1 files changed, 5601 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/27347.txt b/27347.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..51ee538
--- /dev/null
+++ b/27347.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5601 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Appearances, by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Appearances
+       Being Notes of Travel
+
+Author: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
+
+Release Date: November 28, 2008 [EBook #27347]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APPEARANCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ronald Lee
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  _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 the
+East in the _Manchester Guardian_, those from America in the _English
+Review_. In reprinting them, I have chosen a title which may serve also
+as an apology. What I offer is not Reality; but appearances to me. From
+such appearances perhaps, in time, Reality may be constructed. I claim
+only to make my contribution. I do so because the new contact between
+East and West is perhaps the most important fact of our age; and the
+problems of action and thought which it creates can only be solved as
+each civilisation tries to understand the others, and, by so doing,
+better to understand itself. These articles represent at any rate a good
+will to understand; and they may, I hope, for that reason throw one
+gleam of light on the darkness.
+
+For the opportunity of travelling in the East I am indebted to the
+munificence of Mr. Albert Kahn of Paris, who has founded what are known
+in this country as the Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowships.[1] The
+existence of this endowment is perhaps not as widely known as it should
+be. And if this volume should be the occasion of leading others to take
+advantage of the founder's generosity it will not have been written in
+vain.
+
+I have hesitated long before deciding to republish the letters on
+America. They were written in 1909, before the election of President
+Wilson, 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 to
+hesitate. For they deal only incidentally with current politics, and
+whatever value they may have is as a commentary on phases of American
+civilisation which are of more than transitory significance. Much has
+happened in the United States during the last few years which is of
+great interest and importance. The conflict between democracy and
+plutocracy has become more conscious and more acute; there have been
+important developments in the labour movement; and capital has been so
+"harassed" by legislation that it may, for the moment, seem odd to
+capitalists to find America called "the paradise of Plutocracy." No
+doubt the American public has awakened to its situation since 1909. But
+such awakenings take a long time to transform the character of a
+civilisation and all that has occurred serves only to confirm the
+contention in the text that in the new world the same situation is
+arising that confronts the old one.
+
+What made me hesitate was something more important than the date at
+which the letters were written. There is in them a note of exasperation
+which I would have wished to remove if I could. But I could not, without
+a complete rewriting, by which, even if it were possible to me, more
+would have been lost than gained. It is this note of exasperation which
+has induced me hitherto to keep the letters back, in spite of requests
+to the contrary from American friends and publishers. But the
+opportunity of adding them as a pendant to letters from the East, where
+they fall naturally into their place as a complement and a contrast, has
+finally overcome my scruples; the more so, as much that is said of
+America 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, is
+nevertheless the civilisation in which I would choose to live, in which
+I believe, and about which all my hopes centre, I have endeavoured to
+make clear in the concluding essay. And my readers, I hope, if any of
+them 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 that
+disagreeable kind called "candid."
+
+
+    Footnotes:
+
+    [Footnote 1: These Fellowships, each of the value of L660, 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.  ANTAEUS                         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 a
+sound of singing, and I recognised a well-known hymn. The sun was
+blazing on a foam-flecked sea; a range of islands lifted red rocks into
+the 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 no
+idea 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 the
+same reason that we play deck-quoits and shuffle-board; for the same
+reason 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 doing
+the proper thing." "But why should the proper thing be done?" "That
+question ought not to be asked. Anglicanism is an idealistic creed. It
+is anti-utilitarian and anti-rational. It does not ask questions; it has
+faith. The proper thing is the proper thing, and because it is the
+proper thing it is done." "At least," he said, "you do not pretend that
+this is religion?" "No. It has nothing to do with religion. But neither
+is it, as you too simply suppose, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies that you
+know what religion is, and counterfeit it. But these people do not know,
+and they are not counterfeiting. When they go to church they are not
+thinking of religion. They are thinking of the social system. The
+officers and civilians singing up there first learned to sing in the
+village church. They walked to the church from the great house; the
+great house stood in its park; the park was enclosed by the estate; and
+the estate was surrounded by other estates. The service in the village
+church stood for all that. And the service in the saloon stands for it
+still. At bottom, what that hymn means is not that these men are
+Christians, but that they are carrying England to India, to Burma, to
+China." "It is a funny thing," the Frenchman mused, "to carry to 300
+million 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 in
+it. It is the shell that protects them in those oceans of impropriety.
+And from that shell they govern the world." "But how can they govern
+what they can't even see?" "They govern all the better. If once they
+could see, they would be lost. Doubt would enter in. And it is the
+virtue of the Englishman that he never doubts. That is what the system
+does for him."
+
+At this moment a voice was borne down the breeze. It was that of my
+travelling companion, and it appeared, as he approached, that he was
+discoursing to the captain on the merits of Dostoievsky's novels. He is
+no respecter of persons; he imposes his own conversation; and the
+captain, though obviously puzzled, was polite. "Russians may be like
+that," 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 the
+captain with conviction. I looked at the Frenchman. "There," I said,
+"behold the system." "But your friend?" "Ah, but he, like myself, is a
+pariah. Have you not observed? They are quite polite. They have even a
+kind of respect--such as our public school boys have--for anyone who is
+queer, if only he is queer enough. But we don't "belong," and they know
+it. We are outside the system. At bottom we are dangerous, like
+foreigners. And they don't quite approve of our being let loose in
+India." "Besides, you talk to the Indians." "Yes, we talk to the
+Indians." "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--to
+perpetuate between rulers and ruled an impassable gulf!" "Yes. But, as
+Mr. 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; then
+a leap and a dive; a leap and a dive again. A pair of porpoises were
+playing round the bows with the ease, the spontaneity, the beauty of
+perfect and happy life. As we watched them the same mood grew in us till
+it 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 the
+Deccan; scanty crops of maize and cotton; here and there low hills,
+their reddish soil sparsely clothed with trees; to the north, a receding
+line of mountains; elsewhere infinite space and blazing light. Our
+"tonga," its pair of wheels and its white awning rolling and jolting
+behind two good horses, passes long lines of bullock-carts. Indians,
+walking beside them with their inimitable gait, make exquisite gestures
+of abjection to the clumsy white Sahibs huddled uncomfortably on the
+back seat. Their robes of vivid colour, always harmoniously blent, leave
+bare the slender brown legs and often the breast and back. Children
+stark naked ride on their mothers' hips or their fathers' shoulder. Now
+and again the oxen are unyoked at a dribble of water, and a party rests
+and eats in the shade. Otherwise it is one long march with bare feet
+over the burning soil.
+
+We are approaching a market. The mud walls of a village appear. And
+outside, by a stream shrunk now into muddy pools, shimmers and wimmers
+a many-coloured crowd, buzzing among their waggons and awnings and
+improvised stalls. We ford the shallow stream, where women are washing
+clothes, cleaning their teeth, and drinking from the same water, and
+pass among the bags of corn, the sugar-cane, and sweetmeats, saluted
+gravely but unsolicited.
+
+Then on again for hours, the road now solitary, till as day closes we
+reach Fardapur. A cluster of mud-walled compounds and beehive huts lies
+about a fortified enclosure, where the children sprawl and scream, and a
+Brahmin intones to silent auditors. Outside they are drawing water from
+the puddles of the stream. And gradually over the low hills and the
+stretches 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 by
+a boy who wears the Nizam's livery, and explains to us, in a language we
+do not know, but with perfect lucidity, that it is to him, and no one
+else, that backsheesh is due. He sings snatches of music as old and
+strange as the hills; picks us balls of cotton, and prickly pear; and
+once stops to point to the fresh tracks of a panther. We are in the
+winding gorge of a watercourse; and presently, at a turn, in a
+semicircle facing south, we see in the cliff the long line of caves. As
+we enter the first an intolerable odour meets us, and a flight of bats
+explains the cause. Gradually our eyes accustom themselves to the light,
+and we become conscious of a square hall, the flat roof resting on squat
+pillars elaborately carved, fragments of painting on the walls and
+ceiling, narrow slits opening into dark cells, and opposite the
+entrance, set back in a shrine, a colossal Buddha, the light falling
+full on the solemn face, the upturned feet, the expository hands. This
+is a monastery, and most of the caves are on the same plan; but one or
+two 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 of
+the painting--and only ill-lighted fragments remain--is full of
+tenderness, refinement, and grace; no touch of drama; no hint of
+passion. The sculpture, stripped of its stucco surface, is rude but
+often impressive. But what impresses most is not the art but the
+religion of the place. In this terrible country, where the great forces
+of nature, drought and famine and pestilence, the intolerable sun, the
+intolerable rain, and the exuberance of life and death, have made of
+mankind a mere passive horde cowering before inscrutable Powers--here,
+more than anywhere, men were bound under a yoke of observance and ritual
+to the gods they had fashioned and the priests who interpreted their
+will. Then came the Deliverer to set them free not _for_ but _from_
+life, teaching them how to escape from that worst of all evils, rebirth
+again and again into a world of infinite suffering, unguided by any
+reason 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 this
+hell, unless you will learn to deliver yourselves by annihilating
+desire." They listened; they built monasteries; they meditated; and now
+and again, here, perhaps, in these caves, one or other attained
+enlightenment. But the cloud of Hinduism, lifted for a moment, rolled
+back heavier than ever. The older gods were seated too firmly on their
+thrones. Shiva--creator, preserver, destroyer--expelled the Buddha. And
+that passive figure, sublime in its power of mind, sits for ever alone
+in the land of his birth, exiled from light, in a cloud of clinging
+bats.
+
+But outside proceeds the great pageant of day and night, and the
+patient, beautiful people labour without hope, while universal nature,
+symbolised by Shiva's foot, presses heavily on their heads and forbids
+them the stature of man. Only the white man here, bustling, ungainly,
+aggressive, retains his freedom and acts rather than suffers. One
+understands at last the full meaning of the word "environment." Because
+of this sun, because of this soil, because of their vast numbers, these
+people are passive, religious, fatalistic. Because of our cold and rain
+in the north, our fresh springs and summers, we are men of action, of
+science, of no reflection. The seed is the same, but according to the
+soil it brings forth differently. Here the patience, the beauty, the
+abjection before the Devilish-Divine; there the defiance, the cult of
+the 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 one
+always as if one were a public meeting. He approached his face close to
+mine, gradually backing me into the wall. And I realised the full
+meaning of Carlyle's dictum "to be a mere passive bucket to be pumped
+into can be agreeable to no human being."
+
+It was not, naturally, the Irish question for its own sake that
+interested 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 order
+that they may oppress the minority. Here, too, an ideal of independence
+hypocritically masked under the phrase "self-government." "It is a law
+of political science that where there are two minorities they should
+stand 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 were
+not a thousand others"--there were, he hinted, but, rhetorically, he
+"passed them over in silence"--"for that reason alone I am loyal to the
+British raj." It had never occurred to me to doubt it. But I questioned,
+when I got a moment's breathing space, whether really the Hindu
+community 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 "multiplied
+examples"--it was his phrase. The movement for primary education, for
+example. It had nothing to do with education. It was a plot to teach the
+masses Hindi, in order that they might be swept into the anti-British,
+anti-Mahometan current. As to minor matters, no Hindu had ever voted for
+a Mahometan, no Hindu barrister ever sent a client to a Mahometan
+colleague. Whereas in all these matters, one was led to infer,
+Mahometans were conciliation and tolerance itself. I knew that the
+speaker himself had secured the election of Mahometans to all the seats
+in the Council. But I refrained from referring to the matter. Then there
+was caste. A Hindu will not eat with a Mahometan, and this was taken as
+a personal insult. I suggested that the English were equally boycotted;
+but that we regarded the boycott as a religious obligation, not as a
+social stigma. But, like the Irish Ulstermen, he was not there to listen
+to argument. He rolled on like a river. None of us could escape. He
+detected 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 doubt
+there was friction between the two communities, but that the worst way
+to deal with it was by recrimination. He agreed; with tears in his eyes
+he agreed. There was nothing he had not done, no advance he had not
+made, to endeavour to bridge the gulf. All in vain! Never were such
+obstinate fellows as these Hindus. And he proceeded once more to
+"multiply examples." As we said "Good-bye" in the small hours of the
+morning 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 saying
+that this is _the_ Mahometan point of view. Indeed, I have reason to
+know that it is not. But it is a Mahometan point of view in one
+province. And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical members
+of the community. Some twenty-five years ago, they say, Mahometans woke
+to the fact that they were dropping behind in the race for influence and
+power. They started a campaign of education and organisation. At every
+point they found themselves thwarted; and always, behind the obstacle,
+lurked a Hindu. Lord Morley's reform of the Councils, intended to unite
+all sections, had had the opposite effect. Nothing but the separate
+electorates had saved Mahometans from political extinction. And
+precisely because they desired that extinction Hindus desired mixed
+electorates. The elections to the Councils have exasperated the
+antagonism between the two communities. And an enemy might accuse the
+Government 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 of
+learning. But they too, I conceive, can "multiply examples" for their
+side. To a philosophic observer two reflections suggest themselves. One,
+that representative government can only work when there is real give and
+take between the contending parties. The other, that to most men, and
+most nations, religion means nothing more than antagonism to some other
+religion. Witness Ulster in Ireland; and witness, equally, Ulster in
+India.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ANGLO-INDIA
+
+
+From the gallery of the high hall we look down on the assembled society
+of the cantonment. The scene is commonplace enough; twaddle and tea,
+after tennis; "frivolling"--it is their word; women too empty-headed and
+men too tired to do anything else. This mill-round of work and exercise
+is maintained like a religion. The gymkhana represents the "compulsory
+games" of a public school. It is part of the "white man's burden." He
+plays, as he works, with a sense of responsibility. He is bored, but
+boredom is a duty, and there's nothing else to do.
+
+The scene is commonplace. Yes! But this afternoon a band is playing. The
+music suits the occasion. It is soft, melodious, sentimental. It
+provokes a vague sensibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. At
+least it should not, from its quality. But the power of music is
+incalculable. It has an essence independent of its forms. And by virtue
+of that essence its poorest manifestations can sink a shaft into the
+springs of life. So as I listen languidly the scene before me detaches
+itself from actuality and floats away on the stream of art. It becomes
+a symbol; and around and beyond it, in some ideal space, other symbols
+arise and begin to move. I see the East as an infinite procession. Huge
+Bactrian camels balance their bobbing heads as they pad deliberately
+over the burning dust. Laden asses, cattle, and sheep and goats move on
+in troops. Black-bearded men, men with beard and hair dyed red, women
+pregnant or carrying babies on their hips, youths like the Indian
+Bacchus with long curling hair, children of all ages, old men
+magnificent 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 on
+to this little oasis of Englishmen. Then, suddenly, they are an ocean;
+and the Anglo-Indian world floats upon it like an Atlantic liner. It has
+its gymnasium, its swimming-bath, its card-rooms, its concert-room. It
+has its first and second class and steerage, well marked off. It dresses
+for dinner every night; it has an Anglican service on Sunday; it flirts
+mildly; it is bored; but above all it is safe. It has water-tight
+compartments. It is "unsinkable." The band is playing; and when the
+crash comes it will not stop. No; it will play this music, this, which
+is in my ears. Is it Gounod's "Faust" or an Anglican hymn? No matter! It
+is 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 shrink
+from nothing. Of all the stories about the loss of the _Titanic_ the
+best and most characteristic is that of the group of men who sat
+conversing in the second-class smoking-room, till one of them said, "Now
+she's going down. Let's go and sit in the first-class saloon." And they
+did. How touching! How sublime! How English! The _Titanic_ sinks. With a
+roar the machinery crashes from stem to bow. Dust on the water, cries on
+the water, then vacuity and silence. The East has swept over this colony
+of the West. And still its generations pass on, rhythmically swinging;
+slaves of Nature, not, as in the West, rebels against her; cyclical as
+her seasons and her stars; infinite as her storms of dust; identical as
+the leaves of her trees; purposeless as her cyclones and her
+earthquakes.
+
+The music stops and I rub my eyes. Yes, it is only the club, only tea
+and twaddle! Or am I wrong? There is more in these men and women than
+appears. They stand for the West, for the energy of the world, for all,
+in this vast Nature, that is determinate and purposive, not passively
+repetitionary. And if they do not know it, if they never hear the strain
+that transposes them and their work into a tragic dream, if tennis is
+tennis to them, and a valse a valse, and an Indian a native, none the
+less 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 the
+hope, the inspiration, and the meaning of the world. In my heart of
+hearts I apologise as I prolong the banalities of parting, and almost
+vow 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 the
+great 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 the
+dancers, gorgeously robed. All were boys. The leader, a peacock-fan
+flashing in his head-dress, personated Krishna. Beside him sat Rhada,
+his wife. The rest were the milkmaids of the legend. They sat like
+statues, and none of them moved at our entry. But the musicians, who
+were seated on the ground, rose and salaamed, and instantly began to
+play. There were five instruments--a miniature harmonium (terrible
+innovation), two viols, of flat, unresonant tone, a pair of cymbals, and
+a 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 on
+a thread of loose improvisation. Every now and again the musicians burst
+into song. Their voices were harsh and nasal, but their art was
+complicated and subtle. Clearly, this was not barbarous music, it was
+only strange, and its interest increased, as the ear became accustomed
+to it. Suddenly, as though they could resist no longer, the dancers, who
+had not moved, leapt from the platform and began their dance. It was
+symbolical; Krishna was its centre, and the rest were wooing him. Desire
+and its frustration and fulfilment were the theme. Yet it was not
+sensual, or not merely so. The Hindus interpret in a religious spirit
+this legendary sport of Krishna with the milkmaids. It symbolises the
+soul's wooing of God. And so these boys interpreted it. Their passion,
+though it included the flesh, was not of the flesh. The mood was
+rapturous, but not abandoned; ecstatic, but not orgiastic. There were
+moments of a hushed suspense when hardly a muscle moved; only the arms
+undulated and the feet and hands vibrated. Then a break into swift
+whirling, on the toes or on the knees, into leaping and stamping, swift
+flight and pursuit. A pause again; a slow march; a rush with twinkling
+feet; and always, on those young faces, even in the moment of most
+excitement, a look of solemn rapture, as though they were carried out of
+themselves into the divine. I have seen dancing more accomplished, more
+elaborate, more astonishing than this. But never any that seemed to me
+to fulfil so well the finest purposes of the art. The Russian ballet, in
+the retrospect, seems trivial by comparison. It was secular; but this
+was religious. For the first time I seemed to catch a glimpse of what
+the tragic dance of the Greeks might have been like. The rhythms were
+not unlike those of Greek choruses, the motions corresponded strictly to
+the rhythms, and all was attuned to a high religious mood. In such
+dancing the flesh becomes spirit, the body a transparent emblem of the
+soul.
+
+After that the play, I confess, was a drop into bathos. We descended to
+speech, even to tedious burlesque. But the analogy was all the closer to
+mediaeval mysteries. In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it is
+intimate, humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in the
+nursery. So it is in India where the age of Faith has never ceased. What
+was represented that night was an episode in the story of Krishna. The
+characters were the infant god, his mother, Jasodha, and an ancient
+Brahmin who has come from her own country to congratulate her on the
+birth of a child. He is a comic character--the sagging belly and the
+painted face of the pantomime. He answers Jasodha's inquiries after
+friends and relations at home. She offers him food. He professes to have
+no appetite, but, on being pressed, demands portentous measures of rice
+and flour. While she collects the material for his meal, he goes to
+bathe in the Jumna; and the whole ritual of his ablutions is elaborately
+travestied, even a crocodile being introduced in the person of one of
+the musicians, who rudely pulls him by the leg as he is rolling in
+imaginary water. His bathing finished, he retires and cooks his food.
+When it is ready he falls into prayer. But during his abstraction the
+infant Krishna crawls up and begins devouring the food. Returning to
+himself, 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 cook
+his food. This episode was repeated three times in all its detail, and I
+confess I found it insufferably tedious. The third time Jasodha scolds
+the child and asks him why he does it. He replies--and here comes the
+pretty point of the play--that the Brahmin, in praying to God and
+offering him the food, unwittingly is praying to him and offering to
+him, and in eating the food he has but accepted the offering. The mother
+does not understand, but the Brahmin does, and prostrates himself before
+his Lord.
+
+This is crude enough art, but at any rate it is genuine. Like all
+primitive art, it is a representation of what is traditionally believed
+and popularly felt. The story is familiar to the audience and intimate
+to their lives. It represents details which they witness every day, and
+at the same time it has religious significance. Out of it might grow a
+great drama, as once in ancient Greece. And perhaps from no other origin
+can such a drama arise.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+AN INDIAN SAINT
+
+
+It was at Benares that we met him. He led us through the maze of the
+bazaars, his purple robe guiding us like a star, and brought us out by
+the mosque of Aurungzebe. Thence a long flight of stairs plunged sheer
+to the Ganges, shining below in the afternoon sun. We descended; but,
+turning aside before we reached the shore, came to a tiny house perched
+on a terrace above the ghat. We took off our shoes in the anteroom and
+passed through a second chamber, with its riverside open to the air, and
+reached a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We squatted
+and looked round. Some empty bottles were the only furniture. But on the
+wall hung the picture we had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, and
+perhaps as much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe.
+Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles and signs, and
+from them grew leaves and flowers of various hues. Below was a garden
+lit by a rising sun, and a black river where birds and beasts pursued
+and devoured one another. At our request he took a pointer and began to
+explain. I am not sure that I well understood or well remember, but
+something of this kind was the gist of it. In the beginning was
+Parabrahma, 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; and
+of 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. The
+branch to the right was Illusion and ended in God; the branch to the
+left was Ignorance and ended in the Soul. Thus the Soul contemplates
+Illusion under the form of her gods. Up the line of the trunk came next
+the Energy of Nature; then Pride; then Egotism and Individuality; whence
+branched to one side Mind, to the other the senses and the passions.
+Then followed the elements, fire, air, water, and earth; then the
+vegetable creation; then corn; and then, at the summit of the tree, the
+primitive Man and Woman, type of Humanity. The garden below was Eden,
+until the sun rose; but with light came discord and conflict, symbolised
+by the river and the beasts. Evil and conflict belong to the nature of
+the created world; and the purpose of religion is by contemplation to
+enable the Soul to break its bodies, and the whole creation to return
+again to Parabrahma, whence it sprung.
+
+Why did it spring? He did not know. For good or for evil? He could not
+say. What he knew he knew, and what he did not know he did not. "Some
+say there is no God and no Soul." He smiled. "Let them!" His certainty
+was complete. "Can the souls of men be reincarnated as animals?" He
+shrugged his shoulders. "Who can say?" I tried to put in a plea for the
+life of action, but he was adamant; contemplation and contemplation
+alone can deliver us. "Our good men," I said, "desire to make the world
+better, rather than to save their own souls." "Our sages," he replied,
+"are sorry for the world, but they know they cannot help it." His
+religion, I urged, denied all sense to the process of history. "There
+may be process in matter," he replied, "but there is none in God." I
+protested that I loved individual souls, and did not want them absorbed
+in 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. I
+felt like that, and I hugged my Ego; so presently he ministered to it
+with sweetmeats. He even ate with us, and smoked a cigarette. He was the
+most human of men; so human that I thought his religion could not be as
+inhuman as it sounded. But it was the religion of the East, not of the
+West. It refused all significance to the temporal world; it took no
+account of society and its needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop,
+the sense and the power of Individuality. It did not say, but it
+implied, that creation was a mistake; and if it did not profess
+pessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not know whether it
+is the religion of a wise race; but I am sure it could never be that of
+a strong one.
+
+But I loved the saint, and felt that he was a brother. Next morning, as
+we drifted past the long line of ghats, watching the bright figures on
+the terraces and stairs, the brown bodies in the water, and the Brahmins
+squatting on the shore, we saw him among the bathers, and he called to
+us 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 the
+gulf. The gulf, however, was profound; for many and many incarnations
+will be needed before one soul at least can come even to wish to
+annihilate 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 after
+many delays found ourselves drifting down the river in a houseboat. To
+lie on cushions, sheltered from the sun, looking out on the moving
+shore, to the sound of the leisurely plash of oars, is elysium after a
+night in the train. We had seven hours of it and I could have wished it
+were more. But towards sunset we reached our destination. At the wharf a
+crowd of servants were waiting to touch the feet of our hosts who had
+travelled 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 the
+temple. We took off our shoes and entered the enclosure, followed by
+half the village, silent, dignified, and deferential. Over ruined
+shrines of red brick, elaborately carved, clambered and twined the
+sacred peepul tree. And within a more modern building were housed images
+of Krishna and Rhada, and other symbols of what we call too hastily
+idolatry. Outside was a circular platform of brick where these dolls
+are washed in milk at the great festivals of the year. We passed on, and
+watched the village weaver at his work, sitting on the ground with his
+feet in a pit working the pedals of his loom; while outside, in the
+garden, 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 was
+dusk. A lamp was brought into the porch. Musicians and singers squatted
+on the floor. Behind them a white-robed crowd faded into the night. And
+we listened to hymns composed by the village saint, who had lately
+passed 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 easy
+for you! And, if you don't, what becomes of your reputation?" Next, a
+call to the ferry. "Come and cross over with me. Krishna is the boat and
+Rhada the sail. No storms can wreck us. Come, cross over with me." Then
+a prayer for deliverance from the "well" of the world where we are
+imprisoned by those dread foes the five senses of the mind. Then a
+rhapsody on God, invisible, incomprehensible. "He speaks, but He is not
+seen. He lives in the room with me, but I cannot find Him. He brings to
+market 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 that
+they will not tell it me." Then a strange ironical address to Krishna.
+"Really, sir, your conduct is very odd! You flirt with the Gopis! You
+put 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, a
+mystic song, how Krishna has plunged into the ocean of Rhada; how he is
+there drifting, helpless and lost. Can we not save him? But no! It is
+because his love is not perfect and pure. And that is why he must be
+incarnated again and again in the avatars.
+
+Are these people idolaters, these dignified old men, these serious
+youths, these earnest, grave musicians? Look at their temple, and you
+say "Yes." Listen to their hymns, and you say "No." Reformers want to
+educate them, and, perhaps, they are right. But if education is to mean
+the substitution of the gramophone and music-hall songs for this
+traditional art, these native hymns? I went to bed pondering, and was
+awakened at six by another chorus telling us it was time to get up. We
+did so, and visited the school, set up by my friend as an experiment; a
+mud floor, mud-lined walls, all scrupulously clean; and squatting round
+the four sides children of all ages, all reciting their lessons at once,
+and all the lessons different. They were learning to read and write
+their native language, and that, at least, seemed harmless enough. But
+parents complained that it unfitted them for the fields. "Our fathers
+did not do it"--that, said my impatient young host, is their reply to
+every attempt at reform. In his library were all the works of Nietzsche,
+Tolstoy, Wells, and Shaw, as well as all the technical journals of
+scientific agriculture. He lectured them on the chemical constituents of
+milk and the crossing of sugar-canes. They embraced his feet, sang their
+hymns, and did as their fathers had done. He has a hard task before him,
+but one far better worth attempting than the legal and political
+activities in which most young Zemindars indulge. And, as he said, here
+you see the fields and hear the birds, and here you can bathe in the
+Ganges. We did; and then breakfasted; and then set out in palanquins for
+the nearest railway station. The bearers sang a rhythmic chant as they
+bore us smoothly along through mustard and pulses, yellow and orange and
+mauve. The sun blazed hot; the bronzed figures streamed with sweat; the
+cheerful voices never failed or flagged. I dozed and drowsed, while East
+and West in my mind wove a web whose pattern I cannot trace. But a
+pattern 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 as
+lately the home of Sri Ramakrishna. He was only a name to me, and I did
+not pay much attention, though I had his "Gospel" [2] actually under my
+arm. I was preoccupied with the sunset, burning behind a veil of smoke;
+and presently, as we landed, with the great floating haystacks
+smouldering at the wharf in the red afterglow. As we waited for the
+tram, someone said, "Would you like to see Kali?" and we stepped aside
+to the little shrine. Within it was the hideous idol, black and
+many-armed, decked with tinsel and fed with the blood of goats; and
+there swept over me a wave of the repulsion I had felt from the first
+for the Hindu religion, its symbols, its cult, its architecture, even
+its philosophy. Seated in the tram, it was with an effort that I opened
+the "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 I
+asked about Hindu idolatry. The people, I was told, even the humblest
+and most ignorant, worshipped not the idol but what it symbolised.
+Actually, this hideous Kali stood to them for the Divine Mother. And I
+was told of an old woman, racked with rheumatism, who had determined at
+last to seek relief from the goddess. She returned with radiant face.
+She had seen the Mother! And she had no more rheumatism. In this popular
+religion, it would seem, the old cosmic elements have dropped out, and
+the human only persist. So that even the terrifying form of Shiva, the
+Destroyer, stands only for the divine husband of Parvati, the divine
+wife. Hinduism, I admitted, is not as inhuman and superstitious as it
+looks. But I admitted it reluctantly and with many reserves, remembering
+all I had seen and heard of obscene rites and sculptures, of the
+perpetual repetition of the names of God, of parasitic Brahmins and
+self-torturing ascetics.
+
+What manner of man, then, was this Sri Ramakrishna? I turned the pages
+and 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 to
+Hellenism and the West. "Go your way, Ramakrishna," I said, "but your
+way is not mine. For me and my kind action not meditation; the temporal
+not the eternal; the human not the ultra-divine; Socrates not
+Ramakrishna!" 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 this
+all-comprehensive Hinduism, this universal toleration, this refusal to
+recognise ultimate antagonisms, this "mush," in a word, as my friends
+would 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 and
+the cactuses and the palms rattling in the breeze, comes to us news of
+the Franchise Bill and of militant suffragettes. And I reflect that in
+this respect England is a "backward" country and Travancore an
+"advanced" one. Women here--except the Brahmin women--are, and always
+have been, politically and socially on an equality and more than an
+equality with men. For this is one of the few civilised States--for
+aught 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 equally
+with men. But it means that woman is the head of the family, and that
+property follows her line, not the man's. All women own property equally
+with men, and own it in their own right. The mother's property passes to
+her children, but the father's passes to his mother's kin. The husband,
+in fact, is not regarded as related to the wife. Relationship means
+descent from a common mother, whereas descent from a common father is a
+negligible fact, no doubt because formerly it was a questionable one.
+Women administer their own property, and, as I am informed, administer
+it more prudently than the men.
+
+Not only so; they have in marriage the superior position occupied by men
+in the West. The Nair woman chooses her own husband; he comes to her
+house, she does not go to his; and, till recently, she could dismiss him
+as soon as she was tired of him. The law--man-made, no doubt!--has
+recently altered this, and now mutual consent is required for a valid
+divorce. Still the woman is, at least on this point, on an equality with
+the man. And the heavens have not yet fallen. As to the vote, it is not
+so important or so general here as at home. The people live under a
+paternal monarchy "by right divine." The Rajah who consolidated the
+kingdom, early in the eighteenth century, handed it over formally to the
+god of the temple, and administers it in his name. Incidentally this
+gave him access to temple revenues. It also makes his person sacred. So
+much so that in a recent prison riot, when the convicts escaped and
+marched to the police with their grievances, the Rajah had only to
+appear 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 by
+votes. Still there are votes for local councils, and women have them
+equally with men. Any other arrangement would have seemed merely
+preposterous to the Nairs; and perhaps if any exclusion had been
+contemplated it would have been of men rather than of women.
+
+Other incidental results follow from the equality of the sexes. The
+early marriages which are the curse of India do not prevail among the
+Nairs. Consequently the schooling of girls is continued later. And this
+State holds the record in all India for female education. We visited a
+school of over 600 girls, ranging from infancy to college age, and
+certainly I never saw school-girls look happier, keener, or more alive.
+Society, clearly, has not gone to pieces under "the monstrous regimen of
+women." Travancore claims, probably with justice, to be the premier
+native State; the most advanced, the most prosperous, the most happy.
+Because of the position of women? Well, hardly. The climate is
+delightful, the soil fertile, the natural resources considerable. Every
+man sits under his own palm tree, and famine is unknown. The people, and
+especially the children, are noticeably gay, in a land where gaiety is
+not common. But one need not be a suffragette to hold that the equality
+of the sexes is one element that contributes to its well-being, and to
+feel that in this respect England lags far behind Travancore.
+
+Echoes of the suffrage controversy at home have led me to dwell upon
+this matter of the position of women. But, to be candid, it will not be
+that that lingers in my mind when I look back upon my sojourn here. What
+then? Perhaps a sea of palm leaves, viewed from the lighthouse top,
+stretching beside the sea of blue waves; perhaps a sandy river bed, with
+brown nude figures washing clothes in the shining pools; perhaps the
+oiled and golden skins glistening in the sun; perhaps naked children
+astride on their mothers' hips, or screaming with laughter as they race
+the motor-car; perhaps the huge tusked elephant that barred our way for
+a moment yesterday; perhaps the jungle teeming with hidden and menacing
+life; perhaps the seashore and its tumbling waves. One studies
+institutions, but one does not love them. Often one must wish that they
+did not exist, or existed in such perfection that their existence might
+be unperceived. Still, as institutions go, this, which regulates the
+relations of men and women, is, I suppose, the most important. So from
+the surf of the Arabian sea and the blaze of the Indian sun I send this
+little object lesson.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE BUDDHA AT BURUPUDUR
+
+
+To the north the cone of a volcano, rising sharp and black. To the east
+another. South and west a jagged chain of hills. In the foreground
+ricefields and cocoa palms. Everywhere intense green, untoned by grey;
+and in the midst of it this strange erection. Seen from below and from a
+distance it looks like a pyramid that has been pressed flat. In fact, it
+is a series of terraces built round a low hill. Six of them are
+rectangular; then come three that are circular; and on the highest of
+these is a solid dome, crowned by a cube and a spire. Round the circular
+terraces are set, close together, similar domes, but hollow, and pierced
+with lights, through which is seen in each a seated Buddha. Seated
+Buddhas, too, line the tops of the parapets that run round the lower
+terraces. 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 instruction
+would be for the selfish and the cruel. For what is inscribed is the
+legend and cult of the lord of tenderness. Much of it remains
+undeciphered and unexplained. But on the second terrace is recorded, on
+one side, the life of Sakya-Muni; on the other, his previous
+incarnations. The latter, taken from the "Jatakas," are naive and
+charming apologues.
+
+For example: Once the Buddha lived upon earth as a hare. In order to
+test him Indra came down from heaven in the guise of a traveller.
+Exhausted and faint, he asked the animals for help. An otter brought
+fish, a monkey fruit, a jackal a cup of milk. But the hare had nothing
+to give. So he threw himself into a fire, that the wanderer might eat
+his roasted flesh. Again: Once the Buddha lived upon earth as an
+elephant. He was met by seven hundred travellers, lost and exhausted
+with hunger. He told them where water would be found, and, near it, the
+body of an elephant for food. Then, hastening to the spot, he flung
+himself 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 him
+home. All round the outer wall run these pictured lessons. And opposite
+is shown the story of Sakya-Muni himself. We see the new-born child with
+his feet on lotuses. We see the fatal encounter with poverty, sickness,
+and death. We see the renunciation, the sojourn in the wilderness, the
+attainment under the bo-tree, the preaching of the Truth. And all this
+sculptured gospel seems to bring home to one, better than the volumes of
+the 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 warm
+impulse of pity and love that beats still in these tender and human
+pictures. It meant not the hope or desire for extinction, but the
+charming dream of thousands of lives, past and to come, in many forms,
+many conditions, many diverse fates. The pessimism of the master is as
+little likely as his high philosophy to have reached the mind or the
+heart of the people. The whole history of Buddhism, indeed, shows that
+it did not, and does not. What touched them in him was the saint and the
+lover of animals and men. And this love it was that flowed in streams
+over the world, leaving wherever it passed, in literature and art, in
+pictures of flowers or mountains, in fables and poems and tales, the
+trace of its warm and humanising flood.
+
+Still, there is the other Buddhism, the Buddhism of the thinker; his
+theory of human life, its value and purpose. And it was this that filled
+my mind later as I sat on the summit next to a solemn Buddha against the
+setting sun. For a long time I was silent, meditating his doctrine. Then
+I spoke of children, and he said, "They grow old." I spoke of strong
+men, and he said, "They grow weak." I spoke of their work and
+achievement, and he said, "They die." The stars came out, and I spoke of
+eternal law. He said, "One law concerns you--that which binds you to the
+wheel of life." The moon rose, and I spoke of beauty. He said, "There is
+one beauty--that of a soul redeemed from desire." Thereupon the West
+stirred in me, and cried "No!" "Desire," it said, "is the heart and
+essence of the world. It needs not and craves not extinction. It needs
+and craves perfection. Youth passes; strength passes; life passes. Yes!
+What of it? We have access to the youth, the strength, the life of the
+world. Man is born to sorrow. Yes! But he feels it as tragedy and
+redeems it. Not round life, not outside life, but through life is the
+way. Desire more and more intense, because more and more pure; not
+peace, but the plenitude of experience. Your foundation was false. You
+thought man wanted rest. He does not. We at least do not, we of the
+West. 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 it
+hardens us to strength We believe in action; we believe in desire. And
+we 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 was
+untroubled, unruffled the majestic brow, unperplexed the sweet, solemn
+mouth. Secure in his Nirvana, he heard or he heard me not. He had
+attained the life-in-death he sought. But I, I had not attained the life
+in life. Unhelped by him, I must go my way. The East, perhaps, he had
+understood. He had not understood the West.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+A MALAY THEATRE
+
+
+It seems to be a principle among shipping companies so to arrange their
+connections that the traveller should be compelled to spend some days in
+Singapore. We evaded this necessity by taking a trip to Sumatra, but
+even so a day and a night remained to be disposed of. We devoted the
+morning to a bathe and a lunch at the Sea View Hotel, and the afternoon
+to the Botanical Gardens, where the most attractive flowers are the
+children and the most interesting gardeners their Chinese nurses. There
+remained the evening, and we asked about amusements. There was a
+bioscope, of course; there is always a bioscope; we had found one even
+in the tiny town of Medan, in Sumatra. There was also an opera company,
+performing the "Pink Girl." We seemed to know all about her without
+going to see her. Was there nothing else? Yes; a Malay theatre. That
+sounded attractive. So we took the tram through the Chinese quarter,
+among the "Ah Sins" and "Hup Chows," where every one was either a tailor
+or a washerman, and got down at a row of red lights. This was the
+Alexandra Hall, and a bill informed us that the performers were the
+Straits Opera Company. This dismayed us a little. Still, we paid our
+dollars, and entered a dingy, dirty room, with a few Malays occupying
+the back benches and a small group of Chinese women and children in
+either balcony. We took our seats with half a dozen coloured aristocrats
+in 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 was
+painted a couple of Italians in the act of embracing as one only
+embraces in opera. We glanced at our programme and saw that the play was
+the "Moon Princess," and that Afrid, a genie, figured in the cast. It
+was then, at least, Oriental, though it could hardly be Malay, and our
+spirits rose. But the orchestra quickly damped them; there was a piano,
+a violin, a 'cello, a clarionet, and a cornet, and from beginning to end
+of the performance they were never in tune with themselves or with the
+singers. And the music? It was sometimes Italian, sometimes Spanish,
+never, as far as I could detect, Oriental, and always thoroughly and
+frankly bad.
+
+No matter! The curtain rose and displayed a garden. The Prince entered.
+He was dressed in mediaeval Italian costume (a style of dress, be it said
+once for all, which was adopted by the whole company). With gestures of
+ecstatic astonishment he applied his nose to the paper roses. Then he
+advanced and appeared to sing, for his mouth moved; but the orchestra
+drowned any notes he may have emitted. The song finished, he lay down
+upon a couch and slept. Whereupon there entered an ugly little girl, in
+a short white frock and black stockings and ribbons, with an expression
+of fixed gloom upon her face, and began to move her feet and arms in a
+parody of Oriental dancing. We thought at first that she was the Moon
+Princess, and felt a pang of disappointment. But she turned out to be
+the Spirit of Dreams; and presently she ushered in the real Princess,
+with whom, on the spot, the Prince, unlike ourselves, became violently
+enamoured. She vanished, and he woke to find her a vision. Despair of
+the Prince; despair of the King; despair of the Queen, not unmixed with
+rage, to judge from her voice and gestures. Consultation of an
+astrologer. Flight of the Prince in search of his beloved. Universal
+bewilderment and incompetence, such as may be witnessed any day in the
+East when anything happens at all out of the ordinary way. At this point
+enter the comic relief, in the form of woodcutters. I am inclined to
+suppose, from the delight of the audience, that there was something
+genuine here. But whatever it was we were unable to follow it.
+Eventually the woodcutters met Afrid, whether by chance or design I
+could not discover. At any rate, their reception was rough. To borrow
+the words of the synopsis, "a big fight arose and they were thrown to
+space"; but not till they had been pulled by the hair and ears,
+throttled and pummelled, to the general satisfaction, for something like
+half an hour.
+
+The next scenes were equally vigorous. The synopsis describes them thus:
+"Several young princes went to Genie Janar, the father of the Moon
+Princess, to demand her in marriage. Afrid, a genie, met the princes,
+and, after having a row, they were all thrown away." The row was
+peculiar. Afrid took them on one by one. The combatants walked round one
+another, back to back, making feints in the air. Then the Prince got a
+blow in, which Afrid pretended to feel. But suddenly, with a hoarse
+laugh, he rushed again upon the foe, seized him by the throat or the
+arm, and (I cannot improve on the phrase) "threw him away." After all
+four princes were thus disposed of I left, being assured of a happy
+ending by the account of the concluding scene: "The Prince then took the
+Moon Princess to his father's kingdom, where he was married to her
+amidst great rejoicings."
