_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

 A MODERN SYMPOSIUM. 

 THE MEANING OF GOOD. 

 JUSTICE & LIBERTY, A POLITICAL DIALOGUE. 

 _PROBLEMS OF THE DAY SERIES_

 RELIGION & IMMORTALITY. 

 LETTERS FROM JOHN CHINAMAN. 

 RELIGION: A FORECAST. 

 APPEARANCES

 APPEARANCES BEING NOTES OF TRAVEL

 BY

 G. LOWES DICKINSON AUTHOR OF "A MODERN SYMPOSIUM, " "JUSTICE AND LIBERTY, " ETC. 

 [Illustration]

 MCMXIV

 LONDON & TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 

 All rights reserved

PREFACE

The articles included in this book have already appeared, those from theEast in the _Manchester Guardian_, those from America in the _EnglishReview_. In reprinting them, I have chosen a title which may serve alsoas an apology. What I offer is not Reality; but appearances to me. Fromsuch appearances perhaps, in time, Reality may be constructed. I claimonly to make my contribution. I do so because the new contact betweenEast and West is perhaps the most important fact of our age; and theproblems of action and thought which it creates can only be solved aseach civilisation tries to understand the others, and, by so doing, better to understand itself. These articles represent at any rate a goodwill to understand; and they may, I hope, for that reason throw onegleam of light on the darkness. 

For the opportunity of travelling in the East I am indebted to themunificence of Mr. Albert Kahn of Paris, who has founded what are knownin this country as the Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowships. [1] Theexistence of this endowment is perhaps not as widely known as it shouldbe. And if this volume should be the occasion of leading others to takeadvantage of the founder's generosity it will not have been written invain. 

I have hesitated long before deciding to republish the letters onAmerica. They were written in 1909, before the election of PresidentWilson, and all that led up to and is implied in that event. It was not, however, the fact that, so far, they are out of date, that caused me tohesitate. For they deal only incidentally with current politics, andwhatever value they may have is as a commentary on phases of Americancivilisation which are of more than transitory significance. Much hashappened in the United States during the last few years which is ofgreat interest and importance. The conflict between democracy andplutocracy has become more conscious and more acute; there have beenimportant developments in the labour movement; and capital has been so"harassed" by legislation that it may, for the moment, seem odd tocapitalists to find America called "the paradise of Plutocracy. " Nodoubt the American public has awakened to its situation since 1909. Butsuch awakenings take a long time to transform the character of acivilisation and all that has occurred serves only to confirm thecontention in the text that in the new world the same situation isarising that confronts the old one. 

What made me hesitate was something more important than the date atwhich the letters were written. There is in them a note of exasperationwhich I would have wished to remove if I could. But I could not, withouta complete rewriting, by which, even if it were possible to me, morewould have been lost than gained. It is this note of exasperation whichhas induced me hitherto to keep the letters back, in spite of requeststo the contrary from American friends and publishers. But theopportunity of adding them as a pendant to letters from the East, wherethey fall naturally into their place as a complement and a contrast, hasfinally overcome my scruples; the more so, as much that is said ofAmerica is as typical of all the West, as it is foreign to all the East. That this Western civilisation, against which I have so much to say, isnevertheless the civilisation in which I would choose to live, in whichI believe, and about which all my hopes centre, I have endeavoured tomake clear in the concluding essay. And my readers, I hope, if any ofthem persevere to the end, will feel that they have been listening, after all, to the voice of a friend, even if the friend be of thatdisagreeable kind called "candid. "

 Footnotes:

 [Footnote 1: These Fellowships, each of the value of £660, were established to enable the persons appointed to them to travel round the world. The Trust is administered at the University of London, and full information regarding it can be obtained from the Principal, Sir Henry Miers, F. R. S. , who is Honorary Secretary to the Trustees. ]

 CONTENTS

 PART I

 INDIA

 PAGE

 I. IN THE RED SEA. 3

 II. AJANTA. 7

 III. ULSTER IN INDIA 12

 IV. ANGLO-INDIA. 16

 V. A MYSTERY PLAY. 20

 VI. AN INDIAN SAINT. 24

 VII. A VILLAGE IN BENGAL 28

 VIII. SRI RAMAKRISHNA. 32

 IX. THE MONSTROUS REGIMEN OF WOMEN 38

 X. THE BUDDHA AT BURUPUDUR 42

 XI. A MALAY THEATRE 47

 PART II

 CHINA

 I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA 55

 II. NANKING 60

 III. IN THE YANGTSE GORGES 65

 IV. PEKIN 72

 V. THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD 79

 VI. CHINA IN TRANSITION 87

 VII. A SACRED MOUNTAIN 95

 PART III

 JAPAN

 I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN 105

 II. A "NO" DANCE 111

 III. NIKKO 116

 IV. DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN 122

 V. FUJI 129

 VI. JAPAN AND AMERICA 136

 VII. HOME 142

 PART IV

 AMERICA

 I. THE "DIVINE AVERAGE" 149

 II. A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS 153

 III. NIAGARA 160

 IV. "THE MODERN PULPIT" 164

 V. IN THE ROCKIES 171

 VI. IN THE ADIRONDACKS 178

 VII. THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS 184

 VIII. RED-BLOODS AND "MOLLYCODDLES" 192

 IX. ADVERTISEMENT 199

 X. CULTURE 205

 XI. ANTÆUS 211

 CONCLUDING ESSAY 218

PART I

INDIA

I

IN THE RED SEA

"But why do you do it?" said the Frenchman. From the saloon above came asound of singing, and I recognised a well-known hymn. The sun wasblazing on a foam-flecked sea; a range of islands lifted red rocks intothe glare; the wind blew fresh; and, from above, "Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling. "

Male voices were singing; voices whose owners, beyond a doubt, had noidea of clinging to anything. Female voices, too, of clingers, perhaps, but hardly to a cross. "Why do you do it?"--I began to explain. "For thesame reason that we play deck-quoits and shuffle-board; for the samereason that we dress for dinner. It's the system. " "The system?" "Yes. What I call Anglicanism. It's a form of idealism. It consists in doingthe proper thing. " "But why should the proper thing be done?" "Thatquestion ought not to be asked. Anglicanism is an idealistic creed. Itis anti-utilitarian and anti-rational. It does not ask questions; it hasfaith. The proper thing is the proper thing, and because it is theproper thing it is done. " "At least, " he said, "you do not pretend thatthis is religion?" "No. It has nothing to do with religion. But neitheris it, as you too simply suppose, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies that youknow what religion is, and counterfeit it. But these people do not know, and they are not counterfeiting. When they go to church they are notthinking of religion. They are thinking of the social system. Theofficers and civilians singing up there first learned to sing in thevillage church. They walked to the church from the great house; thegreat house stood in its park; the park was enclosed by the estate; andthe estate was surrounded by other estates. The service in the villagechurch stood for all that. And the service in the saloon stands for itstill. At bottom, what that hymn means is not that these men areChristians, but that they are carrying England to India, to Burma, toChina. " "It is a funny thing, " the Frenchman mused, "to carry to 300million Hindus and Mahometans, and 400 million Confucians, Buddhists, and devil-worshippers. What do they do with it when they get there?""They plant it down in little oases all over the country, and live init. It is the shell that protects them in those oceans of impropriety. And from that shell they govern the world. " "But how can they governwhat they can't even see?" "They govern all the better. If once theycould see, they would be lost. Doubt would enter in. And it is thevirtue of the Englishman that he never doubts. That is what the systemdoes for him. "

At this moment a voice was borne down the breeze. It was that of mytravelling companion, and it appeared, as he approached, that he wasdiscoursing to the captain on the merits of Dostoievsky's novels. He isno respecter of persons; he imposes his own conversation; and thecaptain, though obviously puzzled, was polite. "Russians may be likethat, " he was remarking as he passed, "but Englishmen aren't. " "No, "said my friend, "but don't you wish they were?" "I do _not_, " said thecaptain with conviction. I looked at the Frenchman. "There, " I said, "behold the system. " "But your friend?" "Ah, but he, like myself, is apariah. Have you not observed? They are quite polite. They have even akind of respect--such as our public school boys have--for anyone who isqueer, if only he is queer enough. But we don't "belong, " and they knowit. We are outside the system. At bottom we are dangerous, likeforeigners. And they don't quite approve of our being let loose inIndia. " "Besides, you talk to the Indians. " "Yes, we talk to theIndians. " "And that is contrary to the system?" "Yes, on board the boat;it's all very well while you're still in England. " "A strange system--toperpetuate between rulers and ruled an impassable gulf!" "Yes. But, asMr. Podsnap remarked, 'so it is. '"

We had penetrated to the bows of the ship and hung looking over. Suddenly, just under the surf, there was an emerald gleam; another; thena leap and a dive; a leap and a dive again. A pair of porpoises wereplaying round the bows with the ease, the spontaneity, the beauty ofperfect and happy life. As we watched them the same mood grew in us tillit forced expression. And "Oh, " I said, "the ship's a prison!" "No, "said the Frenchman, "it's the system. "

II

AJANTA

A dusty road running through an avenue across the great plateau of theDeccan; scanty crops of maize and cotton; here and there low hills, their reddish soil sparsely clothed with trees; to the north, a recedingline of mountains; elsewhere infinite space and blazing light. Our"tonga, " its pair of wheels and its white awning rolling and joltingbehind two good horses, passes long lines of bullock-carts. Indians, walking beside them with their inimitable gait, make exquisite gesturesof abjection to the clumsy white Sahibs huddled uncomfortably on theback seat. Their robes of vivid colour, always harmoniously blent, leavebare the slender brown legs and often the breast and back. Childrenstark naked ride on their mothers' hips or their fathers' shoulder. Nowand again the oxen are unyoked at a dribble of water, and a party restsand eats in the shade. Otherwise it is one long march with bare feetover the burning soil. 

We are approaching a market. The mud walls of a village appear. Andoutside, by a stream shrunk now into muddy pools, shimmers and wimmersa many-coloured crowd, buzzing among their waggons and awnings andimprovised stalls. We ford the shallow stream, where women are washingclothes, cleaning their teeth, and drinking from the same water, andpass among the bags of corn, the sugar-cane, and sweetmeats, salutedgravely but unsolicited. 

Then on again for hours, the road now solitary, till as day closes wereach Fardapur. A cluster of mud-walled compounds and beehive huts liesabout a fortified enclosure, where the children sprawl and scream, and aBrahmin intones to silent auditors. Outside they are drawing water fromthe puddles of the stream. And gradually over the low hills and thestretches of yellow grass the after-glow spreads a transfiguring light. Out of a rosy flush the evening star begins to shine; the crickets cry;a fresh breeze blows; and another pitiless day drops into oblivion. 

Next day, at dawn, we walk the four miles to the famous caves, guided bya boy who wears the Nizam's livery, and explains to us, in a language wedo not know, but with perfect lucidity, that it is to him, and no oneelse, that backsheesh is due. He sings snatches of music as old andstrange as the hills; picks us balls of cotton, and prickly pear; andonce stops to point to the fresh tracks of a panther. We are in thewinding gorge of a watercourse; and presently, at a turn, in asemicircle facing south, we see in the cliff the long line of caves. Aswe enter the first an intolerable odour meets us, and a flight of batsexplains the cause. Gradually our eyes accustom themselves to the light, and we become conscious of a square hall, the flat roof resting on squatpillars elaborately carved, fragments of painting on the walls andceiling, narrow slits opening into dark cells, and opposite theentrance, set back in a shrine, a colossal Buddha, the light fallingfull on the solemn face, the upturned feet, the expository hands. Thisis a monastery, and most of the caves are on the same plan; but one ortwo are long halls, presumably for worship, with barrel-vaulted roofs, and at the end a great solid globe on a pedestal. 

Of the art of these caves I will not speak. What little can be seen ofthe painting--and only ill-lighted fragments remain--is full oftenderness, refinement, and grace; no touch of drama; no hint ofpassion. The sculpture, stripped of its stucco surface, is rude butoften impressive. But what impresses most is not the art but thereligion of the place. In this terrible country, where the great forcesof nature, drought and famine and pestilence, the intolerable sun, theintolerable rain, and the exuberance of life and death, have made ofmankind a mere passive horde cowering before inscrutable Powers--here, more than anywhere, men were bound under a yoke of observance and ritualto the gods they had fashioned and the priests who interpreted theirwill. Then came the Deliverer to set them free not _for_ but _from_life, teaching them how to escape from that worst of all evils, rebirthagain and again into a world of infinite suffering, unguided by anyreason to any good end. "There is no god, " said this strange master, "there is no soul; but there is life after death, life here in thishell, unless you will learn to deliver yourselves by annihilatingdesire. " They listened; they built monasteries; they meditated; and nowand again, here, perhaps, in these caves, one or other attainedenlightenment. But the cloud of Hinduism, lifted for a moment, rolledback heavier than ever. The older gods were seated too firmly on theirthrones. Shiva--creator, preserver, destroyer--expelled the Buddha. Andthat passive figure, sublime in its power of mind, sits for ever alonein the land of his birth, exiled from light, in a cloud of clingingbats. 

But outside proceeds the great pageant of day and night, and thepatient, beautiful people labour without hope, while universal nature, symbolised by Shiva's foot, presses heavily on their heads and forbidsthem the stature of man. Only the white man here, bustling, ungainly, aggressive, retains his freedom and acts rather than suffers. Oneunderstands at last the full meaning of the word "environment. " Becauseof this sun, because of this soil, because of their vast numbers, thesepeople are passive, religious, fatalistic. Because of our cold and rainin the north, our fresh springs and summers, we are men of action, ofscience, of no reflection. The seed is the same, but according to thesoil it brings forth differently. Here the patience, the beauty, theabjection before the Devilish-Divine; there the defiance, the cult ofthe proud self. And these things have met. To what result?

III

ULSTER IN INDIA

"Are you a Home Ruler?" "Yes. Are you?" Instantly a torrent of protest. He was a Mahometan, eminent in law and politics; clever, fluent, forensic, with a passion for hearing himself talk, and addressing onealways as if one were a public meeting. He approached his face close tomine, gradually backing me into the wall. And I realised the fullmeaning of Carlyle's dictum "to be a mere passive bucket to be pumpedinto can be agreeable to no human being. "

It was not, naturally, the Irish question for its own sake thatinterested him. But he took it as a type of the Indian question. Here, too, he maintained, there is an Ulster, the Mahometan community. Here, too, there are Nationalists, the Hindus. Here, too, a "loyal" minority, protected by a beneficent and impartial Imperial Government. Here, too, a majority of "rebels" bent on throwing off that Government in orderthat they may oppress the minority. Here, too, an ideal of independencehypocritically masked under the phrase "self-government. " "It is a lawof political science that where there are two minorities they shouldstand together against the majority. The Hindus want to get rid of you, as they want to get rid of us. And for that reason alone, if there werenot a thousand others"--there were, he hinted, but, rhetorically, he"passed them over in silence"--"for that reason alone I am loyal to theBritish raj. " It had never occurred to me to doubt it. But I questioned, when I got a moment's breathing space, whether really the Hinducommunity deliberately nourished this dark conspiracy. He had no doubt, so far as the leaders were concerned; and he mistrusted the "moderates"more than the extremists, because they were cleverer. He "multipliedexamples"--it was his phrase. The movement for primary education, forexample. It had nothing to do with education. It was a plot to teach themasses Hindi, in order that they might be swept into the anti-British, anti-Mahometan current. As to minor matters, no Hindu had ever voted fora Mahometan, no Hindu barrister ever sent a client to a Mahometancolleague. Whereas in all these matters, one was led to infer, Mahometans were conciliation and tolerance itself. I knew that thespeaker himself had secured the election of Mahometans to all the seatsin the Council. But I refrained from referring to the matter. Then therewas caste. A Hindu will not eat with a Mahometan, and this was taken asa personal insult. I suggested that the English were equally boycotted;but that we regarded the boycott as a religious obligation, not as asocial stigma. But, like the Irish Ulstermen, he was not there to listento argument. He rolled on like a river. None of us could escape. Hedetected the first signs of straying, and beckoned us back to the flock. "Mr. Audubon, this is important. " "Mr. Coryat, you must listen to this. "Coryat, at last, grew restive, and remarked rather tartly that no doubtthere was friction between the two communities, but that the worst wayto deal with it was by recrimination. He agreed; with tears in his eyeshe agreed. There was nothing he had not done, no advance he had notmade, to endeavour to bridge the gulf. All in vain! Never were suchobstinate fellows as these Hindus. And he proceeded once more to"multiply examples. " As we said "Good-bye" in the small hours of themorning he pressed into our hands copies of his speeches and addresses. And we left him perorating on the steps of the hotel. 

A painfully acquired mistrust of generalisation prevents me from sayingthat this is _the_ Mahometan point of view. Indeed, I have reason toknow that it is not. But it is a Mahometan point of view in oneprovince. And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical membersof the community. Some twenty-five years ago, they say, Mahometans woketo the fact that they were dropping behind in the race for influence andpower. They started a campaign of education and organisation. At everypoint they found themselves thwarted; and always, behind the obstacle, lurked a Hindu. Lord Morley's reform of the Councils, intended to uniteall sections, had had the opposite effect. Nothing but the separateelectorates had saved Mahometans from political extinction. Andprecisely because they desired that extinction Hindus desired mixedelectorates. The elections to the Councils have exasperated theantagonism between the two communities. And an enemy might accuse theGovernment of being actuated, in that reform, by the Machiavellian maxim"Divide et impera. "

What the Hindus have to say to all this I have not had an opportunity oflearning. But they too, I conceive, can "multiply examples" for theirside. To a philosophic observer two reflections suggest themselves. One, that representative government can only work when there is real give andtake between the contending parties. The other, that to most men, andmost nations, religion means nothing more than antagonism to some otherreligion. Witness Ulster in Ireland; and witness, equally, Ulster inIndia. 

IV

ANGLO-INDIA

From the gallery of the high hall we look down on the assembled societyof the cantonment. The scene is commonplace enough; twaddle and tea, after tennis; "frivolling"--it is their word; women too empty-headed andmen too tired to do anything else. This mill-round of work and exerciseis maintained like a religion. The gymkhana represents the "compulsorygames" of a public school. It is part of the "white man's burden. " Heplays, as he works, with a sense of responsibility. He is bored, butboredom is a duty, and there's nothing else to do. 

The scene is commonplace. Yes! But this afternoon a band is playing. Themusic suits the occasion. It is soft, melodious, sentimental. Itprovokes a vague sensibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. Atleast it should not, from its quality. But the power of music isincalculable. It has an essence independent of its forms. And by virtueof that essence its poorest manifestations can sink a shaft into thesprings of life. So as I listen languidly the scene before me detachesitself from actuality and floats away on the stream of art. It becomesa symbol; and around and beyond it, in some ideal space, other symbolsarise and begin to move. I see the East as an infinite procession. HugeBactrian camels balance their bobbing heads as they pad deliberatelyover the burning dust. Laden asses, cattle, and sheep and goats move onin troops. Black-bearded men, men with beard and hair dyed red, womenpregnant or carrying babies on their hips, youths like the IndianBacchus with long curling hair, children of all ages, old menmagnificent and fierce, all the generations of Asia pass and pass on, seen like a frieze against a rock background, blazing with colour, rhythmical and fluent, marching menacingly down out of infinite space onto this little oasis of Englishmen. Then, suddenly, they are an ocean;and the Anglo-Indian world floats upon it like an Atlantic liner. It hasits gymnasium, its swimming-bath, its card-rooms, its concert-room. Ithas its first and second class and steerage, well marked off. It dressesfor dinner every night; it has an Anglican service on Sunday; it flirtsmildly; it is bored; but above all it is safe. It has water-tightcompartments. It is "unsinkable. " The band is playing; and when thecrash comes it will not stop. No; it will play this music, this, whichis in my ears. Is it Gounod's "Faust" or an Anglican hymn? No matter! Itis the same thing, sentimental, and not imaginative. And sentimentally, not imaginatively, the Englishman will die. He will not face the event, but he will stand up to it. He will realise nothing, but he will shrinkfrom nothing. Of all the stories about the loss of the _Titanic_ thebest and most characteristic is that of the group of men who satconversing in the second-class smoking-room, till one of them said, "Nowshe's going down. Let's go and sit in the first-class saloon. " And theydid. How touching! How sublime! How English! The _Titanic_ sinks. With aroar the machinery crashes from stem to bow. Dust on the water, cries onthe water, then vacuity and silence. The East has swept over this colonyof the West. And still its generations pass on, rhythmically swinging;slaves of Nature, not, as in the West, rebels against her; cyclical asher seasons and her stars; infinite as her storms of dust; identical asthe leaves of her trees; purposeless as her cyclones and herearthquakes. 

The music stops and I rub my eyes. Yes, it is only the club, only teaand twaddle! Or am I wrong? There is more in these men and women thanappears. They stand for the West, for the energy of the world, for all, in this vast Nature, that is determinate and purposive, not passivelyrepetitionary. And if they do not know it, if they never hear the strainthat transposes them and their work into a tragic dream, if tennis istennis to them, and a valse a valse, and an Indian a native, none theless they are what a poet would see them to be, an oasis in the desert, a liner on the ocean, ministers of the life within life that is thehope, the inspiration, and the meaning of the world. In my heart ofhearts I apologise as I prolong the banalities of parting, and almostvow never again to abuse Gounod's music. 

V

A MYSTERY PLAY

A few lamps set on the floor lit up the white roof. On either side thegreat hall was open to the night; and now and again a bird flew across, or a silent figure flitted from dark to dark. On a low platform sat thedancers, gorgeously robed. All were boys. The leader, a peacock-fanflashing in his head-dress, personated Krishna. Beside him sat Rhada, his wife. The rest were the milkmaids of the legend. They sat likestatues, and none of them moved at our entry. But the musicians, whowere seated on the ground, rose and salaamed, and instantly began toplay. There were five instruments--a miniature harmonium (terribleinnovation), two viols, of flat, unresonant tone, a pair of cymbals, anda small drum. The ear, at first, detected little but discordant chaos, but by degrees a form became apparent--short phrases, of strong rhythm, in a different scale from ours, repeated again and again, and strung ona thread of loose improvisation. Every now and again the musicians burstinto song. Their voices were harsh and nasal, but their art wascomplicated and subtle. Clearly, this was not barbarous music, it wasonly strange, and its interest increased, as the ear became accustomedto it. Suddenly, as though they could resist no longer, the dancers, whohad not moved, leapt from the platform and began their dance. It wassymbolical; Krishna was its centre, and the rest were wooing him. Desireand its frustration and fulfilment were the theme. Yet it was notsensual, or not merely so. The Hindus interpret in a religious spiritthis legendary sport of Krishna with the milkmaids. It symbolises thesoul's wooing of God. And so these boys interpreted it. Their passion, though it included the flesh, was not of the flesh. The mood wasrapturous, but not abandoned; ecstatic, but not orgiastic. There weremoments of a hushed suspense when hardly a muscle moved; only the armsundulated and the feet and hands vibrated. Then a break into swiftwhirling, on the toes or on the knees, into leaping and stamping, swiftflight and pursuit. A pause again; a slow march; a rush with twinklingfeet; and always, on those young faces, even in the moment of mostexcitement, a look of solemn rapture, as though they were carried out ofthemselves into the divine. I have seen dancing more accomplished, moreelaborate, more astonishing than this. But never any that seemed to meto fulfil so well the finest purposes of the art. The Russian ballet, inthe retrospect, seems trivial by comparison. It was secular; but thiswas religious. For the first time I seemed to catch a glimpse of whatthe tragic dance of the Greeks might have been like. The rhythms werenot unlike those of Greek choruses, the motions corresponded strictly tothe rhythms, and all was attuned to a high religious mood. In suchdancing the flesh becomes spirit, the body a transparent emblem of thesoul. 

After that the play, I confess, was a drop into bathos. We descended tospeech, even to tedious burlesque. But the analogy was all the closer tomediæval mysteries. In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it isintimate, humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in thenursery. So it is in India where the age of Faith has never ceased. Whatwas represented that night was an episode in the story of Krishna. Thecharacters were the infant god, his mother, Jasodha, and an ancientBrahmin who has come from her own country to congratulate her on thebirth of a child. He is a comic character--the sagging belly and thepainted face of the pantomime. He answers Jasodha's inquiries afterfriends and relations at home. She offers him food. He professes to haveno appetite, but, on being pressed, demands portentous measures of riceand flour. While she collects the material for his meal, he goes tobathe in the Jumna; and the whole ritual of his ablutions is elaboratelytravestied, even a crocodile being introduced in the person of one ofthe musicians, who rudely pulls him by the leg as he is rolling inimaginary water. His bathing finished, he retires and cooks his food. When it is ready he falls into prayer. But during his abstraction theinfant Krishna crawls up and begins devouring the food. Returning tohimself, the Brahmin, in a rage, runs off into the darkness of the hall. Jasodha pursues him and brings him back. And he begins once more to cookhis food. This episode was repeated three times in all its detail, and Iconfess I found it insufferably tedious. The third time Jasodha scoldsthe child and asks him why he does it. He replies--and here comes thepretty point of the play--that the Brahmin, in praying to God andoffering him the food, unwittingly is praying to him and offering tohim, and in eating the food he has but accepted the offering. The motherdoes not understand, but the Brahmin does, and prostrates himself beforehis Lord. 

