
his emphasising, let me say, the greatness of little thin-s.
Through the virtue of such an Oriental attitude of
philosophy which serves as moral geometry, defining our
sense of proportion to the universe, we have made the
morning-glory gain its floral distinction of to-day from the
state of nameless weed of long ages ago which a certain
Obaku temple priest of Uji brought from China. What a change
in the public estimate!
I love the months of summer, because I can commune more intimately then
with the nature from whose heart of imagination and peace,
unlike that of spring too fanciful and defiant, again unlike
that of autumn too philosophical [<78] and real, I will
build a little dream and slowly wear away my soul as if a
cicada fired after a heartful song; I love them as I find in
them quite a celtic infinitude which is commingled twilight
and weariness. Hear the nocturnal song of the summer nights
in the flashes of fireflies and lanterns swinging as ff the
spirits from another world, which shall be, long before
reaching the climax, interrupted by the early dawn (how
short are the summer nights!). when my heart at once opens
wide as the morning-glory; I am an early riser then, in
spite of my being a late riser in other seasons, with that
morning-glory whose floral beauty or flame is born out of
dews and sunlight, the colour of transparency itself out of
whose heart, as it seems to me, whether it be blue or
purple, red or white, all the colour has been taken. How the
flower stands in relation to the breath or odour of the
summer dawn would be exactly the same problem as how I stand
towards it; I am glad to read myself through their presence,
my own strength of impulse towards nature and song. What a
stretch of vines of the morning-glory, what force of theirs
[<79] hardly conceivable as belonging to the vegetable
kind, what a sensitiveness more than human; there's no
wonder when one can read every change of the hour and even
minute of the day in their look and attitude. I often ask
myself why they do not speak a word of grief or joy, when
they fade away with their spirits of flight across the seas
of the unknowable ; perhaps they do speak it, although my
ears seem not to hear it at all.
When Kaga no Chiyo, the lady hokkushi or seventeen-syllable
poetess of some two hundred years ago, wrote—
Asagawo ni
Tsurube torarete
Morai mizu."
I see at once, not the moral teaching, although the
commentator wishes to bring it out first, but one beautiful
emotion of accident realised by the morning-glory and her
heart with the summer dawn as a background. But where Sir
Edwin Arnold translated Chiyo's poem into the following
English:
"The morning-glory
Her leaves and bells has bound [<80]
My bucket-handle round.
I could not break the bands
Of those soft hands.
The bucket and the well to her left,
'Let me some water, for I come bereft."'
I see that the lyrical gleam of the original has turned,
alas! to prosaic formality : I almost cry that it is
hopeless if the poet has to put in two lines (the fourth and
fifth) which the original has not (in fact, the translation
has ten times more than the original, and spiritually ten
times less), and wonder at the poetical possibility of the
English mind. And how those rhymes bother my Japanese mind
in love with irregularity !
It might be proper to thank, if thank one must, our Japanese moralists
for their tireless propagation in popularising the
morning-glory, as they find them to be the things fittest
for encouraging the habit of early-rising; it seems they do
not quite understand how the word simplicity sounds to our
modern minds, whose passion, is more Psychical, when those
good old moralists wish to solve all the questions of the
morning-glory with the power of that one [<81] word. I agree
with them in calling them plebeian or democratic on account
of the little cost of raising them ; I see frequently they
are blooming as beautifully as in any millionaire's garden
upon the dangerous roof of tile or badly kept bamboo porch
for people who cannot well afford to have even a few yards
of ground in crowded cities. It is surprising to find out
that the flowers which were raised under such conditions of
privation always get the distinguished medals at the general
exhibition. I am told that the chrysanthemums are often the
true cause of a man's poverty; but the morning-glories will
never invite such a reproach when they only entreat you to
rise early (but, remember, with plenty of love), and, when
you have company, suggest you to offer a cup of tea.
Putting aside all sentimentality, the whole credit, I think, should go
to our horticulturists, who, as with the chrysanthemum, have
raised the morning-glory from a weed into a floral wonder as
we see it to-day, of such a variety of shapes, from a
dragon's moustache to the hanging bell ; of such a variety
of colour, from [<82] the foam of the sea or frozen
moonlight to the purple sky or striped shade of a cascade ;
of such a variety of size, from half a foot in ,diameter to
star-like smallness. There is no other flower like the
morning-glory, so sensitive to our human love, and, let me
say, horticultural art. I have only to wonder whether the
human beings and the morning-glory are not born from the
same old heart of mystery in Japan.
Next: JAPANESE PLUM-BLOSSOM
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