+
+Comment perhaps is superfluous. But as I went home in my rickshaw my
+mind went back to those evenings in India when I had seen Indian boys
+perform to Indian music dances and plays in honour of Krishna, and to
+the Bengal village where the assembled inhabitants had sung us hymns
+composed by their native saint. And I remembered that everywhere, in
+Egypt, in India, in Java, in Sumatra, in Japan, the gramophone
+harmonium is displacing the native instruments; and that the
+bioscope--that great instrument of education--is familiarising the
+peasants of the East with all that is most vulgar and most shoddy in the
+humour and sentiment of the West.
+
+The Westernising of the East must come, no doubt, and ought to come. But
+in the process what by-products of waste, or worse! Once, surely, there
+must have been a genuine "Malay theatre." This is what Europe has made
+of it.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+CHINA
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA
+
+
+Some recent travellers have expressed disappointment or even disgust
+with what they saw or learned or guessed of China. My own first
+impression 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 forgets
+all that. Imagine a maze of narrow streets, more confused and confusing
+than Venice; high houses (except in the old city); and hanging parallel
+to these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs inscribed with
+huge Chinese characters, gold on black, gold on red, red or blue on
+white, a blaze of colour; and under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream,
+yellow faces, black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot or
+borne 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 truth
+of all one has heard of the order, independence, and vigour of this
+extraordinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with the
+street, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and commonly,
+within, they are cut across by a kind of arch elaborately carved and
+blazing 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; and
+one is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a heavy
+burden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, so painfully in
+evidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this native sea. He passes in
+his chair; but, like oneself, he is only a drop in the ocean. Canton is
+China, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set me
+thinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Often
+in 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; a
+lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing
+penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but
+phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly--that is the kind of impression
+India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of
+course, 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 in
+India, moon or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven.
+Recall, for example, Benares--the fantastic buildings rising and falling
+like a sea, the stairs running up to infinity, the sacred river, the
+sages meditating on its banks, the sacrificial ablutions, the squealing
+temple-pipes, and, in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the body
+returns to the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing of
+the dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as something
+eminently religious. Death and dissolution take place in the midst of
+life, for death is no more a mystery than life. In the open air, in the
+press of men, the soul takes flight. She is no stranger, for everything
+is soul--houses, trees, men, the elements into which the body is
+resolved. Death is not annihilation, it is change of form; and through
+all changes of form the essence persists.
+
+But now turn back to Canton. We pass the shops of the coffin-makers. We
+linger. But "No stop," says our guide; "better coffins soon." "Soon" is
+what the guide-books call the "City of the Dead." A number of little
+chapels; and laid in each a great lacquered coffin in which the dead man
+lives. I say "lives" advisedly, for there is set for his use a table and
+a chair, and every morning he is provided with a cup of tea. A bunch of
+paper, yellow and white, symbolises his money; and perhaps a couple of
+figures represent attendants. There he lives, quite simply and
+naturally as he had always lived, until the proper time and place is
+discovered in which he may be buried. It may be months, it may be, or
+rather, might have been, years; for I am told that a reforming
+Government 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 not
+mystical. What he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and,
+one might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family chapel
+of the Changs--another of the sights of Canton--one sees ranged round
+the walls hundreds of little tablets, painted green and inscribed in
+gold. These are the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged in
+three classes, those who pay most being in the first and those who pay
+least in the third. One can even reserve one's place--first, second, or
+third--while one is still alive, by a white tablet. You die, and the
+green is substituted. And so, while you yet live, you may secure your
+social status after death. How--how British! Yes, the word is out; and I
+venture 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 with
+Englishmen, if not with the English Government, than with any other
+Westerners. 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. The
+East must be confined to India, and China included in the West. That as
+a preliminary correction. I say nothing yet about Japan. But I shall
+have more to say, I hope, about China.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+NANKING
+
+
+The Chinese, one is still told, cannot and will not change. On the other
+hand, Professor Ross writes a book entitled _The Changing Chinese_. And
+anyone may see that the Chinese educated abroad are transformed, at any
+rate externally, out of all recognition. In Canton I met some of the
+officials of the new Government; and found them, to the outward sense,
+pure Americans. The dress, the manners, the accent, the intellectual
+outfit--all complete! Whether, in some mysterious sense, they remain
+Chinese at the core I do not presume to affirm or deny. But an external
+transformation so complete must imply _some_ inward change. Foreign
+residents in China deplore the foreign-educated product. I have met some
+who almost gnash their teeth at "young China." But this seems rather
+hard 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 her
+of unpardonable levity, and treachery to her own traditions. What _do_
+foreigners want? the Chinese may well ask. I am afraid the true answer
+is, that they want nothing but concessions, interest on loans, and trade
+profits, at all and every cost to China.
+
+But I must not deviate into politics. What suggested this train of
+thought was the student-guide supplied me at Nanking by the American
+missionary college. There he was, complete American; and, I fear I must
+add, boring as only Americans can bore. Still, he showed me Nanking, and
+Nanking is worth seeing, though the interest of it is somewhat tragic. A
+wall 20 to 40 feet thick, 40 to 90 feet high, and 22 miles in circuit (I
+take these figures on trust) encloses an area larger than that of any
+other Chinese city. But the greater part of this area is fields and
+ruins. You pass through the city gate in the train, and find yourself in
+the country. You alight, and you are still in the country. A carriage
+takes you, in time, to the squalid village, or series of villages, where
+are housed the 350,000 inhabitants of modern Nanking. Among them are
+quartered the khaki-clad soldiers of new China, the new national flag
+draped 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, a
+surrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps and their
+sores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. Ragged children run for
+miles beside the carriage, singing for alms; and stop at last,
+laughing, as though it had been a good joke to run so far and get
+nothing for it. One monument in all this scene of squalor arrests
+attention--the now disused examination hall. It is a kind of
+rabbit-warren of tiny cells, six feet deep, four feet broad, and six
+feet high; row upon row of them, opening on narrow unroofed corridors;
+no doors now, nor, I should suppose, at any time, for it would be
+impossible to breathe in these boxes if they had lids. Here, for a week
+or a fortnight, the candidates sat and excogitated, unable to lie down
+at 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 among
+examiners and examinees. For centuries, as is well known, this system
+selected the rulers of China; and whole lives, from boyhood to extreme
+old age, were spent in preparing for the examinations. Now all this is
+abolished; and some people appear to regret it. Once more, what _do_ the
+foreigners want?
+
+The old imperial city, where once the Ming dynasty reigned, was
+destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion. The Tartar city, where before the
+revolution 3000 mandarins lived on their pensions, was burnt in the
+siege of 1911. Of these cities nothing remains but their huge walls and
+gates and the ruins of their houses. The principal interest of Nanking,
+the so-called "Ming tombs," lies outside the walls. And the interest is
+not the tombs, but the road to them. It is lined by huge figures carved
+out of monoliths. Brutes first--lions, camels, elephants, horses, a pair
+of each lying down and a pair standing; then human figures, military and
+civil officers. What they symbolise I cannot tell. They are said to
+guard the road. And very impressive they are in the solitude. Not so
+what they lead to, which is merely a hill, artificial, I suppose, piled
+on a foundation of stone. Once, my guide informed me, there was a door
+giving admission; and within, a complete house, with all its furniture,
+in stone. But the door is sealed, and for centuries no one has explored
+the interior. I suggested excavation, but was told the superstition of
+the inhabitants forbade it. "Besides," said my guide, "the Chinese are
+not curious." I wonder? Whether or no they are curious, they are
+certainly superstitious. Apropos, a gunboat ran aground on the Yangtse.
+The river was falling, and there seemed no chance of getting off for
+months. The officers made up their minds to it, and fraternised with the
+priest of a temple on the bank. The priest one day asked for a
+photograph of the boat. They gave him one, and he asked them to dinner.
+After dinner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And--"would
+you believe it?"--next day a freshet came down and set the vessel
+afloat. Which shows how superstitions are generated and maintained in a
+world 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-boat
+that I write. Hour after hour there passes by the panorama of hills and
+plain, of green wheat and yellow rape, of the great flood with its
+flocks of wild duck, of fishers' cabins on the shore and mud-built
+thatched huts, of junks with bamboo-threaded sails skimming on flat
+bottoms, of high cliffs with monasteries perched on perilous ledges, of
+changing light and shade, of burning sunset and the stars. Travelling by
+river is the best of all travelling--smooth, slow, quiet, and soothingly
+contemplative. All China, I am informed by some pessimists, is in a
+state of anarchy, actual or latent. It may be. But it is difficult to
+believe it among these primitive industrious people living and working
+as they have lived and worked for 4000 years. Any other country, I
+suppose, in such a crisis as the present would be seething with civil
+war. But China? When one puts the point to the foreigner who has been
+talking of anarchy he says, "Ah! but the Chinese are so peaceable! They
+don't mind whether there's a Government or no. They just go on without
+it!" Exactly! That is the wonderful thing. But even that seems to annoy
+the 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 Horse
+Lungs" I watched the steamboat smoking and splashing up stream. She had
+traversed in a few hours the distance I, in my houseboat, had taken
+three days to cover; and certainly she is much more convenient and much
+more comfortable. That, however, is not necessarily an advantage. What
+may be urged with some force is that travelling by steamboat is more
+humane. It dispenses with human labour of a peculiarly dangerous and
+strenuous kind. Twenty-eight boatmen are attached to my single person. A
+big junk may have a crew of two hundred. When the wind is not fair they
+must row or tow; and towing is not like towing along the Thames!
+Suddenly you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Presently
+they appear high above, creeping with the line along a ledge of rock.
+And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, "Plenty coolie fall here. Too high
+place." Or they are clambering over boulders, one or two told off to
+disentangle the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling along
+a greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly able to advance
+a step or even to hold their own. As a labour-saving machine one must
+welcome the advent of the steamboat, as one is constrained to welcome
+even that of the motor-omnibus. But from the traveller's point of view
+it is different. Railways and steamboats enable more of us to travel,
+and to travel farther, in space. But in experience he travels the
+farthest who travels the slowest. A mediaeval student or apprentice
+walking through Europe on foot really did see the world. A modern
+tourist sees nothing but the inside of hotels. Unless, that is, he
+chooses to walk, or ride, or even cycle. Then it is different. Then he
+begins to see. As now I, from my houseboat, begin to see China. Not
+profoundly, of course, but somehow intimately. For instance, while my
+crew 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. The
+people, too, who, one thought, would insult or mob the foreigner, either
+take 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 foreign
+devil, but nothing in their countenance or manner suggests it. The
+children are far better-mannered than in most European countries. They
+may follow you, and chatter and laugh; but at least they have not learnt
+to beg. Curiosity they have, and gaiety, but I detect no sign of
+hostility. I walk down the long street, with its shops and roomy
+houses--far roomier and more prosperous-looking than in most Indian
+villages--and come to the temple. Smilingly I am invited to enter. There
+are no mysteries in Chinese religion. I begin to wonder, indeed, whether
+there is any religion left. For everywhere I find the temples and
+monasteries either deserted or turned into schools or barracks. This one
+is deserted. It is like a series of lumber-rooms, full of dusty idols.
+The idols were once gaudy, brightly painted "to look like life," with
+beards and whiskers of real hair. But now their splendour is dimmed. The
+demons scowl to no purpose. To no purpose the dragons coil. No
+trespasser threatens the god behind his dingy curtains. In one chamber
+only a priest kneels before the shrine and chants out of a book while he
+taps a bronze vessel with a little hammer. Else, solitude, vacuity, and
+silence. Is he Buddhist or Taoist? I have no language in which to ask. I
+can only accept with mute gestures the dusty seat he offers and the cup
+of lukewarm tea. What has happened to religion? So far as I can make
+out, something like the "disestablishment of the Church." The Republic
+has 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 the
+scholars show me round. On the outside wall, for him who runs to read,
+are scored up long addition sums in our Western figures. Inside, the
+walls are hung with drawings of birds and beasts, of the human skeleton
+and organs, even of bacteria! There are maps of China and of the world.
+The children even produce in triumph an English reading-book, though I
+must confess they do not seem to have profited by it much. Still, they
+can say "cat" when you show them a picture of the creature; which is
+more than I could do in Chinese. And China does not change? Wait a
+generation! This, remember, is a tiny village in the heart of the
+country, more than 1000 miles from the coast. And this is happening all
+over the Celestial Empire, I suppose. I start to return to my boat, but
+have not gone a quarter of a mile before I hear a shout, and looking
+back find half the school following me and escorting their teacher, who
+speaks English. He regrets to have missed my visit; will I not return
+and let him show me the school? I excuse myself, and he walks with me to
+the boat, making what conversation he can. One remark I remember--"China
+a good place now; China a republic." And I thought, as we exchanged
+cards, that he represented the Republic more essentially than the
+politicians whom foreigners so severely criticise. Anyhow, Republic or
+no, China is being transformed. And there is something other than
+steamboats to attest it.
+
+Which brings me back to my starting-point. On the steamboat you have no
+adventures. But on the houseboat you do. For instance, the other day
+the rope broke as we were towing up a rapid, and down we dashed, turning
+round 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--the
+railway from Ichang to Chungking. When it is finished we shall go by
+train--not even by steamboat,--and so see nothing except tunnels.
+Certainly, we shall not be compelled to pass the night in a small
+village; nor permitted to see the sunset behind these lovely hills and
+the moon rising over the river between the cliffs of the gorge. Nor
+shall we then be delayed, as I was yesterday, till the water should run
+down, 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; green
+of mulberries, green of fruit trees, green of young corn; and above, the
+purple hills, with all their bony structure showing under the skin of
+soil. I followed a high path, greeted by the peasants I met with a
+charming smile and that delightful gesture whereby, instead of shaking
+your hand, they clasp theirs and shake them _at_ you. I came at last to
+a solitary place, and, sitting down there, watched the evening light on
+the 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 and
+the junks were trying to pass the rapid. There must have been fifty of
+them crowded together. They could only pass one by one; and the scene
+was pandemonium. The Chinese are even noisier than the Italians, and
+present the same appearance of confusion. But in some mysterious way an
+order is always getting evolved. On this occasion it seemed to be
+perfectly understood which boat should go first. And presently there she
+was, in mid-rapid, apparently not advancing an inch, the ropes held taut
+from a causeway a quarter of a mile off. At last the strain suddenly
+ceased, and she moved quickly up stream. Another followed. Then it was
+dark. And we had to pass the night, after all, tossing uneasily in the
+rough water. Soon after dawn we started again. I went across to the
+causeway, and watched the trackers at work--twenty each on two ropes,
+hardly advancing a step in five minutes. Then the boat's head swung into
+shore, the tension ceased; something had happened. I waited half an hour
+or so. "Nothing doing," in the expressive American phrase. Then I went
+back. We had sprung a leak, and my cabin was converted into a
+swimming-bath. Another hour or so repairing this. Then the rope had to
+be brought back and attached again. At last we started for the second
+time, and in half an hour got safely through the hundred yards of racing
+waters into the bank above. At ten I got my breakfast, and we started to
+sail with a fair wind. It dropped. Rain came on. My crew (as always in
+that conjuncture) put up their awning and struck work. So here we are at
+1 P.M., in a heavy thunder-shower, a mile from the place we tried to
+leave at six o'clock this morning. This is the ancient method of
+travelling--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 a
+religious nation. No nation, I think, ever was, unless it be the
+Indians. But religious impulses sweep over nations and pass away,
+leaving deposits--rituals, priesthoods, and temples. Such an impulse
+once swept over China, in the form of Buddhism; and I am now visiting
+its deposit in the neighbourhood of Pekin. Scattered over the hills to
+the west of the city are a number of monastery temples. Some are
+deserted; some are let as villas to Europeans; some, like the one where
+I am staying, have still their complement of monks--in this temple, I am
+told, some three to four hundred. But neither here nor anywhere have I
+seen anything that suggests vitality in the religion. I entered one of
+the temples yesterday at dusk and watched the monks chanting and
+processing round a shrine from which loomed in the shadow a gigantic
+bronze-gold Buddha. They began to giggle like children at the entrance
+of the foreigner and never took their eyes off us. Later, individual
+monks came running round the shrines, beating a gong as though to call
+the attention of the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctory
+praise or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen even in
+Italy, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the latter end of the gospel
+of Buddha in China. It seems better that he should sit deserted in his
+Indian caves than be dishonoured by such mummeries.
+
+But once it must have been otherwise. Once this religion was alive. And
+then it was that men chose these exquisite sites for contemplation. The
+Chinese Buddhists had clearly the same sense for the beauty of nature
+that the Italian Franciscans had. In secluded woods and copses their
+temples nestle, courts and terraces commanding superb views over the
+great plain to Pekin. The architecture is delicate and lovely; tiled
+roofs, green or gold or grey, cornices elaborately carved and painted in
+lovely harmonies of blue and green; fine trees religiously preserved;
+the whole building so planned and set as to enhance, not destroy, the
+lines and colour of the landscape. To wander from one of these temples
+to another, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in them at
+night, is to taste a form of travel impossible in Europe now, though
+familiar enough there in the Middle Ages. Specially delightful is it to
+come at dusk upon a temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkle
+as the wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a dark
+recess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces and swords that seem
+to threaten the impious intruder.
+
+This morning there was a festival, and the people from the country
+crowded into the temple. Very bright and gay they looked in their gala
+clothes. The women especially were charming; painted, it is true, but
+painted quite frankly, to better nature, not to imitate her. Their
+cheeks were like peaches or apples, and their dresses correspondingly
+gay. Why they had come did not appear; not, apparently, to worship, for
+their mood was anything but religious. Some perhaps came to carry away a
+little porcelain boy or girl as guarantee of a baby to come. For the
+Chinese, by appropriate rites, can determine the sex of a child--a
+secret unknown as yet to the doctors of Europe! Some, perhaps, came to
+cure their eyes, and will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of the
+organs affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the sights
+and the country. We saw a group on their way home, climbing a steep hill
+for no apparent purpose except to look at the view. What English
+agricultural labourer would do as much? But the Chinese are not
+"agricultural labourers"; they are independent peasants; and a people so
+gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have found
+nowhere else in the world.
+
+The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate with Italy. First
+the plain, with its fresh spring green, its dusty paths, its grey and
+orange villages, its cypress groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs.
+Then the hills, swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine and
+clean in colour and form. For this beauty I was unprepared. I have even
+read that there is no natural beauty in China. And I was unprepared for
+Pekin 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 feet
+high, 14 miles round, as broad at the top as a London street, and you
+look over a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge the
+orange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, and find the
+great roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running north and south, east and
+west, and thick, as the case may be, with dust or mud; and opening out
+of them a maze of streets and lanes, one-storeyed houses, grey walls and
+roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, all
+goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarming
+pedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in this
+gigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley of
+greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only is
+commonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with
+its cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists,
+concession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, occupying
+and guarding the great north gate, and playing baseball in its
+precincts. 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 they
+have characteristically written "Lest we forget!" Forget what? The one
+or two children who died in the Legation, and the one or two men who
+were killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devastation which
+followed when the siege was relieved? This latter, I fear, the Chinese
+are not likely to forget soon. Yet it would be better if they could. And
+better if the Europeans could remember much that they forget--could
+remember that they forced their presence and their trade on China
+against her will; that their treaties were extorted by force, and their
+loans imposed by force, since they exacted from China what are
+ironically called "indemnities" which she could not pay except by
+borrowing from those who were robbing her. If Europeans could remember
+and realise these facts they would perhaps cease to complain that China
+continues to evade their demands by the only weapon of the
+weak--cunning. When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, and
+picked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to enter into social
+relations with you merely because you pick him up and, retaining his
+property, propose that you should now be friends and begin to do
+business. The obliquity of vision of the European residents on all these
+points is extraordinary. They cannot see that wrong has been done, and
+that wrong engenders wrong. They repeat comfortable formulae about the
+duplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge them with
+dishonesty at the very moment that they are dismembering their country;
+they attach intolerable conditions to their loans, and then complain if
+their victims attempt to find accommodation elsewhere. Of all the Powers
+the United States alone have shown some generosity and fairness, and
+they are reaping their reward in the confidence of Young China. The
+Americans had the intelligence to devote some part of the excessive
+indemnity they exacted after the Boxer riots to educating Chinese
+students in America. Hundreds of these young men are now returned to
+China, with the friendliest feeling to America, and, naturally, anxious
+to develop political and commercial relations with her rather than with
+other Powers. British trade may suffer because British policy has been
+less generous. But British trade, I suppose, would suffer in any case.