This is crude enough art, but at any rate it is genuine. Like allprimitive art, it is a representation of what is traditionally believedand popularly felt. The story is familiar to the audience and intimateto their lives. It represents details which they witness every day, andat the same time it has religious significance. Out of it might grow agreat drama, as once in ancient Greece. And perhaps from no other origincan such a drama arise. 

VI

AN INDIAN SAINT

It was at Benares that we met him. He led us through the maze of thebazaars, his purple robe guiding us like a star, and brought us out bythe mosque of Aurungzebe. Thence a long flight of stairs plunged sheerto the Ganges, shining below in the afternoon sun. We descended; but, turning aside before we reached the shore, came to a tiny house perchedon a terrace above the ghat. We took off our shoes in the anteroom andpassed through a second chamber, with its riverside open to the air, andreached a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We squattedand looked round. Some empty bottles were the only furniture. But on thewall hung the picture we had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, andperhaps as much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe. Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles and signs, andfrom them grew leaves and flowers of various hues. Below was a gardenlit by a rising sun, and a black river where birds and beasts pursuedand devoured one another. At our request he took a pointer and began toexplain. I am not sure that I well understood or well remember, butsomething of this kind was the gist of it. In the beginning wasParabrahma, existing in himself, a white circle at the root of the tree. Whence sprang, following the line of the trunk, the egg of the universe, pregnant with all potentialities. Thence came the energy of Brahma; andof this there were three aspects, the Good, the Evil, and the Neuter, symbolised by three triangles in a circle. Thence the trunk continued, but also thence emerged a branch to the right and one to the left. Thebranch to the right was Illusion and ended in God; the branch to theleft was Ignorance and ended in the Soul. Thus the Soul contemplatesIllusion under the form of her gods. Up the line of the trunk came nextthe Energy of Nature; then Pride; then Egotism and Individuality; whencebranched to one side Mind, to the other the senses and the passions. Then followed the elements, fire, air, water, and earth; then thevegetable creation; then corn; and then, at the summit of the tree, theprimitive Man and Woman, type of Humanity. The garden below was Eden, until the sun rose; but with light came discord and conflict, symbolisedby the river and the beasts. Evil and conflict belong to the nature ofthe created world; and the purpose of religion is by contemplation toenable the Soul to break its bodies, and the whole creation to returnagain to Parabrahma, whence it sprung. 

Why did it spring? He did not know. For good or for evil? He could notsay. What he knew he knew, and what he did not know he did not. "Somesay there is no God and no Soul. " He smiled. "Let them!" His certaintywas complete. "Can the souls of men be reincarnated as animals?" Heshrugged his shoulders. "Who can say?" I tried to put in a plea for thelife of action, but he was adamant; contemplation and contemplationalone can deliver us. "Our good men, " I said, "desire to make the worldbetter, rather than to save their own souls. " "Our sages, " he replied, "are sorry for the world, but they know they cannot help it. " Hisreligion, I urged, denied all sense to the process of history. "Theremay be process in matter, " he replied, "but there is none in God. " Iprotested that I loved individual souls, and did not want them absorbedin Parabrahma. He laughed his good cheery laugh, out of his black beard, but it was clear that he held me to be a child, imprisoned in the Ego. Ifelt like that, and I hugged my Ego; so presently he ministered to itwith sweetmeats. He even ate with us, and smoked a cigarette. He was themost human of men; so human that I thought his religion could not be asinhuman as it sounded. But it was the religion of the East, not of theWest. It refused all significance to the temporal world; it took noaccount of society and its needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop, the sense and the power of Individuality. It did not say, but itimplied, that creation was a mistake; and if it did not professpessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not know whether itis the religion of a wise race; but I am sure it could never be that ofa strong one. 

But I loved the saint, and felt that he was a brother. Next morning, aswe drifted past the long line of ghats, watching the bright figures onthe terraces and stairs, the brown bodies in the water, and the Brahminssquatting on the shore, we saw him among the bathers, and he called tous cheerily. We waved our hands and passed on, never to see him again. East had not met West, but at least they had shaken hands across thegulf. The gulf, however, was profound; for many and many incarnationswill be needed before one soul at least can come even to wish toannihilate itself in the Universal. 

VII

A VILLAGE IN BENGAL

At 6 A. M. We got out of the train at a station on the Ganges; and aftermany delays found ourselves drifting down the river in a houseboat. Tolie on cushions, sheltered from the sun, looking out on the movingshore, to the sound of the leisurely plash of oars, is elysium after anight in the train. We had seven hours of it and I could have wished itwere more. But towards sunset we reached our destination. At the wharf acrowd of servants were waiting to touch the feet of our hosts who hadtravelled with us. They accompanied us through a tangle of palms, bananas, mangoes, canes, past bamboo huts raised on platforms of hard, dry mud, to the central place where a great banyan stood in front of thetemple. We took off our shoes and entered the enclosure, followed byhalf the village, silent, dignified, and deferential. Over ruinedshrines of red brick, elaborately carved, clambered and twined thesacred peepul tree. And within a more modern building were housed imagesof Krishna and Rhada, and other symbols of what we call too hastilyidolatry. Outside was a circular platform of brick where these dollsare washed in milk at the great festivals of the year. We passed on, andwatched the village weaver at his work, sitting on the ground with hisfeet in a pit working the pedals of his loom; while outside, in thegarden, a youth was running up and down setting up, thread by thread, the long strands of the warp. By the time we reached the house it wasdusk. A lamp was brought into the porch. Musicians and singers squattedon the floor. Behind them a white-robed crowd faded into the night. Andwe listened to hymns composed by the village saint, who had latelypassed away. 

First there was a prayer for forgiveness. "Lord, forgive us our sins. You _must_ forgive, for you are called the merciful. And it's so easyfor you! And, if you don't, what becomes of your reputation?" Next, acall to the ferry. "Come and cross over with me. Krishna is the boat andRhada the sail. No storms can wreck us. Come, cross over with me. " Thena prayer for deliverance from the "well" of the world where we areimprisoned by those dread foes the five senses of the mind. Then arhapsody on God, invisible, incomprehensible. "He speaks, but He is notseen. He lives in the room with me, but I cannot find Him. He brings tomarket His moods, but the marketer never appears. Some call Him fire, some ether. But I ask His name in vain. I suppose I am such a fool thatthey will not tell it me. " Then a strange ironical address to Krishna. "Really, sir, your conduct is very odd! You flirt with the Gopis! Youput Rhada in a sulk, and then ask to be forgiven! You say you are a god, and yet you pray to God! Really, sir, what are we to think?" Lastly, amystic song, how Krishna has plunged into the ocean of Rhada; how he isthere drifting, helpless and lost. Can we not save him? But no! It isbecause his love is not perfect and pure. And that is why he must beincarnated again and again in the avatars. 

Are these people idolaters, these dignified old men, these seriousyouths, these earnest, grave musicians? Look at their temple, and yousay "Yes. " Listen to their hymns, and you say "No. " Reformers want toeducate them, and, perhaps, they are right. But if education is to meanthe substitution of the gramophone and music-hall songs for thistraditional art, these native hymns? I went to bed pondering, and wasawakened at six by another chorus telling us it was time to get up. Wedid so, and visited the school, set up by my friend as an experiment; amud floor, mud-lined walls, all scrupulously clean; and squatting roundthe four sides children of all ages, all reciting their lessons at once, and all the lessons different. They were learning to read and writetheir native language, and that, at least, seemed harmless enough. Butparents complained that it unfitted them for the fields. "Our fathersdid not do it"--that, said my impatient young host, is their reply toevery attempt at reform. In his library were all the works of Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Wells, and Shaw, as well as all the technical journals ofscientific agriculture. He lectured them on the chemical constituents ofmilk and the crossing of sugar-canes. They embraced his feet, sang theirhymns, and did as their fathers had done. He has a hard task before him, but one far better worth attempting than the legal and politicalactivities in which most young Zemindars indulge. And, as he said, hereyou see the fields and hear the birds, and here you can bathe in theGanges. We did; and then breakfasted; and then set out in palanquins forthe nearest railway station. The bearers sang a rhythmic chant as theybore us smoothly along through mustard and pulses, yellow and orange andmauve. The sun blazed hot; the bronzed figures streamed with sweat; thecheerful voices never failed or flagged. I dozed and drowsed, while Eastand West in my mind wove a web whose pattern I cannot trace. But apattern there is. And some day historians will be able to find it. 

VIII

SRI RAMAKRISHNA

As we dropped down the Hooghly they pointed to a temple on the shore aslately the home of Sri Ramakrishna. He was only a name to me, and I didnot pay much attention, though I had his "Gospel" [2] actually under myarm. I was preoccupied with the sunset, burning behind a veil of smoke;and presently, as we landed, with the great floating haystackssmouldering at the wharf in the red afterglow. As we waited for thetram, someone said, "Would you like to see Kali?" and we stepped asideto the little shrine. Within it was the hideous idol, black andmany-armed, decked with tinsel and fed with the blood of goats; andthere swept over me a wave of the repulsion I had felt from the firstfor the Hindu religion, its symbols, its cult, its architecture, evenits philosophy. Seated in the tram, it was with an effort that I openedthe "Gospel" of Sri Ramakrishna. But at once my attention was arrested. This was an account by a disciple of the life and sayings of his master. And presently I read the following:

 "_Disciple. _ Then, sir, one may hold that God is 'with form. ' But surely He is not the earthen image that is worshipped!

 "_Master. _ But, my dear sir, why should you call it an earthen image? Surely the Image Divine is made of the Spirit!

 "The disciple cannot follow this. He goes on: But is it not one's duty, sir, to make it clear to those who worship images that God is not the same as the clay form they worship, and that in worshipping they should keep God Himself in view and not the clay images?

 * * * * *

 "_Master. _ You talk of 'images made of clay. ' Well, there often comes a necessity of worshipping even such images as these. God Himself has provided these various forms of worship. The Lord has done all this--to suit different men in different stages of knowledge. 

 "The mother so arranges the food for her children that every one gets what agrees with him. Suppose she has five children. Having a fish to cook, she makes different dishes out of it. She can give each one of the children what suits him exactly. One gets rich _polow_ with the fish, while she gives only a little soup to another who is of weak digestion; she makes a sauce of sour tamarind for the third, fries the fish for the fourth, and so on, exactly as it happens to agree with the stomach. Don't you see?

 "_Disciple. _ Yes, sir, now I do. The Lord is to be worshipped in the image of clay as a spirit by the beginner. The devotee, as he advances, may worship Him independently of the image. 

 "_Master. _ Yes. And again, when he sees God he realises that everything--image and all--is a manifestation of the Spirit. To him the image is made of Spirit--not of clay. God is a Spirit. "

As I read this, I remembered the answer invariably given to me when Iasked about Hindu idolatry. The people, I was told, even the humblestand most ignorant, worshipped not the idol but what it symbolised. Actually, this hideous Kali stood to them for the Divine Mother. And Iwas told of an old woman, racked with rheumatism, who had determined atlast to seek relief from the goddess. She returned with radiant face. She had seen the Mother! And she had no more rheumatism. In this popularreligion, it would seem, the old cosmic elements have dropped out, andthe human only persist. So that even the terrifying form of Shiva, theDestroyer, stands only for the divine husband of Parvati, the divinewife. Hinduism, I admitted, is not as inhuman and superstitious as itlooks. But I admitted it reluctantly and with many reserves, rememberingall I had seen and heard of obscene rites and sculptures, of theperpetual repetition of the names of God, of parasitic Brahmins andself-torturing ascetics. 

What manner of man, then, was this Sri Ramakrishna? I turned the pagesand read:

 "The disciples were walking about the garden. M. Walked by himself at the cluster of five trees. It is about five in the afternoon. Coming back to the verandah, north of the Master's chamber, M. Comes upon a strange sight. The Master is standing still. Narendra is singing a hymn. He and three or four other disciples are standing with the Master in their midst. M. Is charmed with their song. Never in his life has he heard a sweeter voice. Looking at the Master, M. Marvels and becomes speechless. The Master stands motionless. His eyes are fixed. It is hard to say whether he is breathing or not. This state of ecstasy, says a disciple in low tones, is called Samadhi. M. Has never seen or heard of anything like this. He thinks to himself, 'Is it possible that the thought of God can make a man forget the world? How great must be his faith and love for God who is thrown into such a state!'"

"Yes, " I said, "that is the Hindu ideal--ecstatic contemplation. "Something in me leapt to approve it; but the stronger pull was toHellenism and the West. "Go your way, Ramakrishna, " I said, "but yourway is not mine. For me and my kind action not meditation; the temporalnot the eternal; the human not the ultra-divine; Socrates notRamakrishna!" But hardly had I said the words when I read on:

 "M. Enters. Looking at him the Master laughs and laughs. He cries out, 'Why, look! There he is again!' The boys all join in the merriment. M. Takes his seat, and the Master tells Narendra and the other disciples what has made him laugh. He says:

 "'Once upon a time a small quantity of opium was given to a certain peacock at four o'clock in the afternoon. Well, punctually at four the next afternoon who should come in but the selfsame peacock, longing for a repetition of the favour--another dose of opium!'--(Laughter. )

 "M. Sat watching the Master as he amused himself with the boys. He kept up a running fire of chaff, and it seemed as if these boys were his own age and he was playing with them. Peals of laughter and brilliant flashes of humour follow upon one another, calling to mind the image of a fair when the Joy of the World is to be had for sale. "

I rubbed my eyes. Was this India or Athens? Is East East? Is West West?Are there any opposites that exclude one another? Or is thisall-comprehensive Hinduism, this universal toleration, this refusal torecognise ultimate antagonisms, this "mush, " in a word, as my friendswould dub it--is this, after all, the truest and profoundest vision?

And I read in my book:

 "M. 's egotism is now completely crushed. He thinks to himself: What this God-man says is indeed perfectly true. What business have I to go about preaching to others? Have I myself known God? Do I love God? About God I know nothing. It would indeed be the height of folly and vulgarity itself, of which I should be ashamed, to think of teaching others! This is not mathematics, or history, or literature; it is the science of God! Yes, I see the force of the words of this holy man. "

 Footnotes:

 [Footnote 2: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. _ Second Edition. Part 1. Madras: Published by the Ramakrishna Mission. 1912. ]

IX

THE MONSTROUS REGIMEN OF WOMEN

Here at Cape Comorin, at India's southernmost point, among the sands andthe cactuses and the palms rattling in the breeze, comes to us news ofthe Franchise Bill and of militant suffragettes. And I reflect that inthis respect England is a "backward" country and Travancore an"advanced" one. Women here--except the Brahmin women--are, and alwayshave been, politically and socially on an equality and more than anequality with men. For this is one of the few civilised States--foraught I know it is the only one--in which "matriarchy" still prevails. That doesn't mean--though the word suggests it--that women govern, though, in fact, the succession to the throne passes to women equallywith men. But it means that woman is the head of the family, and thatproperty follows her line, not the man's. All women own property equallywith men, and own it in their own right. The mother's property passes toher children, but the father's passes to his mother's kin. The husband, in fact, is not regarded as related to the wife. Relationship meansdescent from a common mother, whereas descent from a common father is anegligible fact, no doubt because formerly it was a questionable one. Women administer their own property, and, as I am informed, administerit more prudently than the men. 

Not only so; they have in marriage the superior position occupied by menin the West. The Nair woman chooses her own husband; he comes to herhouse, she does not go to his; and, till recently, she could dismiss himas soon as she was tired of him. The law--man-made, no doubt!--hasrecently altered this, and now mutual consent is required for a validdivorce. Still the woman is, at least on this point, on an equality withthe man. And the heavens have not yet fallen. As to the vote, it is notso important or so general here as at home. The people live under apaternal monarchy "by right divine. " The Rajah who consolidated thekingdom, early in the eighteenth century, handed it over formally to thegod of the temple, and administers it in his name. Incidentally thisgave him access to temple revenues. It also makes his person sacred. Somuch so that in a recent prison riot, when the convicts escaped andmarched to the police with their grievances, the Rajah had only toappear and tell them to march back to prison, and they did so to a man, and took their punishment. The government, it will be seen, is not byvotes. Still there are votes for local councils, and women have themequally with men. Any other arrangement would have seemed merelypreposterous to the Nairs; and perhaps if any exclusion had beencontemplated it would have been of men rather than of women. 

Other incidental results follow from the equality of the sexes. Theearly marriages which are the curse of India do not prevail among theNairs. Consequently the schooling of girls is continued later. And thisState holds the record in all India for female education. We visited aschool of over 600 girls, ranging from infancy to college age, andcertainly I never saw school-girls look happier, keener, or more alive. Society, clearly, has not gone to pieces under "the monstrous regimen ofwomen. " Travancore claims, probably with justice, to be the premiernative State; the most advanced, the most prosperous, the most happy. Because of the position of women? Well, hardly. The climate isdelightful, the soil fertile, the natural resources considerable. Everyman sits under his own palm tree, and famine is unknown. The people, andespecially the children, are noticeably gay, in a land where gaiety isnot common. But one need not be a suffragette to hold that the equalityof the sexes is one element that contributes to its well-being, and tofeel that in this respect England lags far behind Travancore. 

Echoes of the suffrage controversy at home have led me to dwell uponthis matter of the position of women. But, to be candid, it will not bethat that lingers in my mind when I look back upon my sojourn here. Whatthen? Perhaps a sea of palm leaves, viewed from the lighthouse top, stretching beside the sea of blue waves; perhaps a sandy river bed, withbrown nude figures washing clothes in the shining pools; perhaps theoiled and golden skins glistening in the sun; perhaps naked childrenastride on their mothers' hips, or screaming with laughter as they racethe motor-car; perhaps the huge tusked elephant that barred our way fora moment yesterday; perhaps the jungle teeming with hidden and menacinglife; perhaps the seashore and its tumbling waves. One studiesinstitutions, but one does not love them. Often one must wish that theydid not exist, or existed in such perfection that their existence mightbe unperceived. Still, as institutions go, this, which regulates therelations of men and women, is, I suppose, the most important. So fromthe surf of the Arabian sea and the blaze of the Indian sun I send thislittle object lesson. 

X

THE BUDDHA AT BURUPUDUR

To the north the cone of a volcano, rising sharp and black. To the eastanother. South and west a jagged chain of hills. In the foregroundricefields and cocoa palms. Everywhere intense green, untoned by grey;and in the midst of it this strange erection. Seen from below and from adistance it looks like a pyramid that has been pressed flat. In fact, itis a series of terraces built round a low hill. Six of them arerectangular; then come three that are circular; and on the highest ofthese is a solid dome, crowned by a cube and a spire. Round the circularterraces are set, close together, similar domes, but hollow, and piercedwith lights, through which is seen in each a seated Buddha. SeatedBuddhas, too, line the tops of the parapets that run round the lowerterraces. And these parapets are covered with sculpture in high relief. One might fancy oneself walking round one of the ledges of Dante's"Purgatorio" meditating instruction on the walls. Here the instructionwould be for the selfish and the cruel. For what is inscribed is thelegend and cult of the lord of tenderness. Much of it remainsundeciphered and unexplained. But on the second terrace is recorded, onone side, the life of Sakya-Muni; on the other, his previousincarnations. The latter, taken from the "Jatakas, " are naïve andcharming apologues. 

For example: Once the Buddha lived upon earth as a hare. In order totest him Indra came down from heaven in the guise of a traveller. Exhausted and faint, he asked the animals for help. An otter broughtfish, a monkey fruit, a jackal a cup of milk. But the hare had nothingto give. So he threw himself into a fire, that the wanderer might eathis roasted flesh. Again: Once the Buddha lived upon earth as anelephant. He was met by seven hundred travellers, lost and exhaustedwith hunger. He told them where water would be found, and, near it, thebody of an elephant for food. Then, hastening to the spot, he flunghimself over a precipice, that he might provide the meal himself. Again:Once the Buddha lived upon earth as a stag. A king, who was hunting him, fell into a ravine. Whereupon the stag halted, descended, and helped himhome. All round the outer wall run these pictured lessons. And oppositeis shown the story of Sakya-Muni himself. We see the new-born child withhis feet on lotuses. We see the fatal encounter with poverty, sickness, and death. We see the renunciation, the sojourn in the wilderness, theattainment under the bo-tree, the preaching of the Truth. And all thissculptured gospel seems to bring home to one, better than the volumes ofthe learned, what Buddhism really meant to the masses of its followers. It meant, surely, not the denial of the soul or of God, but that warmimpulse of pity and love that beats still in these tender and humanpictures. It meant not the hope or desire for extinction, but thecharming dream of thousands of lives, past and to come, in many forms, many conditions, many diverse fates. The pessimism of the master is aslittle likely as his high philosophy to have reached the mind or theheart of the people. The whole history of Buddhism, indeed, shows thatit did not, and does not. What touched them in him was the saint and thelover of animals and men. And this love it was that flowed in streamsover the world, leaving wherever it passed, in literature and art, inpictures of flowers or mountains, in fables and poems and tales, thetrace of its warm and humanising flood. 

Still, there is the other Buddhism, the Buddhism of the thinker; histheory of human life, its value and purpose. And it was this that filledmy mind later as I sat on the summit next to a solemn Buddha against thesetting sun. For a long time I was silent, meditating his doctrine. ThenI spoke of children, and he said, "They grow old. " I spoke of strongmen, and he said, "They grow weak. " I spoke of their work andachievement, and he said, "They die. " The stars came out, and I spoke ofeternal law. He said, "One law concerns you--that which binds you to thewheel of life. " The moon rose, and I spoke of beauty. He said, "There isone beauty--that of a soul redeemed from desire. " Thereupon the Weststirred in me, and cried "No!" "Desire, " it said, "is the heart andessence of the world. It needs not and craves not extinction. It needsand craves perfection. Youth passes; strength passes; life passes. Yes!What of it? We have access to the youth, the strength, the life of theworld. Man is born to sorrow. Yes! But he feels it as tragedy andredeems it. Not round life, not outside life, but through life is theway. Desire more and more intense, because more and more pure; notpeace, but the plenitude of experience. Your foundation was false. Youthought man wanted rest. He does not. We at least do not, we of theWest. We want more labour; we want more stress; we want more passion. Pain we accept, for it stings us into life. Strife we accept, for ithardens us to strength We believe in action; we believe in desire. Andwe believe that by them we shall attain. " So the West broke out in me;and I looked at him to see if he was moved. But the calm eye wasuntroubled, unruffled the majestic brow, unperplexed the sweet, solemnmouth. Secure in his Nirvana, he heard or he heard me not. He hadattained the life-in-death he sought. But I, I had not attained the lifein life. Unhelped by him, I must go my way. The East, perhaps, he hadunderstood. He had not understood the West. 

XI

A MALAY THEATRE

It seems to be a principle among shipping companies so to arrange theirconnections that the traveller should be compelled to spend some days inSingapore. We evaded this necessity by taking a trip to Sumatra, buteven so a day and a night remained to be disposed of. We devoted themorning to a bathe and a lunch at the Sea View Hotel, and the afternoonto the Botanical Gardens, where the most attractive flowers are thechildren and the most interesting gardeners their Chinese nurses. Thereremained the evening, and we asked about amusements. There was abioscope, of course; there is always a bioscope; we had found one evenin the tiny town of Medan, in Sumatra. There was also an opera company, performing the "Pink Girl. " We seemed to know all about her withoutgoing to see her. Was there nothing else? Yes; a Malay theatre. Thatsounded attractive. So we took the tram through the Chinese quarter, among the "Ah Sins" and "Hup Chows, " where every one was either a tailoror a washerman, and got down at a row of red lights. This was theAlexandra Hall, and a bill informed us that the performers were theStraits Opera Company. This dismayed us a little. Still, we paid ourdollars, and entered a dingy, dirty room, with a few Malays occupyingthe back benches and a small group of Chinese women and children ineither balcony. We took our seats with half a dozen coloured aristocratsin the front rows, and looked about us. We were the only Europeans. But, to console us in our isolation, on either side of the proscenium waspainted a couple of Italians in the act of embracing as one onlyembraces in opera. We glanced at our programme and saw that the play wasthe "Moon Princess, " and that Afrid, a genie, figured in the cast. Itwas then, at least, Oriental, though it could hardly be Malay, and ourspirits rose. But the orchestra quickly damped them; there was a piano, a violin, a 'cello, a clarionet, and a cornet, and from beginning to endof the performance they were never in tune with themselves or with thesingers. And the music? It was sometimes Italian, sometimes Spanish, never, as far as I could detect, Oriental, and always thoroughly andfrankly bad. 

