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Show TI1I0.WT1IEJA1' Douglas Bladen Writes an Interesting Letter Let-ter of Sir Edwin Arnold the Author of "Light of Africa." WHEKE THE POEM WAS WRITTEN. He Had Intended Writing a Japanese Sister Poism to His Celebrated Masterpiece. r cpro AVE YOU REAL) y Sir Edwin Arnold s A IwSHff Ligutortho Wond?' 1 It r5V!ffl on every body's ; ( 1 1 tongue reminds me V, IE I of Hie day 1 spent ' l si him' last year fy!---;5H in Japan when lie LSj miis writing "ihe ).., a ui Kit. n oihl."Ho had been carry -j inglhu idea ol the poem he toid in. and hfs "Light of the World." "When it was fin'shed it occupied three folio manuscripts, manu-scripts, written in Sir Edwin's beautiful handwriting, which is as dear as print, and has tho bountiful free cunvs characteristic char-acteristic of Oxford bred uieu who have written much Greek. The headings and emphatio passages here and there wcra in Unman capitals. The room in which "The Light of the World" was written was the guest chamber cham-ber of tho Japanese house, and the lower end of it Sir lid win used literally, for ho is as hospitable as an Arab, and lie used , it as his dining room. Thy upper end he made his study, anil at an ordinary kneo hole table, sitting on an ordinary library chair, ho wrote the built of his great poem. This end of the room was very Japanese, for it had the double recess re-cess characteristic of the Japanese guest chamber ouo-half called toko-noma, from tho fiction that if ever tho mikado came to stay in tho house hid bed (toko) would bo spread there, tho other cliigai dana (uneven shelves), from ettch shelf I being half at one level, half at another, like au English Btile. In the !oko-iionta, j as will bo seen from the cut, hangs one of a kakemono the Japanese pictures I which are mounted on a roller like a i map, and on tha floor lies a Daily Tele-j Tele-j graph, to remind Sir Edwin that lie is j its editor. i This guest chamber fe most delight-i delight-i ful room albeit long and narrow as an ' English hall for tho wholo of the shutters shut-ters on the west side are glass, and through thorn the low sun of the cloudless cloud-less Japanese winter floods the room with : glory every sunset. j Push back a paper panel in nny part j of tho south side and you will bo in the j drawing room a charming room, with ! European furniture, it is true, but other-' other-' wise thoroughly Japanese, with its walls of sliding panels below and a brown plaster dado above framed in tho tin-painted tin-painted and unvarnished tirwood, over which Sir Edwin raves. Its ceiling, too, is of this same undisfigured firwood, supported sup-ported in the center by a gnarled cherry ': i A r- - v s I - i STTl KDWW ARNOLD. molding it in his mind for twelve years, longing for the moment to arrivo when ho could titrip the editorial harness off bis Peg;ums and let him soar, and at hist it came, in Japan, and in a very few months the great poem stood on paper perfected. It is not probable that he went to j Japan with any idea of writing thia , poem there. Probably he went to col- ! luct local color in tho Land of the Rising I Sun hitherto nnexploited by Anglo- j Saxon poets, expecting to give the world iv Japanese sister poem to "The Light of Asia" instead of this great "Light of j the World." But tho poetic impulse j was too strong for him, and once in i Japan, enjoying tho meditative ease of that lotus land, he could but sing his "Light of the World," What was it like, this Japanese home in which the great poem was born? The ideal of a Japanese home adapted to the Bine qua nous of English life what I have called elsewhere "a sort of modus vivendi between Europe and Asia." It was a veritable Japanese house a frame with sliding ah utters instead of walls. But these shutters (shoji) wertf made of wood and glass, instead of paper, outside, though inside all the rooms were divided from etich other Eimply by sliding slid-ing paper panels, . The house is tenanted usually by Gen, Palmer, an English engineer ofii- ! SIR EDWIN AKNUI.US UKIUtOOM. : trunk left entirely in its natural state, except for having the b.irk stripped off the typical Japanese ceiling support even in the mikado's palace. That January day when we first renewed re-newed