+For the British continue to maintain their ignorance and contempt of
+China and all things Chinese, while Germans and Japanese are travelling
+and studying indefatigably all over the country. "We see too much of
+things Chinese!" was the amazing remark made to me by a business man in
+Shanghai. Too much! They see nothing at all, and want to see nothing.
+They live in the treaty ports, dine, dance, play tennis, race. China is
+in birth-throes, and they know and care nothing. A future in China is
+hardly for them.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD
+
+
+To write from China about the Englishman may seem an odd choice. But to
+see 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 you
+suddenly perceive him, and can estimate him--fallaciously or no--as you
+estimate foreigners.
+
+So seen the Englishman appears as the eternal school-boy. I mean no
+insult; I mean to express his qualities as well as his defects. He has
+the pluck, the zest, the sense of fair play, the public spirit of our
+great schools. He has also their narrowness and their levity. Enter his
+office, and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming,
+skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with an air of
+playing at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of an hour he will have
+asked you round to the club and offered you a whisky and soda. Dine with
+him, and the talk will turn on golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, and
+the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definite
+questions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise and
+intelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will flounder
+resentfully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissing
+you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customs
+of the country in which he lives he will know and care nothing, except
+so far as they may touch his affairs. He will never, if he can help it,
+leave the limits of the foreign settlement. Physically he oscillates
+between his home, his office, the club, and the racecourse; mentally,
+between his business and sport. On all general topics his opinions are
+second or third hand. They are the ghosts of old prejudices imported
+years ago from England, or taken up unexamined from the English
+community abroad. And these opinions pass from hand to hand till they
+are as similar as pebbles on the shore. In an hour or so you will have
+acquired the whole stock of ideas current in the foreign community
+throughout a continent. Your only hope of new light is in particular
+instances and illustrations. And these, of course, may be had for the
+asking.
+
+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 pioneering
+brings out his most characteristic qualities. He loves to decide
+everything on his own judgment, on the spur of the moment, directly on
+the immediate fact, and in disregard of remoter contingencies and
+possibilities. He needs adventure to bring out his powers, and only
+really takes to business when business is something of a "lark." To
+combine 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, he
+opens 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 archaeology was founded by English
+travellers. Darwin and Wallace and Galton in their youth pursued
+adventure as much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, when
+laboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is apt to retire
+and leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, "larks"
+into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is
+free-living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact,
+routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not
+easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less
+capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such
+questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them.
+The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to be
+lived before he will consent to live it. The Englishman just lives
+ahead, not aware that there is a problem; or convinced that, if there is
+one, it will only be solved "by walking." The philosopher proceeds from
+the abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with the concrete,
+and may or, more probably, may not arrive at the abstract. No general
+rules are of any use to him except such as he may have elaborated for
+himself out of his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education.
+For education teaches how to think in general, and that isn't what he
+wants or believes in. So, when he gets into affairs, he discards all his
+training and starts again at the beginning, learning to think, if he
+ever does learn it, over his own particular job. And his own way, he
+opines, must be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt and even
+indignation for individuals or nations who are moved by "ideas." At this
+moment his annoyance with the leaders of "Young China" is provoked
+largely by the fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how a
+nation should be governed and organised, instead of starting with the
+particularities of their own society, and trying to mend it piece by
+piece and from hand to mouth. Before they make a Constitution, he
+thinks, they ought to make roads; and before they draw up codes, to
+extirpate consumption. The conclusion lies near at hand, and I have
+heard it drawn--"What they want is a few centuries of British rule."
+And, indeed, it is curious how constantly the Englishman abroad is
+opposed, in the case of other nations, to all the institutions and
+principles he is supposed to be proud of at home. Partly, no doubt, this
+is due to his secret or avowed belief that the whole world ought to be
+governed despotically by the English. But partly it is because he does
+not believe that the results the English have achieved can be achieved
+in any other way than theirs. They arrived at them without intention or
+foresight, by a series of detached steps, each taken without prescience
+of the one that would follow. So, and so only, can other nations arrive
+at them. He does not believe in short cuts, nor in learning by the
+experience 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 with
+irritation.
+
+Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's enthusiasms. He
+cannot endure the profession that a man is moved by high motives. His
+annoyance, for example, with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to the
+fact that he supports the importation into China of Indian opium. Very
+commonly he does not. But the movement is an "agitation" (dreadful
+word!). It is "got up" by missionaries. It purports to be based on moral
+grounds, and he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is not
+himself moved by moral considerations. Almost invariably he is. But he
+will never admit it for himself, and he deeply suspects it in others.
+The words "hypocrite," "humbug," "sentimentalist" spring readily to his
+lips. But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you will
+find, often enough, that he has arrived at the same conclusion as the
+"sentimentalist"--only, of course, for quite different reasons! For
+intellect he has little use, except so far as it issues in practical
+results. He will forgive a man for being intelligent if he makes a
+fortune, but hardly otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuous
+admiration for a definite intellectual accomplishment which he knows it
+is hard to acquire and is not sure he could acquire himself. That, for
+instance, is his attitude to those who know Chinese. A "sinologue," he
+will tell you, must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give so
+much time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he is proud of
+the sinologue--as a public school is proud of a boy so clever as to
+verge upon insanity, or a village is proud of the village idiot.
+Something of the same feeling, I sometimes think, underlies his respect
+for Shakspere. "If you want that kind of thing," he seems to say to the
+foreigner, "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 secondary
+consideration. Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his
+sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise
+and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all
+about it, except its aesthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot
+see it. He has the _flair_ of the dealer, not the perception of the
+amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any distinction
+between them.
+
+But these, from his point of view, are trifles. What matters is that he
+has pre-eminently the virtues of active life. He is fair-minded, and
+this, oddly, in spite of his difficulty in seeing another man's point of
+view. When he _does_ see it he respects it. Whereas nimbler-witted
+nations see it only to circumvent and cheat it. He is honest; as honest,
+at least, as the conditions of modern business permit. He hates bad
+work, even when, for the moment, bad work pays. He hates skimping and
+paring. And these qualities of his make it hard for him to compete with
+rivals less scrupulous and less generous. He is kind-hearted--much more
+so than he cares to admit. And at the bottom of all his qualities he has
+the sense of duty. He will shoulder loyally all the obligations he has
+undertaken to his country, to his family, to his employer, to his
+employees. The sense of duty, indeed, one might say with truth, is his
+religion. For on the rare occasions on which he can be persuaded to
+broach such themes you will find, I think, at the bottom of his mind
+that what he believes in is Something, somehow, somewhere, in the
+universe, 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 there
+be 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 company
+they 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 doubt
+on his road he has passed, and will pass again, the wrecks of many a
+flying-machine.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+CHINA IN TRANSITION
+
+
+The Chinese Revolution has proceeded, so far, with less disturbance and
+bloodshed than any great revolution known to history. There has been
+little serious fighting and little serious disorder; nothing comparable
+to that which accompanied, for instance, the French Revolution of 1789.
+And this, no doubt, is due to the fact that the Chinese are alone among
+nations of the earth in detesting violence and cultivating reason. Their
+instinct is always to compromise and save everybody's face. And this is
+the main reason why Westerners despise them. The Chinese, they aver,
+have "no guts." And when hard pressed as to the policy of the Western
+Powers in China, they will sometimes quite frankly confess that they
+consider the West has benefited China by teaching her the use of force.
+That this should be the main contribution of Christian to Pagan
+civilisation is one of the ironies of history. But it is part of the
+greater irony which gave the Christian faith to precisely those nations
+whose fundamental instincts and convictions were and are in radical
+antagonism to its teaching.
+
+Though, however, it is broadly true that the Chinese have relied on
+reason and justice in a way and to a degree which is inconceivable in
+the 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 these
+forces have been specially evident in that department to which
+Westerners are apt to pay the greatest attention--in the department of
+government. Government has always been less important in China than in
+the Western world; it has always been rudimentary in its organisation;
+and for centuries it has been incompetent and corrupt. Of this
+corruption Westerners, it is true, make more than they fairly should.
+China is no more corrupt (to say the least) than the United States or
+Italy or France, or than England was in the eighteenth century. And much
+that is called corruption is recognised and established "squeeze,"
+necessary, and understood to be necessary, to supplement the inadequate
+salaries of officials. A Chinese official is corrupt much as Lord
+Chancellor Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought properly
+to be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. Moreover, the
+people have always had their remedy. When the recognised "squeeze" is
+exceeded, they protest by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the most
+unfavourable 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 properly
+paid; and China is not in a position to pay for any reform while the
+Powers are drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources by that
+particular form of robbery called by diplomatists "indemnity." The new
+officials, then, are "corrupt" as the old ones were; and they are
+something more. They are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full of
+ideas as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even more
+divorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign education seems to make
+a cut right across a Chinaman's life. He returns with a new head; and
+this head never gets into normal relations with his heart. That, I
+believe, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with enormous
+rapidity and freedom unchecked by the fly-wheel of traditional feelings.
+And it is Jacobinism that accounts for the extraordinary vigour of the
+campaign against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to maintain that
+this campaign is not serious. But that is because Europeans simply
+cannot conceive that any body of men should be in as deadly earnest
+about a moral issue as are the representatives of Young China. The
+anti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. Smokers are
+flogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; and farmers who resist are
+shot down. The other day in Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventy
+farmers who had protested against the destruction of their crops were
+locked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of seventy-six, falsely
+accused of growing poppy, was fined 500 dollars, and when he refused to
+pay was flogged to death by the orders of a young official of
+twenty-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 be
+no doubt about the general state of affairs. The officials are putting
+down opium with a vigour and a determination which it is inconceivable
+should ever be applied in the West to the traffic in alcohol. But in
+doing so they are showing a ruthlessness which does not seem to be
+native to the Chinese, and which perhaps is to be accounted for by what
+I have called Jacobinism, resulting from the effects of a Western
+education that has been unable to penetrate harmoniously the complicated
+structure of Chinese character.
+
+The anti-opium campaign is one example of the way in which the
+Revolution has elicited and intensified violence in this peace-loving
+people. Another example is the use of assassination. This has been an
+accompaniment of all great revolutions. It took the form of
+"proscriptions" in Rome, of the revolutionary tribunals in France. In
+China it is by comparison a negligible factor; but it exists. Two months
+ago a prominent leader of the southern party was assassinated; and
+popular suspicion traces the murder to high Government officials, and
+even to the President himself. The other day a southern general was
+killed by a bomb. For the manufacture of bombs is one of the things
+China has learned from the Christian West; and the President lives in
+constant terror of this form of murder. China, it will be seen, does not
+altogether escape the violence that accompanies all revolutions. Nor
+does she altogether escape the anarchy. Anarchy, indeed, that is a
+simple strike against authority, may be said to be part of the Chinese
+system. It is the way they have always enforced their notions of
+justice. A curious example has been recently offered by the students of
+the Pekin University. For various reasons--good or bad--they have
+objected 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 that
+they would call again the next day with revolvers; and in the interval
+he saw wisdom and signed. Last week there was a similar episode. The new
+Chancellor proved as unpalatable as his predecessor. The students once
+more presented themselves with his resignation written out. He refused
+to resign, and, as the students aver, scurrilously abused them. They
+proceeded to the Minister of Education, who refused to see them.
+Thereupon they camped out in his courtyard, and stayed all day and all
+night, sending a message to the professors dated "from under the trees
+of the Education Office" to explain that they were unfortunately unable
+to attend lectures. This Chancellor, too, it would seem, has seen wisdom
+and 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 certain
+that we are wrong. Our notion is that everything must be done by
+authority, and that unless authority is maintained there will be
+anarchy. The Chinese notion is that authority is there to carry out what
+the people recognise to be common sense and justice; if it does
+otherwise, it must be resisted; and if it disappears life will still go
+on--as it is going on now in the greater part of China--on the basis of
+the traditional and essentially reasonable routine. Almost certainly the
+students of the University had justice on their side; otherwise such
+action would not be taken; and when they get justice they will be more
+docile and orderly than our own undergraduates at home.
+
+Another thing surprising to European observers is the apparent belief of
+the Chinese in verbal remonstrance. Under the present regime officials
+and public men are allowed the free use of the telegraph. The
+consequence is that telegrams of advice, admonition, approval, blame,
+fear, hope, doubt pour in daily to the Government from civil and
+military governors, from members of Parliament and party leaders. In the
+paper to-day, for example, is a telegram from the Governors of
+seventeen provinces addressed to the National Assembly. It begins as
+follows:
+
+    "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 is
+exposed, an appeal to the Assembly to act more reasonably and
+competently, 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--a
+belief in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said enough to show
+that this attitude does not exclude the use of violence; but I feel sure
+that it limits it far more than it has ever been limited in Europe. Even
+in time of revolution the Chinese are peaceable and orderly to an extent
+unknown and almost unbelievable in the West. And the one thing the West
+is teaching them and priding itself on teaching them is the absurdity of
+this attitude. Well, one day it is the West that will repent because
+China 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 was
+full. We passed across fields, through deserted alleys where sleepers
+lay naked on the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by halls
+and 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 vast
+temple and its monuments--iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tablet
+of the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stones
+inscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after
+hall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling
+walls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent of
+Tai Shan, the most sacred mountain in China, the most frequented,
+perhaps, in the world. There, according to tradition, legendary emperors
+worshipped God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, and
+sighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. The great
+Chin-Shih-Huang was there in the third century B.C. Chien Lung in the
+eighteenth century covered it with inscriptions. And millions of humble
+pilgrims for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep and
+narrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no detours, but follows straight
+up the bed of a stream, and the greater part of the five thousand feet
+is ascended by stone steps. A great ladder of eighteen flights climbs
+the last ravine, and to see it from below, sinuously mounting the
+precipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, is
+enough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least were glad to be
+chaired some part of the way. A wonderful way! On the lower slopes it
+passes from portal to portal, from temple to temple. Meadows shaded with
+aspen and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool to green
+pool. Higher up are scattered pines Else the rocks are bare--bare, but
+very beautiful, with that significance of form which I have found
+everywhere in the mountains in China.
+
+To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. All the way up the
+rocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctity
+of the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially,
+by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. They
+are models, one is told, of caligraphy as well as of literary
+composition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not be
+the one without the other. The very names of favourite spots are poems
+in themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phoenixes"; another "the
+fountain of the white cranes." A rock is called "the tower of the
+quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of the
+clouds." More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a
+rock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles," because there some
+mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny
+stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarly
+Chinese!
+
+It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple that
+crowns it, dedicated to Yue Huang, the "Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; and
+his image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But
+we 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, five
+thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim grey levels.
+
+Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after range
+of lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, with
+half a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full
+in view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the great
+Tang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to drink and make
+verses. They are still known to tradition as the "six idlers of the
+bamboo grove"; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upon
+their symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours
+passed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred
+to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for
+there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There are
+temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself; to the Lady of
+the mountain, Pi-hsia-yueen, who is at once the Venus of
+Lucretius--"goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the
+sky," one inscription calls her--and the kindly mother who gives
+children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the
+Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to
+the Cloud-compeller; to many others. And in all this, is there no room
+for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship
+the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or the
+spirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that some
+men adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor--is
+he a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions set
+up 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 as
+anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of the
+worshippers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been,
+the mass of worshippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any
+country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not
+know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of
+religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and
+what lies behind it--for the religion of a Wordsworth--they seem to be
+pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others
+like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the
+inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is
+loveliest--all goes to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills,
+perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in
+all 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 have
+been wrung from him had he been born in China.
+
+And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of
+China--"pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the
+East--assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even
+the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is
+apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan
+may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a
+place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential
+values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt,
+incompetent, even if it were true--and it is far from being true in any
+unqualified sense--would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of
+inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the
+superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its
+foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western
+civilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers,
+and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity
+never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It
+is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood
+flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous
+foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless
+architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen,
+all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West
+everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that
+this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent
+aesthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of
+sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken.
+The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. It
+implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the
+opposite 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 will
+shortly 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 a
+funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the
+Chinese have written poems in exquisite caligraphy, _they_ will cover
+the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of
+temples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in the
+landscape, _they_ will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs
+on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they _will_, because
+they _have_ done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment.
+Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, our
+medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a
+price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages
+they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive
+culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of
+civilising 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 so
+beautiful could be real. Take the west coast of Scotland, bathe it in
+Mediterranean light and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific.
+Take the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, and
+dominate all with the only perfect mountain in the world--a mountain
+that catches at your breath like a masterpiece of art. Make the copses
+woods, and the woods forests. For our fields with their hedgerows
+substitute the vivid green of rice, shining across the gleam of flooded
+plains. Everywhere let water flow; and at every waterfall and cave erect
+a little shrine to hallow the spot. Over the whole pour a flood of pure
+white light, and you have a faint image of Japan. Perhaps it is not,
+naturally, more beautiful than the British Isles--few countries are. But
+it is unspoilt by man, or almost so. Osaka, indeed, is as ugly as
+Manchester, Yokohama as Liverpool. But these are small blots. For the
+rest, Japan is Japan of the Middle Ages, and lovely as England may have
+been, when England could still be called merry.
+
+And the people are lovely, too. I do not speak of facial beauty. Some
+may think, in that respect, the English or the Americans handsomer. But
+these people have the beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masques
+that pass for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, quick,
+responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiff
+integuments, they have active members, for the most bare or moving
+freely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, machine-like
+emission of sound they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical.
+Their children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, so
+cheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely to walk in the
+streets and look at them. It is a pure happiness, I might almost say, to
+look at anyone, so gay is their greeting, so radiant their smile, so
+full of vitality their gestures. I do not know what they think of the
+foreigner, but at least they betray no animosity. They let his stiff,
+ungainly presence move among them unchallenged. Perhaps they are sorry
+for him; but I think they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, of
+Old 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 is
+still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not
+believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh,
+unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at least of
+not destroying beauty.
+
+And in this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it
+was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan
+to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no
+stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare
+with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating from the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are to be seen in Kyoto and
+elsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea how exquisite human life
+might be made. The Japanese, as is well known, discovered the secret of
+emptiness. Their rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paper
+walls, and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old palatial
+rooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a background of gold-leaf
+emerge and fade away suggestions of river and coast and hill, of
+peonies, chrysanthemums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds and
+pools, of all that is elusive and choice in nature; decorations that are
+also lyric poems, hints of landscape that yet never pretend to be a
+substitute for the real thing. The real thing is outside, and perhaps it
+will not intrude; for where we should have glass windows the Japanese
+have white paper screens. But draw back, if you choose, one of these
+screens, and you will see a little landscape garden, a little lake, a
+little bridge, a tiny rockery, a few goldfish, a cluster of irises, a
+bed of lotus, and, above and beyond, the great woods. These are royal
+apartments; but all the cost, it will be seen, is lavished on the work
+of art. The principle is the same in humbler homes.
+
+People who could so devise life, we may be sure, are people with a
+fineness of perception unknown to the West, unless it were once in
+ancient Greece. The Japanese indeed, I suspect, are the Greeks of the
+East. In the theatre at Kyoto this was curiously borne in upon me. On
+the floor of the house reclined figures in loose robes, bare-necked and
+barefooted. On the narrow stage were one or two actors, chanting in
+measured speech, and moving slowly from pose to pose. From boxes on
+either side of the stage intoned a kind of chorus; and a flute and
+pizzicato strings accompanied the whole in the solemn strains of some
+ancient mode. I have seen nothing so like what a Greek play may have
+been, though doubtless even this was far enough away. And still more was
+I struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to the tragedy, and
+I found the young and old Japan confronting one another exactly as the
+young and old Athens met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the
+_Frogs_ of Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount Fuji; the
+actors two groups of young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of
+the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were
+climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they
+meet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not
+unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, like
+those of Aristophanes, were with the old school. It is the pilgrims who
+reach the top and the modern young women who collapse. And the modern
+young man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and frightened by a
+ghost. The playwright had at least Aristophanes' gift of lampoon, though
+I doubt whether he had a touch of his genius. Perhaps, however, he had a
+better cause. For, I doubt, modern Japan may deserve lampooning more
+than 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, everything
+aristocratic and distinguished. The other was clad in European dress,
+sprigged waistcoat, gold watch-chain, a coarse, thick-lipped face, a
+podgy figure. It was a hot July day, and we were passing through some of
+the loveliest scenery in the world. He first closed all doors and
+windows, and then extended himself at full length and went to sleep.