No matter! The curtain rose and displayed a garden. The Prince entered. He was dressed in mediæval Italian costume (a style of dress, be it saidonce for all, which was adopted by the whole company). With gestures ofecstatic astonishment he applied his nose to the paper roses. Then headvanced and appeared to sing, for his mouth moved; but the orchestradrowned any notes he may have emitted. The song finished, he lay downupon a couch and slept. Whereupon there entered an ugly little girl, ina short white frock and black stockings and ribbons, with an expressionof fixed gloom upon her face, and began to move her feet and arms in aparody of Oriental dancing. We thought at first that she was the MoonPrincess, and felt a pang of disappointment. But she turned out to bethe Spirit of Dreams; and presently she ushered in the real Princess, with whom, on the spot, the Prince, unlike ourselves, became violentlyenamoured. She vanished, and he woke to find her a vision. Despair ofthe Prince; despair of the King; despair of the Queen, not unmixed withrage, to judge from her voice and gestures. Consultation of anastrologer. Flight of the Prince in search of his beloved. Universalbewilderment and incompetence, such as may be witnessed any day in theEast when anything happens at all out of the ordinary way. At this pointenter the comic relief, in the form of woodcutters. I am inclined tosuppose, from the delight of the audience, that there was somethinggenuine here. But whatever it was we were unable to follow it. Eventually the woodcutters met Afrid, whether by chance or design Icould not discover. At any rate, their reception was rough. To borrowthe words of the synopsis, "a big fight arose and they were thrown tospace"; but not till they had been pulled by the hair and ears, throttled and pummelled, to the general satisfaction, for something likehalf an hour. 

The next scenes were equally vigorous. The synopsis describes them thus:"Several young princes went to Genie Janar, the father of the MoonPrincess, to demand her in marriage. Afrid, a genie, met the princes, and, after having a row, they were all thrown away. " The row waspeculiar. Afrid took them on one by one. The combatants walked round oneanother, back to back, making feints in the air. Then the Prince got ablow in, which Afrid pretended to feel. But suddenly, with a hoarselaugh, he rushed again upon the foe, seized him by the throat or thearm, and (I cannot improve on the phrase) "threw him away. " After allfour princes were thus disposed of I left, being assured of a happyending by the account of the concluding scene: "The Prince then took theMoon Princess to his father's kingdom, where he was married to heramidst great rejoicings. "

Comment perhaps is superfluous. But as I went home in my rickshaw mymind went back to those evenings in India when I had seen Indian boysperform to Indian music dances and plays in honour of Krishna, and tothe Bengal village where the assembled inhabitants had sung us hymnscomposed by their native saint. And I remembered that everywhere, inEgypt, in India, in Java, in Sumatra, in Japan, the gramophoneharmonium is displacing the native instruments; and that thebioscope--that great instrument of education--is familiarising thepeasants of the East with all that is most vulgar and most shoddy in thehumour and sentiment of the West. 

The Westernising of the East must come, no doubt, and ought to come. Butin the process what by-products of waste, or worse! Once, surely, theremust have been a genuine "Malay theatre. " This is what Europe has madeof it. 

PART II

CHINA

I

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA

Some recent travellers have expressed disappointment or even disgustwith what they saw or learned or guessed of China. My own firstimpression is quite contrary. The climate, it is true, for the moment, inclines one to gloomy views. An icy wind, a black sky, a cold drizzle. March in England could hardly do worse. But in Canton one almost forgetsall that. Imagine a maze of narrow streets, more confused and confusingthan Venice; high houses (except in the old city); and hanging parallelto these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs inscribed withhuge Chinese characters, gold on black, gold on red, red or blue onwhite, a blaze of colour; and under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream, yellow faces, black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot orborne on chairs, not a cart or carriage, rarely a pony, nobody crowding, nobody hustling or jostling, an even flow of cheerful humanity, inexhaustible, imperturbable, convincing one at first sight of the truthof all one has heard of the order, independence, and vigour of thisextraordinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with thestreet, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and commonly, within, they are cut across by a kind of arch elaborately carved andblazing with gold. Every trade may be seen plying--jade-cutters, cloth-rollers, weavers, ring-makers, rice-pounders, a thousand others. Whole animals, roasted, hang before the butchers' shops, ducks, pigs--even we saw a skinned tiger! The interest is inexhaustible; andone is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a heavyburden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, so painfully inevidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this native sea. He passes inhis chair; but, like oneself, he is only a drop in the ocean. Canton isChina, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set methinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Oftenin India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; alost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doingpenance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely butphantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly--that is the kind of impressionIndia left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, ofcourse, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man, working, marrying, begetting and rearing children, growing middle-aged, growing old, dying--and that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but inIndia, moon or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven. Recall, for example, Benares--the fantastic buildings rising and fallinglike a sea, the stairs running up to infinity, the sacred river, thesages meditating on its banks, the sacrificial ablutions, the squealingtemple-pipes, and, in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the bodyreturns to the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing ofthe dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as somethingeminently religious. Death and dissolution take place in the midst oflife, for death is no more a mystery than life. In the open air, in thepress of men, the soul takes flight. She is no stranger, for everythingis soul--houses, trees, men, the elements into which the body isresolved. Death is not annihilation, it is change of form; and throughall changes of form the essence persists. 

But now turn back to Canton. We pass the shops of the coffin-makers. Welinger. But "No stop, " says our guide; "better coffins soon. " "Soon" iswhat the guide-books call the "City of the Dead. " A number of littlechapels; and laid in each a great lacquered coffin in which the dead manlives. I say "lives" advisedly, for there is set for his use a table anda chair, and every morning he is provided with a cup of tea. A bunch ofpaper, yellow and white, symbolises his money; and perhaps a couple offigures represent attendants. There he lives, quite simply andnaturally as he had always lived, until the proper time and place isdiscovered in which he may be buried. It may be months, it may be, orrather, might have been, years; for I am told that a reformingGovernment has limited the time to six months. And after burial? Why, presumably he lives still. But not with the life of the universal soul. Oh no! There have been mystics in China, but the Chinese are notmystical. What he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and, one might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family chapelof the Changs--another of the sights of Canton--one sees ranged roundthe walls hundreds of little tablets, painted green and inscribed ingold. These are the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged inthree classes, those who pay most being in the first and those who payleast in the third. One can even reserve one's place--first, second, orthird--while one is still alive, by a white tablet. You die, and thegreen is substituted. And so, while you yet live, you may secure yoursocial status after death. How--how British! Yes, the word is out; and Iventure to record a suspicion that has long been maturing in my mind. The Chinese are not only Western; among the Western they are English. Their minds move as ours do; they are practical, sensible, reasonable. And that is why--as it would seem--they have more sympathy withEnglishmen, if not with the English Government, than with any otherWesterners. East may be East and West West, though I very much doubt it. But if there be any truth in the aphorism, we must define our terms. TheEast must be confined to India, and China included in the West. That asa preliminary correction. I say nothing yet about Japan. But I shallhave more to say, I hope, about China. 

II

NANKING

The Chinese, one is still told, cannot and will not change. On the otherhand, Professor Ross writes a book entitled _The Changing Chinese_. Andanyone may see that the Chinese educated abroad are transformed, at anyrate externally, out of all recognition. In Canton I met some of theofficials of the new Government; and found them, to the outward sense, pure Americans. The dress, the manners, the accent, the intellectualoutfit--all complete! Whether, in some mysterious sense, they remainChinese at the core I do not presume to affirm or deny. But an externaltransformation so complete must imply _some_ inward change. Foreignresidents in China deplore the foreign-educated product. I have met somewho almost gnash their teeth at "young China. " But this seems ratherhard on China. For nearly a century foreigners have been exhorting her, at the point of the bayonet, to adopt Western ways and Western ideas. And when she begins to do so, the same people turn round and accuse herof unpardonable levity, and treachery to her own traditions. What _do_foreigners want? the Chinese may well ask. I am afraid the true answeris, that they want nothing but concessions, interest on loans, and tradeprofits, at all and every cost to China. 

But I must not deviate into politics. What suggested this train ofthought was the student-guide supplied me at Nanking by the Americanmissionary college. There he was, complete American; and, I fear I mustadd, boring as only Americans can bore. Still, he showed me Nanking, andNanking is worth seeing, though the interest of it is somewhat tragic. Awall 20 to 40 feet thick, 40 to 90 feet high, and 22 miles in circuit (Itake these figures on trust) encloses an area larger than that of anyother Chinese city. But the greater part of this area is fields andruins. You pass through the city gate in the train, and find yourself inthe country. You alight, and you are still in the country. A carriagetakes you, in time, to the squalid village, or series of villages, whereare housed the 350, 000 inhabitants of modern Nanking. Among them arequartered the khaki-clad soldiers of new China, the new national flagdraped at the gate of their barracks. Meantime old China swarms, unregenerate, in the narrow little streets, chaffering, chattering, laughing in its rags as though there had never been a siege, asurrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps and theirsores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. Ragged children run formiles beside the carriage, singing for alms; and stop at last, laughing, as though it had been a good joke to run so far and getnothing for it. One monument in all this scene of squalor arrestsattention--the now disused examination hall. It is a kind ofrabbit-warren of tiny cells, six feet deep, four feet broad, and sixfeet high; row upon row of them, opening on narrow unroofed corridors;no doors now, nor, I should suppose, at any time, for it would beimpossible to breathe in these boxes if they had lids. Here, for a weekor a fortnight, the candidates sat and excogitated, unable to lie downat night, sleeping, if they could, in their chairs. And no wonder if, every now and again, one of them incontinently died and was hauled out, a corpse, through a hole in the wall; or went mad and ran amuck amongexaminers and examinees. For centuries, as is well known, this systemselected the rulers of China; and whole lives, from boyhood to extremeold age, were spent in preparing for the examinations. Now all this isabolished; and some people appear to regret it. Once more, what _do_ theforeigners want?

The old imperial city, where once the Ming dynasty reigned, wasdestroyed in the Taiping Rebellion. The Tartar city, where before therevolution 3000 mandarins lived on their pensions, was burnt in thesiege of 1911. Of these cities nothing remains but their huge walls andgates and the ruins of their houses. The principal interest of Nanking, the so-called "Ming tombs, " lies outside the walls. And the interest isnot the tombs, but the road to them. It is lined by huge figures carvedout of monoliths. Brutes first--lions, camels, elephants, horses, a pairof each lying down and a pair standing; then human figures, military andcivil officers. What they symbolise I cannot tell. They are said toguard the road. And very impressive they are in the solitude. Not sowhat they lead to, which is merely a hill, artificial, I suppose, piledon a foundation of stone. Once, my guide informed me, there was a doorgiving admission; and within, a complete house, with all its furniture, in stone. But the door is sealed, and for centuries no one has exploredthe interior. I suggested excavation, but was told the superstition ofthe inhabitants forbade it. "Besides, " said my guide, "the Chinese arenot curious. " I wonder? Whether or no they are curious, they arecertainly superstitious. Apropos, a gunboat ran aground on the Yangtse. The river was falling, and there seemed no chance of getting off formonths. The officers made up their minds to it, and fraternised with thepriest of a temple on the bank. The priest one day asked for aphotograph of the boat. They gave him one, and he asked them to dinner. After dinner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And--"wouldyou believe it?"--next day a freshet came down and set the vesselafloat. Which shows how superstitions are generated and maintained in aworld so little subject to law, on the surface of it, as ours. 

My anecdote has brought me to the Yangtse, and it is on a river-boatthat I write. Hour after hour there passes by the panorama of hills andplain, of green wheat and yellow rape, of the great flood with itsflocks of wild duck, of fishers' cabins on the shore and mud-builtthatched huts, of junks with bamboo-threaded sails skimming on flatbottoms, of high cliffs with monasteries perched on perilous ledges, ofchanging light and shade, of burning sunset and the stars. Travelling byriver is the best of all travelling--smooth, slow, quiet, and soothinglycontemplative. All China, I am informed by some pessimists, is in astate of anarchy, actual or latent. It may be. But it is difficult tobelieve it among these primitive industrious people living and workingas they have lived and worked for 4000 years. Any other country, Isuppose, in such a crisis as the present would be seething with civilwar. But China? When one puts the point to the foreigner who has beentalking of anarchy he says, "Ah! but the Chinese are so peaceable! Theydon't mind whether there's a Government or no. They just go on withoutit!" Exactly! That is the wonderful thing. But even that seems to annoythe foreigner. Once more, what _does_ he want? I give it up. 

III

IN THE YANGTSE GORGES

At the upper end of the gorge poetically named "Ox Liver and HorseLungs" I watched the steamboat smoking and splashing up stream. She hadtraversed in a few hours the distance I, in my houseboat, had takenthree days to cover; and certainly she is much more convenient and muchmore comfortable. That, however, is not necessarily an advantage. Whatmay be urged with some force is that travelling by steamboat is morehumane. It dispenses with human labour of a peculiarly dangerous andstrenuous kind. Twenty-eight boatmen are attached to my single person. Abig junk may have a crew of two hundred. When the wind is not fair theymust row or tow; and towing is not like towing along the Thames!Suddenly you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Presentlythey appear high above, creeping with the line along a ledge of rock. And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, "Plenty coolie fall here. Too highplace. " Or they are clambering over boulders, one or two told off todisentangle the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling alonga greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly able to advancea step or even to hold their own. As a labour-saving machine one mustwelcome the advent of the steamboat, as one is constrained to welcomeeven that of the motor-omnibus. But from the traveller's point of viewit is different. Railways and steamboats enable more of us to travel, and to travel farther, in space. But in experience he travels thefarthest who travels the slowest. A mediæval student or apprenticewalking through Europe on foot really did see the world. A moderntourist sees nothing but the inside of hotels. Unless, that is, hechooses to walk, or ride, or even cycle. Then it is different. Then hebegins to see. As now I, from my houseboat, begin to see China. Notprofoundly, of course, but somehow intimately. For instance, while mycrew eat their midday rice, I stroll up to the neighbouring village. Contrary to all I have been taught to expect, I find it charming, picturesque, not so dirty after all, not so squalid, not so poor. Thepeople, too, who, one thought, would insult or mob the foreigner, eithertake no notice, or, if you greet them, respond in the friendliest way. They may, of course, be explaining to one another that you are a foreigndevil, but nothing in their countenance or manner suggests it. Thechildren are far better-mannered than in most European countries. Theymay follow you, and chatter and laugh; but at least they have not learntto beg. Curiosity they have, and gaiety, but I detect no sign ofhostility. I walk down the long street, with its shops and roomyhouses--far roomier and more prosperous-looking than in most Indianvillages--and come to the temple. Smilingly I am invited to enter. Thereare no mysteries in Chinese religion. I begin to wonder, indeed, whetherthere is any religion left. For everywhere I find the temples andmonasteries either deserted or turned into schools or barracks. This oneis deserted. It is like a series of lumber-rooms, full of dusty idols. The idols were once gaudy, brightly painted "to look like life, " withbeards and whiskers of real hair. But now their splendour is dimmed. Thedemons scowl to no purpose. To no purpose the dragons coil. Notrespasser threatens the god behind his dingy curtains. In one chamberonly a priest kneels before the shrine and chants out of a book while hetaps a bronze vessel with a little hammer. Else, solitude, vacuity, andsilence. Is he Buddhist or Taoist? I have no language in which to ask. Ican only accept with mute gestures the dusty seat he offers and the cupof lukewarm tea. What has happened to religion? So far as I can makeout, something like the "disestablishment of the Church. " The Republichas been at work; and in the next village I see what it has been doing. For there the temple is converted into a school. Delightedly thescholars show me round. On the outside wall, for him who runs to read, are scored up long addition sums in our Western figures. Inside, thewalls are hung with drawings of birds and beasts, of the human skeletonand organs, even of bacteria! There are maps of China and of the world. The children even produce in triumph an English reading-book, though Imust confess they do not seem to have profited by it much. Still, theycan say "cat" when you show them a picture of the creature; which ismore than I could do in Chinese. And China does not change? Wait ageneration! This, remember, is a tiny village in the heart of thecountry, more than 1000 miles from the coast. And this is happening allover the Celestial Empire, I suppose. I start to return to my boat, buthave not gone a quarter of a mile before I hear a shout, and lookingback find half the school following me and escorting their teacher, whospeaks English. He regrets to have missed my visit; will I not returnand let him show me the school? I excuse myself, and he walks with me tothe boat, making what conversation he can. One remark I remember--"Chinaa good place now; China a republic. " And I thought, as we exchangedcards, that he represented the Republic more essentially than thepoliticians whom foreigners so severely criticise. Anyhow, Republic orno, China is being transformed. And there is something other thansteamboats to attest it. 

Which brings me back to my starting-point. On the steamboat you have noadventures. But on the houseboat you do. For instance, the other daythe rope broke as we were towing up a rapid, and down we dashed, turninground and round, and annihilating in five minutes the labour of an hour. I was afraid, I confess; but the boatmen took it as a matter of course. In some way, incomprehensible to me, they got us into the bank, and, looking up, the first thing I saw was an embankment in construction--therailway from Ichang to Chungking. When it is finished we shall go bytrain--not even by steamboat, --and so see nothing except tunnels. Certainly, we shall not be compelled to pass the night in a smallvillage; nor permitted to see the sunset behind these lovely hills andthe moon rising over the river between the cliffs of the gorge. Norshall we then be delayed, as I was yesterday, till the water should rundown, and so tempted to walk into the country. I made for a side valley, forded a red torrent, and found myself among fields and orchards; greenof mulberries, green of fruit trees, green of young corn; and above, thepurple hills, with all their bony structure showing under the skin ofsoil. I followed a high path, greeted by the peasants I met with acharming smile and that delightful gesture whereby, instead of shakingyour hand, they clasp theirs and shake them _at_ you. I came at last toa solitary place, and, sitting down there, watched the evening light onthe mountains. I watched, and they seemed to be saying something. What?

 "Rocks that are bones, earth that is flesh, what, what do you mean Eyeing me silently? Streams that are voices, what, what do you say? You are pouring an ocean into a cup. Yet pour, that all it can hold May at least be water of yours. "

At dusk I got back to the river, and found that a wind had sprung up andthe junks were trying to pass the rapid. There must have been fifty ofthem crowded together. They could only pass one by one; and the scenewas pandemonium. The Chinese are even noisier than the Italians, andpresent the same appearance of confusion. But in some mysterious way anorder is always getting evolved. On this occasion it seemed to beperfectly understood which boat should go first. And presently there shewas, in mid-rapid, apparently not advancing an inch, the ropes held tautfrom a causeway a quarter of a mile off. At last the strain suddenlyceased, and she moved quickly up stream. Another followed. Then it wasdark. And we had to pass the night, after all, tossing uneasily in therough water. Soon after dawn we started again. I went across to thecauseway, and watched the trackers at work--twenty each on two ropes, hardly advancing a step in five minutes. Then the boat's head swung intoshore, the tension ceased; something had happened. I waited half an houror so. "Nothing doing, " in the expressive American phrase. Then I wentback. We had sprung a leak, and my cabin was converted into aswimming-bath. Another hour or so repairing this. Then the rope had tobe brought back and attached again. At last we started for the secondtime, and in half an hour got safely through the hundred yards of racingwaters into the bank above. At ten I got my breakfast, and we started tosail with a fair wind. It dropped. Rain came on. My crew (as always inthat conjuncture) put up their awning and struck work. So here we are at1 P. M. , in a heavy thunder-shower, a mile from the place we tried toleave at six o'clock this morning. This is the ancient method oftravelling--four thousand years old, I suppose. It is very inconvenient!Oh, yes--BUT!----

IV

PEKIN

Professor Giles tells us, no doubt truly, that the Chinese are not areligious nation. No nation, I think, ever was, unless it be theIndians. But religious impulses sweep over nations and pass away, leaving deposits--rituals, priesthoods, and temples. Such an impulseonce swept over China, in the form of Buddhism; and I am now visitingits deposit in the neighbourhood of Pekin. Scattered over the hills tothe west of the city are a number of monastery temples. Some aredeserted; some are let as villas to Europeans; some, like the one whereI am staying, have still their complement of monks--in this temple, I amtold, some three to four hundred. But neither here nor anywhere have Iseen anything that suggests vitality in the religion. I entered one ofthe temples yesterday at dusk and watched the monks chanting andprocessing round a shrine from which loomed in the shadow a giganticbronze-gold Buddha. They began to giggle like children at the entranceof the foreigner and never took their eyes off us. Later, individualmonks came running round the shrines, beating a gong as though to callthe attention of the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctorypraise or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen even inItaly, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the latter end of the gospelof Buddha in China. It seems better that he should sit deserted in hisIndian caves than be dishonoured by such mummeries. 

But once it must have been otherwise. Once this religion was alive. Andthen it was that men chose these exquisite sites for contemplation. TheChinese Buddhists had clearly the same sense for the beauty of naturethat the Italian Franciscans had. In secluded woods and copses theirtemples nestle, courts and terraces commanding superb views over thegreat plain to Pekin. The architecture is delicate and lovely; tiledroofs, green or gold or grey, cornices elaborately carved and painted inlovely harmonies of blue and green; fine trees religiously preserved;the whole building so planned and set as to enhance, not destroy, thelines and colour of the landscape. To wander from one of these templesto another, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in them atnight, is to taste a form of travel impossible in Europe now, thoughfamiliar enough there in the Middle Ages. Specially delightful is it tocome at dusk upon a temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkleas the wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a darkrecess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces and swords that seemto threaten the impious intruder. 

This morning there was a festival, and the people from the countrycrowded into the temple. Very bright and gay they looked in their galaclothes. The women especially were charming; painted, it is true, butpainted quite frankly, to better nature, not to imitate her. Theircheeks were like peaches or apples, and their dresses correspondinglygay. Why they had come did not appear; not, apparently, to worship, fortheir mood was anything but religious. Some perhaps came to carry away alittle porcelain boy or girl as guarantee of a baby to come. For theChinese, by appropriate rites, can determine the sex of a child--asecret unknown as yet to the doctors of Europe! Some, perhaps, came tocure their eyes, and will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of theorgans affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the sightsand the country. We saw a group on their way home, climbing a steep hillfor no apparent purpose except to look at the view. What Englishagricultural labourer would do as much? But the Chinese are not"agricultural labourers"; they are independent peasants; and a people sogay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have foundnowhere else in the world. 

The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate with Italy. Firstthe plain, with its fresh spring green, its dusty paths, its grey andorange villages, its cypress groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs. Then the hills, swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine andclean in colour and form. For this beauty I was unprepared. I have evenread that there is no natural beauty in China. And I was unprepared forPekin too. How can I describe it? At this time of year, seen from above, it is like an immense green park. You mount the tremendous wall, 40 feethigh, 14 miles round, as broad at the top as a London street, and youlook over a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge theorange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, and find thegreat roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running north and south, east andwest, and thick, as the case may be, with dust or mud; and opening outof them a maze of streets and lanes, one-storeyed houses, grey walls androofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, allgoods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarmingpedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in thisgigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley ofgreatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only iscommonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, withits cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists, concession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, occupyingand guarding the great north gate, and playing baseball in itsprecincts. There are the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, the Russians, the Japanese; and there, in a magnificent Chinese palace, are the British, girt by that famous wall of the siege on which theyhave characteristically written "Lest we forget!" Forget what? The oneor two children who died in the Legation, and the one or two men whowere killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devastation whichfollowed when the siege was relieved? This latter, I fear, the Chineseare not likely to forget soon. Yet it would be better if they could. Andbetter if the Europeans could remember much that they forget--couldremember that they forced their presence and their trade on Chinaagainst her will; that their treaties were extorted by force, and theirloans imposed by force, since they exacted from China what areironically called "indemnities" which she could not pay except byborrowing from those who were robbing her. If Europeans could rememberand realise these facts they would perhaps cease to complain that Chinacontinues to evade their demands by the only weapon of theweak--cunning. When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, andpicked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to enter into socialrelations with you merely because you pick him up and, retaining hisproperty, propose that you should now be friends and begin to dobusiness. The obliquity of vision of the European residents on all thesepoints is extraordinary. They cannot see that wrong has been done, andthat wrong engenders wrong. They repeat comfortable formulæ about theduplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge them withdishonesty at the very moment that they are dismembering their country;they attach intolerable conditions to their loans, and then complain iftheir victims attempt to find accommodation elsewhere. Of all the Powersthe United States alone have shown some generosity and fairness, andthey are reaping their reward in the confidence of Young China. TheAmericans had the intelligence to devote some part of the excessiveindemnity they exacted after the Boxer riots to educating Chinesestudents in America. Hundreds of these young men are now returned toChina, with the friendliest feeling to America, and, naturally, anxiousto develop political and commercial relations with her rather than withother Powers. British trade may suffer because British policy has beenless generous. But British trade, I suppose, would suffer in any case. For the British continue to maintain their ignorance and contempt ofChina and all things Chinese, while Germans and Japanese are travellingand studying indefatigably all over the country. "We see too much ofthings Chinese!" was the amazing remark made to me by a business man inShanghai. Too much! They see nothing at all, and want to see nothing. They live in the treaty ports, dine, dance, play tennis, race. China isin birth-throes, and they know and care nothing. A future in China ishardly for them. 

V

THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD

To write from China about the Englishman may seem an odd choice. But tosee him abroad is to see him afresh. At home he is the air one breathes;one is unaware of his qualities. Against a background of other races yousuddenly perceive him, and can estimate him--fallaciously or no--as youestimate foreigners. 

