Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/19

 tween clumps of bamboo, began to torment him by impressing on his mind that hitherto in his effort to see too much he had not seen enough. He wished his brush to picture the hidden soul of things, their mysterious life, their longings and dreams, and as the months went by, he understood ever more clearly that one human life was insufficient for the mastery of so much as he had attempted in the beginning, and he blessed the day that had brought him disfavour and expelled him into this country, where he had awoken to his former blindness. And upon his return from his ramble that day, he sat down to his work as if in a fever, without the slightest idea of what he was about to paint. Was it to be the snowdrift over which he had walked today, the snowdrift thawing under the June sun and pierced here and there by bamboo grass with leaflets of a rich blue-green hue, margined with yellow? Was it to be the great white chalices of wild magnolias, which had commanded his, admiration beneath the pass? Or those graceful red camellias on the mountain slope which every day lured him into a wood of shining leaves sprinkled as if with drops of blood? His heart bled; and his brush pictured the excruciating desire of that poor heart in one single twig with three charming blossoms that opened beneath his hand in tremulous and sweet agitation. Never before had he been so well contented with his work; he felt that he had created life, or even more, that he had. There were people who heard the rustling of the spring breeze in his plume-like bamboos; but nobody had thought of listening in his paintings for the soul of the bamboo, for the. Nevertheless these three camellias seemed to him to be the first step into regions where he had never been before, and into which nobody’s footprints could lead him.

He became a painter of camellias, partly out of gratitude, but mainly because he became aware of the strange fascination they had for him. His liking for them gradually deepened into passion. It was not long before all other things lost interest for him, and it seemed to him that before his love for camellias all had been but passing play, the whiling away of time, and impatient waiting for the Great Moment which had come upon the day when in his first painting of their flowers he had regained his lost contentment and self-confidence. He painted camellias as some paint again and again the portrait of a beloved woman; he painted them in the way some dedicate their brush to the gods, and in painting camellias he expressed not only their souls but also his own, he betrayed the most secret depths of his inner self. His camellia-blossoms played a wonderful and unending scale of shades of red, and gradually