+There he lay, his great paunch sagging--prosperity exuding from every
+pore--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 and
+rejected the other. And if civilisation is to be judged, as it fairly
+may be, by the kind of men it brings to the top, there is much to be
+said 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 square
+building of unvarnished wood; a floor covered with matting, exquisitely
+clean, and divided into little boxes, or rather trays (so low were the
+partitions), in which the audience knelt on their heels, beautiful in
+loose robes; running out from the back wall a square stage, with a roof
+supported by pillars; a passage on the same level, by which the actors
+entered, on the left; the screens removed from the outer walls, so that
+the hall was open to the air, and one looked out on sky and trees, or
+later on darkness, against which shone a few painted lanterns. Compare
+this with the Queen's Hall in London, or with any of our theatres, and
+realise the effect on one's mood of the mere setting of the drama. Drama
+was it? Or opera? Or what? It is called a "dance." But there was very
+little dancing. What mainly remains in my mind is a series of visual
+images, one more beautiful than another; figures seated motionless for
+minutes, almost for half-hours, with a stillness of statues, not an
+eyelash shaking; or passing very slowly across the stage, with that
+movement of bringing one foot up to the other and pausing before the
+next step which is so ridiculous in our opera, but was here so right and
+so impressive; or turning slowly, or rising and sitting with immense
+deliberation; each figure right in its relation to the stage and to the
+others. 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. The
+mask, in fact, the use of which in Greek drama I had always felt to be
+so questionable, was here triumphantly justified. It completed the
+repudiation of actuality which was the essence of the effect. It was a
+musical sound, as it were, made visible. It symbolised humanity, but it
+was not human, still less inhuman. I would rather call it divine. And
+this whole art of movement and costume required that completion. Once I
+had 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 of
+the slow and solemn posing I have described. There was no violence, no
+leaping, no quick steps; rather a turning and bending, a slow sweep of
+the arm, a walking a little more rhythmical, on the verge, at most, of
+running. It was never exciting, but I could not say it was never
+passionate. It seemed to express a kind of frozen or petrified passion;
+rather, perhaps, a passion run into a mould of beauty and turned out a
+statue. 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 in
+quick time, and to an art full of episode, of intellectual content, of
+rapid change and rapid development. I have lost to a great extent that
+power of prolonging an emotion which seems to be the secret of Eastern
+art. I am bored--subconsciously, as it were--where an Oriental is lulled
+into ecstasy. His case is the better. But also, in this matter of the No
+dance he has me at a disadvantage. In the first place he can understand
+the words. These, it is true, have far less importance than in a drama
+of Shakspere. They are only a lyric or narrative accompaniment to the
+music and the dance. Still they have, one is informed, a beauty much
+appreciated by Japanese, and one that the stranger, ignorant of the
+language, misses. And secondly, what is worse, the music failed to move
+me. Whether this is my own fault, or that of the music, I do not presume
+to decide, for I do not know whether, as so often is the case, I was
+defeated by a convention unfamiliar to me, or whether the convention has
+really become formal and artificial. In any case, after the first shock
+of interest, I found the music monotonous. It was solemn and religious
+in character, and reminded me more of Gregorian chants than of anything
+else. But it had one curious feature which seemed rather to be primitive
+and orgiastic. The two musicians who played the drums accompanied the
+performers, almost unceasingly, by a kind of musical ejaculation,
+starting on a low note and swooping up to a high, long-held falsetto
+cry. This over and over again, through the dialogue and through the
+singing. The object, I suppose, and perhaps, to Japanese, the effect, is
+to sustain a high emotional tone. In my case it failed, as the music
+generally failed. My interest, as I began by saying, was maintained by
+the visual beauty; and that must have been very great to be able to
+maintain itself independently of the words and the music.
+
+As to the drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in which we have
+come to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction," no
+knot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession of
+scenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy,
+or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be called
+epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it most
+obviously 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 the
+other hand, these actors, I felt, are the only ones who could act Greek
+drama. They have, I think, quite clearly the same tradition and aim as
+the Greeks. They desire not to reproduce but to symbolise actuality; and
+their conception of acting is the very opposite of ours. The last thing
+they aim at is to be "natural." To be unnatural rather is their object.
+Hence the costume, hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. And
+how effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion
+only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that
+purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or
+Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out
+of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic
+drama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetry
+in England, if we had as a living tradition anything analogous to work
+upon!
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+NIKKO
+
+
+Waking in the night, I heard the sound of running water. Across my
+window I saw, stretching dimly, the branch of a pine, and behind it
+shone the stars. I remembered that I was in Japan and felt that all the
+essence of it was there. Running water, pine trees, sun and moon and
+stars. 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 an
+accomplishment, an ornament, an excrescence. It is the flower of the
+plant. Some men, some families of men, feeling beauty as every one felt
+it, had the power also to express it. Or perhaps I should say--it is the
+Japanese view--to suggest it. To them the branch of a tree stands for a
+forest, a white disk on gold for night and the moon, a quivering reed
+for a river, a bamboo stalk for a grove. Their painters are poets. By
+passionate observation they have learnt what expression of the part most
+inevitably 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; a
+similar 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 the
+famous and sumptuous temples I was moved by the smaller and humbler
+shrines, so caressing are they of every choice spot, so expressive, not
+of princely, but of popular feeling. Here is one, for instance, standing
+under a cliff beside a stream, where women offer bits of wood in the
+faith that so they will be helped to pass safely through the pangs of
+childbirth. Here in a ravine is another where men who want to develop
+their calves hang up sandals to a once athletic saint. "The Lord," our
+Scripture says, "delighteth not in any man's legs." How pleasant, then,
+it must be to have a saint who does! Especially for the Japanese, whose
+legs are so finely made, and who display them so delightfully. Such, all
+over the world, is the religion of the people, when they have any
+religion at all. And how human it is, and how much nearer to life than
+the austerities and abstractions of a creed!
+
+Hour after hour I strolled through these lovely places, so beautifully
+ordered that the authorities, one feels, must themselves delight in the
+nature they control. I had proof of it, I thought, in a notice which
+ran 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 in
+England breaking into this personal note? And how reserved! Almost like
+Japanese art. Compare the invitation I once saw in Switzerland, to visit
+"das schoenste Schwaerm- und Aussichtspunkt des ganzen Schweitzerischen
+Reichs." There speaks the advertiser. But beside the Somen Fall there
+was no restaurant.
+
+Northerners, and Anglo-Saxons in particular, have always at the back of
+their minds a notion that there is something effeminate about the sense
+for beauty. That is reserved for decadent Southern nations. _Tu regere
+imperio populos, Romane memento_ they would say, if they knew the tag;
+and translate it "Britain rules the waves"! But history gives the lie to
+this complacent theory. No nations were ever more virile than the Greeks
+or the Italians. They have left a mark on the world which will endure
+when 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 so
+tragic were required; and so does all their mediaeval history. Japanese
+feudalism was as bloody, as ruthless, as hard as European. It was even
+more gallant, stoical, loyal. But it had something else which I think
+Europe missed, unless it were once in Provence. It had in the midst of
+its hardness a consciousness of the pathos of life, of its beauty, its
+brevity, its inexplicable pain. I think in no other country has anything
+arisen analogous to the Zen sect of Buddhism, when knights withdrew from
+battle to a garden and summerhouse, exquisitely ordered to symbolise the
+spiritual life, and there, over a cup of tea served with an elaborate
+ritual, looking out on a lovely nature, entered into mystic communion
+with the spirit of beauty which was also the spirit of life. From that
+communion, with that mood about them, they passed out to kill or to
+die--to die, it might be, by their own hand, by a process which I think
+no Western man can bear even to think of, much less conceive himself as
+imitating.
+
+This sense at once of the beauty and of the tragedy of life, this power
+of appreciating the one and dominating the other, seems to be the
+essence 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 the
+shade of trees, surrounded by chapels and oratories more sumptuous and
+superb than anything else in Japan, approached for miles and miles by a
+road lined on either side with giant cryptomerias. His spirit, if it
+could know, would appreciate, we may be sure, this habitation of beauty.
+For these men, ruthless as they were, were none the less sensitive. For
+example, the traveller is shown (in Kyoto, I think) a little pavilion in
+a garden where Hideyoshi used to sit and contemplate the moon. I believe
+it. I think Iyeyasu did the same. And also he wrote this, on a roll here
+preserved:
+
+    "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 a
+race peculiarly insensitive to beauty. The Japanese stoics were also
+artists and poets. Their earliest painters were feudal lords, and it was
+feudal lords who fostered and acted the No dances. If Nietzsche had
+known Japan--I think he did not?--he would surely have found in these
+Daimyos and Samurai the forerunners of his Superman. A blood-red blossom
+growing out of the battlefield, that, I think, was his ideal. It is one
+which, I hope, the world has outlived. I look for the lily flowering
+over the fields of peace.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+DIVINE RIGHT IN JAPAN
+
+
+When Japan was opened to the West, after more than two centuries of
+seclusion, she was in possession of a national spirit which had been
+enabled, by isolation, to become and remain simple and homogeneous. All
+public feeling, all public morals centred about the divinity of the
+Emperor; an idea which, by a process unique in history, had hibernated
+through centuries of political obscuration, and emerged again to the
+light with its prestige unimpaired in the middle of the nineteenth
+century. In the Emperor, one may say, Japan was incarnate. And to this
+faith the Japanese, as well as foreign observers, attribute their great
+achievement in the Russian War. The little book of Captain Sakurai,
+_Human Bullets_, testifies to this fact in every sentence: "Through the
+abundant grace of Heaven and the illustrious virtue of his Majesty, the
+Imperial forces defeated the great enemy both on land and sea." ... "I
+jumped out of bed, cleansed my person with pure water, donned my best
+uniform, bowed to the East where the great Sire resides, solemnly read
+his proclamation of war, and told his Majesty that his humble subject
+was just starting to the front. When I offered my last prayers--the last
+I then believed they were--before the family shrine of my ancestors I
+felt a thrill going all through me, as if they were giving me a solemn
+injunction, saying: 'Thou art not thy own. For his Majesty's sake, thou
+shalt go to save the nation from calamity, ready to bear the crushing of
+thy bones and the tearing of thy flesh. Disgrace not thy ancestors by an
+act of cowardice.'" This, it is clear, is an attitude quite different
+from that of an Englishman towards the King. The King, to us, is at most
+a symbol. The Emperor, to the Japanese, is, or was, a god. And the
+difference may be noted in small matters. For instance, a Japanese,
+writing from England, observes with astonishment that we put the head of
+the King on our stamps and cover it with postmarks. That, to a Japanese,
+seems to be blasphemy. Again, he is puzzled, at the Coronation in
+Westminster Abbey, to find the people looking down from above on the
+King. That, again, seems to him blasphemy. Last year, when the Emperor
+was dying, crowds knelt hour after hour, day and night, on the road
+beside the palace praying for him. And a photographer who took a picture
+of them by flashlight was literally torn to pieces. One could multiply
+examples, but the thing is plain. The national spirit of Japan centres
+about the divinity of the Emperor. And precisely therein lies their
+present problem. For one may say, I think, with confidence that this
+attitude cannot endure, and is already disappearing. Western thought is
+an irresistible solvent of all irrational and instinctive ideas. Men
+cannot be engineers and pathologists and at the same time believe that a
+man is a god. They cannot be historians and at the same time believe
+that their first Emperor came down from heaven. Above all, they cannot
+be politicians and abstain from analysing the real source and sanction
+of political power. English political experience, it is true, suggests
+immense possibilities in the way of clinging to fictions with the
+feelings 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 British
+Constitution. But the success of that method depends upon the condition
+that the fictions shall be nothing _but_ fictions. The feelings of the
+English can centre about the King only because they are well assured
+that he does not and will not govern. But that condition does not exist
+in Japan. The Japanese Constitution is conceived on the German, not the
+English, model; and it bristles with clauses which are intended to
+prevent the development which has taken place in England--the shifting
+of power from the Sovereign to a Parliamentary majority. The Ministers
+are the Emperor's Ministers; the policy is the Emperor's policy. That is
+the whole tenour of the Constitution. No Constitution, it is true, can
+"trammel up" facts and put power anywhere but where nature puts it. If
+an Emperor is not a strong man he will not govern, and his Ministers
+will. And it seems to be well understood among Japanese politicians that
+the 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 soon
+as conflict develops between the Parliament and the Government. And such
+conflict is bound to arise, and is already arising. Japanese parties, it
+is true, stand for persons rather than principles; and the real
+governing power hitherto has been a body quite unknown to the
+Constitution--namely, the group of "Elder Statesmen." But there are
+signs that this group is disintegrating, and that its members are
+beginning to recognise the practical necessity of forming and depending
+upon a party in the country and the House of Representatives. The crisis
+which led, the other day, to the fall of Prince Katsura was provoked by
+popular tumults; and it was noticeable that, for the first time, the
+name of the Emperor was introduced into political controversy. It seems
+clear that in the near future either the Emperor must appear openly as a
+fighting force, as the German Emperor does, or he must subside into a
+figure-head and the government pass into the hands of Parliament. The
+former alternative is quite incompatible with the idea of the god-king;
+the latter might not be repugnant to it if other things tended to foster
+it. But it is so clear that they do not! An Emperor who is titular head
+of a Parliamentary Government might, and in Japan no doubt _would_, be
+surrounded with affection and respect. He could never be seriously
+regarded as divine. For that whole notion belongs to an age innocent of
+all 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 the
+Japanese educational system which endeavours to centre all duty about
+the person of the Emperor. The Japanese are trying a great experiment in
+State-imposed morality--a policy highly questionable at the best, but
+becoming almost demonstrably absurd when it is based on an idea which is
+foredoomed to discredit. The well-known Imperial rescript, which is kept
+framed 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 teach
+every Westerner that a document so framed is at variance with the whole
+bent of the modern mind, and, if forced upon it, could only goad it
+into rebellion. And such, I have been informed, and easily believe, is
+the effect it is beginning to have in Japan. Young people brought up on
+Western languages and Western science demand a Western, that is a
+rational, sanction for conduct. They do not believe the Emperor to be
+divine, and therefore they cannot take their moral principles on trust
+from him and from his ancestors. The violent reaction from this
+State-imposed doctrine drives them into sheer scepticism and anarchy.
+And here, as always throughout history, authority defeats its own
+purposes. Western ideas cannot be taken _in part_. They cannot be
+applied to the natural world and fenced off from the moral world. Japan
+must go through the same crisis through which the West is passing; she
+must revise the whole basis of her traditional morals. And in doing so
+she must be content to lose that passionate and simple devotion which is
+the 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 the
+entrance of the inn. I had never before stayed at a Japanese inn, and
+this one, so my friend assured me, was a bad specimen of the class.
+Certainly it was disorderly and dirty. It was also overcrowded. But that
+was inevitable, for a thousand pilgrims in a day were landing at Gotemba
+station. Men and women, young and old, grandparents, parents, children
+come flocking in to climb the great mountain. The village street is
+lined with inns; and in front of each stood a boy with a lantern hailing
+the new arrivals. We were able, in spite of the crowd, to secure a room
+to ourselves, and even, with difficulty, some water to wash in--too many
+people had used and were using the one bath! A table and a chair were
+provided for the foreigner, and very uncouth they looked in the pretty
+Japanese room. But a bed was out of the question. One had to sleep on
+the floor among the fleas. Certainly it was not comfortable; but it was
+amusing. From my room in the upper storey I looked into the whole row
+of rooms in the inn opposite, thrown open to the street, with their
+screens drawn back. One saw families and parties, a dozen or more in a
+room, dressing and undressing, naked and clothed, sleeping, eating,
+talking; all, of course, squatting on the floor, with a low stool for a
+table, and red-lacquered bowls for plates and dishes. How people manage
+to eat rice with chopsticks will always be a mystery to me. For my own
+part, I cannot even--but I will not open that humiliating chapter.
+
+Of the night, the less said the better. I rose with relief, but dressed
+with embarrassment; for the girl who waited on us selected the moment of
+my toilet to clean the room. It was still raining hard, and we had
+decided to abandon our expedition, for another night in that inn was
+unthinkable. But, about eleven, a gleam of sun encouraged us to proceed,
+and we started on horseback for the mountain. And here I must note that
+by the official tariff, approved by the police, a foreigner is charged
+twice as much for a horse as a Japanese. If one asks why, one is calmly
+informed that a foreigner, as a rule, is heavier! This is typical of
+travel in Japan; and there have been moments when I have sympathised
+with 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. We
+rode for three hours at a foot-pace, and by the time we left our horses
+and began the ascent on foot we were wrapped in thick, cold mist. There
+is no difficulty about climbing Fuji, except the fatigue. You simply
+walk for hours up a steep and ever-steeper heap of ashes. It was perhaps
+as well that we did not see what lay before us, or we might have been
+discouraged. We saw nothing but the white-grey mist and the purple-grey
+soil. Except that, looming out of the cloud just in front of us, there
+kept 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 on
+a sheet, like spirits on the mountain of Purgatory, like anything but
+solid men walking up a hill. So for hours we laboured on, the slope
+becoming steeper every step, till we could go no further, and stopped at
+a shelter to pass the night. Here we were lucky. The other climbers had
+halted 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 warming
+and congratulating ourselves, when suddenly our guide at the door gave a
+cry. We hurried to see. And what a sight it was! The clouds lay below us
+and a starlit sky above. At our feet the mountain fell away like a
+cliff, but it fell rather to a glacier than a sea--a glacier infinite as
+the ocean, yawning in crevasses, billowing in ridges; a glacier not of
+ice, but of vapour, changing form as one watched, opening here, closing
+there, rising, falling, shifting, while far away, at the uttermost
+verge, appeared a crimson crescent, then a red oval, then a yellow
+globe, swimming up above the clouds, touching their lights with gold,
+deepening their shadows, and spreading, where it rose, a lake of silver
+fire over the surface of the tossing plain.
+
+We looked till it was too cold to look longer, then wrapped ourselves in
+quilts and went to sleep. At midnight I woke. Outside there was a
+strange moaning. The wind had risen; and the sound of it in that lonely
+place gave me a shock of fear. The mountain, then, was more than a heap
+of dead ashes. Presences haunted it; powers indifferent to human fate.
+That wind had blown before man came into being, and would blow when he
+had ceased to exist. It moaned and roared. Then it was still. But I
+could not sleep again, and lay watching the flicker of the lamp on the
+long wooden roof, and the streaks of moonlight through the chinks, till
+the coolie lit a fire and called us to get up. We started at four. The
+clouds were still below, and the moon above; but she had moved across to
+the west, Orion had appeared, and a new planet blazed in the east. The
+last climb was very steep and our breath very scant. But we had other
+things than that to think of. Through a rift in a cloud to the eastward
+dawned a salmon-coloured glow; it brightened to fire; lit up the clouds
+above and the clouds below; blazed more and intolerably, till, as we
+reached the summit, the sun leapt into view and sent a long line of
+light 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 fire
+filled the fetid air with acrid smoke! What there was to be seen we
+saw--the crater, neither wide nor deep; the Shinto temple, where a
+priest was intoning prayers; and the Post Office, where an enterprising
+Government sells picture-postcards for triumphant pilgrims to despatch
+to their friends. My friend must have written at least a dozen, while I
+waited and shivered with numbed feet and hands. But after an hour we
+began the descent, and quickly reached the shelter where we were to
+breakfast. Thence we had to plunge again into the clouds. But before
+doing so we took a long look at the marvellous scene--more marvellous
+than any view of earth; icebergs tossing in a sea, mountains exhaling
+and vanishing, magic castles and palaces towering across infinite space.
+A step, and once more the white-grey mist and the purple-grey soil. But
+the clouds had moved higher; and it was not long before we saw, to the
+south, cliffs and the sea, to the east, the gleam of green fields,
+running up, under cloud-shadows, to mountain ridges and peaks. And so
+back to Gotemba, and our now odious inn.