So seen the Englishman appears as the eternal school-boy. I mean noinsult; I mean to express his qualities as well as his defects. He hasthe pluck, the zest, the sense of fair play, the public spirit of ourgreat schools. He has also their narrowness and their levity. Enter hisoffice, and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming, skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with an air ofplaying at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of an hour he will haveasked you round to the club and offered you a whisky and soda. Dine withhim, and the talk will turn on golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, andthe gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definitequestions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise andintelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will flounderresentfully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissingyou as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customsof the country in which he lives he will know and care nothing, exceptso far as they may touch his affairs. He will never, if he can help it, leave the limits of the foreign settlement. Physically he oscillatesbetween his home, his office, the club, and the racecourse; mentally, between his business and sport. On all general topics his opinions aresecond or third hand. They are the ghosts of old prejudices importedyears ago from England, or taken up unexamined from the Englishcommunity abroad. And these opinions pass from hand to hand till theyare as similar as pebbles on the shore. In an hour or so you will haveacquired the whole stock of ideas current in the foreign communitythroughout a continent. Your only hope of new light is in particularinstances and illustrations. And these, of course, may be had for theasking. 

But the Englishman abroad in some points is the Englishman at his best. For he is or has been a pioneer, at any rate in China. And pioneeringbrings out his most characteristic qualities. He loves to decideeverything on his own judgment, on the spur of the moment, directly onthe immediate fact, and in disregard of remoter contingencies andpossibilities. He needs adventure to bring out his powers, and onlyreally takes to business when business is something of a "lark. " Tocombine the functions of a trader with those of an explorer, a soldier, and a diplomat is what he really enjoys. So, all over the world, heopens the ways, and others come in to reap the fruit of his labours. This is true in things intellectual as in things practical. In science, too, he is a pioneer. Modern archæology was founded by Englishtravellers. Darwin and Wallace and Galton in their youth pursuedadventure as much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, whenlaboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is apt to retireand leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, "larks"into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, isfree-living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact, routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is noteasy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has lesscapacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how suchquestions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them. The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to belived before he will consent to live it. The Englishman just livesahead, not aware that there is a problem; or convinced that, if there isone, it will only be solved "by walking. " The philosopher proceeds fromthe abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with the concrete, and may or, more probably, may not arrive at the abstract. No generalrules are of any use to him except such as he may have elaborated forhimself out of his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education. For education teaches how to think in general, and that isn't what hewants or believes in. So, when he gets into affairs, he discards all histraining and starts again at the beginning, learning to think, if heever does learn it, over his own particular job. And his own way, heopines, must be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt and evenindignation for individuals or nations who are moved by "ideas. " At thismoment his annoyance with the leaders of "Young China" is provokedlargely by the fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how anation should be governed and organised, instead of starting with theparticularities of their own society, and trying to mend it piece bypiece and from hand to mouth. Before they make a Constitution, hethinks, they ought to make roads; and before they draw up codes, toextirpate consumption. The conclusion lies near at hand, and I haveheard it drawn--"What they want is a few centuries of British rule. "And, indeed, it is curious how constantly the Englishman abroad isopposed, in the case of other nations, to all the institutions andprinciples he is supposed to be proud of at home. Partly, no doubt, thisis due to his secret or avowed belief that the whole world ought to begoverned despotically by the English. But partly it is because he doesnot believe that the results the English have achieved can be achievedin any other way than theirs. They arrived at them without intention orforesight, by a series of detached steps, each taken without prescienceof the one that would follow. So, and so only, can other nations arriveat them. He does not believe in short cuts, nor in learning by theexperience of others. And so the watchwords "Liberty, " "Justice, ""Constitution, " so dear to him at home, leave him cold abroad. Or, rather, they make him very warm, but warm not with zeal but withirritation. 

Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's enthusiasms. Hecannot endure the profession that a man is moved by high motives. Hisannoyance, for example, with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to thefact that he supports the importation into China of Indian opium. Verycommonly he does not. But the movement is an "agitation" (dreadfulword!). It is "got up" by missionaries. It purports to be based on moralgrounds, and he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is nothimself moved by moral considerations. Almost invariably he is. But hewill never admit it for himself, and he deeply suspects it in others. The words "hypocrite, " "humbug, " "sentimentalist" spring readily to hislips. But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you willfind, often enough, that he has arrived at the same conclusion as the"sentimentalist"--only, of course, for quite different reasons! Forintellect he has little use, except so far as it issues in practicalresults. He will forgive a man for being intelligent if he makes afortune, but hardly otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuousadmiration for a definite intellectual accomplishment which he knows itis hard to acquire and is not sure he could acquire himself. That, forinstance, is his attitude to those who know Chinese. A "sinologue, " hewill tell you, must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give somuch time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he is proud ofthe sinologue--as a public school is proud of a boy so clever as toverge upon insanity, or a village is proud of the village idiot. Something of the same feeling, I sometimes think, underlies his respectfor Shakspere. "If you want that kind of thing, " he seems to say to theforeigner, "and it's the kind of thing you _would_ want, _we_ can do it, you see, better than you can!"

So with art. He is never a connoisseur, but he is often a collector. Partly, no doubt, because there is money in it, but that is a secondaryconsideration. Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to hissporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be preciseand definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know allabout it, except its æsthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannotsee it. He has the _flair_ of the dealer, not the perception of theamateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any distinctionbetween them. 

But these, from his point of view, are trifles. What matters is that hehas pre-eminently the virtues of active life. He is fair-minded, andthis, oddly, in spite of his difficulty in seeing another man's point ofview. When he _does_ see it he respects it. Whereas nimbler-wittednations see it only to circumvent and cheat it. He is honest; as honest, at least, as the conditions of modern business permit. He hates badwork, even when, for the moment, bad work pays. He hates skimping andparing. And these qualities of his make it hard for him to compete withrivals less scrupulous and less generous. He is kind-hearted--much moreso than he cares to admit. And at the bottom of all his qualities he hasthe sense of duty. He will shoulder loyally all the obligations he hasundertaken to his country, to his family, to his employer, to hisemployees. The sense of duty, indeed, one might say with truth, is hisreligion. For on the rare occasions on which he can be persuaded tobroach such themes you will find, I think, at the bottom of his mindthat what he believes in is Something, somehow, somewhere, in theuniverse, which helps him, and which he is helping, when he does right. There must, he feels, be some sense in life. And what sense would therebe if duty were nonsense?

Poets, artists, philosophers can never be at home with the Englishman. His qualities and his defects alike are alien to them. In his companythey live as in prison, for it is not an air in which wings can soar. But for solid walking on the ground he has not his equal. The phrase"Solvitur ambulando" must surely have been coined for him. And no doubton his road he has passed, and will pass again, the wrecks of many aflying-machine. 

VI

CHINA IN TRANSITION

The Chinese Revolution has proceeded, so far, with less disturbance andbloodshed than any great revolution known to history. There has beenlittle serious fighting and little serious disorder; nothing comparableto that which accompanied, for instance, the French Revolution of 1789. And this, no doubt, is due to the fact that the Chinese are alone amongnations of the earth in detesting violence and cultivating reason. Theirinstinct is always to compromise and save everybody's face. And this isthe main reason why Westerners despise them. The Chinese, they aver, have "no guts. " And when hard pressed as to the policy of the WesternPowers in China, they will sometimes quite frankly confess that theyconsider the West has benefited China by teaching her the use of force. That this should be the main contribution of Christian to Pagancivilisation is one of the ironies of history. But it is part of thegreater irony which gave the Christian faith to precisely those nationswhose fundamental instincts and convictions were and are in radicalantagonism to its teaching. 

Though, however, it is broadly true that the Chinese have relied onreason and justice in a way and to a degree which is inconceivable inthe West, they have not been without their share of original sin. Violence, anarchy, and corruption have played a part in their history, though a less part than in the history of most countries. And theseforces have been specially evident in that department to whichWesterners are apt to pay the greatest attention--in the department ofgovernment. Government has always been less important in China than inthe Western world; it has always been rudimentary in its organisation;and for centuries it has been incompetent and corrupt. Of thiscorruption Westerners, it is true, make more than they fairly should. China is no more corrupt (to say the least) than the United States orItaly or France, or than England was in the eighteenth century. And muchthat is called corruption is recognised and established "squeeze, "necessary, and understood to be necessary, to supplement the inadequatesalaries of officials. A Chinese official is corrupt much as LordChancellor Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought properlyto be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. Moreover, thepeople have always had their remedy. When the recognised "squeeze" isexceeded, they protest by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the mostunfavourable view, may be described as corruption tempered by anarchy. 

And this system, it is admitted, still prevails after the Revolution. Clearly, indeed, it cannot be extirpated until officials are properlypaid; and China is not in a position to pay for any reform while thePowers are drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources by thatparticular form of robbery called by diplomatists "indemnity. " The newofficials, then, are "corrupt" as the old ones were; and they aresomething more. They are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full ofideas as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even moredivorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign education seems to makea cut right across a Chinaman's life. He returns with a new head; andthis head never gets into normal relations with his heart. That, Ibelieve, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with enormousrapidity and freedom unchecked by the fly-wheel of traditional feelings. And it is Jacobinism that accounts for the extraordinary vigour of thecampaign against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to maintain thatthis campaign is not serious. But that is because Europeans simplycannot conceive that any body of men should be in as deadly earnestabout a moral issue as are the representatives of Young China. Theanti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. Smokers areflogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; and farmers who resist areshot down. The other day in Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventyfarmers who had protested against the destruction of their crops werelocked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of seventy-six, falselyaccused of growing poppy, was fined 500 dollars, and when he refused topay was flogged to death by the orders of a young official oftwenty-two. Stories of this kind come in from every part of the country;and though this or that story may be untrue or exaggerated, there can beno doubt about the general state of affairs. The officials are puttingdown opium with a vigour and a determination which it is inconceivableshould ever be applied in the West to the traffic in alcohol. But indoing so they are showing a ruthlessness which does not seem to benative to the Chinese, and which perhaps is to be accounted for by whatI have called Jacobinism, resulting from the effects of a Westerneducation that has been unable to penetrate harmoniously the complicatedstructure of Chinese character. 

The anti-opium campaign is one example of the way in which theRevolution has elicited and intensified violence in this peace-lovingpeople. Another example is the use of assassination. This has been anaccompaniment of all great revolutions. It took the form of"proscriptions" in Rome, of the revolutionary tribunals in France. InChina it is by comparison a negligible factor; but it exists. Two monthsago a prominent leader of the southern party was assassinated; andpopular suspicion traces the murder to high Government officials, andeven to the President himself. The other day a southern general waskilled by a bomb. For the manufacture of bombs is one of the thingsChina has learned from the Christian West; and the President lives inconstant terror of this form of murder. China, it will be seen, does notaltogether escape the violence that accompanies all revolutions. Nordoes she altogether escape the anarchy. Anarchy, indeed, that is asimple strike against authority, may be said to be part of the Chinesesystem. It is the way they have always enforced their notions ofjustice. A curious example has been recently offered by the students ofthe Pekin University. For various reasons--good or bad--they haveobjected to the conduct of their Chancellor. After ineffectual protests, they called upon him in large numbers with his resignation written out, and requested him to sign it. He refused; whereupon they remarked thatthey would call again the next day with revolvers; and in the intervalhe saw wisdom and signed. Last week there was a similar episode. The newChancellor proved as unpalatable as his predecessor. The students oncemore presented themselves with his resignation written out. He refusedto resign, and, as the students aver, scurrilously abused them. Theyproceeded to the Minister of Education, who refused to see them. Thereupon they camped out in his courtyard, and stayed all day and allnight, sending a message to the professors dated "from under the treesof the Education Office" to explain that they were unfortunately unableto attend lectures. This Chancellor, too, it would seem, has seen wisdomand resigned. 

How strange it all seems to Western eyes! A country, we should suppose, where such things occur, is incapable of organisation. But it is certainthat we are wrong. Our notion is that everything must be done byauthority, and that unless authority is maintained there will beanarchy. The Chinese notion is that authority is there to carry out whatthe people recognise to be common sense and justice; if it doesotherwise, it must be resisted; and if it disappears life will still goon--as it is going on now in the greater part of China--on the basis ofthe traditional and essentially reasonable routine. Almost certainly thestudents of the University had justice on their side; otherwise suchaction would not be taken; and when they get justice they will be moredocile and orderly than our own undergraduates at home. 

Another thing surprising to European observers is the apparent belief ofthe Chinese in verbal remonstrance. Under the present régime officialsand public men are allowed the free use of the telegraph. Theconsequence is that telegrams of advice, admonition, approval, blame, fear, hope, doubt pour in daily to the Government from civil andmilitary governors, from members of Parliament and party leaders. In thepaper to-day, for example, is a telegram from the Governors ofseventeen provinces addressed to the National Assembly. It begins asfollows:

 "To the President, the Cabinet, the Tsan Yi Yuan, the Chung Yi Yuan, and the Press Association, --When the revolution took place at Wuchang, the various societies and groups responded, and when the Republic was inaugurated the troops raised among these bodies were gradually disbanded. For fear that, being driven by hunger, these disbanded soldiers would become a menace to the place, the various societies and groups have established a society at Shanghai called the Citizens' Progressive Society, to promote the means of livelihood for the people, and the advancement of society, and the establishment has been registered in the offices of the Tutuhs of the provinces. "

Then follows a statement of the "six dangers" to which the country isexposed, an appeal to the Assembly to act more reasonably andcompetently, and then the following peroration:

 "The declarations of us, Yuan-hung and others, are still there, our wounds have not yet been fully recovered, and should the sea and ocean be dried up, our original hearts will not be changed. We will protect the Republic with our sinews and blood of brass and iron, we will take the lead of the province, and be their backbone, and we will not allow the revival of the monarchy and the suppression of the powers of the people. Let Heaven and earth be witness to our words. You gentlemen are pillars of the political parties, or the representatives of the people, and you should unite together and not become inconsistent. You first determined that the Loan is necessary, but such opinion is now changed, and you now reject the Loan. Can the ice be changed into red coal in your hearts? Thus even those who love and admire you will not be able to defend your position. However, if you have any extraordinary plan or suggestion to save the present situation, you can show it to us. "

Some of the strange effect produced by this document is due, no doubt, to translation. But it, like the many others of the kind I have read, seems to indicate what is at the root of the Chinese attitude to life--abelief in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said enough to showthat this attitude does not exclude the use of violence; but I feel surethat it limits it far more than it has ever been limited in Europe. Evenin time of revolution the Chinese are peaceable and orderly to an extentunknown and almost unbelievable in the West. And the one thing the Westis teaching them and priding itself on teaching them is the absurdity ofthis attitude. Well, one day it is the West that will repent becauseChina has learnt the lesson too well. 

VII

A SACRED MOUNTAIN

It was midnight when the train set us down at Tai-an-fu. The moon wasfull. We passed across fields, through deserted alleys where sleeperslay naked on the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by hallsand pavilions, by shimmering tree-shadowed spaces, up and down steps, and into a court where cypresses grew. We set up our beds in a verandah, and woke to see leaves against the morning sky. We explored the vasttemple and its monuments--iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tabletof the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stonesinscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall afterhall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumblingwalls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent ofTai Shan, the most sacred mountain in China, the most frequented, perhaps, in the world. There, according to tradition, legendary emperorsworshipped God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, andsighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. The greatChin-Shih-Huang was there in the third century B. C. Chien Lung in theeighteenth century covered it with inscriptions. And millions of humblepilgrims for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep andnarrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no détours, but follows straightup the bed of a stream, and the greater part of the five thousand feetis ascended by stone steps. A great ladder of eighteen flights climbsthe last ravine, and to see it from below, sinuously mounting theprecipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, isenough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least were glad to bechaired some part of the way. A wonderful way! On the lower slopes itpasses from portal to portal, from temple to temple. Meadows shaded withaspen and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool to greenpool. Higher up are scattered pines Else the rocks are bare--bare, butvery beautiful, with that significance of form which I have foundeverywhere in the mountains in China. 

To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. All the way up therocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctityof the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially, by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. Theyare models, one is told, of caligraphy as well as of literarycomposition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not bethe one without the other. The very names of favourite spots are poemsin themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phoenixes"; another "thefountain of the white cranes. " A rock is called "the tower of thequickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of theclouds. " More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on arock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles, " because there somemandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funnystories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarlyChinese!

It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple thatcrowns it, dedicated to Yü Huang, the "Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; andhis image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. Butwe did not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disc, straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the river, fivethousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim grey levels. 

Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after rangeof lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, withhalf a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Fullin view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the greatTang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to drink and makeverses. They are still known to tradition as the "six idlers of thebamboo grove"; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upontheir symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hourspassed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacredto what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, forthere are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There aretemples here to various gods: to the mountain himself; to the Lady ofthe mountain, Pi-hsia-yüen, who is at once the Venus ofLucretius--"goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as thesky, " one inscription calls her--and the kindly mother who giveschildren to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to theGreat Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; tothe Cloud-compeller; to many others. And in all this, is there no roomfor God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worshipthe mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or thespirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that somemen adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor--ishe a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions setup by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run as follows:--

 "Without labour, oh Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest things. "

 "Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world. "

 "In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord to achieve great works. "

These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are as religious asanything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of theworshippers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of worshippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in anycountry are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do notknow that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form ofreligion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty andwhat lies behind it--for the religion of a Wordsworth--they seem to bepre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many otherslike it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, theinscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view isloveliest--all goes to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, inall the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature?

 "Great God, I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. "

That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never havebeen wrung from him had he been born in China. 

And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers ofChina--"pro-Chinese, " as they are contemptuously called in theEast--assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, eventhe candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, isapt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shanmay help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate aplace of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essentialvalues of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true--and it is far from being true in anyunqualified sense--would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation ofinadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, thesuperstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding itsfoundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Westerncivilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgaritynever before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. Itis terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western floodflinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulousfoam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaninglessarchitectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen, all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the Westeverything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think thatthis destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadentæsthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need ofsewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. Itimplies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China theopposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West willshortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up afunicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where theChinese have written poems in exquisite caligraphy, _they_ will coverthe rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series oftemples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in thelandscape, _they_ will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabson the face of nature. I say with confidence that they _will_, becausethey _have_ done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, ourmedicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high aprice for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantagesthey may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitiveculture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks ofcivilising China. Would that China could civilise the West!

PART III

JAPAN

I

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN

Japan, surely, must be a mirage created by enchantment. Nothing sobeautiful could be real. Take the west coast of Scotland, bathe it inMediterranean light and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific. Take the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, anddominate all with the only perfect mountain in the world--a mountainthat catches at your breath like a masterpiece of art. Make the copseswoods, and the woods forests. For our fields with their hedgerowssubstitute the vivid green of rice, shining across the gleam of floodedplains. Everywhere let water flow; and at every waterfall and cave erecta little shrine to hallow the spot. Over the whole pour a flood of purewhite light, and you have a faint image of Japan. Perhaps it is not, naturally, more beautiful than the British Isles--few countries are. Butit is unspoilt by man, or almost so. Osaka, indeed, is as ugly asManchester, Yokohama as Liverpool. But these are small blots. For therest, Japan is Japan of the Middle Ages, and lovely as England may havebeen, when England could still be called merry. 

And the people are lovely, too. I do not speak of facial beauty. Somemay think, in that respect, the English or the Americans handsomer. Butthese people have the beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masquesthat pass for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, quick, responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiffinteguments, they have active members, for the most bare or movingfreely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, machine-likeemission of sound they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical. Their children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, socheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely to walk in thestreets and look at them. It is a pure happiness, I might almost say, tolook at anyone, so gay is their greeting, so radiant their smile, sofull of vitality their gestures. I do not know what they think of theforeigner, but at least they betray no animosity. They let his stiff, ungainly presence move among them unchallenged. Perhaps they are sorryfor him; but I think they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, ofOld Japan, of the Japan that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did, in the south, avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It isstill the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do notbelieve; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh, unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at least ofnot destroying beauty. 

And in this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if itwas less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japanto compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is nostone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to comparewith the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating from thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries are to be seen in Kyoto andelsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea how exquisite human lifemight be made. The Japanese, as is well known, discovered the secret ofemptiness. Their rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paperwalls, and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old palatialrooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a background of gold-leafemerge and fade away suggestions of river and coast and hill, ofpeonies, chrysanthemums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds andpools, of all that is elusive and choice in nature; decorations that arealso lyric poems, hints of landscape that yet never pretend to be asubstitute for the real thing. The real thing is outside, and perhaps itwill not intrude; for where we should have glass windows the Japanesehave white paper screens. But draw back, if you choose, one of thesescreens, and you will see a little landscape garden, a little lake, alittle bridge, a tiny rockery, a few goldfish, a cluster of irises, abed of lotus, and, above and beyond, the great woods. These are royalapartments; but all the cost, it will be seen, is lavished on the workof art. The principle is the same in humbler homes. 

People who could so devise life, we may be sure, are people with afineness of perception unknown to the West, unless it were once inancient Greece. The Japanese indeed, I suspect, are the Greeks of theEast. In the theatre at Kyoto this was curiously borne in upon me. Onthe floor of the house reclined figures in loose robes, bare-necked andbarefooted. On the narrow stage were one or two actors, chanting inmeasured speech, and moving slowly from pose to pose. From boxes oneither side of the stage intoned a kind of chorus; and a flute andpizzicato strings accompanied the whole in the solemn strains of someancient mode. I have seen nothing so like what a Greek play may havebeen, though doubtless even this was far enough away. And still more wasI struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to the tragedy, andI found the young and old Japan confronting one another exactly as theyoung and old Athens met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the_Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount Fuji; theactors two groups of young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses ofthe Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set wereclimbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and theymeet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but notunguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, likethose of Aristophanes, were with the old school. It is the pilgrims whoreach the top and the modern young women who collapse. And the modernyoung man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and frightened by aghost. The playwright had at least Aristophanes' gift of lampoon, thoughI doubt whether he had a touch of his genius. Perhaps, however, he had abetter cause. For, I doubt, modern Japan may deserve lampooning morethan the Athens of Aristophanes. For modern Japan is the modern West. And that--well, it seemed to be symbolised to me yesterday in the train. In my carriage were two Japanese. One was loosely wrapt in a kimono, bare throat and feet, fine features, fine gestures, everythingaristocratic and distinguished. The other was clad in European dress, sprigged waistcoat, gold watch-chain, a coarse, thick-lipped face, apodgy figure. It was a hot July day, and we were passing through some ofthe loveliest scenery in the world. He first closed all doors andwindows, and then extended himself at full length and went to sleep. There he lay, his great paunch sagging--prosperity exuding from everypore--an emblem and type of what in the West we call a "successful" man. And the other? The other, no doubt, was going downhill. Both, of course, were Japanese types; but the civilisation of the West chose the one andrejected the other. And if civilisation is to be judged, as it fairlymay be, by the kind of men it brings to the top, there is much to besaid for the point of view of my Tory playwright. 

II

A "NO" DANCE

On entering the theatre I was invaded by a sense of serenity and peace. There was no ornament, no upholstery, no superfluity at all. A squarebuilding of unvarnished wood; a floor covered with matting, exquisitelyclean, and divided into little boxes, or rather trays (so low were thepartitions), in which the audience knelt on their heels, beautiful inloose robes; running out from the back wall a square stage, with a roofsupported by pillars; a passage on the same level, by which the actorsentered, on the left; the screens removed from the outer walls, so thatthe hall was open to the air, and one looked out on sky and trees, orlater on darkness, against which shone a few painted lanterns. Comparethis with the Queen's Hall in London, or with any of our theatres, andrealise the effect on one's mood of the mere setting of the drama. Dramawas it? Or opera? Or what? It is called a "dance. " But there was verylittle dancing. What mainly remains in my mind is a series of visualimages, one more beautiful than another; figures seated motionless forminutes, almost for half-hours, with a stillness of statues, not aneyelash shaking; or passing very slowly across the stage, with thatmovement of bringing one foot up to the other and pausing before thenext step which is so ridiculous in our opera, but was here so right andso impressive; or turning slowly, or rising and sitting with immensedeliberation; each figure right in its relation to the stage and to theothers. All were clothed in stiff brocade, sumptuous but not gorgeous. One or two were masked; and all of them, I felt, ought to have been. Themask, in fact, the use of which in Greek drama I had always felt to beso questionable, was here triumphantly justified. It completed therepudiation of actuality which was the essence of the effect. It was amusical sound, as it were, made visible. It symbolised humanity, but itwas not human, still less inhuman. I would rather call it divine. Andthis whole art of movement and costume required that completion. Once Ihad seen a mask I missed it in all the characters that were without it. 