our acquaintance in Japan it had the blue and white porcelain pot, with a dwarf double blossomed plum tree flowering flow-ering in it as every Japanese house, however humble, has at New Years tide. Sir Edwin pushed aside another panel and took me into his bedroom an utterly Japanese room except for the " camp wash band stand in one corner, cor-ner, and the blazer, couriWsord and trousers hanging from a rack. It contained nothing else except two of ! ; the little Japanese chests of drawers ! made in white wood bound with black j iron work, and a futon bed ono quilt, or futon, for him to lie on, one to go ' over him, and one of the little boot I scraper Japanese pillows for the bead to rest on which had emanated a "Light of the World" and a "Light of Asia." This was the only room of the four which had the inch thick straw mat, six feet by three, with which tho Japaneso not only carpet their rooms keeping them as clean as newly fallen snow but reckon their area a six mat room, an eight mat room, and so on. Miss Arnold's bedroom bed-room and bed were perfectly Philistine and comfortable on the European plan, I had almost forgotten the garden-one garden-one of the so called Japaneso gardens (imitated from China) with its flowering flower-ing plums, cherries, irises and azaleas, its fantastic rock work, for which the Japanese pay such extravagant prices, its artificial Fujiyama commanding a view of the real Fuji lifting a peerless, saow cloaked cone 13,000 feet up into the clouds more tlwin fifty miles away, its trained or tortured fir trees and its Btone votive lanterns Ishidoro. Here, except wheu ho was writing the magnificent mag-nificent passage in which lie compares Mary Magdalene with the sleeping, suow crowned volcano a passage written actually at the foot of Fujiyama Sir Edwin walked when he was thinking cut "The Light of the World;" here ho received tiie "test intellects" in Tokio, Japanese or western, and here he used WI1HRH THE POEM WAS WRITTEN. cer, who occupies the illogical position of being the correspondent of The London Times (supposed to send home impartial accounts of Japanese affairs), and making the bulk of his livelihood as a paid servant of the Japanese government. govern-ment. Sir Edwin rented the house while (Jen. Palmer was away on a holiday in England. It belongs to Inspector Asso, a Japanese, who luus a European house standing in the same grounds, which he occupies himself. The house is situated in Azabn, a suburb of Tokio, the Japanese capital, famous for its floweriness and waving groves of bamboo and its assassinations from the time when the English and American legations, then situated in to organize delightful kite flying parties. It is a pleasant idyll in my life to have seen one of the great poets of this century cent-ury in the picturesque oriental home in which he luxuriated through tho one lotus year of a laborious life, and was delivered of one of his greatest poems. Douglas Bladen. temples there, lost their interpreters in days before the revolution, to last Easter, when the Canadian missionary. Large, lost his life so heroically in the mission school there. As Azabu is outside tho limits allowed for tho residence of foreigners, Sir Ed-I Ed-I win was nominally English tutor to In-j In-j specter Asso's daughters at a salary of $000 a year, to take advantage of the ex- Slit EDWIN ARNOLD'S HOUSE AND GARDEN. emption accorded V Japanese employes, A good deal of the tutoring. consisted in "teaching the girls English conversation" conversa-tion" while they played the national instruments in-struments the oto, the biwa and the samisen to the great English poet, who had come so far to impressionize in Japan. Ja-pan. I knew Sir Edwin before he went to Japan. When 1 first went to call ou him in Tokio I found him not a whit altered al-tered the same iron gray man, powerful power-ful in body, to match the handsome, powerful face with its bushy hair, which would never give 'one the idea of belonging be-longing to a man 07 years old strikingly striking-ly like Charles Dickens. "Why, how do yon do, Sladen?" he said. "Who'd have thought of meeting you here. See what I've come all the way to Japan to be busying myself about." And then he led me off to his stndv and showed me e.ad me part of I |