+
+We would not stop there. So we parted, my friend for Tokyo, I for
+Kyoto. But time-tables had been fallacious, and I found myself landed at
+Numatsa, with four hours to wait for the night train, no comfort in the
+waiting-room, and no Japanese words at my command. I understood then a
+little better why foreigners are so offensive in the East. They do not
+know the language; they find themselves impotent where their instinct is
+to domineer; and they visit on the Oriental the ill-temper which is
+really produced by their own incompetence. Yes, I must confess that I
+had to remind myself severely that it was I, and not the Japanese, who
+was stupid. At last the station-master came to my rescue--the
+station-master always speaks English. He endured my petulance with the
+unfailing courtesy and patience of his race, and sent me off at last in
+a rickshaw to the beach and a Japanese hotel. But my troubles were not
+ended. I reached the hotel; I bowed and smiled to the group of
+kow-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 that
+did 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 these
+people do not know English." The pity, I replied, was that I did not
+know Japanese, but his courtesy repudiated the suggestion. Could I have
+a bathing costume? Of course! And in a quarter of an hour he brought me
+a wet one. Where could I change? He showed me a room; and presently I
+was swimming in the sea, with such delight as he only can know who has
+ascended and descended Fuji without the chance of a bath. Returning to
+the inn, I wandered about in my wet costume seeking vainly the room in
+which I had changed. Laughing girls pushed me here, and pulled me there,
+uncomprehending of my pantomime, till one at last, quicker than the
+rest, pulled back a slide, and revealed the room I was seeking. Then
+came dinner--soup, fried fish, and rice; and--for my weakness--a spoon
+and fork to eat them with. The whole house seemed to be open, and one
+looked into every room, watching the ways of these gay and charming
+people. At last I paid--to accomplish _that_ by pantomime was easy,--and
+said good-bye to my hostess and her maids, who bowed their heads to the
+ground and smiled as though I had been the most honoured of guests
+instead of a clumsy foreigner, fit food for mirth. A walk in a twilight
+pine wood, and then back to the station, where I boarded the night
+train, and slept fitfully until five, when we reached Kyoto, and my
+wanderings were over. How I enjoyed the comfort of the best hotel in the
+East! But also how I regretted that I had not long ago learnt to find
+comfort 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 Californians
+to the Japanese this is not the place to dwell. At bottom, it is a
+conflict of civilisations, a conflict which is largely due to ignorance
+and misunderstanding, and which should never be allowed to develop into
+avowed antagonism. For with time, patience, and sympathy it will
+disappear of itself. The patience and sympathy, I think, are not lacking
+on the side of the Japanese, but they are sadly lacking among the
+Californians, and indeed among all white men in Western America. The
+truth is that the Western pioneer knows nothing of Japan and wants to
+know nothing. And he would be much astonished, not to say indignant,
+were he told that the civilisation of Japan is higher than that of
+America. Yet there can, I think, be no doubt that this is the case, if
+real values be taken as a standard. America, and the "new" countries
+generally, have contributed, so far, nothing to the world except
+material prosperity. I do not under-estimate this. It is a great thing
+to have subdued a continent. And it may be argued that those who are
+engaged in this task have no energy to spare for other activities. But
+the Japanese subdued their island centuries, even millenniums, ago. And,
+having reduced it to as high a state of culture as they required, they
+began 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 you
+reflect life in the forms of art, literature, philosophy, and religion.
+To all these things the Japanese have made notable contributions; less
+notable, indeed, than those of China, from whom they derived their
+inspiration, but still native, genuine, and precious. To take first bare
+externals, the physical life of the Japanese is beautiful. I read with
+amazement the other day a quotation from a leading Californian newspaper
+to the effect that "there is an instinctive sense of physical repugnance
+on 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 made
+no difference to him if he had, for he is evidently one of those who
+cannot or will not see. But to me the first and chief impression of
+Japan is the physical attractiveness of the people. The Japanese are
+perfectly proportioned; their joints, their hands, their feet, their
+hips are elegant and fine; and they display to the best advantage these
+natural graces by a costume which is as beautiful as it is simple. To
+see these perfect figures walking, running, mounting stairs, bathing,
+even pulling rickshaws, is to receive a constant stream of shocks of
+surprise and delight. In so much that, after some weeks in the country,
+I begin to feel "a sense of physical repugnance" to Americans and
+Europeans--a sense which, if I were as uneducated and inexperienced as
+the writer in the _Argonaut_, I should call "instinctive," and make the
+basis of a campaign of race-hatred. The misfortune is that the Japanese
+abandon their own dress when they go abroad. And in European dress,
+which they do not understand, and which conceals their bodies, they are
+apt to look mean and vulgar. Similarly, in European dress, they lose
+their own perfect manners and mis-acquire the worst of the West. So that
+there may be some excuse for feeling "repugnance" to the Japanese
+abroad, though, of course, it is merely absurd and barbarous to base
+upon such superficial distaste a policy of persecution and insult.
+
+If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, the Japanese show
+themselves in no respect inferior, and in some important respects
+superior, to the Americans. New though they are to the whole mental
+attitude which underlies science and its applications, they have
+already, 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. In
+particular, to apply the only test which the Western nations seem really
+to accept, they can build ships, train men, organise a campaign, and
+beat a great Western Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But all
+this, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in our imagination,
+is secondary and subordinate in a true estimate of civilisation. The
+great claim the Japanese may make, as I began by saying, is that they
+have known how to live; and they have proved that by the only test--by
+the way they have reflected life.
+
+Japanese literature and art may not be as great as that of Europe; but
+it exists, whereas that of America and all the new countries is yet to
+seek. While Europe was still plunged in the darkest of the dark ages,
+Japanese poets were already producing songs in exquisite response to the
+beauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human life. From the seventh
+century on, their painting and their sculpture was reflecting in tender
+and gracious forms the mysteries of their faith. Their literature and
+their art changed its content and its form with the centuries, but it
+continued without a break, in a stream of genuine inspiration, down to
+the time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. From
+that moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. But
+what a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof that
+the Japanese belong to the civilised nations--the nations that can live
+and express life.
+
+But perhaps this test may be rejected. Morals, it may be urged, is the
+touchstone of civilisation, not art. Well, take morals. The question is
+a large one; but, summarily, where do the Japanese fail, as compared
+with the Western nations? Is patriotism the standard? In this respect
+what nation can compete with them? Is it courage? What people are
+braver? Is it industry? Who is more industrious? It is their very
+industry that has aroused the jealous fears of the Californians. Is it
+family life? Where, outside the East, is found such solidarity as in
+Japan? Is it sexual purity? On that point, what Western nation can hold
+up its head? Is it honesty? What of the honesty of the West? No; no
+Westerner, knowing the facts, could for a moment maintain that, all
+round and on the whole, the morals of the Japanese are inferior to those
+of Europe or America. It would probably be easier to maintain the
+opposite. Judged by every real test the Japanese civilisation is not
+lower, it is higher than that of any of the new countries who refuse to
+permit the Japanese to live among them.
+
+That, I admit, does not settle the question. Competent and impartial men
+like Admiral Mahan, who would admit all that I have urged, still
+maintain that the Japanese ought not to be allowed to settle in the
+West. This conclusion I do not now discuss. The point I wish to make is
+that the question can never be fairly faced, in a dry light, and with
+reference only to the simple facts, until the prejudice is broken up and
+destroyed that the Japanese, and all other Orientals, are "inferior"
+races. It is this prejudice which distorts all the facts and all the
+values, which makes Californians and British Columbians and Australians
+sheerly unreasonable, and causes them to jump at one argument after
+another, each more fallacious than the last, to defend an attitude which
+at bottom is nothing but the childish and ignorant hatred of the
+uncultivated man for everything strange. If the Japanese had had white
+skins, should we ever have heard of the economic argument? And should we
+ever have been presented with that new shibboleth "unassimilable"?
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+HOME
+
+
+Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London! What a crescendo of life! What a
+quickening of the flow! What a gathering intensity! "Whatever else we
+may think of the West," I said to the young French artist, "it is, at
+any rate, the centre of life." "Yes," he replied, "but the curious thing
+is that that Life produces only Death. Dead things, and dead people." I
+reflected. Yes! The _things_ certainly were dead. Look at the Louvre!
+Look at the Madeleine! Look at any of the streets! Machine-men had made
+it all, not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? "Certainly!" he
+insisted. "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 the
+West." "Then what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at the
+roaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Steam."
+
+With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot criticism and
+speculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, in the trim hedgerows and
+fields, in the sound of English voices and the sight of English faces.
+In London it was the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, the
+discreetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young men in City
+offices who reassured me about my baggage, the autumn sun on the maze of
+misty streets, the vast picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of a
+mountain or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St.
+Paul's--"Dead," I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade,--I
+went in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold space came the
+dreary 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 Eastern
+plain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a "sacred
+edifice"; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines of
+Japan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of
+cheerful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and came under the
+dome. Then something happened--the thing that always happens when one
+comes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that
+he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, the
+dome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragments
+visions 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, green
+and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean;
+hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble
+palaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors,
+and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations of peasants
+through long millenniums, toiling, suffering, believing, in one
+unchanging course of life, before the dawn of history on and down to
+here and now. As they were, so they are; and I heard them sound as with
+the drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone something new
+appeared. Late in time, Western history emerged, and--astonishing
+thing--began to move and change! "Why," I said, "there's something
+trying to happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?" There was
+not one. But there was--has the reader ever heard the second--or is it
+the third?--overture to "Leonora"? A scale begins to run up, first on
+the violins; then one by one the other instruments join in, till the
+great basses are swept into the current and run and scale too. So it was
+here. The West began; but the East caught it up. The unchanging drone
+began to move and flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more and
+more intensely, crying and flaming towards--what? Beethoven knew, and
+put it into his music. We cannot put it into ideas or words. We can see
+the problem, not the solution; and the problem is this. To reconcile the
+Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eternity; the Western
+multiformity with the Eastern identity; the Western energy with the
+Eastern peace. For God is neither Time nor Eternity, but Time in
+Eternity; neither One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit nor
+Matter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, and the great
+saints; the modern artists and the modern saints, who have been or who
+will be. Goethe was one; Beethoven was one; and there will be greater,
+when the contact between East and West becomes closer, and the sparks
+from pole to pole fly faster.
+
+I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the organ had
+stopped. I left the great church and came out upon the back of Queen
+Anne, which made me laugh. Still, it was quite religious; so were the
+'buses, and the motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the Law
+Courts, and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. "Dear people," I
+said, "you are not dead, any more than I am. You think you are, as I too
+often 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 is
+original, if not independent. India, China, Japan, each has a peculiar
+outlook on the world. Not so America, at any rate in the north. America,
+we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of
+Europe. Nor does an "American spirit" exist; there exists instead the
+spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants and
+descendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful of
+orientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found in
+Western Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the
+different European countries, but what is common to them all. What
+America 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 his
+costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, and
+retains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continent
+all the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, and
+flourish in unexampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that is
+evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriant
+profusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe the
+American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always
+the same--masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once
+good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you
+do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity,
+intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of
+ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising
+nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual
+life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the
+conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child
+with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for
+what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplished
+brute.
+
+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, as
+well as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has,
+broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident in
+Europe, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, they
+win it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result not
+of American institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It is
+the poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this continent. He
+alone has the proper point of view; and he, unfortunately, is dumb. But
+often, when I have contemplated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts of
+New York, the hideous wooden shanties planted askew in wastes of
+garbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or Venice, suddenly it has been
+borne in upon me that the Italians living there feel that they have
+their feet on the ladder leading to paradise; that for the first time
+they have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while they have
+lost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty and their charm, they
+have gained something which, in their eyes, and perhaps in reality, more
+than compensates for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gained
+self-respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. "The
+vision of America," a friend writes, "is the vision of the lifting up of
+the millions." This, I believe, is true, and it is America's great
+contribution to civilisation. I do not forget it; but neither shall I
+dwell upon it; for though it is, I suppose, the most important thing
+about America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. What
+strikes more often and more directly home to me is the other fact that
+America, if she is not burdened by masses lying below the average, is
+also not inspired by an elite rising above it. Her distinction is the
+absence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the "Divine
+Average." There was nothing else in America for him to sing. But he
+should not have called it divine; he should have called it "human, all
+too human."
+
+Or _is_ it divine? Divine somehow in its potentialities? Divine to a
+deeper vision than mine? I was writing this at Brooklyn, in a room that
+looks across the East River to New York. And after putting down those
+words, "human, all too human," I stepped out on to the terrace. Across
+the gulf before me went shooting forward and back interminable rows of
+fiery shuttles; and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas.
+Beyond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, dusking and
+shimmering, primrose and green, up to a diadem of gold. About it hung
+galaxies and constellations, outshining the firmament of stars; and
+all the air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingeminating
+Babylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. This is New York. This
+it is that the average man has done, he knows not why; this is the
+symbol of his work, so much more than himself, so much more than what
+seems to be itself in the common light of day. America does not know
+what she is doing, neither do I know, nor any man. But the impulse that
+drives her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps more
+significance in the eye of God; and the optimism of this continent, so
+seeming-frivolous, is justified, may be, by reason lying beyond its
+ken.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS
+
+
+The American, I said, in the previous letter, is the average Western
+man. 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 to
+be explained, I believe, by this fact. Among pioneers the individual is
+everything and the society nothing. Every man relies on himself and on
+his personal relations. He is a friend, and an enemy; he is never a
+citizen. Justice, order, respect for law, honesty even and honour are to
+him mere abstract names; what is real is intelligence and force, the
+service done or the injury inflicted, the direct emotional reaction to
+persons and deeds. And still, as it seems to the foreign observer, even
+in the long-settled east, still more in the west, this attitude
+prevails. To the American politician or business man, that a thing is
+right or wrong, legal or illegal, seems a pale and irrelevant
+consideration. The real question is, will it pay? will it please
+Theophilus P. Polk or vex Harriman Q. Kunz? If it is illegal, will it be
+detected? If detected, will it be prosecuted? What are our resources
+for evading or defeating the law? And all this with good temper and good
+conscience. What stands in the way, says the pioneer, must be swept out
+of it; no matter whether it be the moral or the civil law, a public
+authority or a rival in business. "The strong business man" has no use
+for scruples. Public or social considerations do not appeal to him. Or
+if they do present themselves, he satisfies himself with the belief
+that, from activities so strenuous and remarkable as his, Good must
+result to the community. If he break the law, that is the fault of the
+law, for being stupid and obstructive; if he break individuals, that is
+their fault for being weak. _Vae victis!_ Never has that principle, or
+rather instinct, ruled more paramount than it does in America.
+
+To say this, is to say that American society is the most individualistic
+in the modern world. This follows naturally from the whole situation of
+the country. The pioneer has no object save to get rich; the government
+of pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. To this
+object everything is sacrificed, including the interests of future
+generations. All new countries have taken the most obvious and easy
+course. They have given away for nothing, or for a song, the whole of
+their natural resources to anybody who will undertake to exploit them.
+And those who have appropriated this wealth have judged it to be theirs
+by a kind of natural right. "These farms, mines, forests,
+oilsprings--of course they are ours. Did not we discover them? Did not
+we squat upon them? Have we not 'mixed our labour with them'?" If
+pressed as to the claims of later comers they would probably reply that
+there remains "as much and as good" for others. And this of course is
+true for a time; but for a very short time, even when it is a continent
+that is being divided up. Practically the whole territory of the United
+States is now in private ownership. Still, the owners have made such
+good use of their opportunities that they have created innumerable
+opportunities for non-owners. Artisans get good wages; lawyers make
+fortunes; stock and share holders get high dividends. Every one feels
+that he is nourishing, and flourishing by his own efforts. He has no
+need to combine with his fellows; or, if he does combine, is ready to
+desert them in a moment when he sees his own individual chance.
+
+But this is only a phase; and inevitably, by the logic of events, there
+supervenes upon it another on which, it would appear, America is just
+now entering. With all her natural resources distributed among
+individuals or corporations, and with the tide of immigration unchecked,
+she begins to feel the first stress of the situation of which the
+tension in Europe has already become almost intolerable. It is the
+situation which cannot fail to result from the system of private
+property and inheritance established throughout the Western world.
+Opportunities diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste of
+wage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of
+property-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; and
+substantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration and
+simplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians.
+American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of
+European society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is a
+repetition of the old on a larger scale. And, curiously, she is less
+"new" than the other new countries. Australia and New Zealand for years
+past have been trying experiments in social policy; they are determined
+to do what they can to prevent the recurrence there of the European
+situation. But in America, there is no sign of such tendencies. The
+political and social philosophy of the United States is still that of
+the early English individualists. And, no doubt, there are adequate
+causes, if not good reasons for this. The immense wealth and size of the
+country, the huge agricultural population, the proportionally smaller
+aggregation in cities has maintained in the mass of the people what I
+have called the "pioneer" attitude. Opportunity has been, and still is,
+more open than in any other country; and, in consequence, there has
+hardly 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 European
+institutions; and "labour" will assert itself more and more as an
+independent factor in politics.
+
+Whether it will assert itself successfully is another matter. At
+present, as is notorious, American politics are controlled by wealth,
+more completely, perhaps, than those of any other country, even of
+England. The "corporations" make it a main part of their business to
+capture 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 Corporations
+control the cities; and the protected interests dominate the Senate.
+Business governs America; and business does not include labour. In no
+civilised country except Japan is labour-legislation so undeveloped as
+in the States; in none is capital so uncontrolled; in none is justice so
+openly prostituted to wealth. America is the paradise of plutocracy; for
+the rich there enjoy not only a real power but a social prestige such as
+can hardly have been accorded to them even in the worst days of the
+Roman Empire. Great fortunes and their owners are regarded with a
+respect as naif and as intense as has ever been conceded to birth in
+Europe. No American youth of ambition, I am told, leaves college with
+any less or greater purpose in his heart than that of emulating Mr.
+Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller. And, on the other hand, it must be
+conceded, rich men feel an obligation to dispose of their wealth for
+public purposes, to a degree quite unknown in Europe. By these lavish
+gifts the people are dazzled. They feel that the millionaire has paid
+his ransom; and are ready to forgive irregularities in the process of
+acquiring wealth when they are atoned for by such splendid penance. Thus
+the rich man in America comes to assume the position of a kind of
+popular dictator. He is admired on account of his prowess and forgiven
+on account of his beneficence. And, since every one feels that one day
+he 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 labour
+of others. Rather he is the type, the genius of the American people; and
+they point to him with pride as "one of our strong men," "one of our
+conservative men of business."
+
+Individualism, then, is stronger and deeper rooted in America than
+elsewhere. And, it must be added, socialism is weaker. It is an imported
+article, and it does not thrive on the new soil. The formulae of Marx are
+even less congenial to the American than to the English mind; and
+American conditions have not yet given rise to a native socialism, based
+on local conditions and adapted to local habits of thought. Such a
+native socialism, I believe, is bound to come before long, perhaps is
+arising even now. But I would not hazard the assertion that it is likely
+to 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 the
+form of her present Plutocracy, and realise that new feudalism of
+industry 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 that
+it should happen in any European country. It is an error to think of
+America as democratic; her Democracy is all on the surface. But in
+Europe, Democracy is penetrating deeper and deeper. And, in particular,
+there can be little doubt that England is now more democratic than the
+United 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 sitting
+to-night on a bench on the river bank. The racing water-ridges glimmered
+faintly in the dusk and the roar of the falls droned in unwavering
+monotony. I fell, I think, into a kind of stupor; anyhow, I cannot
+remember when it was that some one took a seat beside me, and began to
+talk. I seemed to wake and feel him speaking; and the first remark I
+definitely heard was this: "All America is Niagara." "All America is
+Niagara," the voice repeated--I could see no face. "Force without
+direction, noise without significance, speed without accomplishment. All
+day and all night the water rushes and roars. I sit and listen; and it
+does nothing. It is Nature; and Nature has no significance. It is we
+poets who create significance, and for that reason Nature hates us. She
+is afraid of us, for she knows that we condemn her. We have standards
+before which she shrinks abashed. But she has her revenge; for poets
+are incarnate. She owns our bodies; and she hurls us down Niagara with
+the rest, with the others that she loves, and that love her, the virile
+big-jawed men, trampling and trampled, hustling and hustled, working and
+asking no questions, falling as water and dispersing as spray. Nature is
+force, loves force, wills force alone. She hates the intellect, she
+hates 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 broke
+out:
+
+"There is no progress! It is always the same river! New waves succeed
+for ever, but always in the old forms. History tells, from beginning to
+end, the same tale--the victory of the strong over the sensitive, of the
+active over the reflective, of intelligence over intellect. Rome
+conquered Greece, the Germans the Italians, the English the French, and
+now, 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 perennial
+conquest of civilisation by barbarians. The little islands before us,
+lovely with trees and flowers, green oases in the rushing river, it is
+but 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 moralists
+maintain, because of her vices, but because of her virtues. She is
+becoming just, scrupulous, humane, and therefore she is doomed. Ignoble
+though she be, she is yet too noble to survive; for Germany and America
+are baser than she. Hark, Hark to Niagara! Force, at all costs! Do you
+hear it? Do you see it? I can see it, though it is dark. It is a river
+of mouths and teeth, of greedy outstretched hands, of mirthless
+laughter, of tears and of blood. I am there, you are there; we are
+hurrying over the fall; we are going up in spray."
+
+"Yes," I cried as one cries in a nightmare, "and in that spray hangs the
+rainbow."
+
+He caught at the phrase. "It is true. The rainbow hangs in the spray! It
+is 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 the
+world."
+
+"We do not make the rainbow," I said. "The sun makes it, shining against
+it. What is the sun?"
+
+"The sun is the Platonic Good; it lights the world, but does not warm
+it. By its illumination we see the river in which we are involved; see
+and judge, and condemn, and are swept away. That we can condemn is our
+greatness; by that we are children of the sun. But our vision is never
+fruitful. The sun cannot breed out of matter; no, not even maggots by
+kissing carrion. Between Force and Light, Matter and Good, there is no
+interchange. 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 the
+tiniest wave was ever dimpled or crisped by its rays. Matter alone moves
+matter; and the world is matter. Best not cry, best not even blaspheme.