To me, then, this visual spectacle was the essence of the "No" dance. The dancing itself, when it came, was but a slight intensification ofthe slow and solemn posing I have described. There was no violence, noleaping, no quick steps; rather a turning and bending, a slow sweep ofthe arm, a walking a little more rhythmical, on the verge, at most, ofrunning. It was never exciting, but I could not say it was neverpassionate. It seemed to express a kind of frozen or petrified passion;rather, perhaps, a passion run into a mould of beauty and turned out astatue. I have never seen an art of such reserve and such distinction. "Or of such tediousness, " I seem to hear an impatient reader exclaim. Well, let me be frank. Like all Westerners, I am accustomed to life inquick time, and to an art full of episode, of intellectual content, ofrapid change and rapid development. I have lost to a great extent thatpower of prolonging an emotion which seems to be the secret of Easternart. I am bored--subconsciously, as it were--where an Oriental is lulledinto ecstasy. His case is the better. But also, in this matter of the Nodance he has me at a disadvantage. In the first place he can understandthe words. These, it is true, have far less importance than in a dramaof Shakspere. They are only a lyric or narrative accompaniment to themusic and the dance. Still they have, one is informed, a beauty muchappreciated by Japanese, and one that the stranger, ignorant of thelanguage, misses. And secondly, what is worse, the music failed to moveme. Whether this is my own fault, or that of the music, I do not presumeto decide, for I do not know whether, as so often is the case, I wasdefeated by a convention unfamiliar to me, or whether the convention hasreally become formal and artificial. In any case, after the first shockof interest, I found the music monotonous. It was solemn and religiousin character, and reminded me more of Gregorian chants than of anythingelse. But it had one curious feature which seemed rather to be primitiveand orgiastic. The two musicians who played the drums accompanied theperformers, almost unceasingly, by a kind of musical ejaculation, starting on a low note and swooping up to a high, long-held falsettocry. This over and over again, through the dialogue and through thesinging. The object, I suppose, and perhaps, to Japanese, the effect, isto sustain a high emotional tone. In my case it failed, as the musicgenerally failed. My interest, as I began by saying, was maintained bythe visual beauty; and that must have been very great to be able tomaintain itself independently of the words and the music. 

As to the drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in which we havecome to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction, " noknot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession ofscenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy, or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be calledepic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it mostobviously differs from the Greek drama. It has no intellectual content, or very little. And, perhaps for that reason, it has had no development, but remains fossilised where it was in the fifteenth century. On theother hand, these actors, I felt, are the only ones who could act Greekdrama. They have, I think, quite clearly the same tradition and aim asthe Greeks. They desire not to reproduce but to symbolise actuality; andtheir conception of acting is the very opposite of ours. The last thingthey aim at is to be "natural. " To be unnatural rather is their object. Hence the costume, hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. Andhow effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passiononly those will understand who have realised how ineffective for thatpurpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles orShakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For outof it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poeticdrama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetryin England, if we had as a living tradition anything analogous to workupon!

III

NIKKO

Waking in the night, I heard the sound of running water. Across mywindow I saw, stretching dimly, the branch of a pine, and behind itshone the stars. I remembered that I was in Japan and felt that all theessence of it was there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon andstars. All their life, as all their art, seems to be a mood of these. For to them their life and their art are inseparable. The art is not anaccomplishment, an ornament, an excrescence. It is the flower of theplant. Some men, some families of men, feeling beauty as every one feltit, had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should say--it is theJapanese view--to suggest it. To them the branch of a tree stands for aforest, a white disk on gold for night and the moon, a quivering reedfor a river, a bamboo stalk for a grove. Their painters are poets. Bypassionate observation they have learnt what expression of the part mostinevitably symbolises the whole. That they give; and their admirers, trained like them in feeling, fill in the rest. This art presupposes, what it has always had, a public not less sensitive than the artist; asimilar mood, a similar tradition, a similar culture. Feel as they do, and you must create as they do, or at least appreciate their creations. 

It was with this in my mind that I wandered about this exquisite place, where Man has made a lovely nature lovelier still. More even than by thefamous and sumptuous temples I was moved by the smaller and humblershrines, so caressing are they of every choice spot, so expressive, notof princely, but of popular feeling. Here is one, for instance, standingunder a cliff beside a stream, where women offer bits of wood in thefaith that so they will be helped to pass safely through the pangs ofchildbirth. Here in a ravine is another where men who want to developtheir calves hang up sandals to a once athletic saint. "The Lord, " ourScripture says, "delighteth not in any man's legs. " How pleasant, then, it must be to have a saint who does! Especially for the Japanese, whoselegs are so finely made, and who display them so delightfully. Such, allover the world, is the religion of the people, when they have anyreligion at all. And how human it is, and how much nearer to life thanthe austerities and abstractions of a creed!

Hour after hour I strolled through these lovely places, so beautifullyordered that the authorities, one feels, must themselves delight in thenature they control. I had proof of it, I thought, in a notice whichran as follows:

 "FAMOUS TAKINO TEMPLE STANDS NOT FAR AWAY, AND SOMEN FALL TOO. IT IS WORTH WHILE TO BE THERE ONCE. "

It is indeed, and many times! But can you imagine a rural council inEngland breaking into this personal note? And how reserved! Almost likeJapanese art. Compare the invitation I once saw in Switzerland, to visit"das schönste Schwärm- und Aussichtspunkt des ganzen SchweitzerischenReichs. " There speaks the advertiser. But beside the Somen Fall therewas no restaurant. 

Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back oftheir minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sensefor beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. _Tu regereimperio populos, Romane memento_ they would say, if they knew the tag;and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie tothis complacent theory. No nations were ever more virile than the Greeksor the Italians. They have left a mark on the world which will endurewhen Anglo-Saxon civilisation is forgotten. And none have been, or are, more virile than the Japanese. That they have the delicacy of women, too, does not alter the fact. The Russian War proved it, if proof sotragic were required; and so does all their mediæval history. Japanesefeudalism was as bloody, as ruthless, as hard as European. It was evenmore gallant, stoical, loyal. But it had something else which I thinkEurope missed, unless it were once in Provence. It had in the midst ofits hardness a consciousness of the pathos of life, of its beauty, itsbrevity, its inexplicable pain. I think in no other country has anythingarisen analogous to the Zen sect of Buddhism, when knights withdrew frombattle to a garden and summerhouse, exquisitely ordered to symbolise thespiritual life, and there, over a cup of tea served with an elaborateritual, looking out on a lovely nature, entered into mystic communionwith the spirit of beauty which was also the spirit of life. From thatcommunion, with that mood about them, they passed out to kill or todie--to die, it might be, by their own hand, by a process which I thinkno Western man can bear even to think of, much less conceive himself asimitating. 

This sense at once of the beauty and of the tragedy of life, this powerof appreciating the one and dominating the other, seems to be theessence of the Japanese character. In this place, it will be remembered, is the tomb of Iyeyasu, the greatest statesman Japan has produced. Appropriately, after his battles and his labours, he sleeps under theshade of trees, surrounded by chapels and oratories more sumptuous andsuperb than anything else in Japan, approached for miles and miles by aroad lined on either side with giant cryptomerias. His spirit, if itcould know, would appreciate, we may be sure, this habitation of beauty. For these men, ruthless as they were, were none the less sensitive. Forexample, the traveller is shown (in Kyoto, I think) a little pavilion ina garden where Hideyoshi used to sit and contemplate the moon. I believeit. I think Iyeyasu did the same. And also he wrote this, on a roll herepreserved:

 "Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy load. Let thy steps be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. Persuade thyself that privations are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou hast passed through. Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance for ever. Look upon wrath as thy enemy. If thou knowest only what it is to conquer, and knowest not what it is to be defeated, woe unto thee! It will fare ill with thee. Find fault with thyself rather than with others. Better the less than the more. "

Marcus Aurelius might have said that. But Marcus Aurelius belonged to arace peculiarly insensitive to beauty. The Japanese stoics were alsoartists and poets. Their earliest painters were feudal lords, and it wasfeudal lords who fostered and acted the No dances. If Nietzsche hadknown Japan--I think he did not?--he would surely have found in theseDaimyos and Samurai the forerunners of his Superman. A blood-red blossomgrowing out of the battlefield, that, I think, was his ideal. It is onewhich, I hope, the world has outlived. I look for the lily floweringover the fields of peace. 

IV

DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN

When Japan was opened to the West, after more than two centuries ofseclusion, she was in possession of a national spirit which had beenenabled, by isolation, to become and remain simple and homogeneous. Allpublic feeling, all public morals centred about the divinity of theEmperor; an idea which, by a process unique in history, had hibernatedthrough centuries of political obscuration, and emerged again to thelight with its prestige unimpaired in the middle of the nineteenthcentury. In the Emperor, one may say, Japan was incarnate. And to thisfaith the Japanese, as well as foreign observers, attribute their greatachievement in the Russian War. The little book of Captain Sakurai, _Human Bullets_, testifies to this fact in every sentence: "Through theabundant grace of Heaven and the illustrious virtue of his Majesty, theImperial forces defeated the great enemy both on land and sea. " ... "Ijumped out of bed, cleansed my person with pure water, donned my bestuniform, bowed to the East where the great Sire resides, solemnly readhis proclamation of war, and told his Majesty that his humble subjectwas just starting to the front. When I offered my last prayers--the lastI then believed they were--before the family shrine of my ancestors Ifelt a thrill going all through me, as if they were giving me a solemninjunction, saying: 'Thou art not thy own. For his Majesty's sake, thoushalt go to save the nation from calamity, ready to bear the crushing ofthy bones and the tearing of thy flesh. Disgrace not thy ancestors by anact of cowardice. '" This, it is clear, is an attitude quite differentfrom that of an Englishman towards the King. The King, to us, is at mosta symbol. The Emperor, to the Japanese, is, or was, a god. And thedifference may be noted in small matters. For instance, a Japanese, writing from England, observes with astonishment that we put the head ofthe King on our stamps and cover it with postmarks. That, to a Japanese, seems to be blasphemy. Again, he is puzzled, at the Coronation inWestminster Abbey, to find the people looking down from above on theKing. That, again, seems to him blasphemy. Last year, when the Emperorwas dying, crowds knelt hour after hour, day and night, on the roadbeside the palace praying for him. And a photographer who took a pictureof them by flashlight was literally torn to pieces. One could multiplyexamples, but the thing is plain. The national spirit of Japan centresabout the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies theirpresent problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that thisattitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought isan irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Mencannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that aman is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believethat their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above all, they cannotbe politicians and abstain from analysing the real source and sanctionof political power. English political experience, it is true, suggestsimmense possibilities in the way of clinging to fictions with thefeelings while insisting upon facts in practice. And the famous verse:

 "But I was thinking of a plan To dye my whiskers green, And always wear so large a fan That they should not be seen, "

might have been written to summarise the development of the BritishConstitution. But the success of that method depends upon the conditionthat the fictions shall be nothing _but_ fictions. The feelings of theEnglish can centre about the King only because they are well assuredthat he does not and will not govern. But that condition does not existin Japan. The Japanese Constitution is conceived on the German, not theEnglish, model; and it bristles with clauses which are intended toprevent the development which has taken place in England--the shiftingof power from the Sovereign to a Parliamentary majority. The Ministersare the Emperor's Ministers; the policy is the Emperor's policy. That isthe whole tenour of the Constitution. No Constitution, it is true, can"trammel up" facts and put power anywhere but where nature puts it. Ifan Emperor is not a strong man he will not govern, and his Ministerswill. And it seems to be well understood among Japanese politicians thatthe personal will of the Emperor does not, in fact, count for very much. But it is supposed to; and that must become an important point so soonas conflict develops between the Parliament and the Government. And suchconflict is bound to arise, and is already arising. Japanese parties, itis true, stand for persons rather than principles; and the realgoverning power hitherto has been a body quite unknown to theConstitution--namely, the group of "Elder Statesmen. " But there aresigns that this group is disintegrating, and that its members arebeginning to recognise the practical necessity of forming and dependingupon a party in the country and the House of Representatives. The crisiswhich led, the other day, to the fall of Prince Katsura was provoked bypopular tumults; and it was noticeable that, for the first time, thename of the Emperor was introduced into political controversy. It seemsclear that in the near future either the Emperor must appear openly as afighting force, as the German Emperor does, or he must subside into afigure-head and the government pass into the hands of Parliament. Theformer alternative is quite incompatible with the idea of the god-king;the latter might not be repugnant to it if other things tended to fosterit. But it is so clear that they do not! An Emperor who is titular headof a Parliamentary Government might, and in Japan no doubt _would_, besurrounded with affection and respect. He could never be seriouslyregarded as divine. For that whole notion belongs to an age innocent ofall that is implied in the very possibility of Parliamentary government. It belongs to the age of mythology and poetry, not to the age of reason. Japanese patriotism in the future must depend on love of country, unsupported by the once powerful sanction of a divine personality. 

If this be true, I question very much the wisdom of that part of theJapanese educational system which endeavours to centre all duty aboutthe person of the Emperor. The Japanese are trying a great experiment inState-imposed morality--a policy highly questionable at the best, butbecoming almost demonstrably absurd when it is based on an idea which isforedoomed to discredit. The well-known Imperial rescript, which is keptframed in every school, reads as follows:

 "Our Ancestors founded the State on a vast basis, and deeply implanted virtue; and Our subjects, by their unanimity in their great loyalty and filial affection, have in all ages shown these qualities in perfection. Such is the essential beauty of Our national polity, and such, too, is the true spring of Our educational system. You, Our beloved subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers, be loving husbands and wives, and truthful to your friends. Conduct yourselves with modesty, and be benevolent to all. Develop your intellectual faculties and perfect your moral power by gaining knowledge and by acquiring a profession. Further, promote the public interest and advance the public affairs; and in case of emergency, courageously sacrifice yourself to the public good. Thus offer every support to Our Imperial Dynasty, which shall be as lasting as the Universe. You will then not only be Our most loyal subjects, but will be enabled to exhibit the noble character of your ancestors. 

 "Such are the testaments left us by Our Ancestors, which must be observed alike by their descendants and subjects. These precepts are perfect throughout all ages and of universal application. It is Our desire to bear them in Our heart, in common with you Our subjects, to the end that we may constantly possess their virtues. "

This rescript may be read with admiration. But common sense would teachevery Westerner that a document so framed is at variance with the wholebent of the modern mind, and, if forced upon it, could only goad itinto rebellion. And such, I have been informed, and easily believe, isthe effect it is beginning to have in Japan. Young people brought up onWestern languages and Western science demand a Western, that is arational, sanction for conduct. They do not believe the Emperor to bedivine, and therefore they cannot take their moral principles on trustfrom him and from his ancestors. The violent reaction from thisState-imposed doctrine drives them into sheer scepticism and anarchy. And here, as always throughout history, authority defeats its ownpurposes. Western ideas cannot be taken _in part_. They cannot beapplied to the natural world and fenced off from the moral world. Japanmust go through the same crisis through which the West is passing; shemust revise the whole basis of her traditional morals. And in doing soshe must be content to lose that passionate and simple devotion which isthe good as well as the evil product of an age of uncritical faith. 

V

FUJI

It was raining when we reached Gotemba and took off our boots at theentrance of the inn. I had never before stayed at a Japanese inn, andthis one, so my friend assured me, was a bad specimen of the class. Certainly it was disorderly and dirty. It was also overcrowded. But thatwas inevitable, for a thousand pilgrims in a day were landing at Gotembastation. Men and women, young and old, grandparents, parents, childrencome flocking in to climb the great mountain. The village street islined with inns; and in front of each stood a boy with a lantern hailingthe new arrivals. We were able, in spite of the crowd, to secure a roomto ourselves, and even, with difficulty, some water to wash in--too manypeople had used and were using the one bath! A table and a chair wereprovided for the foreigner, and very uncouth they looked in the prettyJapanese room. But a bed was out of the question. One had to sleep onthe floor among the fleas. Certainly it was not comfortable; but it wasamusing. From my room in the upper storey I looked into the whole rowof rooms in the inn opposite, thrown open to the street, with theirscreens drawn back. One saw families and parties, a dozen or more in aroom, dressing and undressing, naked and clothed, sleeping, eating, talking; all, of course, squatting on the floor, with a low stool for atable, and red-lacquered bowls for plates and dishes. How people manageto eat rice with chopsticks will always be a mystery to me. For my ownpart, I cannot even--but I will not open that humiliating chapter. 

Of the night, the less said the better. I rose with relief, but dressedwith embarrassment; for the girl who waited on us selected the moment ofmy toilet to clean the room. It was still raining hard, and we haddecided to abandon our expedition, for another night in that inn wasunthinkable. But, about eleven, a gleam of sun encouraged us to proceed, and we started on horseback for the mountain. And here I must note thatby the official tariff, approved by the police, a foreigner is chargedtwice as much for a horse as a Japanese. If one asks why, one is calmlyinformed that a foreigner, as a rule, is heavier! This is typical oftravel in Japan; and there have been moments when I have sympathisedwith the Californians in their discrimination against the Japanese. Those moments, however, are rare and brief, and speedily repented of. 

Naturally, as soon as we had started the weather clouded over again. Werode for three hours at a foot-pace, and by the time we left our horsesand began the ascent on foot we were wrapped in thick, cold mist. Thereis no difficulty about climbing Fuji, except the fatigue. You simplywalk for hours up a steep and ever-steeper heap of ashes. It was perhapsas well that we did not see what lay before us, or we might have beendiscouraged. We saw nothing but the white-grey mist and the purple-greysoil. Except that, looming out of the cloud just in front of us, therekept appearing and vanishing a long line of pilgrims, with peaked hats, capes, and sandals, all made of straw, winding along with their staffs, forty at least, keeping step, like figures in a frieze, like shadows ona sheet, like spirits on the mountain of Purgatory, like anything butsolid men walking up a hill. So for hours we laboured on, the slopebecoming steeper every step, till we could go no further, and stopped ata shelter to pass the night. Here we were lucky. The other climbers hadhalted below or above, and we had the long, roomy shed to ourselves. Blankets, a fire of wood, and a good meal restored us. We sat warmingand congratulating ourselves, when suddenly our guide at the door gave acry. We hurried to see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below usand a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like acliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea--a glacier infinite asthe ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not ofice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closingthere, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermostverge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellowglobe, swimming up above the clouds, touching their lights with gold, deepening their shadows, and spreading, where it rose, a lake of silverfire over the surface of the tossing plain. 

We looked till it was too cold to look longer, then wrapped ourselves inquilts and went to sleep. At midnight I woke. Outside there was astrange moaning. The wind had risen; and the sound of it in that lonelyplace gave me a shock of fear. The mountain, then, was more than a heapof dead ashes. Presences haunted it; powers indifferent to human fate. That wind had blown before man came into being, and would blow when hehad ceased to exist. It moaned and roared. Then it was still. But Icould not sleep again, and lay watching the flicker of the lamp on thelong wooden roof, and the streaks of moonlight through the chinks, tillthe coolie lit a fire and called us to get up. We started at four. Theclouds were still below, and the moon above; but she had moved across tothe west, Orion had appeared, and a new planet blazed in the east. Thelast climb was very steep and our breath very scant. But we had otherthings than that to think of. Through a rift in a cloud to the eastwarddawned a salmon-coloured glow; it brightened to fire; lit up the cloudsabove and the clouds below; blazed more and intolerably, till, as wereached the summit, the sun leapt into view and sent a long line oflight down the tumultuous sea of rolling cloud. 

How cold it was! And what an atmosphere inside the highest shelter, where sleepers had been packed like sardines and the newly kindled firefilled the fetid air with acrid smoke! What there was to be seen wesaw--the crater, neither wide nor deep; the Shinto temple, where apriest was intoning prayers; and the Post Office, where an enterprisingGovernment sells picture-postcards for triumphant pilgrims to despatchto their friends. My friend must have written at least a dozen, while Iwaited and shivered with numbed feet and hands. But after an hour webegan the descent, and quickly reached the shelter where we were tobreakfast. Thence we had to plunge again into the clouds. But beforedoing so we took a long look at the marvellous scene--more marvellousthan any view of earth; icebergs tossing in a sea, mountains exhalingand vanishing, magic castles and palaces towering across infinite space. A step, and once more the white-grey mist and the purple-grey soil. Butthe clouds had moved higher; and it was not long before we saw, to thesouth, cliffs and the sea, to the east, the gleam of green fields, running up, under cloud-shadows, to mountain ridges and peaks. And soback to Gotemba, and our now odious inn. 

We would not stop there. So we parted, my friend for Tokyo, I forKyoto. But time-tables had been fallacious, and I found myself landed atNumatsa, with four hours to wait for the night train, no comfort in thewaiting-room, and no Japanese words at my command. I understood then alittle better why foreigners are so offensive in the East. They do notknow the language; they find themselves impotent where their instinct isto domineer; and they visit on the Oriental the ill-temper which isreally produced by their own incompetence. Yes, I must confess that Ihad to remind myself severely that it was I, and not the Japanese, whowas stupid. At last the station-master came to my rescue--thestation-master always speaks English. He endured my petulance with theunfailing courtesy and patience of his race, and sent me off at last ina rickshaw to the beach and a Japanese hotel. But my troubles were notended. I reached the hotel; I bowed and smiled to the group ofkow-towing girls; but how to tell them that I wanted a bathe and a meal?Signs were unavailing. We looked at one another and laughed, but thatdid not help. At last they sent for a student who knew a little English. I could have hugged him. "It is a great pity, " he said, "that thesepeople do not know English. " The pity, I replied, was that I did notknow Japanese, but his courtesy repudiated the suggestion. Could I havea bathing costume? Of course! And in a quarter of an hour he brought mea wet one. Where could I change? He showed me a room; and presently Iwas swimming in the sea, with such delight as he only can know who hasascended and descended Fuji without the chance of a bath. Returning tothe inn, I wandered about in my wet costume seeking vainly the room inwhich I had changed. Laughing girls pushed me here, and pulled me there, uncomprehending of my pantomime, till one at last, quicker than therest, pulled back a slide, and revealed the room I was seeking. Thencame dinner--soup, fried fish, and rice; and--for my weakness--a spoonand fork to eat them with. The whole house seemed to be open, and onelooked into every room, watching the ways of these gay and charmingpeople. At last I paid--to accomplish _that_ by pantomime was easy, --andsaid good-bye to my hostess and her maids, who bowed their heads to theground and smiled as though I had been the most honoured of guestsinstead of a clumsy foreigner, fit food for mirth. A walk in a twilightpine wood, and then back to the station, where I boarded the nighttrain, and slept fitfully until five, when we reached Kyoto, and mywanderings were over. How I enjoyed the comfort of the best hotel in theEast! But also how I regretted that I had not long ago learnt to findcomfort in the far more beautiful manner of life of Japan!

VI

JAPAN AND AMERICA

On the reasons, real or alleged, for the hostility of the Californiansto the Japanese this is not the place to dwell. At bottom, it is aconflict of civilisations, a conflict which is largely due to ignoranceand misunderstanding, and which should never be allowed to develop intoavowed antagonism. For with time, patience, and sympathy it willdisappear of itself. The patience and sympathy, I think, are not lackingon the side of the Japanese, but they are sadly lacking among theCalifornians, and indeed among all white men in Western America. Thetruth is that the Western pioneer knows nothing of Japan and wants toknow nothing. And he would be much astonished, not to say indignant, were he told that the civilisation of Japan is higher than that ofAmerica. Yet there can, I think, be no doubt that this is the case, ifreal values be taken as a standard. America, and the "new" countriesgenerally, have contributed, so far, nothing to the world exceptmaterial prosperity. I do not under-estimate this. It is a great thingto have subdued a continent. And it may be argued that those who areengaged in this task have no energy to spare for other activities. Butthe Japanese subdued their island centuries, even millenniums, ago. And, having reduced it to as high a state of culture as they required, theybegan to live--a thing the new countries have not yet attempted. 

To live, in the sense in which I am using the term, implies that youreflect life in the forms of art, literature, philosophy, and religion. To all these things the Japanese have made notable contributions; lessnotable, indeed, than those of China, from whom they derived theirinspiration, but still native, genuine, and precious. To take first bareexternals, the physical life of the Japanese is beautiful. I read withamazement the other day a quotation from a leading Californian newspaperto the effect that "there is an instinctive sense of physical repugnanceon the part of the Western or European races towards the Japanese race"!Had the writer, I wonder, ever been in Japan? Perhaps it would have madeno difference to him if he had, for he is evidently one of those whocannot or will not see. But to me the first and chief impression ofJapan is the physical attractiveness of the people. The Japanese areperfectly proportioned; their joints, their hands, their feet, theirhips are elegant and fine; and they display to the best advantage thesenatural graces by a costume which is as beautiful as it is simple. Tosee these perfect figures walking, running, mounting stairs, bathing, even pulling rickshaws, is to receive a constant stream of shocks ofsurprise and delight. In so much that, after some weeks in the country, I begin to feel "a sense of physical repugnance" to Americans andEuropeans--a sense which, if I were as uneducated and inexperienced asthe writer in the _Argonaut_, I should call "instinctive, " and make thebasis of a campaign of race-hatred. The misfortune is that the Japaneseabandon their own dress when they go abroad. And in European dress, which they do not understand, and which conceals their bodies, they areapt to look mean and vulgar. Similarly, in European dress, they losetheir own perfect manners and mis-acquire the worst of the West. So thatthere may be some excuse for feeling "repugnance" to the Japaneseabroad, though, of course, it is merely absurd and barbarous to baseupon such superficial distaste a policy of persecution and insult. 

If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, the Japanese showthemselves in no respect inferior, and in some important respectssuperior, to the Americans. New though they are to the whole mentalattitude which underlies science and its applications, they havealready, in half a century, produced physicians, surgeons, pathologists, engineers who can hold their own with the best of Europe and America. All that the West can do in this, its own special sphere, the Japanese, late-comers though they be, are showing that they can do too. Inparticular, to apply the only test which the Western nations seem reallyto accept, they can build ships, train men, organise a campaign, andbeat a great Western Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But allthis, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in our imagination, is secondary and subordinate in a true estimate of civilisation. Thegreat claim the Japanese may make, as I began by saying, is that theyhave known how to live; and they have proved that by the only test--bythe way they have reflected life. 

