Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life — Inside the Classic

Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than intellectual beauty. And, by way of conclusion, I may venture to quote from an article on education by Ferdinand Brunetiere:--

"All our educational measures will prove vain, if there be no effort to force into the mind, and to deeply impress upon it, the sense of those fine words of Lamennais: '_Human society is based upon mutual giving, or upon the sacrifice of man for man, or of each man for all other men; and sacrifice is the very essence of all true society._' It is this that we have been unlearning for nearly a century; and if we have to put ourselves to school afresh, it will be in order that we may learn it again. Without such knowledge there can be no society and no education,--not, at least, if the object of education be to form man for society. Individualism is to-day the enemy of education, as it is also the enemy of social order. It has not been so always; but it has so become. It will not be so forever; but it is so now. And without striving to destroy it-which would mean to fall from one extreme into another--we must recognize that, no matter what we wish to do for the family, for society, for education, and for the country, it is against individualism that the work will have to be done."

A woman carrying a samisen, and accompanied by a little boy seven or eight years old, came to my house to sing. She wore the dress of a peasant, and a blue towel tied round her head. She was ugly; and her natural ugliness had been increased by a cruel attack of smallpox. The child carried a bundle of printed ballads.

Neighbors then began to crowd into my front yard,--mostly young mothers and nurse girls with babies on their backs, but old women and men likewise--the inkyo of the vicinity. Also the jinrikisha-men came from their stand at the next street-corner; and presently there was no more room within the gate.

The woman sat down on my doorstep, tuned her samisen, played a bar of accompaniment,--and a spell descended upon the people; and they stared at each other in smiling amazement.

For out of those ugly disfigured lips there gushed and rippled a miracle of a voice--young, deep, unutterably touching in its penetrating sweetness. "Woman or wood-fairy?" queried a bystander. Woman only,--but a very, very great artist. The way she handled her instrument might have astounded the most skillful geisha; but no such voice had ever been heard from any geisha, and no such song. She sang as only a peasant can sing,--with vocal rhythms learned, perhaps, from the cicada and the wild nightingales,--and with fractions and semi-fractions and demi-semi-fractions of tones never written down in the musical language of the West.

And as she sang, those who listened began to weep silently. I did not distinguish the words; but I felt the sorrow and the sweetness and the patience of the life of Japan pass with her voice into my heart,--plaintively seeking for something never there. A tenderness invisible seemed to gather and quiver about us; and sensations of places and of times forgotten came softly back, mingled with feelings ghostlier,--feelings not of any place or time in living memory.

Then I saw that the singer was blind.

When the song was finished, we coaxed the woman into the house, and questioned her. Once she had been fairly well to do, and had learned the samisen when a girl. The little boy was her son. Her husband was paralyzed. Her eyes had been destroyed by smallpox. But she was strong, and able to walk great distances. When the child became tired, she would carry him on her back. She could support the little one, as well as the bed-ridden husband, because whenever she sang the people cried, and gave her coppers and food.... Such was her story. We gave her some money and a meal; and she went away, guided by her boy.