+Pass over the fall in silence. Perhaps, at the bottom, there is
+oblivion. 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 not
+know. Perhaps it was only the roar of Niagara. When I returned to the
+hotel, I heard that this very afternoon, while I was sunning myself on
+one of the islands, a woman had thrown herself into the rapids and been
+swept 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 of
+the Indians. Centuries will pass, millenniums will pass, mankind will
+have come and gone, and still the river will flow and the sun shine, and
+they will communicate to one another their stern immortal joy, in which
+there 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 a
+tangle of wild roses, to a calm sea and a flock of white sails.
+Everything invites to happy thought and innocent reverie. Moreover, it
+is the day of rest, and every one is at leisure to turn his mind towards
+pleasant things. To what, in fact, are most people on this continent
+turning theirs? To this, which I hold in my hand, the Sunday newspaper.
+
+Let us analyse this production, peculiar to the New World. It comprises
+eight sections and eighty-eight pages, and very likely does really, as
+it 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 who
+defame and censure it the Association for New York was incorporated
+yesterday."
+
+I notice also "Conferences agree to short rates on woollen goods," and
+am reminded of the shameless bargaining of which, for many weeks past,
+Washington has been the centre; which leads me to reflect on the
+political advantages of a Tariff and its wholesome effect on the
+national 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 of
+all goods ready for the sale. We are tuning up. By September it is our
+intention to have assembled in these two great buildings the most
+fashionable merchandise ever shown. No one piece of goods will be
+permitted to linger that lacks, in any detail, the aesthetic beauty
+demanded by New York women of fashion. Everything will be better and a
+definite percentage lower in price than New York will find in any other
+store. Do not expect a sale of ordinary proportions. To-morrow you will
+find the store alive with enthusiasm. This is not a summer hurrah." And
+so 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 round
+to third on another miscue by Williams. Charley Clough was on deck with
+a timely single, which scored Merritt. Curran's out at first put Clough
+on third, from whence he tallied on Cuming's single. Cuming got to
+second, when Wiley grounded out along the first base line and scored on
+Reinmund's single. Every other time Reinmund came to the bat he struck
+out."
+
+I pass to the _Magazine Section_.
+
+On the first page is the mysterious heading "E. of K. and E." Several
+huge portraits of a bald clean-shaven man in shirt sleeves partially
+explain. E. is Mr. Erlanger, a theatrical impresario, and K. and E.
+presumably is his firm. The article describes "the accomplishment of a
+busy man on one of his ordinary days," and makes one hope no day is ever
+extraordinary. The interviewer who tells about him is almost speechless
+with emotion. He searches for a phrase to express his feelings, finds it
+at 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 Dolly
+was a professional model"; "The Doctor's Story," with a picture of a
+corpse, "whose white shapely hands were clasped one over the other";
+and "Would you Convict on Circumstantial Evidence?--A Scaffold
+Confession. A True Story." I glance at this, and read, "While the crowd
+watched in strained, breathless silence there came a sharp agonised
+voice and a commotion near the steps of the scaffold. 'Stop! Stop! The
+man is not guilty. I mean it. It is I who should stand there. Let me
+speak.'" You can now reconstruct the story for yourself. Next comes "Get
+the Man! Craft and courage of old-time and modern express robbers
+matched by organised secret service and the mandate that makes capture
+alone the end of an unflagging man-hunt." This is accompanied by
+portraits of famous detectives and train-robbers.
+
+There follows "_Thrilling Lines_," with a picture of a man who seems to
+be looping the loop on a bicycle.
+
+And the conclusion of the section is a poem, entitled "Cynthianna
+Blythe," 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 the
+whole of the press of America is not of this character. Among the
+thousands of papers daily produced on that continent, it would be
+possible, I believe, to name ten--I myself could mention five--which
+contain in almost every issue some piece of information or comment which
+an intelligent man might care to peruse. There are to be found, now and
+again, passing references to European and even to Asiatic politics; for
+it cannot be said that the press of America wholly ignored the recent
+revolutions in Persia and in Turkey. I myself saw a reference to the new
+Sultan as a man "fat, but not fleshy." England looms big enough on the
+American horizon to be treated to an occasional gibe; and the doings of
+fashionable Americans in London are reported somewhat fully. Still, on
+the whole, the American daily press is typified by the specimen I have
+analysed. Sensations, personalities and fiction are its stock-in-trade.
+Why? The causes are well known, but are worth recapitulating, for they
+are part of the system of modern civilisation.
+
+The newspaper press is a business intended to make money. This is its
+primary aim, which may, or may not, include the subordinate purpose of
+advocating some line of public policy. Now, to make money, it is
+essential to secure advertisements; and to secure advertisements it is
+essential to have a large circulation. But a large circulation can only
+be obtained by lowering the price of the paper, and adapting it to the
+leisure mood of the mass of people. But this leisure mood is usually one
+of sheer vacuity, incapable of intellectual effort or imaginative
+response. The man is there, waiting to be filled, and to be filled with
+the stuff easiest to digest. The rest follows. The newspapers supply the
+demand and by supplying extend and perpetuate it. Among the possible
+appeals open to them they deliberately choose the lowest. For people are
+capable of Good as well as of Bad; and if they cannot get the Bad they
+will sometimes take the Good. Newspapers, probably, could exist, even
+under democratic conditions, by maintaining a certain standard of
+intelligence and morals. But it is easier to exist on melodrama,
+fatuity and sport. And one or two papers adopting that course force the
+others into line; for here, as in so many departments of modern life,
+"The Bad drives out the Good." This process of deterioration of the
+press is proceeding rapidly in England, with the advent of the halfpenny
+newspaper. It has not gone so far as in America; but there is no reason
+why it should not, and every reason why it should; for the same causes
+are at work.
+
+I have called the process "deterioration," but that, of course, is
+matter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a recent Conference in London,
+is reported to have congratulated the press on its progressive
+improvement during recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. The
+more the English press approximates to the American, the more, it would
+seem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. And that is natural, for
+the American method pays.
+
+Well, the sun still shines and the sky is still blue. But between it and
+the American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! the
+fathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may be
+said, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning
+and storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff of
+the modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated to
+evoke 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, and
+I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me
+there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in
+vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a
+thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of
+recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that
+absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness
+but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and
+resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell
+faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I
+wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly
+enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to
+establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the
+achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless
+telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the
+name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he
+will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has
+exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the
+mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent.
+"Click--click--click--Pick--pick--pick--Pock--pock--pockets." So the
+west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds
+roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate
+iron road.
+
+It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I was
+obliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow youth assented, with his air
+of elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as he
+could. About sunset, the storm passed away over the plains. Behind its
+flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment the
+prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and as
+profound, a thousand miles of grass where men and cattle crept like
+flies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinite
+monotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a
+democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From one
+newspaper topic to another we passed to the talk about signalling to
+Mars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but he
+knew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now shining bright
+above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of double
+stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and the
+infinity of space, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presently
+remarked: "Gee! I guess then it doesn't matter two cents after all who
+gets elected president!" Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I to
+lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is long
+since the notion of infinite space and infinite worlds has impressed my
+imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic
+scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not
+only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to
+our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he
+bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of
+Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and
+through,--that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of
+man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of
+him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at
+sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of
+Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances
+of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the
+earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate
+wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright
+luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of
+Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze;
+and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their
+order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate
+Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and
+all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend
+and in whom they rest.
+
+And I recalled the passage:
+
+    "Frate, la nostra volonta quieta
+      Virtu di carita, che fa volerne
+      Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta.
+
+    Se disiassimo esser piu superne,
+      Foran discordi gli nostri disiri
+      Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;
+
+    Che vedrai non capere in questi giri,
+      S'essere in caritate e qui necesse,
+      E se la sua natura ben rimiri;
+
+    Anzi e 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 e nostra pace:
+      Ella e 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 the
+clicking needle, to the corner in wheat, to Chicago and Pittsburg and
+New 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 of
+all the peace of God. All move, but about no centre; they move on, to
+more power, to more wealth, to more motion. There is not one of them who
+conceives that he has a place, if only he could find it, a rank and
+order fitted to his nature, higher than some, lower than others, but
+right, and the only right for him, his true position in the cosmic
+scheme, his ultimate relation to the Power whence it proceeds. Life,
+like astronomy, has become Copernican. It has no centre, no
+significance, or, if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, not
+love. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, a
+force that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and
+spirit. "Click--click--click--tick--tick--tick," so goes the economic
+clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the
+stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for
+us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that
+ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America
+is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America is
+Niagara." 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 mood
+of the night. I took leave of my host, and under his directions, after
+half a mile along the line, plunged down into a gorge, and followed for
+miles, crossing and re-crossing, a mountain brook, between cliffs of red
+rocks, by fields of mauve anemones, in the shadow and fragrance of
+pines; till suddenly, after hours of rough going, I was confronted by a
+notice, 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 my
+getting in!" "Avoid trouble! Ah, what trouble would I not face, could I
+but get in!" And I went on, but not in, and met no trouble, and
+returned to the hotel, and had dinner, and watched for a solitary hour,
+in the hall, the shifting interminable array of vacant eyes and blank
+faces, 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 in
+the Adirondacks. All about me are mountains and unlumbered forest. The
+tree lies where it falls; the undergrowth chokes the trails; and on the
+hottest day it is cool in the green, sun-chequered wilderness. Deer
+start in the thickets or steal down to drink in the lake. The only
+sounds are the wood-pecker's scream, the song of the hermit-thrush, the
+thrumming and drumming of bull-frogs in the water. My friend is a
+sportsman; I am not; and while he catches trout I have been reading
+Homer and Shelley. Shelley I have always understood; but now, for the
+first time, I seem to understand Homer. Our guide here, I feel, might
+have been Homer, if he had had imagination; but he could never have been
+Shelley. Homer, I conceive, had from the first the normal bent for
+action. What his fellows did he too wanted to do. He learned to hunt, to
+sail a boat, to build a house, to use a spear and bow. He had his
+initiation early, in conflict, in danger, and in death. He loved the
+feast, the dance, and the song. But also he had dreams. He used to sit
+alone and think. And, as he grew, these moods grew, till he came to live
+a second life, a kind of double of the first. The one was direct,
+unreflective, and purposeful. In it he hunted wild beasts that he might
+kill them, fought battles that he might win them, sailed boats that he
+might arrive somewhere. So far, he was like his fellows, and like our
+guide, with his quick observation, his varied experience, his practical
+skill. But then, on the other hand, he had imagination. This active life
+he reproduced; not by recapitulating it--that the guide can do; but by
+recreating it. He detached it, as it were, from himself as centre;
+ceased, indeed, to be a self; and became all that he contemplated--the
+victor and the vanquished, the hunter and the hunted, the house and its
+builder, Thersites and Achilles. He became the sun and the moon and the
+stars, the gods and the laughter of the gods. He took no sides,
+pronounced no judgment, espoused no cause. He became pure vision; but
+not passive vision. To see, he had to re-create; and the material his
+observation had amassed he offered up as a holocaust on the altar of his
+imagination. Fused in that fierce fire, like drew to like, parts ran
+together and formed a whole. Did he see a warrior fall? In a moment the
+image arose of "a stately poplar falling by the axe in a meadow by the
+riverside." Did a host move out to meet the foe? It recalled the ocean
+shore where "wave follows wave far out at sea until they break in
+thunder on the beach." Was battle engaged? "The clash of the weapons
+rang like the din of woodcutters in the mountain-glades." Did a wounded
+hero fall? The combatants gathered about him "like flies buzzing round
+the brimming milk-pails in the spring." All commonest things, redeemed
+from isolation and irrelevance, revealed the significance with which
+they were charged. The result was the actual made real, a reflexion
+which was a disclosure, a reproduction which was a recreation. And if
+experience, as we know it, is the last word of life, if there is nothing
+beyond and nothing behind, if there is no meaning, no explanation, no
+purpose or end, then the poetry of Homer is the highest reach of human
+achievement.
+
+For, observe, Homer is not a critic. His vision transmutes life, but
+does not transcend it. Experience is ultimate; all the poet does is to
+experience fully. Common men live, but do not realise life; he realises
+it. 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 brute
+actuality. Not only is there no explanation, there is not even a
+question to be asked. So it is, so it has been, so it will be. Homer's
+outlook is that of the modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and they
+novels, is an accident of time and space. Turgeneff or Balzac writing
+1000 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 a
+rebel. From the first dawn of consciousness he challenged and defied the
+works and ways of men and the apparent order of the universe. Never for
+a moment anywhere was he at home in the world. There was nothing
+attainable he cared to pursue, nothing actual he cared to represent. He
+could no more see what is called fact than he could act upon it. His
+eyes were dazzled by a different vision. Life and the world not only are
+intolerable to him, they are unreal. Beyond and behind lies Reality, and
+it is good. Now it is a Perfectibility lying in the future; now a
+Perfection existing eternally. In any case, whatever it be, however and
+wherever to be found, it is the sole object of his quest and of his
+song. Whatever of good or lovely or passionate gleams here and there, on
+the surface or in the depths of the actual, is a ray of that Sun, an
+image of that Beauty. His imagination is kindled by Appearance only to
+soar away from it. The landscape he depicts is all light, all fountains
+and caverns. The Beings with which it is peopled are discarnate Joys and
+Hopes; Justice and Liberty, Peace and Love and Truth. Among these only
+is he at home; in the world of men he is an alien captive; and Human
+Life 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 the
+beginning, 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 sings
+it 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 is
+superficial, and the difference profound. Was it Homer or Shelley that
+grasped Reality? This is not a question of literary excellence; it is a
+question of the sense of life. And--oddly enough--it is a question to
+which the intellect has no answer. The life in each of us takes hold of
+it and answers it empirically. The normal man is Homeric, though he is
+not aware of the fact. Especially is the American Homeric; naif,
+spontaneous, at home with fact, implicitly denying the Beyond. Is he
+right? 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 is
+another 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, the
+woman carrying an hour-glass, the man leaning on a stick; and
+underneath, 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 new
+world to the old, and the old to the new. Not seldom I feel among
+Americans as the Egyptian is said to have felt among the Greeks, that I
+am moving in a world of precocious and inexperienced children, bearing
+on my own shoulders the weight of the centuries. Yet it is not exactly
+that Americans strike one as young in spirit; rather they strike one as
+undeveloped. It is as though they had never faced life and asked
+themselves what it is; as though they were so occupied in running that
+it has never occurred to them to inquire where they started and whither
+they are going. They seem to be always doing and never experiencing. A
+dimension of life, one would say, is lacking, and they live in a plane
+instead of in a solid. That missing dimension I shall call religion. Not
+that Americans do not, for aught I know, "believe" as much as or more
+than Europeans; but they appear neither to believe nor to disbelieve
+religiously. That, I admit, is true almost everywhere of the mass of the
+people. But even in Europe--and far more in India--there has always
+been, and still is, a minority who open windows to the stars; and
+through these windows, in passing, the plain man sometimes looks. The
+impression America makes on me is that the windows are blocked up. It
+has become incredible that this continent was colonised by the Pilgrim
+Fathers. That intense, narrow, unlovely but genuine spiritual life has
+been transformed into industrial energy; and this energy, in its new
+form, the churches, oddly enough, are endeavouring to recapture and use
+to drive their machines. Religion is becoming a department of practical
+business. The Churches--orthodox and unorthodox, old and new, Christian,
+Christian-Scientific, theosophic, higher-thinking--vie with one another
+in advertising goods which are all material benefits: "Follow me, and
+you will get rich," "Follow me, and you will get well," "Follow me, and
+you will be cheerful, prosperous, successful." Religion in America is
+nothing 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! Better
+than patent medicines!" The only part of the Gospels one would suppose
+that interests the modern American is the miracles; for the miracles
+really did _do_ something. As for the Sermon on the Mount--well, no
+Westerner ever took that seriously.
+
+This conversion of religion into business is interesting enough. But
+even more striking is what looks like a conversion of business into
+religion. Business is so serious that it sometimes assumes the shrill
+tone of a revivalist propaganda. There has recently been brought to my
+attention a circular addressed to the agents of an insurance society,
+urging them to rally round the firm, with a special effort, in what I
+can only call a "mission-month." I quote--with apologies to the unknown
+author--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 the
+headquarters of the Salvation Army? And is not the following exactly
+parallel to a denunciation, from the mission-pulpit, of the unprofitable
+servant?
+
+    "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 could
+be produced in evidence of the character of American civilisation. There
+is all the push, initiative, and enterprise on which they justly pride
+themselves; there is also the reduction of all values to terms of
+business, the concentration of what, at other times, have been moral and
+religious forces upon the one aim of material progress. In such an
+atmosphere it is easy to see how those who care for spiritual values are
+led 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 that
+guise 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 must
+pretend they can offer power; they must go into business, because
+business is going into religion!
+
+It is a curious spectacle! How long will it last? How real is it, even
+now? That withered couple, I half believe, hanging on the wall, descend
+at night and wander through the land, whispering to all the sleepers
+their disquieting warning; and all day long there hovers at the back of
+the minds of these active men a sense of discomfort which, if it became
+articulate, 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 hilly
+and wooded, like a larger and wilder Surrey; and through it flows what,
+to an Englishman, seems a large river, the Connecticut. Charming villas
+are dotted about, well designed and secluded in pretty gardens. I
+mention this because, in my experience of America, it is unique. Almost
+everywhere the houses stare blankly at one another and at the public
+roads, ugly, unsheltered, and unashamed, as much as to say, "Every one
+is 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 American
+people." It was not, however, to describe the country that I began this
+letter, but to elaborate a generalisation developed by my host and
+myself 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. We
+have adopted it from a famous speech of Mr. Roosevelt, and redeemed
+it--perverted it, if you will--to other uses. A few examples will make
+the notion clear. Shakespeare's Henry V. is a typical Red-blood; so was
+Bismarck; so was Palmerston; so is almost any business man. On the other
+hand, typical Mollycoddles were Socrates, Voltaire, and Shelley. The
+terms, you will observe, are comprehensive, and the types very broad.
+Generally speaking, men of action are Red-bloods. Not but what the
+Mollycoddle may act, and act efficiently. But, if so, he acts from
+principle, not from the instinct of action. The Red-blood, on the other
+hand, acts as the stone falls, and does indiscriminately anything that
+comes 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 to
+work like a machine. The ideals and standards of his family, his class,
+his city, his country and his age, he swallows as naturally as he
+swallows food and drink. He is therefore always "in the swim"; and he is
+bound to "arrive," because he has set before himself the attainable. You
+will find him everywhere in all the prominent positions. In a military
+age he is a soldier, in a commercial age a business man. He hates his
+enemies, and he may love his friends; but he does not require friends to
+love. A wife and children he does require, for the instinct to propagate
+the 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 view
+but 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. He
+neither looks back nor looks ahead. He lives in present action. And when
+he can no longer act, he loses his reason for existence. The Red-blood
+is happiest if he dies in the prime of life; otherwise, he may easily
+end with suicide. For he has no inner life; and when the outer life
+fails, he can only fail with it. The instinct that animated him being
+dead, 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 indeed
+act, as I said, but he acts, so to speak, by accident; just as the
+Red-blood may reflect, but reflects by accident. The Mollycoddle in
+action is the Crank: it is he who accomplishes reforms; who abolished
+slavery, for example, and revolutionised prisons and lunatic asylums.
+Still, primarily, the Mollycoddle is a critic, not a man of action. He
+challenges all standards and all facts. If an institution is
+established, that is a reason why he will not accept it; if an idea is
+current, that is a reason why he should repudiate it. He questions
+everything, including life and the universe. And for that reason Nature
+hates him. On the Red-blood she heaps her favours; she gives him a good
+digestion, a clear complexion, and sound nerves. But to the Mollycoddle
+she apportions dyspepsia and black bile. In the universe and in society
+the Mollycoddle is "out of it" as inevitably as the Red-blood is "in
+it." At school, he is a "smug" or a "swat," while the Red-blood is
+captain of the Eleven. At college, he is an "intellectual," while the
+Red-blood is in the "best set." In the world, he courts failure while
+the Red-blood achieves success. The Red-blood sees nothing; but the
+Mollycoddle sees through everything. The Red-blood joins societies; the
+Mollycoddle is a non-joiner. Individualist of individualists, he can
+only stand alone, while the Red-blood requires the support of a crowd.
+The Mollycoddle engenders ideas, and the Red-blood exploits them. The
+Mollycoddle discovers, and the Red-blood invents. The whole structure of
+civilisation rests on foundations laid by Mollycoddles; but all the
+building is done by Red-bloods. The Red-blood despises the Mollycoddle;
+but, in the long run, he does what the Mollycoddle tells him. The
+Mollycoddle 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; but
+after his death, he is his master, though the Red-blood know it not.