Japanese literature and art may not be as great as that of Europe; butit exists, whereas that of America and all the new countries is yet toseek. While Europe was still plunged in the darkest of the dark ages, Japanese poets were already producing songs in exquisite response to thebeauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human life. From the seventhcentury on, their painting and their sculpture was reflecting in tenderand gracious forms the mysteries of their faith. Their literature andtheir art changed its content and its form with the centuries, but itcontinued without a break, in a stream of genuine inspiration, down tothe time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. Fromthat moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. Butwhat a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof thatthe Japanese belong to the civilised nations--the nations that can liveand express life. 

But perhaps this test may be rejected. Morals, it may be urged, is thetouchstone of civilisation, not art. Well, take morals. The question isa large one; but, summarily, where do the Japanese fail, as comparedwith the Western nations? Is patriotism the standard? In this respectwhat nation can compete with them? Is it courage? What people arebraver? Is it industry? Who is more industrious? It is their veryindustry that has aroused the jealous fears of the Californians. Is itfamily life? Where, outside the East, is found such solidarity as inJapan? Is it sexual purity? On that point, what Western nation can holdup its head? Is it honesty? What of the honesty of the West? No; noWesterner, knowing the facts, could for a moment maintain that, allround and on the whole, the morals of the Japanese are inferior to thoseof Europe or America. It would probably be easier to maintain theopposite. Judged by every real test the Japanese civilisation is notlower, it is higher than that of any of the new countries who refuse topermit the Japanese to live among them. 

That, I admit, does not settle the question. Competent and impartial menlike Admiral Mahan, who would admit all that I have urged, stillmaintain that the Japanese ought not to be allowed to settle in theWest. This conclusion I do not now discuss. The point I wish to make isthat the question can never be fairly faced, in a dry light, and withreference only to the simple facts, until the prejudice is broken up anddestroyed that the Japanese, and all other Orientals, are "inferior"races. It is this prejudice which distorts all the facts and all thevalues, which makes Californians and British Columbians and Australianssheerly unreasonable, and causes them to jump at one argument afteranother, each more fallacious than the last, to defend an attitude whichat bottom is nothing but the childish and ignorant hatred of theuncultivated man for everything strange. If the Japanese had had whiteskins, should we ever have heard of the economic argument? And should weever have been presented with that new shibboleth "unassimilable"?

VII

HOME

Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London! What a crescendo of life! What aquickening of the flow! What a gathering intensity! "Whatever else wemay think of the West, " I said to the young French artist, "it is, atany rate, the centre of life. " "Yes, " he replied, "but the curious thingis that that Life produces only Death. Dead things, and dead people. " Ireflected. Yes! The _things_ certainly were dead. Look at the Louvre!Look at the Madeleine! Look at any of the streets! Machine-men had madeit all, not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? "Certainly!" heinsisted. "Their works are a proof. Where there is life there is art. And there is no art in the modern world--neither in the East nor in theWest. " "Then what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at theroaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Steam. "

With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot criticism andspeculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, in the trim hedgerows andfields, in the sound of English voices and the sight of English faces. In London it was the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, thediscreetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young men in Cityoffices who reassured me about my baggage, the autumn sun on the maze ofmisty streets, the vast picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of amountain or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St. Paul's--"Dead, " I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade, --Iwent in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold space came thedreary wail I remembered so well. I had heard Church music at Moscow, and knew what it ought to be. But the tremendous passion of that Easternplain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a "sacrededifice"; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines ofJapan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds ofcheerful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and came under thedome. Then something happened--the thing that always happens when onecomes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves thathe was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, thedome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragmentsvisions of my journey--Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese, white robes and bare limbs from Japan, plains of corn, plains of rice, plains of scorched grass; snow-peaks under the stars, volcanoes, greenand black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean;hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marblepalaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors, and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations of peasantsthrough long millenniums, toiling, suffering, believing, in oneunchanging course of life, before the dawn of history on and down tohere and now. As they were, so they are; and I heard them sound as withthe drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone something newappeared. Late in time, Western history emerged, and--astonishingthing--began to move and change! "Why, " I said, "there's somethingtrying to happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?" There wasnot one. But there was--has the reader ever heard the second--or is itthe third?--overture to "Leonora"? A scale begins to run up, first onthe violins; then one by one the other instruments join in, till thegreat basses are swept into the current and run and scale too. So it washere. The West began; but the East caught it up. The unchanging dronebegan to move and flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more andmore intensely, crying and flaming towards--what? Beethoven knew, andput it into his music. We cannot put it into ideas or words. We can seethe problem, not the solution; and the problem is this. To reconcile theWestern flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eternity; the Westernmultiformity with the Eastern identity; the Western energy with theEastern peace. For God is neither Time nor Eternity, but Time inEternity; neither One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit norMatter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, and the greatsaints; the modern artists and the modern saints, who have been or whowill be. Goethe was one; Beethoven was one; and there will be greater, when the contact between East and West becomes closer, and the sparksfrom pole to pole fly faster. 

I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the organ hadstopped. I left the great church and came out upon the back of QueenAnne, which made me laugh. Still, it was quite religious; so were the'buses, and the motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the LawCourts, and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. "Dear people, " Isaid, "you are not dead, any more than I am. You think you are, as I toooften do. When you feel dead you should go to church; but not in a'sacred edifice. ' Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better. "

PART IV

AMERICA

I

THE "DIVINE AVERAGE"

The great countries of the East have each a civilisation that isoriginal, if not independent. India, China, Japan, each has a peculiaroutlook on the world. Not so America, at any rate in the north. America, we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot ofEurope. Nor does an "American spirit" exist; there exists instead thespirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants anddescendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful oforientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found inWestern Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of thedifferent European countries, but what is common to them all. WhatAmerica does, not, of course, in a moment, but with incredible rapidity, is to obliterate distinctions. The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops hiscostume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, andretains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continentall the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, andflourish in unexampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that isevolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriantprofusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe theAmerican; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and alwaysthe same--masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at oncegood-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if youdo, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous ofideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognisingnothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spirituallife, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore theconqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the childwith the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown forwhat he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naïf, precociously accomplishedbrute. 

One does not then find in America anything one does not find in Europe;but one finds in Europe what one does not find in America. One finds, aswell as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has, broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident inEurope, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, theywin it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result notof American institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It isthe poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this continent. Healone has the proper point of view; and he, unfortunately, is dumb. Butoften, when I have contemplated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts ofNew York, the hideous wooden shanties planted askew in wastes ofgarbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or Venice, suddenly it has beenborne in upon me that the Italians living there feel that they havetheir feet on the ladder leading to paradise; that for the first timethey have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while they havelost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty and their charm, theyhave gained something which, in their eyes, and perhaps in reality, morethan compensates for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gainedself-respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. "Thevision of America, " a friend writes, "is the vision of the lifting up ofthe millions. " This, I believe, is true, and it is America's greatcontribution to civilisation. I do not forget it; but neither shall Idwell upon it; for though it is, I suppose, the most important thingabout America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. Whatstrikes more often and more directly home to me is the other fact thatAmerica, if she is not burdened by masses lying below the average, isalso not inspired by an élite rising above it. Her distinction is theabsence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the "DivineAverage. " There was nothing else in America for him to sing. But heshould not have called it divine; he should have called it "human, alltoo human. "

Or _is_ it divine? Divine somehow in its potentialities? Divine to adeeper vision than mine? I was writing this at Brooklyn, in a room thatlooks across the East River to New York. And after putting down thosewords, "human, all too human, " I stepped out on to the terrace. Acrossthe gulf before me went shooting forward and back interminable rows offiery shuttles; and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas. Beyond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, dusking andshimmering, primrose and green, up to a diadem of gold. About it hunggalaxies and constellations, outshining the firmament of stars; andall the air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingeminatingBabylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. This is New York. Thisit is that the average man has done, he knows not why; this is thesymbol of his work, so much more than himself, so much more than whatseems to be itself in the common light of day. America does not knowwhat she is doing, neither do I know, nor any man. But the impulse thatdrives her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps moresignificance in the eye of God; and the optimism of this continent, soseeming-frivolous, is justified, may be, by reason lying beyond itsken. 

II

A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS

The American, I said, in the previous letter, is the average Westernman. It should be added, he is the average man in the guise of pioneer. Much that surprises or shocks Europeans in the American character is tobe explained, I believe, by this fact. Among pioneers the individual iseverything and the society nothing. Every man relies on himself and onhis personal relations. He is a friend, and an enemy; he is never acitizen. Justice, order, respect for law, honesty even and honour are tohim mere abstract names; what is real is intelligence and force, theservice done or the injury inflicted, the direct emotional reaction topersons and deeds. And still, as it seems to the foreign observer, evenin the long-settled east, still more in the west, this attitudeprevails. To the American politician or business man, that a thing isright or wrong, legal or illegal, seems a pale and irrelevantconsideration. The real question is, will it pay? will it pleaseTheophilus P. Polk or vex Harriman Q. Kunz? If it is illegal, will it bedetected? If detected, will it be prosecuted? What are our resourcesfor evading or defeating the law? And all this with good temper and goodconscience. What stands in the way, says the pioneer, must be swept outof it; no matter whether it be the moral or the civil law, a publicauthority or a rival in business. "The strong business man" has no usefor scruples. Public or social considerations do not appeal to him. Orif they do present themselves, he satisfies himself with the beliefthat, from activities so strenuous and remarkable as his, Good mustresult to the community. If he break the law, that is the fault of thelaw, for being stupid and obstructive; if he break individuals, that istheir fault for being weak. _Vae victis!_ Never has that principle, orrather instinct, ruled more paramount than it does in America. 

To say this, is to say that American society is the most individualisticin the modern world. This follows naturally from the whole situation ofthe country. The pioneer has no object save to get rich; the governmentof pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. To thisobject everything is sacrificed, including the interests of futuregenerations. All new countries have taken the most obvious and easycourse. They have given away for nothing, or for a song, the whole oftheir natural resources to anybody who will undertake to exploit them. And those who have appropriated this wealth have judged it to be theirsby a kind of natural right. "These farms, mines, forests, oilsprings--of course they are ours. Did not we discover them? Did notwe squat upon them? Have we not 'mixed our labour with them'?" Ifpressed as to the claims of later comers they would probably reply thatthere remains "as much and as good" for others. And this of course istrue for a time; but for a very short time, even when it is a continentthat is being divided up. Practically the whole territory of the UnitedStates is now in private ownership. Still, the owners have made suchgood use of their opportunities that they have created innumerableopportunities for non-owners. Artisans get good wages; lawyers makefortunes; stock and share holders get high dividends. Every one feelsthat he is nourishing, and flourishing by his own efforts. He has noneed to combine with his fellows; or, if he does combine, is ready todesert them in a moment when he sees his own individual chance. 

But this is only a phase; and inevitably, by the logic of events, theresupervenes upon it another on which, it would appear, America is justnow entering. With all her natural resources distributed amongindividuals or corporations, and with the tide of immigration unchecked, she begins to feel the first stress of the situation of which thetension in Europe has already become almost intolerable. It is thesituation which cannot fail to result from the system of privateproperty and inheritance established throughout the Western world. Opportunities diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste ofwage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste ofproperty-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; andsubstantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration andsimplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians. American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms ofEuropean society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is arepetition of the old on a larger scale. And, curiously, she is less"new" than the other new countries. Australia and New Zealand for yearspast have been trying experiments in social policy; they are determinedto do what they can to prevent the recurrence there of the Europeansituation. But in America, there is no sign of such tendencies. Thepolitical and social philosophy of the United States is still that ofthe early English individualists. And, no doubt, there are adequatecauses, if not good reasons for this. The immense wealth and size of thecountry, the huge agricultural population, the proportionally smalleraggregation in cities has maintained in the mass of the people what Ihave called the "pioneer" attitude. Opportunity has been, and still is, more open than in any other country; and, in consequence, there hashardly emerged a definite "working class" with a class consciousness. This, however, is a condition that cannot be expected to continue. America will develop on the lines of Europe, because she has Europeaninstitutions; and "labour" will assert itself more and more as anindependent factor in politics. 

Whether it will assert itself successfully is another matter. Atpresent, as is notorious, American politics are controlled by wealth, more completely, perhaps, than those of any other country, even ofEngland. The "corporations" make it a main part of their business tocapture Congress, the Legislatures, the Courts and the city governments;and they are eminently successful. The smallest country town has its"boss, " in the employ of the Railway; the Public Service Corporationscontrol the cities; and the protected interests dominate the Senate. Business governs America; and business does not include labour. In nocivilised country except Japan is labour-legislation so undeveloped asin the States; in none is capital so uncontrolled; in none is justice soopenly prostituted to wealth. America is the paradise of plutocracy; forthe rich there enjoy not only a real power but a social prestige such ascan hardly have been accorded to them even in the worst days of theRoman Empire. Great fortunes and their owners are regarded with arespect as naïf and as intense as has ever been conceded to birth inEurope. No American youth of ambition, I am told, leaves college withany less or greater purpose in his heart than that of emulating Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller. And, on the other hand, it must beconceded, rich men feel an obligation to dispose of their wealth forpublic purposes, to a degree quite unknown in Europe. By these lavishgifts the people are dazzled. They feel that the millionaire has paidhis ransom; and are ready to forgive irregularities in the process ofacquiring wealth when they are atoned for by such splendid penance. Thusthe rich man in America comes to assume the position of a kind ofpopular dictator. He is admired on account of his prowess and forgivenon account of his beneficence. And, since every one feels that one dayhe may have the chance of imitating him, no one judges him too severely. He is regarded not as the "exploiter, " the man grown fat on the labourof others. Rather he is the type, the genius of the American people; andthey point to him with pride as "one of our strong men, " "one of ourconservative men of business. "

Individualism, then, is stronger and deeper rooted in America thanelsewhere. And, it must be added, socialism is weaker. It is an importedarticle, and it does not thrive on the new soil. The formulæ of Marx areeven less congenial to the American than to the English mind; andAmerican conditions have not yet given rise to a native socialism, basedon local conditions and adapted to local habits of thought. Such anative socialism, I believe, is bound to come before long, perhaps isarising even now. But I would not hazard the assertion that it is likelyto prevail. America, it would seem, stands at the parting of the ways. Either she may develop on democratic lines; and Democracy, as I think, demonstrably implies some kind of socialism. Or she may fossilise in theform of her present Plutocracy, and realise that new feudalism ofindustry which was dreamt of by Saint-Simon, by Comte, and by Carlyle. It would be a strange consummation, but stranger things have happened;and it seems more probable that this should happen in America than thatit should happen in any European country. It is an error to think ofAmerica as democratic; her Democracy is all on the surface. But inEurope, Democracy is penetrating deeper and deeper. And, in particular, there can be little doubt that England is now more democratic than theUnited States. 

III

NIAGARA

I shall not describe Niagara; instead I shall repeat a conversation. 

After a day spent in visiting the falls and the rapids, I was sittingto-night on a bench on the river bank. The racing water-ridges glimmeredfaintly in the dusk and the roar of the falls droned in unwaveringmonotony. I fell, I think, into a kind of stupor; anyhow, I cannotremember when it was that some one took a seat beside me, and began totalk. I seemed to wake and feel him speaking; and the first remark Idefinitely heard was this: "All America is Niagara. " "All America isNiagara, " the voice repeated--I could see no face. "Force withoutdirection, noise without significance, speed without accomplishment. Allday and all night the water rushes and roars. I sit and listen; and itdoes nothing. It is Nature; and Nature has no significance. It is wepoets who create significance, and for that reason Nature hates us. Sheis afraid of us, for she knows that we condemn her. We have standardsbefore which she shrinks abashed. But she has her revenge; for poetsare incarnate. She owns our bodies; and she hurls us down Niagara withthe rest, with the others that she loves, and that love her, the virilebig-jawed men, trampling and trampled, hustling and hustled, working andasking no questions, falling as water and dispersing as spray. Nature isforce, loves force, wills force alone. She hates the intellect, shehates the soul, she hates the spirit. Nietszche understood her aright, Nietszche the arch-traitor, who spied on the enemy, learned her secrets, and then went over to her side. Force rules the world. "

I must have said something banal about progress, for the voice brokeout:

"There is no progress! It is always the same river! New waves succeedfor ever, but always in the old forms. History tells, from beginning toend, the same tale--the victory of the strong over the sensitive, of theactive over the reflective, of intelligence over intellect. Romeconquered Greece, the Germans the Italians, the English the French, andnow, the Americans the world! What matters the form of the struggle, whether it be in arms or commerce, whether the victory go to the sword, or to shoddy, advertisement, and fraud? History is the perennialconquest of civilisation by barbarians. The little islands before us, lovely with trees and flowers, green oases in the rushing river, it isbut a few years and they will be engulfed. So Greece was swallowed up, so Italy, and so will it be with England. Not, as your moralistsmaintain, because of her vices, but because of her virtues. She isbecoming just, scrupulous, humane, and therefore she is doomed. Ignoblethough she be, she is yet too noble to survive; for Germany and Americaare baser than she. Hark, Hark to Niagara! Force, at all costs! Do youhear it? Do you see it? I can see it, though it is dark. It is a riverof mouths and teeth, of greedy outstretched hands, of mirthlesslaughter, of tears and of blood. I am there, you are there; we arehurrying over the fall; we are going up in spray. "

"Yes, " I cried as one cries in a nightmare, "and in that spray hangs therainbow. "

He caught at the phrase. "It is true. The rainbow hangs in the spray! Itis the type of the Ideal, hanging always above the Actual, never in it, never controlling it. We poets make the rainbow; we do not shape theworld. "

"We do not make the rainbow, " I said. "The sun makes it, shining againstit. What is the sun?"

"The sun is the Platonic Good; it lights the world, but does not warmit. By its illumination we see the river in which we are involved; seeand judge, and condemn, and are swept away. That we can condemn is ourgreatness; by that we are children of the sun. But our vision is neverfruitful. The sun cannot breed out of matter; no, not even maggots bykissing carrion. Between Force and Light, Matter and Good, there is nointerchange. Good is not a cause, it is only an idea. "

"To illuminate, " I said, "is to transform. "

"No! it is only to reveal! Light dances on the surface; but not thetiniest wave was ever dimpled or crisped by its rays. Matter alone movesmatter; and the world is matter. Best not cry, best not even blaspheme. Pass over the fall in silence. Perhaps, at the bottom, there isoblivion. It is the best we can hope, we who see. "

And he was gone! Had there been anyone? Was there a real voice? I do notknow. Perhaps it was only the roar of Niagara. When I returned to thehotel, I heard that this very afternoon, while I was sunning myself onone of the islands, a woman had thrown herself into the rapids and beenswept over the fall. Niagara took her, as it takes a stick or a stone. Soon it will take the civilisation of America, as it has taken that ofthe Indians. Centuries will pass, millenniums will pass, mankind willhave come and gone, and still the river will flow and the sun shine, andthey will communicate to one another their stern immortal joy, in whichthere is no part for ephemeral men. 

IV

"THE MODERN PULPIT"

It is a bright July morning. As I sit in the garden I look out, over atangle of wild roses, to a calm sea and a flock of white sails. Everything invites to happy thought and innocent reverie. Moreover, itis the day of rest, and every one is at leisure to turn his mind towardspleasant things. To what, in fact, are most people on this continentturning theirs? To this, which I hold in my hand, the Sunday newspaper. 

Let us analyse this production, peculiar to the New World. It compriseseight sections and eighty-eight pages, and very likely does really, asit boasts, contain "more reading matter than the whole Bible. "

Opening Section 1, I read the following headings:

 "Baron Shot as Bank-teller--Ends Life with Bullet. "

 "Two fatally Hurt in Strike Riots at Pittsburg. "

 "Steals a Look at Busy Burglars. "

 "Drowned in Surf at Narragansett. "

 "Four of a Family fear a Dogs' bite" (_sic_). 

 "Two are Dead, Two Dying; Fought over Cow. "

Section 2 appears to be concerned with similar matter, for example:

 "Struck by Blast, Woman is Dying. "

 "Hard Shell Crabs help in giving Burglar Alarm. "

 "Man who has been Married three times denies the Existence of God. "

But here I notice further the interesting and enigmatic heading:

 "Will 'boost' not 'knock' New York, "

and roused for the first time to something like curiosity, read:

"To lock horns with the muckrakes and to defend New York against all whodefame and censure it the Association for New York was incorporatedyesterday. "

I notice also "Conferences agree to short rates on woollen goods, " andam reminded of the shameless bargaining of which, for many weeks past, Washington has been the centre; which leads me to reflect on thepolitical advantages of a Tariff and its wholesome effect on thenational life. 

Section 3 deals with Aviation and seaside resorts:

 "Brave Lake Placid, " I read, "Planning New Hotel. "

 "Haines Falls entertaining a Great Throng of People. "

 "Resound with the Laughter and Shout of Summer Throngs. "

Section 4 consists entirely of advertisements:

"Tuning-up Sale, " I read. "Buff-and-crimson cards will mark the trail ofall goods ready for the sale. We are tuning up. By September it is ourintention to have assembled in these two great buildings the mostfashionable merchandise ever shown. No one piece of goods will bepermitted to linger that lacks, in any detail, the æsthetic beautydemanded by New York women of fashion. Everything will be better and adefinite percentage lower in price than New York will find in any otherstore. Do not expect a sale of ordinary proportions. To-morrow you willfind the store alive with enthusiasm. This is not a summer hurrah. " Andso on, to the end of the page. Twelve pages of advertisements, uninterrupted by any item of news. 

Section 5 is devoted to automobile gossip and automobile advertisements. 

Thereupon follows the _Special Sporting Section_:

 "Rumsom Freebooters defeat Devon's first. "

 "'Young Corbett' is chipped in the 8th. "

 "Doggett and Cubs each win shut out. "

 "Brockett is easy for Detroit Nine. "

Glancing at the small type I read:--

"Englewood was the first to tally. This was in the fourth inning. W. Merritt, the first man up, was safe on Williams' error, and he got roundto third on another miscue by Williams. Charley Clough was on deck witha timely single, which scored Merritt. Curran's out at first put Cloughon third, from whence he tallied on Cuming's single. Cuming got tosecond, when Wiley grounded out along the first base line and scored onReinmund's single. Every other time Reinmund came to the bat he struckout. "

I pass to the _Magazine Section_. 

On the first page is the mysterious heading "E. Of K. And E. " Severalhuge portraits of a bald clean-shaven man in shirt sleeves partiallyexplain. E. Is Mr. Erlanger, a theatrical impresario, and K. And E. Presumably is his firm. The article describes "the accomplishment of abusy man on one of his ordinary days, " and makes one hope no day is everextraordinary. The interviewer who tells about him is almost speechlesswith emotion. He searches for a phrase to express his feelings, finds itat last, and comes triumphantly to his close--Mr. Erlanger is a man"with trained arms, trained legs, a trained body and a trained mind. "There follows: "The Story of a Society Girl, " in which we are told"there is a confession of love and the startling discovery that Dollywas a professional model"; "The Doctor's Story, " with a picture of acorpse, "whose white shapely hands were clasped one over the other";and "Would you Convict on Circumstantial Evidence?--A ScaffoldConfession. A True Story. " I glance at this, and read, "While the crowdwatched in strained, breathless silence there came a sharp agonisedvoice and a commotion near the steps of the scaffold. 'Stop! Stop! Theman is not guilty. I mean it. It is I who should stand there. Let mespeak. '" You can now reconstruct the story for yourself. Next comes "Getthe Man! Craft and courage of old-time and modern express robbersmatched by organised secret service and the mandate that makes capturealone the end of an unflagging man-hunt. " This is accompanied byportraits of famous detectives and train-robbers. 

There follows "_Thrilling Lines_, " with a picture of a man who seems tobe looping the loop on a bicycle. 

And the conclusion of the section is a poem, entitled "CynthiannaBlythe, " with coloured illustrations apparently intended for children, and certainly successful in not appealing to adults. 

Comment, I suppose, is superfluous. But it is only fair to say that thewhole of the press of America is not of this character. Among thethousands of papers daily produced on that continent, it would bepossible, I believe, to name ten--I myself could mention five--whichcontain in almost every issue some piece of information or comment whichan intelligent man might care to peruse. There are to be found, now andagain, passing references to European and even to Asiatic politics; forit cannot be said that the press of America wholly ignored the recentrevolutions in Persia and in Turkey. I myself saw a reference to the newSultan as a man "fat, but not fleshy. " England looms big enough on theAmerican horizon to be treated to an occasional gibe; and the doings offashionable Americans in London are reported somewhat fully. Still, onthe whole, the American daily press is typified by the specimen I haveanalysed. Sensations, personalities and fiction are its stock-in-trade. Why? The causes are well known, but are worth recapitulating, for theyare part of the system of modern civilisation. 

The newspaper press is a business intended to make money. This is itsprimary aim, which may, or may not, include the subordinate purpose ofadvocating some line of public policy. Now, to make money, it isessential to secure advertisements; and to secure advertisements it isessential to have a large circulation. But a large circulation can onlybe obtained by lowering the price of the paper, and adapting it to theleisure mood of the mass of people. But this leisure mood is usually oneof sheer vacuity, incapable of intellectual effort or imaginativeresponse. The man is there, waiting to be filled, and to be filled withthe stuff easiest to digest. The rest follows. The newspapers supply thedemand and by supplying extend and perpetuate it. Among the possibleappeals open to them they deliberately choose the lowest. For people arecapable of Good as well as of Bad; and if they cannot get the Bad theywill sometimes take the Good. Newspapers, probably, could exist, evenunder democratic conditions, by maintaining a certain standard ofintelligence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama, fatuity and sport. And one or two papers adopting that course force theothers into line; for here, as in so many departments of modern life, "The Bad drives out the Good. " This process of deterioration of thepress is proceeding rapidly in England, with the advent of the halfpennynewspaper. It has not gone so far as in America; but there is no reasonwhy it should not, and every reason why it should; for the same causesare at work. 

I have called the process "deterioration, " but that, of course, ismatter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a recent Conference in London, is reported to have congratulated the press on its progressiveimprovement during recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. Themore the English press approximates to the American, the more, it wouldseem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. And that is natural, forthe American method pays. 

Well, the sun still shines and the sky is still blue. But between it andthe American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! thefathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may besaid, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightningand storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff ofthe modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated toevoke curious reflections. 

V

IN THE ROCKIES

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway. There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, andI determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told methere was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, invain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by athin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign ofrecognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time thatabsence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surlinessbut independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, andresumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fellfaster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, Iwondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idlyenough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring toestablish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between theachievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wirelesstelegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell thename of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and hewill use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he hasexterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across themountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent. "Click--click--click--Pick--pick--pick--Pock--pock--pockets. " So thewest called to the east, and the east to the west, while the windsroared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolateiron road. 

It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I wasobliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow youth assented, with his airof elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as hecould. About sunset, the storm passed away over the plains. Behind itsflying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment theprairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and asprofound, a thousand miles of grass where men and cattle crept likeflies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinitemonotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was ademocrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From onenewspaper topic to another we passed to the talk about signalling toMars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but heknew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now shining brightabove us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of doublestars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and theinfinity of space, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presentlyremarked: "Gee! I guess then it doesn't matter two cents after all whogets elected president!" Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I tolie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is longsince the notion of infinite space and infinite worlds has impressed myimagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaicscheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands notonly order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant toour destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but hebereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision ofDante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through andthrough, --that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate ofman, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought ofhim as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea atsunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest ofRavenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chancesof war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about theearth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricatewheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those brightluminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow ofMars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze;and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and theirorder, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimateEssence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things andall creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tendand in whom they rest. 

And I recalled the passage:

 "Frate, la nostra volontà quieta Virtù di carità, che fa volerne Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta. 

 Se disiassimo esser più superne, Fôran discordi gli nostri disiri Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;

 Che vedrai non capere in questi giri, S'essere in caritate è qui necesse, E se la sua natura ben rimiri;

 Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse Tenersi dentro alia divina voglia, Perch'una fansi nostre voglie stesse. 

 Si che, come noi siam di soglia in soglia Per questo regno, a tutto il regno piace, Com'allo re, che in suo voler ne invoglia. 

 E la sua volontade è nostra pace: Ella è quel mare al qual tutto si muove Cio ch' ella crea o che natura face. "[3]

And then, with a leap, I was back to what we call reality--to theclicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago and Pittsburg andNew York. In all this continent, I thought, in all the western world, there is not a human soul whose will seeks any peace at all, least ofall the peace of God. All move, but about no centre; they move on, tomore power, to more wealth, to more motion. There is not one of them whoconceives that he has a place, if only he could find it, a rank andorder fitted to his nature, higher than some, lower than others, butright, and the only right for him, his true position in the cosmicscheme, his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. Life, like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no centre, nosignificance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, notlove. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, aforce that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will andspirit. "Click--click--click--tick--tick--tick, " so goes the economicclock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from thestars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now forus no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and thatultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane. " "Americais a clock, " I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America isNiagara. " And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away, out into the infinite, out into unconsciousness. 

The sun was shining brightly when I woke, and I had slept away my moodof the night. I took leave of my host, and under his directions, afterhalf a mile along the line, plunged down into a gorge, and followed formiles, crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs of redrocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow and fragrance ofpines; till suddenly, after hours of rough going, I was confronted by anotice, set up, apparently, in the desert:

 "Keep out. Avoid trouble. This means you. "

I laughed. "Keep out!" I said. "If only there were a chance of mygetting in!" "Avoid trouble! Ah, what trouble would I not face, could Ibut get in!" And I went on, but not in, and met no trouble, andreturned to the hotel, and had dinner, and watched for a solitary hour, in the hall, the shifting interminable array of vacant eyes and blankfaces, and then retired to write this letter; "and so to bed. "

 Footnotes:

 [Footnote 3:

 "Brother, the quality of love stilleth our will, and maketh us long only for what we have, and giveth us no other thirst, "Did we desire to be more aloft, our longings were discordant from his will who here assorteth us, "And for that, thou wilt see, there is no room within these circles, if of necessity we have our being here in love, and if thou think again what is love's nature. 

 "Nay, 'tis the essence of this blessed being to hold ourselves within the divine will, whereby our own wills are themselves made one. 

 "So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold, throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm as to the King, who draweth our wills to what he willeth;

 "And his will is our peace; it is that sea to which all moves that it createth and that nature maketh. "

 DANTE, _Purgatorio_, iii. 70-87 (trans. By Rev. Philip H. Wicksteed, in the "Temple Classics" edition). ]

VI

IN THE ADIRONDACKS

For the last few days I have been living in camp on a mountain lake inthe Adirondacks. All about me are mountains and unlumbered forest. Thetree lies where it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on thehottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. Deerstart in the thickets or steal down to drink in the lake. The onlysounds are the wood-pecker's scream, the song of the hermit-thrush, thethrumming and drumming of bull-frogs in the water. My friend is asportsman; I am not; and while he catches trout I have been readingHomer and Shelley. Shelley I have always understood; but now, for thefirst time, I seem to understand Homer. Our guide here, I feel, mighthave been Homer, if he had had imagination; but he could never have beenShelley. Homer, I conceive, had from the first the normal bent foraction. What his fellows did he too wanted to do. He learned to hunt, tosail a boat, to build a house, to use a spear and bow. He had hisinitiation early, in conflict, in danger, and in death. He loved thefeast, the dance, and the song. But also he had dreams. He used to sitalone and think. And, as he grew, these moods grew, till he came to livea second life, a kind of double of the first. The one was direct, unreflective, and purposeful. In it he hunted wild beasts that he mightkill them, fought battles that he might win them, sailed boats that hemight arrive somewhere. So far, he was like his fellows, and like ourguide, with his quick observation, his varied experience, his practicalskill. But then, on the other hand, he had imagination. This active lifehe reproduced; not by recapitulating it--that the guide can do; but byrecreating it. He detached it, as it were, from himself as centre;ceased, indeed, to be a self; and became all that he contemplated--thevictor and the vanquished, the hunter and the hunted, the house and itsbuilder, Thersites and Achilles. He became the sun and the moon and thestars, the gods and the laughter of the gods. He took no sides, pronounced no judgment, espoused no cause. He became pure vision; butnot passive vision. To see, he had to re-create; and the material hisobservation had amassed he offered up as a holocaust on the altar of hisimagination. Fused in that fierce fire, like drew to like, parts rantogether and formed a whole. Did he see a warrior fall? In a moment theimage arose of "a stately poplar falling by the axe in a meadow by theriverside. " Did a host move out to meet the foe? It recalled the oceanshore where "wave follows wave far out at sea until they break inthunder on the beach. " Was battle engaged? "The clash of the weaponsrang like the din of woodcutters in the mountain-glades. " Did a woundedhero fall? The combatants gathered about him "like flies buzzing roundthe brimming milk-pails in the spring. " All commonest things, redeemedfrom isolation and irrelevance, revealed the significance with whichthey were charged. The result was the actual made real, a reflexionwhich was a disclosure, a reproduction which was a recreation. And ifexperience, as we know it, is the last word of life, if there is nothingbeyond and nothing behind, if there is no meaning, no explanation, nopurpose or end, then the poetry of Homer is the highest reach of humanachievement. 

For, observe, Homer is not a critic. His vision transmutes life, butdoes not transcend it. Experience is ultimate; all the poet does is toexperience fully. Common men live, but do not realise life; he realisesit. But he does not question it; it is there and it is final; glorious, lovely, august, terrible, sordid, cruel, unjust. And the partial, smiling, unmoved, unaccountable Olympians are the symbol of its bruteactuality. Not only is there no explanation, there is not even aquestion to be asked. So it is, so it has been, so it will be. Homer'soutlook is that of the modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and theynovels, is an accident of time and space. Turgeneff or Balzac writing1000 years before Christ would have been Homer; and Homer, writing now, would have been Turgeneff or Balzac. 

But Shelley could never have been Homer; for he was born a critic and arebel. From the first dawn of consciousness he challenged and defied theworks and ways of men and the apparent order of the universe. Never fora moment anywhere was he at home in the world. There was nothingattainable he cared to pursue, nothing actual he cared to represent. Hecould no more see what is called fact than he could act upon it. Hiseyes were dazzled by a different vision. Life and the world not only areintolerable to him, they are unreal. Beyond and behind lies Reality, andit is good. Now it is a Perfectibility lying in the future; now aPerfection existing eternally. In any case, whatever it be, however andwherever to be found, it is the sole object of his quest and of hissong. Whatever of good or lovely or passionate gleams here and there, onthe surface or in the depths of the actual, is a ray of that Sun, animage of that Beauty. His imagination is kindled by Appearance only tosoar away from it. The landscape he depicts is all light, all fountainsand caverns. The Beings with which it is peopled are discarnate Joys andHopes; Justice and Liberty, Peace and Love and Truth. Among these onlyis he at home; in the world of men he is an alien captive; and HumanLife presents itself as an "unquiet dream. "

 "'Tis we that, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. "

When we die, we awake into Reality--that Reality to which, from thebeginning, Shelley was consecrated:

 "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine--have I not kept my vow?"

He calls it "intellectual Beauty"; he impersonates it as Asia, and singsit in verse that passes beyond sense into music:

 "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks, where whoso gazes Faints, entangled in their mazes. 

 Child of Light! thy limbs are burning Through the vest which seems to hide them; As the radiant lines of morning Through the clouds ere they divide them; And this atmosphere divinest Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest. 

 Fair are others; none beholds thee, But thy voice sounds low and tender Like the fairest, for it folds thee From the sight, that liquid splendour, And all feel, yet see thee never, As I feel now, lost for ever!

 Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness, Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!"

This we call poetry; and we call the Iliad poetry. But the likeness issuperficial, and the difference profound. Was it Homer or Shelley thatgrasped Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is aquestion of the sense of life. And--oddly enough--it is a question towhich the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold ofit and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he isnot aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naïf, spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is heright? This whole continent, the prairies, the mountains and the coast, the trams and trolleys, the sky-scrapers, the factories, elevators, automobiles, shout to that question one long deafening Yes. But there isanother country that speaks a different tongue. Before America was, India is. 

VII

THE RELIGION OF BUSINESS

In the house in which I am staying hangs an old coloured print, representing two couples, one young and lusty, the other decrepit, thewoman carrying an hour-glass, the man leaning on a stick; andunderneath, the following inscription:

 "My father and mother that go so stuping to your grave, Pray tell me what good I may in this world expect to have?"

 "My son, the good you can expect is all forlorn, Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn. "

This dialogue, I sometimes think, symbolises the attitude of the newworld to the old, and the old to the new. Not seldom I feel amongAmericans as the Egyptian is said to have felt among the Greeks, that Iam moving in a world of precocious and inexperienced children, bearingon my own shoulders the weight of the centuries. Yet it is not exactlythat Americans strike one as young in spirit; rather they strike one asundeveloped. It is as though they had never faced life and askedthemselves what it is; as though they were so occupied in running thatit has never occurred to them to inquire where they started and whitherthey are going. They seem to be always doing and never experiencing. Adimension of life, one would say, is lacking, and they live in a planeinstead of in a solid. That missing dimension I shall call religion. Notthat Americans do not, for aught I know, "believe" as much as or morethan Europeans; but they appear neither to believe nor to disbelievereligiously. That, I admit, is true almost everywhere of the mass of thepeople. But even in Europe--and far more in India--there has alwaysbeen, and still is, a minority who open windows to the stars; andthrough these windows, in passing, the plain man sometimes looks. Theimpression America makes on me is that the windows are blocked up. Ithas become incredible that this continent was colonised by the PilgrimFathers. That intense, narrow, unlovely but genuine spiritual life hasbeen transformed into industrial energy; and this energy, in its newform, the churches, oddly enough, are endeavouring to recapture and useto drive their machines. Religion is becoming a department of practicalbusiness. The Churches--orthodox and unorthodox, old and new, Christian, Christian-Scientific, theosophic, higher-thinking--vie with one anotherin advertising goods which are all material benefits: "Follow me, andyou will get rich, " "Follow me, and you will get well, " "Follow me, andyou will be cheerful, prosperous, successful. " Religion in America isnothing if not practical. It does not concern itself with a life beyond;it gives you here and now what you want. "What _do_ you want? Money?Come along!--Success? This is the shop!--Health? Here you are! Betterthan patent medicines!" The only part of the Gospels one would supposethat interests the modern American is the miracles; for the miraclesreally did _do_ something. As for the Sermon on the Mount--well, noWesterner ever took that seriously. 

This conversion of religion into business is interesting enough. Buteven more striking is what looks like a conversion of business intoreligion. Business is so serious that it sometimes assumes the shrilltone of a revivalist propaganda. There has recently been brought to myattention a circular addressed to the agents of an insurance society, urging them to rally round the firm, with a special effort, in what Ican only call a "mission-month. " I quote--with apologies to the unknownauthor--part of this production:

 THE CALL TO ACTION. 

 "How about these beautiful spring days for hustling? Everything is on the move. New life and force is apparent everywhere. The man who can stand still when all creation is on the move is literally and hopelessly a dead one. 

 "These are ideal days for the insurance field-man. Weather like this has a tremendously favourable effect on business. In the city and small town alike there is a genuine revival of business. The farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, are beginning to work overtime. Spring is in the footstep of the ambitious man as well as in the onward march of nature. This is the day of growth, expansion, creation, and re-creation. 

 "Consciously or unconsciously every one responds to the glad call to new life and vigour. Men who are cold and selfish, who are literally frozen up the winter through, yield to the warm, invigorating, energising touch of spring. 

 "Gentlemen of the field force, now is the psychological moment to force your prospects to action as indicated by the dotted line. As in nature, some plants and trees are harder to force than others, so in the nature of human prospects, some are more difficult than others. Sunshine and rain will produce results in the field of life-underwriting. 

 "Will it not be possible for you during these five remaining days not only to increase the production from regular sources, but to go out into the highways and hedges and compel others to sign their applications, if for only a small amount?

 "Everything is now in full swing, and we are going to close up the month

 "IN A BLAZE OF GLORY. "

Might not this almost as well have been an address from theheadquarters of the Salvation Army? And is not the following exactlyparallel to a denunciation, from the mission-pulpit, of the unprofitableservant?

 "A few days ago we heard of a general agent who has one of the largest and most prosperous territories in this country. He has been in the business for years, and yet that man, for some unknown reason, rather apologises for his vocation. He said he was a little ashamed of his calling. Such a condition is almost a crime, and I am sure that the men of the Eastern Department will say, that man ought to get out of the business. 

 "_Instead of being ashamed of his calling, he should be mortally ashamed of his not calling. _

 "Are you happy in your work? If not, give it up and go into some business more to your liking. "

 WHY IS IT?

 "So many times the question is asked, 'Why is it, and how is it, that Mr. So-and-so writes so much business? There is not a week but he procures new applications. ' Gentlemen, there's but one answer to this question. There is a great gulf between the man who is in earnest and works persistently every day and the man who seems to be in earnest and makes believe he is working persistently every day. 

 "One of the most successful personal producers said to the writer the other day: 'No wonder certain agents do not write more business. I couldn't accomplish very much either if I did not work longer hours than they do. Some insurance agents live like millionaires and keep bankers' hours. You cannot expect much business from efforts like that. ' This man speaks from practical knowledge of the business. He has written

 $147, 500 _in personal business in the last six weeks_. 

 "It does seem rather strange, sometimes, that half of the men in the Eastern Department should be writing twice as much business as the other half. They are representing the same company; presenting the same propositions; are supposed to be talking to practically the same number of men; have the same rates, same guarantees, and the same twenty-four hours in each day, and yet are doing twice the business. In other words, making more money. What really makes this difference? I will tell you. They put heart into their work. There is an enthusiasm and earnestness about them that carries conviction. They are business through and through, and everybody knows it. 

 "Are you getting your share of applications? If some other agent is up early, wide-awake and alert, putting in from ten to fifteen hours per day, he is bound to do business, isn't he? This is a plain, every-day horse-sense business fact. No one has a patent on time or the use of it. To work and to succeed is common property. It is your capital, and the use of it will determine your worth. "

I think, really, this is one of the most remarkable documents that couldbe produced in evidence of the character of American civilisation. Thereis all the push, initiative, and enterprise on which they justly pridethemselves; there is also the reduction of all values to terms ofbusiness, the concentration of what, at other times, have been moral andreligious forces upon the one aim of material progress. In such anatmosphere it is easy to see how those who care for spiritual values areled to protest that these are really material; to pack up their goods, so to speak, as if they were biscuits or pork, and palm them off in thatguise on an unsuspecting public. In a world where every one is hustling, the Churches feel they must hustle too; when all the firms advertise, they must advertise too; when only one thing is valued, power, they mustpretend they can offer power; they must go into business, becausebusiness is going into religion!

It is a curious spectacle! How long will it last? How real is it, evennow? That withered couple, I half believe, hanging on the wall, descendat night and wander through the land, whispering to all the sleeperstheir disquieting warning; and all day long there hovers at the back ofthe minds of these active men a sense of discomfort which, if it becamearticulate, might express itself in the ancient words:

 "My son, the good you can expect is all forlorn, Men doe not gather grapes from of a thorn. "

VIII

RED-BLOODS AND "MOLLYCODDLES"

I am staying at a pleasant place in New Hampshire. The country is hillyand wooded, like a larger and wilder Surrey; and through it flows what, to an Englishman, seems a large river, the Connecticut. Charming villasare dotted about, well designed and secluded in pretty gardens. Imention this because, in my experience of America, it is unique. Almosteverywhere the houses stare blankly at one another and at the publicroads, ugly, unsheltered, and unashamed, as much as to say, "Every oneis welcome to see what goes on here. We court publicity. See how we eat, drink, and sleep. Our private life is the property of the Americanpeople. " It was not, however, to describe the country that I began thisletter, but to elaborate a generalisation developed by my host andmyself as a kind of self-protection against the gospel of"strenuousness. "

We have divided men into Red-bloods and Mollycoddles. "A Red-blood man"is a phrase which explains itself, "Mollycoddle" is its opposite. Wehave adopted it from a famous speech of Mr. Roosevelt, and redeemedit--perverted it, if you will--to other uses. A few examples will makethe notion clear. Shakespeare's Henry V. Is a typical Red-blood; so wasBismarck; so was Palmerston; so is almost any business man. On the otherhand, typical Mollycoddles were Socrates, Voltaire, and Shelley. Theterms, you will observe, are comprehensive, and the types very broad. Generally speaking, men of action are Red-bloods. Not but what theMollycoddle may act, and act efficiently. But, if so, he acts fromprinciple, not from the instinct of action. The Red-blood, on the otherhand, acts as the stone falls, and does indiscriminately anything thatcomes to hand. It is thus he that carries on the business of the world. He steps without reflection into the first place offered him and goes towork like a machine. The ideals and standards of his family, his class, his city, his country and his age, he swallows as naturally as heswallows food and drink. He is therefore always "in the swim"; and he isbound to "arrive, " because he has set before himself the attainable. Youwill find him everywhere in all the prominent positions. In a militaryage he is a soldier, in a commercial age a business man. He hates hisenemies, and he may love his friends; but he does not require friends tolove. A wife and children he does require, for the instinct to propagatethe race is as strong in him as all other instincts. His domestic life, however, is not always happy; for he can seldom understand his wife. This is part of his general incapacity to understand any point of viewbut his own. He is incapable of an idea and contemptuous of a principle. He is the Samson, the blind force, dearest to Nature of her children. Heneither looks back nor looks ahead. He lives in present action. And whenhe can no longer act, he loses his reason for existence. The Red-bloodis happiest if he dies in the prime of life; otherwise, he may easilyend with suicide. For he has no inner life; and when the outer lifefails, he can only fail with it. The instinct that animated him beingdead, he dies too. Nature, who has blown through him, blows elsewhere. His stops are dumb; he is dead wood on the shore. 

The Mollycoddle, on the other hand, is all inner life. He may indeedact, as I said, but he acts, so to speak, by accident; just as theRed-blood may reflect, but reflects by accident. The Mollycoddle inaction is the Crank: it is he who accomplishes reforms; who abolishedslavery, for example, and revolutionised prisons and lunatic asylums. Still, primarily, the Mollycoddle is a critic, not a man of action. Hechallenges all standards and all facts. If an institution isestablished, that is a reason why he will not accept it; if an idea iscurrent, that is a reason why he should repudiate it. He questionseverything, including life and the universe. And for that reason Naturehates him. On the Red-blood she heaps her favours; she gives him a gooddigestion, a clear complexion, and sound nerves. But to the Mollycoddleshe apportions dyspepsia and black bile. In the universe and in societythe Mollycoddle is "out of it" as inevitably as the Red-blood is "init. " At school, he is a "smug" or a "swat, " while the Red-blood iscaptain of the Eleven. At college, he is an "intellectual, " while theRed-blood is in the "best set. " In the world, he courts failure whilethe Red-blood achieves success. The Red-blood sees nothing; but theMollycoddle sees through everything. The Red-blood joins societies; theMollycoddle is a non-joiner. Individualist of individualists, he canonly stand alone, while the Red-blood requires the support of a crowd. The Mollycoddle engenders ideas, and the Red-blood exploits them. TheMollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents. The whole structure ofcivilisation rests on foundations laid by Mollycoddles; but all thebuilding is done by Red-bloods. The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle;but, in the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him. TheMollycoddle also despises the Red-blood, but he cannot do without him. Each thinks he is master of the other, and, in a sense, each is right. In his lifetime the Mollycoddle may be the slave of the Red-blood; butafter his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it not. 

Nations, like men, may be classified roughly as Red-blood andMollycoddle. To the latter class belong clearly the ancient Greeks, theItalians, the French, and probably the Russians; to the former theRomans, the Germans, and the English. But the Red-blood nation _parexcellence_ is the American; so that, in comparison with them, Europe asa whole might almost be called Mollycoddle. This characteristic ofAmericans is reflected in the predominant physical type, --the great jawand chin, the huge teeth, and predatory mouth; in their speech, wherebeauty and distinction are sacrificed to force; in their need to liveand feel and act in masses. To be born a Mollycoddle in America is to beborn to a hard fate. You must either emigrate or succumb. This, atleast, hitherto has been the alternative practised. Whether aMollycoddle will ever be produced strong enough to breathe the Americanatmosphere and live, is a crucial question for the future. It is thequestion whether America will ever be civilised. For civilisation, youwill have perceived, depends on a just balance of Red-bloods andMollycoddles. Without the Red-blood there would be no life at all, nostuff, so to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without theMollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. The Red-bloodis the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, theMollycoddle the yeast. On these two poles turns the orb of humansociety. And if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are pointsand have no dimensions, that strictly neither the Mollycoddle nor theRed-blood exist, and that real men contain elements of both mixed indifferent proportions, I have no quarrel with you except such as one haswith the man who states the obvious. I am satisfied to havedistinguished the ideal extremes between which the Actual vibrates. Thedetailed application of the conception I must leave to more patientresearchers. 

One point more before I close. This Dichotomy, so far as I can see, applies only to man. Woman appears to be a kind of hybrid. Regarded as acreature of instinct, she resembles the Red-blood, and it is to him thatshe is first attracted. The hero of her youth is the athlete, thesoldier, the successful man of business; and this predilection of hersaccounts for much of human history, and in particular for themaintenance of the military spirit. On the other hand, as a creaturecapable of and craving sympathy, she has affinities with theMollycoddle. This dual nature is the tragedy of her life. The Red-bloodawakens her passion, but cannot satisfy it. He wins her by his virility, but cannot retain her by his perception. Hence the fact, noted by acynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds the Red-blood. For thewoman, married to the Red-blood, discovers too late that she is to himonly a trophy, a scalp. He hangs her up in the hall, and goes about hisbusiness. Then comes the Mollycoddle, divining all, possessing andoffering all. And if the Red-blood is an American, and the Mollycoddlean European, then the situation is tense indeed. For the AmericanRed-blood despises woman in his heart as profoundly as he respects herin outer observance. He despises her because of the Mollycoddle hedivines in her. Therefore he never understands her; and that is whyEuropean Mollycoddles carry off American women before the very eyes ofthe exasperated Red-blood. "Am I not clean?" he cries. "Am I nothealthy? Am I not athletic and efficient?" He is, but it does not helphim, except with young girls. He may win the body; but he cannot win thesoul. Can it be true then that most women would like two husbands, oneRed-blood, the other Mollycoddle, one to be the father of theirchildren, the other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone cananswer; and, for the first time in history, they are beginning to bearticulate. 

IX

ADVERTISEMENT

The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We passedthrough some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but myfeeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbledvision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dryudders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastlyrealism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I neededthem--U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in aninterminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals ofindigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuousfrieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobaccothan theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a blackmoustache, recurring, like a decimal, _ad infinitum_ on the top of aboard, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toiletpowder; of cod-fish without bones--"the kind you have always bought"; ofbacon packed in glass jars; of whiz suspenders, sen-sen throat-ease, sure-fit hose, and the whole army of patent medicines. By river, wood, and meadow, hamlet or city, mountain or plain, hovers and flits thisobscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing, with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam tothat one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels. 

Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the OneGod Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equalpertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route toVenice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they arebeginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-ship, will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonelymoor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liverand the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul ofman, never and nowhere shall you forget that you are nothing but a body;that you require to eat, to salivate, to digest, to evacuate; that youare liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity, constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy, eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache, hæmorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice, lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey, rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, andso on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Neverand nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying inthe cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forgetthat nothing matters--nothing in the whole universe--except themaintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony arenot commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand inthe way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters exceptwealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket. This--did it ever occur to you--is the real public education everycountry is giving, on every hoarding and sky-sign, to its citizens ofevery age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it nota little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour inschool to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when forthe rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on theirminds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?

But of course advertisement cannot be interfered with! It is thelife-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalistssay so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit, beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an articlein a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individualadvertisement is commonly in good taste, both in legend and inillustration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has trulysaid, the cereal advertisements in the magazines are far moreinteresting than the serial stories. " This latter statement I can easilybelieve; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind apicture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window, a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legendattached, "Cascarella--it works while you sleep. "

The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only asillustrating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degreeof development which has now been attained by what is at once the artand the science of advertisement. "The study of advertisement, " itbegins, "seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. Hardlya month passes but some magazine finds a new and inviting phase of thismodern art to lay before its readers. The solid literature ofadvertisement is also growing rapidly.... The technique of the subjectis almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. Whole volumeshave been compiled on the art of writing advertisements. Commercialschools and colleges devote courses of study to the subject. Indeed thecorner-stone of the curriculum of a well-known business college is anelective upon 'Window-dressing. '" That you may be under nomisapprehension, I must add that this article appears in what isadmittedly the most serious and respectable of the New York newspapers;and that it is not conceived in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To theAmerican, advertisement is a serious, important, and elevatingdepartment of business, and those who make it their speciality endeavourto base their operations on a profound study of human nature. One ofthese gentlemen has expounded, in a book which has a wide circulation, the whole philosophy of his liberal profession. He calls the book"Imagination in Business";[4] and I remark incidentally that the use ofthe word "imagination, " like that of "art, " in this connection, showswhere the inquirer ought to look for the manifestation, on thiscontinent, of the æsthetic spirit. "The imaginative man, " says thewriter, "sends his thought through all the instincts, passions, andprejudices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, he knowsevery human weakness and its sure decoy. " It is this latter clause thatis relevant to his theme. Poets in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas, they celebrated the strength and nobility of men; but the poet of themodern world "cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind. " Of these thechief is "the inability to throw away an element of value, even thoughit cannot be utilised. " On this great principle is constructed the wholeart and science of advertisement. And my author proceeds to give aseries of illustrations, "each of which is an actual fact, either in myexperience, or of which I have been cognisant. " Space and copyrightforbid me to quote. I must refer the reader to the original source. Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the whole theoryand practice of modern trade. That theory and practice is being taughtin schools of commerce throughout the Union; and there are many, Isuppose, who would like to see it taught in English universities. But, really, does anyone--does any man of business--think it a bettereducation than Greek?

 Footnotes:

 [Footnote 4: _Imagination in Business_ (Harper & Brothers). ]

X

CULTURE

Scene, a club in a Canadian city; persons, a professor, a doctor, abusiness man, and a traveller (myself). Wine, cigars, anecdotes; andsuddenly, popping up, like a Jack-in-the-box absurdly crowned with ivy, the intolerable subject of education. I do not remember how it began;but I know there came a point at which, before I knew where I was, Ifound myself being assailed on the subject of Oxford and Cambridge. Not, however, in the way you may anticipate. Those ancient seats of learningwere not denounced as fossilised, effete, and corrupt. On the contrary, I was pressed, urged, implored almost with tears in the eye--to reformthem? No! to let them alone!

"For heaven's sake, keep them as they are! You don't know what you'vegot, and what you might lose! We know! We've had to do without it! Andwe know that without it everything else is of no avail. We bluster andbrag about education on this side of the Atlantic. But in our heart ofhearts we know that we have missed the one thing needful, and that you, over in England, have got it. "

"And that one thing?"

"Is Culture! Yes, in spite of Matthew Arnold, Culture, and Culture, andalways Culture!"

"Meaning by Culture?"

"Meaning Aristotle instead of Agriculture, Homer instead of Hygiene, Shakespeare instead of the Stock Exchange, Bacon instead of Banking, Plato instead of Pædagogics! Meaning intellect before intelligence, thought before dexterity, discovery before invention! Meaning the onlything that is really practical, ideas; and the only thing that is reallyhuman, the Humanities!"

Rather apologetically, I began to explain. At Oxford, I said, no doubtthe Humanities still hold the first place. But at Cambridge they havelong been relegated to the second or the third. There we have schools ofNatural Science, of Economics, of Engineering, of Agriculture. We haveeven a Training College in Pædagogics. Their faces fell, and theyrenewed their passionate appeal. 

"Stop it, " they cried. "For heaven's sake, stop it! In all those thingswe've got you skinned alive over here! If you want Agriculture go toWisconsin! If you want Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Institute! If youwant Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for theEnglish-speaking world what you alone can give! Preserve liberalculture! Preserve the Classics! Preserve Mathematics! Preserve theseed-ground of all practical inventions and appliances! Preserve theintegrity of the human mind!"

Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were not typicalCanadians. But they were not the least intelligent men I have met onthis continent. And when they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berthin the train, and I was left to my own reflections in that mostuncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how odd it was thatin matters educational we are always endeavouring to reform the onlypart of our system that excites the admiration of foreigners. 

I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The pointthat interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in Americathere is no "culture. " And, in the sense they gave to that term, I thinkthey are right. There _is_ no culture in America. There is instruction;there is research; there is technical and professional training; thereis specialisation in science and industry; there is every possibleapplication of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for itsown sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of Americanbusiness that "a man is damned who knows two things. " "He is almost adilettante, " it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"!"The perfect professor, " said a College President, "should be willing towork hard eleven months in the year. " These are straws, if you like, butthey show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travellong in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You willnot, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash uponyou that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do notconverse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meeta man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow itout into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathosor with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions andaffinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple ofAmerican conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hungerfor positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing toone another their travels, their business transactions, theirexperiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feelyou have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American, broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind isembedded in it; it moves wedged in fact. His only escape is into humour;and even his humour is but a formula of exaggeration. It implies noimagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate asubject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the samegrotesque mould. That is why it does not really much amuse the English. For the English are accustomed to Shakespeare, and to the London cabby. 

This may serve to indicate what I mean by lack of culture. I admit, ofcourse, that neither are the English cultured. But they have cultureamong them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught Iknow, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. Ihave visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere, except perhaps at Harvard--unless my impressions are very much atfault--I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known asthe "Yale spirit, " and it is very like that of an English Public School. It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. Itturns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmiccries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation. It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitaryperson, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, ofcourse, exists in English universities. It is imported there from thePublic Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliquesescape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, noone escapes, or they are too few to count. I know Americans of culture, know and love them; but I feel them to be lost in the sea ofphilistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven thelump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour tothem; and all the more loss to America. 

Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the properpolicy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not herediscuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that areachieved by accident, and by accident may be destroyed. The things we doto maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserveit. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of thecauses that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense ofits importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unityif we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seasrally round exactly those things in England which we expect them todeclare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham orLiverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of theEmpire with professors. 

XI

ANTÆUS

I saw to-day some really remarkable landscapes by an American artist. So, at least, they seem to me. They have, at any rate, a quality ofimagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One doesnot expect"--why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedlyshe is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere. American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection andsensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far asimmigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working againstthe artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often producesons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they doso as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that isunfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named"Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed tobreathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see, is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others andrespecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artisticcalling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; includingunder business Politics and Law, which in this country are onlydepartments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem thatis held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life inEngland. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets noencouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the onlyvirile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well becomechauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it isagreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition. " Americans believe ineducation, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to bemade in that profession, and the making of money is the test ofcharacter. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point whichmay easily discourage him from running at all. At the best, he emigratesto Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. Or, remaining in America, he succumbs to the environment, puts aside hiscreative ambition, and enters business. It is not for nothing thatAmericans are the most active people in the world. They pay the penaltyin an atrophy of the faculties of reflection and representation. 

Things are different in Europe, and even in England. There, not onlyare artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful--theyare, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit ofliterature and art is one which a young man need not feel itdiscreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth atOxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines toenter business. The first-class man does not normally aspire to startlife as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers;and both of them have traditional affinities with literature. So has theLaw, still in England a profession and not a trade. One may even be adon or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. Under these conditionsa young man can escape from the stifling pressure of the business pointof view. He can find societies like-minded with himself, equallyindifferent to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired byintellectual or æsthetic ambitions. He can choose to be poor withoutfeeling that he will therefore become despicable. The attitude of thebusiness classes in England, no doubt, is much the same as that of thebusiness classes in America. But in England there are other classes andother traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent commercialism. InAmerica the trade-wind blows broad, steady, universal over the lengthand breadth of the continent. 

This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. Butit is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a longtradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has leftits mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, thephysical features of the country. The books and the pictures can betransplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art thetechnical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what Iwill call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent inAmerica. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into thepresent something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not onlyis Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics aremellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Classes are moresegregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghostof a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with thebeat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear tocatch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it istrue, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. Asensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed. Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but ithas not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he hastouched he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, commerce;one type, the business man; one ideal, that of increasing wealth. Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, monotony of aim, monotony ofoutlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europeis industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, thedifference is vital. 

But the difference is disappearing. Not that America is becoming likeEurope, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of theimitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causesproducing similar results. The disease--or shall we say, to use aneutral term--the diathesis of commercialism found in America an openfield and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course washampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it isspreading none the less surely. And the question arises--In the future, when the European environment is as unfavourable to Art as the American, will there be, in the West, any Art at all? I do not know; no one knows;but there is this to remark. What I am calling commercialism is theinfancy, not the maturity of a civilisation. The revolution in morals, in manners, and in political and social institutions which mustaccompany the revolution in industry, has hardly yet begun its course. It has gone further in Europe than in America; so that, oddly enough, Europe is at once behind and in front of this continent, overlaps it, soto speak, at both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; andfor generations, I conceive, political and social issues will draw awaymuch of the creative talent that might have been available for Art. Inthe end, one may suppose, something like a stable order will arise; anorder, that is, in which people will feel that their institutionscorrespond sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able todevote themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation inArt. 

But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? Itwill be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, acivilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is noindigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society, certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that hasbeen or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war, the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passedirrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes urged, therewill be such a dearth of those tense moments which alone engender theartistic mood, that Art of any kind will have become impossible. If thatwere true, it would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art isimportant, but there are things more important; and among those thingsare justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that apeaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that isuninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurablematerialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalryexcept for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my ownbelief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in whichmost men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritualconflict; that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion tolove, would begin at last to take their proper place in human life; andwould engender the forms of Art appropriate to their expression. 

To return to America, what I am driving at is this. America may have anArt, and a great Art. But it will be after she has had her socialrevolution. Her Art has first to touch ground; and before it can dothat, the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenthcentury that the seed of Mediæval Art could be sown; it was not till thethirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, our civilisation is not ripefor its own Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. Itis torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow. There must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of the modernera. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet ofit, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make hisvision real. 

CONCLUDING ESSAY

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey theimpressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they mayhave depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprintedthem substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, someconcluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of someinterest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit noras final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropingsinto a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore, be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical andsympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but ratheras a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I amtrying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend asimpartially as is compatible with having an attitude of one's own atall. 

Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become acommonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is anEast and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kiplingwas thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinkingof England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approachesthe question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decidewhether there is really an East and a West, and what either stands for. That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its own, is, Ithink, true. But it must be limited in time to the last two centuries, and in space to the countries of Western Europe and the continent ofAmerica. So understood, the West forms, in all the most importantrespects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into differentnations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and oftenconflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important, that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form inthe burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in theperspective of history, they are survivals, atrophying and disappearing. Behind and despite of them there is a common Western mind and a commonWestern organisation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan;trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, and the resultsachieved by it are common. There is one system of industry, that knownas Capitalism; and the problems arising from it and the solutionspropounded appear alike in every nation. There is one politicaltendency, or fact, that of popular government. There are cognate aimsand similar achievements in literature and art. There is, in brief, aWestern movement, a Western problem, a Western mentality; and theparticular happenings of particular nations are all parts of this onehappening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common religion. I donot refer to Christianity, for the religion I mean is held by hundredsand thousands who are not Christians, and indeed does not very readilyfind in Christianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has notbeen formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard in all theserious work and all the serious thought of the West. It is the religionof Good and Evil, of Time and the process in Time. If it tried to drawup a confession of faith perhaps it would produce, as its first attempt, something of this kind:--

 "I believe in the ultimate distinction between Good and Evil, and in a real process in a real Time. I believe it to be my duty to increase Good and diminish Evil; I believe that in doing this I am serving the purpose of the world. I know this; I do not know anything else; and I am reluctant to put questions to which I have no answer, and to which I do not believe that anyone has an answer. Action, as defined above, is my creed. Speculation weakens action. I do not wish to speculate, I wish to live. And I believe the true life to be the life I have described. "

In saying that this is the real creed of the modern Western man I do notpretend that he always knows or would admit it to be so. But if hisactions, his words, and his thoughts be sympathetically interpreted, where all are at their best, I think they will be found to implysomething of this kind. And this attitude I call religious, not merelyethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards Good is ofthe essence of the World, not only of men, or of Man. To believe this isan act of faith, not of reason; though it is not contrary to reason, asno faith should be or long can be. Many men do _not_ believe it, formany are not religious; others, while believing it, may believe alsomany other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of religion in themodern West, the justification of our life, the faith of our works. Icall it the Religion of Time, and distinguish it thus from the Religionof Eternity. 

In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common aim and a commonmotive, there is really a West. Is there also an East? That is not soclear. In some important respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisationsare alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their industry ismanual not mechanical. Their social unit is the extended family. Totravel in the East is to realise that life on the soil and in thevillage is there still the normal life, as it has been almost everywhereand always, throughout civilisation, until the last century in the West. But though there is thus in the East a common way of life, there is nota common organisation nor a common spirit. Economically, the greatEastern countries are still independent of one another. Each lives forthe most part by and on itself. And their intellectual and spiritualintercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negligible astheir economic commerce. The influence that is beginning to be strongupon them all is that of Western culture; and if they become alike intheir outlook on life, it will be by assimilating that. But, at present, they are not alike. It is easy, in this matter, to be deceived by theoutward forms of religion. Because Buddhism originated in India andspread to China and Japan, because Japan took Confucian ideals fromChina, it is natural to conclude that there is a common religious spiritthroughout the East, or the Far East. But one might as reasonably inferthat the spirit of the christianised Teutons was the same as that of theJews or of the Christians in the East. Nations borrow religions, butthey shape them according to their own genius. And if I am not very muchmistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, radicallydistinct from and even opposed to that of China or Japan. These lattercountries, indeed, I believe, are far closer to the West than they areto India. Let me explain. 

India is the true origin and home of what I have called the religion ofEternity. That idea seems to have gone out from her to the rest of theworld. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and passion. Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In Indiathey have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. Nosociety, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activityin Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal thedirect and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, wouldbring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the veryphysical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal wasfirst conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the passion torealise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the dateof the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method ofrealisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of thetemporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of itby a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that bymeditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life andall its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they couldreach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true ofthe latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Westerninfluences have been excluded. Let me illustrate from the words of SriRamakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late inthe nineteenth century. 

First, for the claim to pass directly into union with the Eternal:

 "I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! Why then should I reason? I do actually see that it is the Absolute Who has become all these things about us; it is He who appears as the finite soul and the phenomenal world. One must have such an awakening of the Spirit within to see this Reality.... Spiritual awakening must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of this world. "[5]

And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi is merely oneof intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, orsuper-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains manyaccounts of its effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them:

 "He is now in a state of Samadhi, the superconscious or God-conscious state. The body is again motionless. The eyes are again fixed! The boys only a moment ago were laughing and making merry! Now they all look grave. Their eyes are steadfastly fixed on the master's face. They marvel at the wonderful change that has come over him. It takes him long to come back to the sense world. His limbs now begin to lose their stiffness. His face beams with smiles, the organs of sense begin to come back each to its own work. Tears of joy stand at the corners of his eyes. He chants the sacred name of Rama. "[6]

The object, then, of this saint, and one he claims to have attained, isto come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes himaltogether from contact with this world and from all possibility ofaction in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saintsand most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculativeproblems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongsto my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct dependsupon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, assume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; they merelyattempt to give them a new content. If conduct is to have any meaning, Good and Evil must be real in a real world. If they are held to beappearances conduct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's viewof this matter? The whole life that we Western men call real is to him amere game played by and for the sake of God, or, to use his phrase, ofthe Divine Mother. For her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, insteadof free in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates andmaintains Evil. I quote the passage:

 "My Divine Mother is always in Her sportive mood. The world, indeed, is Her toy. She will have Her own way. It is Her pleasure to take out of the prisonhouse and set free only one or two among a hundred thousand of her children!

 "_A Brahmo_: Sir, She can if She pleases set everybody free. Why is it then, that She has bound us hand and foot with the chains of the world?

 "_Sri Ramakrishna_: Well, I suppose it is her pleasure. It is her pleasure to go on with Her sport with all these beings that She has brought into existence. The player amongst the children that touches the person of the Grand-dame, the same need no longer run about. He cannot take any further part in the exciting play of Hide and Seek that goes on. 

 "The others who have not touched the goal must run about and play to the great delight of the Grand-dame. "[7]

Thus the Indian saint. Let us now try to bring his conception intorelation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In arailway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowlyburned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of hismisery. What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo innocentnatives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tortured, and murdered, that shareholders in Europe may receive high dividends. What is this?The sport of God! In the richest countries of the West a greatproportion of those who produce the wealth receive less than the wageswhich would suffice to keep them in bare physical health. What is this?Once more the sport of God! One might multiply examples, but it would beidle. No Western man could for a moment entertain the view of SriRamakrishna. To him such a God would be a mere devil. The Indianposition, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an idealism conditionedby defective experience of the life in Time. The saint has chosenanother experience. But clearly he has not transcended ours, he hassimply left it out. 

Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the most sincererepresentatives of religion in India that Sri Ramakrishna does nottypify the Indian attitude. Perhaps not, if we take contemporary India. But then contemporary India has been profoundly influenced by Westernthought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly have thought and felt as they did, anddo, were it not for this influence. The following poem of RabindranathTagore may aptly symbolise this breaking in of the West upon the East, though I do not know that that was the author's intention:

 "With days of hard travail I raised a temple. It had no doors or windows, its walls were thickly built with massive stones. 

 I forgot all else, I shunned all the world, I gazed in rapt contemplation at the image I had set upon the altar. 

 It was always night inside, and lit by the lamps of perfumed oil. The ceaseless smoke of incense wound my heart in its heavy coils. 

 Sleepless, I carved on the walls fantastic figures in mazy bewildering lines--winged horses, flowers with human faces, women with limbs like serpents. 

 No passage was left anywhere through which could enter the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum of the busy village. 

 The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that of incantations which I chanted. 

 My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my senses swooned in ecstasy. 

 I knew not how time passed till the thunderstone had struck the temple, and a pain stung me through the heart. 

 The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless in the light, as they would fain hide themselves. 

 I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and alive with the living touch of God. The night I had imprisoned spread its wings and vanished. "[8]

The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the spiritual life ofIndia, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous tothe advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this--thesymbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and theprevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wanderingascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else, unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It isthe religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is thereligion of the Eternal. 

But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produceher teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in aconstant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in orderto live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitalityin the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?

I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggestthat it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict betweenmen's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live notbecause they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Theirhold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I havebeen told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions againstplague, that what they have to contend with is not so much theresistance as the indifference of the population. "Why worry us?" theysay, in effect; "life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid ofit. " Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escapeis either, for the mass, by death; or for the men of spiritual genius, by a flight to the Eternal. How this attitude has arisen I do not hereseek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, allno doubt have played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably aneffect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, Ithink, who knows India, would dispute that this attitude is a fact; andit is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but fromthe Far East. 

For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent stillhave, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, inparticular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular andpractical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have hadChristianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say thattheir outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is byChristianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude tolife, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks outfrom the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the peoplewander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression ofthe practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, socialduty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. Andwhen the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese artpurifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas inIndia the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowningsurface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has thissame hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equallygifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly andtediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry likeWordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weavingacross them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China isessentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable, more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant formsof thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisationfor centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and ona smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have builton the same foundations. 

And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of theEmperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest passion is patriotism. AJapanese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for thesplendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he hasso little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readilythrows it away. The Japanese are unlike the Chinese and unlike theEuropeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe inthe world of time and change; and because of this attitude, they and therest of the world stand together like a mountain in the sun, contemplating uneasily that other mysterious peak, shrouded in mist, which is India. 

The reader by this time will have grasped the point I am trying to put. There are in Man two religious impulses, or, if the expression bepreferred, two aspects of the religious impulse. I have called them thereligion of the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India I suggeststands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, while theother countries of the East rank rather with the West than with India. It is not necessary to my purpose to exaggerate this antithesis. I willsay, if it be preferred, that in India the emphasis is on the Eternal, in the West on Time. But that much at least must be said and is plainlytrue. Now, as between these two attitudes, I find myself quite clearlyand definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the precedingpages hard things about Western civilisation. I hate many of itsmanifestations, I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I cansee no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the southpole, and very little in the invention of aeroplanes; while gramophones, machine guns, advertisements, cinematographs, submarines, dreadnoughts, cosmopolitan hotels, seem to me merely fatuous or sheerly disastrous. But what lies behind all this, the tenacity, the courage, the spirit ofadventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It isnot the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anythingbut pernicious, for its main use is likely to be for war. But the factthat men so lightly risk their lives to perfect it, _that_ is valuable. The West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous on aquest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes, lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to securea society more just and more humane which inspires all men and allmovements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who canunderstand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our mostreckless enterprises. We are living very "dangerously"; all the forcesare loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we areliving towards something; we are living with the religion of Time. 

So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. Butthey may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, "Is thatall? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I mustreply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of theEternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatiblewith the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I haveurged, is that of most Indian, and as I think, of most Western mystics. Not, however, of all, and not of all modern mystics, even in India. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, in his "Sádhana, " has put forward amysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include whatI have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of realexperience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. Formy own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view ofTime, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be trulysaid by one who starts with the belief that that is real. Theprofoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goetheand George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my ownsmall experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of thatprocess in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in thebettering of the material and social environment, though we hold theimportance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. Andthat development consists in a constant expansion of interest away fromand beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of theworld at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art, in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of thereal processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see nolimit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I amclear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same--toexpand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command--I shouldrather say this impulse--seems to me absolute, the one certain thing onwhich everything else must build. I think it enough for religion, in thecase at least of those who have got beyond the infant need forcertitudes and dogmas. These perhaps are few; yet they may be reallymore numerous than appears. And on the increase in their numbers, andthe intensity of their conviction and their life, the fate of the worldseems to me to depend. 

 Footnotes:

 [Footnote 5: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part 1. , p. 310. ]

 [Footnote 6: _Ibid. _, p. 61. ]

 [Footnote 7: _Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna_, second edition, Part 1. , p. 145. ]

 [Footnote 8: _The Gardener_, p. 125. ]

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Pg. 168, added closing single quote mark for clarity. In this case itserves to close a quote within a quote. (speak. '" You can now)

Footnote 3, in the original text, the English translation of Dante'spoem did not preserve the line breaks in each stanza. The originalappearance has been retained. 

Footnote 3, the reference is given as Dante's "Purgatorio". In actualfact the lines of verse come from Dante's "Paradiso". The author'soriginal text has been retained. 

Pg. 184 and 191, line of verse beginning "My son, the good you.... ". Inthe original text, the fifth word was an abbreviation comprising a "y"and a superscript "o". This is presumed to represent "you" and has beenexpanded as such for readability. 

Pg. 192, "poeple" changed to "people". (property of the Americanpoeple. )