+
+Nations, like men, may be classified roughly as Red-blood and
+Mollycoddle. To the latter class belong clearly the ancient Greeks, the
+Italians, the French, and probably the Russians; to the former the
+Romans, the Germans, and the English. But the Red-blood nation _par
+excellence_ is the American; so that, in comparison with them, Europe as
+a whole might almost be called Mollycoddle. This characteristic of
+Americans is reflected in the predominant physical type,--the great jaw
+and chin, the huge teeth, and predatory mouth; in their speech, where
+beauty and distinction are sacrificed to force; in their need to live
+and feel and act in masses. To be born a Mollycoddle in America is to be
+born to a hard fate. You must either emigrate or succumb. This, at
+least, hitherto has been the alternative practised. Whether a
+Mollycoddle will ever be produced strong enough to breathe the American
+atmosphere and live, is a crucial question for the future. It is the
+question whether America will ever be civilised. For civilisation, you
+will have perceived, depends on a just balance of Red-bloods and
+Mollycoddles. Without the Red-blood there would be no life at all, no
+stuff, so to speak, for the Mollycoddle to work upon; without the
+Mollycoddle, the stuff would remain shapeless and chaotic. The Red-blood
+is the matter, the Mollycoddle the form; the Red-blood the dough, the
+Mollycoddle the yeast. On these two poles turns the orb of human
+society. And if, at this point, you choose to say that poles are points
+and have no dimensions, that strictly neither the Mollycoddle nor the
+Red-blood exist, and that real men contain elements of both mixed in
+different proportions, I have no quarrel with you except such as one has
+with the man who states the obvious. I am satisfied to have
+distinguished the ideal extremes between which the Actual vibrates. The
+detailed application of the conception I must leave to more patient
+researchers.
+
+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 a
+creature of instinct, she resembles the Red-blood, and it is to him that
+she is first attracted. The hero of her youth is the athlete, the
+soldier, the successful man of business; and this predilection of hers
+accounts for much of human history, and in particular for the
+maintenance of the military spirit. On the other hand, as a creature
+capable of and craving sympathy, she has affinities with the
+Mollycoddle. This dual nature is the tragedy of her life. The Red-blood
+awakens her passion, but cannot satisfy it. He wins her by his virility,
+but cannot retain her by his perception. Hence the fact, noted by a
+cynic, that it is the Mollycoddle who cuckolds the Red-blood. For the
+woman, married to the Red-blood, discovers too late that she is to him
+only a trophy, a scalp. He hangs her up in the hall, and goes about his
+business. Then comes the Mollycoddle, divining all, possessing and
+offering all. And if the Red-blood is an American, and the Mollycoddle
+an European, then the situation is tense indeed. For the American
+Red-blood despises woman in his heart as profoundly as he respects her
+in outer observance. He despises her because of the Mollycoddle he
+divines in her. Therefore he never understands her; and that is why
+European Mollycoddles carry off American women before the very eyes of
+the exasperated Red-blood. "Am I not clean?" he cries. "Am I not
+healthy? Am I not athletic and efficient?" He is, but it does not help
+him, except with young girls. He may win the body; but he cannot win the
+soul. Can it be true then that most women would like two husbands, one
+Red-blood, the other Mollycoddle, one to be the father of their
+children, the other to be the companion of their souls? Women alone can
+answer; and, for the first time in history, they are beginning to be
+articulate.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ADVERTISEMENT
+
+
+The last two days and nights I spent in a railway train. We passed
+through some beautiful country; that, I believe, is the fact; but my
+feeling is that I have emerged from a nightmare. In my mind is a jumbled
+vision of huge wooden cows cut out in profile and offering from dry
+udders a fibrous milk; of tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly
+realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed
+them--U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an
+interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of
+indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous
+frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco
+than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black
+moustache, recurring, like a decimal, _ad infinitum_ on the top of a
+board, to inform me that his beauty is the product of his own toilet
+powder; of cod-fish without bones--"the kind you have always bought"; of
+bacon 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 this
+obscene host; never to be escaped from, never to be forgotten, fixing,
+with inexorable determination, a fancy that might be tempted to roam to
+that one fundamental fact of life, the operation of the bowels.
+
+Nor, of course, are these incubi, these ghostly emanations of the One
+God Trade, confined to the American continent. They haunt with equal
+pertinacity the lovelier landscapes of England; they line the route to
+Venice; they squat on the Alps and float on the Rhine; they are
+beginning to occupy the very air, and with the advent of the air-ship,
+will obliterate the moon and the stars, and scatter over every lonely
+moor and solitary mountain peak memorials of the stomach, of the liver
+and the lungs. Never, in effect, says modern business to the soul of
+man, 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 you
+are liable to arthritis, blood-poisoning, catarrh, colitis, calvity,
+constipation, consumption, diarrhoea, diabetes, dysmenorrhoea, epilepsy,
+eczema, fatty degeneration, gout, goitre, gastritis, headache,
+haemorrhage, hysteria, hypertrophy, idiocy, indigestion, jaundice,
+lockjaw, melancholia, neuralgia, ophthalmia, phthisis, quinsey,
+rheumatism, rickets, sciatica, syphilis, tonsilitis, tic doloureux, and
+so on to the end of the alphabet and back again to the beginning. Never
+and nowhere shall you forget that you are a trading animal, buying in
+the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Never shall you forget
+that nothing matters--nothing in the whole universe--except the
+maintenance and extension of industry; that beauty, peace, harmony are
+not commercial values, and cannot be allowed for a moment to stand in
+the way of the advance of trade; that nothing, in short, matters except
+wealth, and that there is no wealth except money in the pocket.
+This--did it ever occur to you--is the real public education every
+country is giving, on every hoarding and sky-sign, to its citizens of
+every age, at every moment of their lives. And that being so, is it not
+a little ironical that children should be taught for half an hour in
+school to read a poem of Wordsworth or a play of Shakespeare, when for
+the rest of the twenty-four hours there is being photographed on their
+minds the ubiquitous literature of Owbridge and of Carter?
+
+But of course advertisement cannot be interfered with! It is the
+life-blood of the nation. All traders, all politicians, all journalists
+say so. They sometimes add that it is really, to an unprejudiced spirit,
+beautiful and elevating. Thus only this morning I came across an article
+in a leading New York newspaper, which remarks that: "The individual
+advertisement is commonly in good taste, both in legend and in
+illustration. Many are positively beautiful; and, as a wit has truly
+said, the cereal advertisements in the magazines are far more
+interesting than the serial stories." This latter statement I can easily
+believe; but when I read the former there flitted across my mind a
+picture of a lady lightly clad reclining asleep against an open window,
+a full moon rising in the distance over a lake, with the legend
+attached, "Cascarella--it works while you sleep."
+
+The article from which I have quoted is interesting not only as
+illustrating the diversity of taste, but as indicating the high degree
+of development which has now been attained by what is at once the art
+and the science of advertisement. "The study of advertisement," it
+begins, "seems to have a perennial charm for the American public. Hardly
+a month passes but some magazine finds a new and inviting phase of this
+modern art to lay before its readers. The solid literature of
+advertisement is also growing rapidly.... The technique of the subject
+is almost as extensive as that of scientific agriculture. Whole volumes
+have been compiled on the art of writing advertisements. Commercial
+schools and colleges devote courses of study to the subject. Indeed the
+corner-stone of the curriculum of a well-known business college is an
+elective upon 'Window-dressing.'" That you may be under no
+misapprehension, I must add that this article appears in what is
+admittedly the most serious and respectable of the New York newspapers;
+and that it is not conceived in the spirit of irony or hyperbole. To the
+American, advertisement is a serious, important, and elevating
+department of business, and those who make it their speciality endeavour
+to base their operations on a profound study of human nature. One of
+these 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 of
+the word "imagination," like that of "art," in this connection, shows
+where the inquirer ought to look for the manifestation, on this
+continent, of the aesthetic spirit. "The imaginative man," says the
+writer, "sends his thought through all the instincts, passions, and
+prejudices of men, he knows their desires and their regrets, he knows
+every human weakness and its sure decoy." It is this latter clause that
+is relevant to his theme. Poets in earlier ages wrote epics and dramas,
+they celebrated the strength and nobility of men; but the poet of the
+modern world "cleverly builds on the frailties of mankind." Of these the
+chief is "the inability to throw away an element of value, even though
+it cannot be utilised." On this great principle is constructed the whole
+art and science of advertisement. And my author proceeds to give a
+series of illustrations, "each of which is an actual fact, either in my
+experience, or of which I have been cognisant." Space and copyright
+forbid me to quote. I must refer the reader to the original source.
+Nowhere else will be found so lucid an expression of the whole theory
+and practice of modern trade. That theory and practice is being taught
+in schools of commerce throughout the Union; and there are many, I
+suppose, who would like to see it taught in English universities. But,
+really, does anyone--does any man of business--think it a better
+education than Greek?
+
+
+    Footnotes:
+
+    [Footnote 4: _Imagination in Business_ (Harper & Brothers).]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+CULTURE
+
+
+Scene, a club in a Canadian city; persons, a professor, a doctor, a
+business man, and a traveller (myself). Wine, cigars, anecdotes; and
+suddenly, 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, I
+found myself being assailed on the subject of Oxford and Cambridge. Not,
+however, in the way you may anticipate. Those ancient seats of learning
+were not denounced as fossilised, effete, and corrupt. On the contrary,
+I was pressed, urged, implored almost with tears in the eye--to reform
+them? No! to let them alone!
+
+"For heaven's sake, keep them as they are! You don't know what you've
+got, and what you might lose! We know! We've had to do without it! And
+we know that without it everything else is of no avail. We bluster and
+brag about education on this side of the Atlantic. But in our heart of
+hearts 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, and
+always 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 Paedagogics! Meaning intellect before intelligence,
+thought before dexterity, discovery before invention! Meaning the only
+thing that is really practical, ideas; and the only thing that is really
+human, the Humanities!"
+
+Rather apologetically, I began to explain. At Oxford, I said, no doubt
+the Humanities still hold the first place. But at Cambridge they have
+long been relegated to the second or the third. There we have schools of
+Natural Science, of Economics, of Engineering, of Agriculture. We have
+even a Training College in Paedagogics. Their faces fell, and they
+renewed their passionate appeal.
+
+"Stop it," they cried. "For heaven's sake, stop it! In all those things
+we've got you skinned alive over here! If you want Agriculture go to
+Wisconsin! If you want Medicine, go to the Rockefeller Institute! If you
+want Engineering, go to Pittsburg! But preserve still for the
+English-speaking world what you alone can give! Preserve liberal
+culture! Preserve the Classics! Preserve Mathematics! Preserve the
+seed-ground of all practical inventions and appliances! Preserve the
+integrity of the human mind!"
+
+Interesting, is it not? These gentlemen, no doubt, were not typical
+Canadians. But they were not the least intelligent men I have met on
+this continent. And when they had finally landed me in my sleeping-berth
+in the train, and I was left to my own reflections in that most
+uncomfortable of all situations, I began to consider how odd it was that
+in matters educational we are always endeavouring to reform the only
+part of our system that excites the admiration of foreigners.
+
+I do not intend, however, to plunge into that controversy. The point
+that interests me is the view of my Canadian friends that in America
+there is no "culture." And, in the sense they gave to that term, I think
+they are right. There _is_ no culture in America. There is instruction;
+there is research; there is technical and professional training; there
+is specialisation in science and industry; there is every possible
+application of life, to purposes and ends; but there is no life for its
+own sake. Let me illustrate. It is, I have read, a maxim of American
+business that "a man is damned who knows two things." "He is almost a
+dilettante," it was said of a student, "he reads Dante and Shakespeare"!
+"The perfect professor," said a College President, "should be willing to
+work hard eleven months in the year." These are straws, if you like, but
+they show the way the wind blows. Again, you will find, if you travel
+long in America, that you are suffering from a kind of atrophy. You will
+not, at first, realise what it means. But suddenly it will flash upon
+you that you are suffering from lack of conversation. You do not
+converse; you cannot; you can only talk. It is the rarest thing to meet
+a man who, when a subject is started, is willing or able to follow it
+out into its ramifications, to play with it, to embroider it with pathos
+or with wit, to penetrate to its roots, to trace its connexions and
+affinities. Question and answer, anecdote and jest are the staple of
+American conversation; and, above all, information. They have a hunger
+for positive facts. And you may hear them hour after hour rehearsing to
+one another their travels, their business transactions, their
+experiences in trains, in hotels, on steamers, till you begin to feel
+you have no alternatives before you but murder or suicide. An American,
+broadly speaking, never detaches himself from experience. His mind is
+embedded 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 no
+imagination, no real envisaging of its object. It does not illuminate a
+subject, it extinguishes it, clamping upon every topic the same
+grotesque 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, of
+course, that neither are the English cultured. But they have culture
+among them. They do not, of course, value it; the Americans, for aught I
+know, value it more; but they produce it, and the Americans do not. I
+have visited many of their colleges and universities, and everywhere,
+except perhaps at Harvard--unless my impressions are very much at
+fault--I have found the same atmosphere. It is the atmosphere known as
+the "Yale spirit," and it is very like that of an English Public School.
+It is virile, athletic, gregarious, all-penetrating, all-embracing. It
+turns out the whole university to sing rhythmic songs and shout rhythmic
+cries at football matches. It praises action and sniffs at speculation.
+It exalts morals and depresses intellect. It suspects the solitary
+person, the dreamer, the loafer, the poet, the prig. This atmosphere, of
+course, exists in English universities. It is imported there from the
+Public Schools. But it is not all-pervading. Individuals and cliques
+escape. And it is those who escape that acquire culture. In America, no
+one 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 of
+philistinism. They cannot draw together, as in England, and leaven the
+lump. The lump is bigger, and they are fewer. All the more honour to
+them; and all the more loss to America.
+
+Whether, from all this, any conclusion is to be drawn about the proper
+policy to be pursued at our universities, is a question I will not here
+discuss. Culture, I think, is one of those precious things that are
+achieved by accident, and by accident may be destroyed. The things we do
+to maintain it might kill it; the things we do to kill it might preserve
+it. My Canadian friends may be quite wrong in their diagnosis of the
+causes that engender or destroy it. But they are right in their sense of
+its importance; and it will be an interesting result of imperial unity
+if we find, to our astonishment, that the Dominions beyond the seas
+rally round exactly those things in England which we expect them to
+declare effete. The Rhodes scholars go to Oxford, not to Birmingham or
+Liverpool. And it is Cambridge that peoples the universities of the
+Empire with professors.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+ANTAEUS
+
+
+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 of
+imagination which one does not expect to find in this country. "One does
+not expect"--why not? Why, in this respect, is America, as undoubtedly
+she is, so sterile? Artists must be born here as much as elsewhere.
+American civilisation, it is true, repels men of reflection and
+sensitiveness, just as it attracts men of action; so that, as far as
+immigration is concerned, there is probably a selection working against
+the artistic type. But, on the other hand, men of action often produce
+sons with a genius for the arts; and it is to be supposed that they do
+so as much in America as elsewhere. It must be the environment that is
+unfavourable. Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named
+"Mollycoddle"; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to
+breathe. 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 and
+respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic
+calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit; including
+under business Politics and Law, which in this country are only
+departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that
+is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in
+England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no
+encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles,
+his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only
+virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become
+chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professorial career; but that, it is
+agreed, is adopted only by men of "no ambition." Americans believe in
+education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be
+made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of
+character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which
+may easily discourage him from running at all. At the best, he emigrates
+to Europe, and his achievement is credited to that continent. Or,
+remaining in America, he succumbs to the environment, puts aside his
+creative ambition, and enters business. It is not for nothing that
+Americans are the most active people in the world. They pay the penalty
+in an atrophy of the faculties of reflection and representation.
+
+Things are different in Europe, and even in England. There, not only
+are artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful--they
+are, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit of
+literature and art is one which a young man need not feel it
+discreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at
+Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines to
+enter business. The first-class man does not normally aspire to start
+life as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers;
+and both of them have traditional affinities with literature. So has the
+Law, still in England a profession and not a trade. One may even be a
+don or a schoolmaster without serious discredit. Under these conditions
+a young man can escape from the stifling pressure of the business point
+of view. He can find societies like-minded with himself, equally
+indifferent to the ideal of success in business, equally inspired by
+intellectual or aesthetic ambitions. He can choose to be poor without
+feeling that he will therefore become despicable. The attitude of the
+business classes in England, no doubt, is much the same as that of the
+business classes in America. But in England there are other classes and
+other traditions, havens of refuge from the prevalent commercialism. In
+America the trade-wind blows broad, steady, universal over the length
+and breadth of the continent.
+
+This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But
+it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long
+tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left
+its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the
+physical features of the country. The books and the pictures can be
+transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art the
+technical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what I
+will call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in
+America. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the
+present something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not only
+is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics are
+mellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Classes are more
+segregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghost
+of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with the
+beat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear to
+catch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it is
+true, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A
+sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed.
+Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but it
+has not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has
+touched 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 of
+outlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe
+is industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, the
+difference is vital.
+
+But the difference is disappearing. Not that America is becoming like
+Europe, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of the
+imitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes
+producing similar results. The disease--or shall we say, to use a
+neutral term--the diathesis of commercialism found in America an open
+field and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course was
+hampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it is
+spreading 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 the
+infancy, not the maturity of a civilisation. The revolution in morals,
+in manners, and in political and social institutions which must
+accompany 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, so
+to speak, at both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; and
+for generations, I conceive, political and social issues will draw away
+much of the creative talent that might have been available for Art. In
+the end, one may suppose, something like a stable order will arise; an
+order, that is, in which people will feel that their institutions
+correspond sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able to
+devote themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation in
+Art.
+
+But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? It
+will be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, a
+civilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is no
+indigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society,
+certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that has
+been or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war,
+the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passed
+irrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes urged, there
+will be such a dearth of those tense moments which alone engender the
+artistic mood, that Art of any kind will have become impossible. If that
+were true, it would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art is
+important, but there are things more important; and among those things
+are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a
+peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is
+uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable
+materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry
+except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own
+belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which
+most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual
+conflict; that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion to
+love, would begin at last to take their proper place in human life; and
+would engender the forms of Art appropriate to their expression.
+
+To return to America, what I am driving at is this. America may have an
+Art, and a great Art. But it will be after she has had her social
+revolution. Her Art has first to touch ground; and before it can do
+that, the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenth
+century that the seed of Mediaeval Art could be sown; it was not till the
+thirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, our civilisation is not ripe
+for its own Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It
+is 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 modern
+era. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet of
+it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his
+vision real.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUDING ESSAY
+
+
+The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey the
+impressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they may
+have depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted
+them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some
+concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some
+interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor
+as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings
+into 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 and
+sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but rather
+as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I am
+trying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend as
+impartially as is compatible with having an attitude of one's own at
+all.
+
+Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a
+commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an
+East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling
+was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking
+of England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approaches
+the question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decide
+whether 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, I
+think, 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 of
+America. So understood, the West forms, in all the most important
+respects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into different
+nations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and often
+conflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important,
+that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form in
+the burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in the
+perspective of history, they are survivals, atrophying and disappearing.
+Behind and despite of them there is a common Western mind and a common
+Western organisation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan;
+trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, and the results
+achieved by it are common. There is one system of industry, that known
+as Capitalism; and the problems arising from it and the solutions
+propounded appear alike in every nation. There is one political
+tendency, or fact, that of popular government. There are cognate aims
+and similar achievements in literature and art. There is, in brief, a
+Western movement, a Western problem, a Western mentality; and the
+particular happenings of particular nations are all parts of this one
+happening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common religion. I do
+not refer to Christianity, for the religion I mean is held by hundreds
+and thousands who are not Christians, and indeed does not very readily
+find in Christianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has not
+been formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard in all the
+serious work and all the serious thought of the West. It is the religion
+of Good and Evil, of Time and the process in Time. If it tried to draw
+up 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 not
+pretend that he always knows or would admit it to be so. But if his
+actions, his words, and his thoughts be sympathetically interpreted,
+where all are at their best, I think they will be found to imply
+something of this kind. And this attitude I call religious, not merely
+ethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards Good is of
+the essence of the World, not only of men, or of Man. To believe this is
+an act of faith, not of reason; though it is not contrary to reason, as
+no faith should be or long can be. Many men do _not_ believe it, for
+many are not religious; others, while believing it, may believe also
+many other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of religion in the
+modern West, the justification of our life, the faith of our works. I
+call it the Religion of Time, and distinguish it thus from the Religion
+of Eternity.
+
+In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common aim and a common
+motive, there is really a West. Is there also an East? That is not so
+clear. In some important respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisations
+are alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their industry is
+manual not mechanical. Their social unit is the extended family. To
+travel in the East is to realise that life on the soil and in the
+village is there still the normal life, as it has been almost everywhere
+and 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 not
+a common organisation nor a common spirit. Economically, the great
+Eastern countries are still independent of one another. Each lives for
+the most part by and on itself. And their intellectual and spiritual
+intercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negligible as
+their economic commerce. The influence that is beginning to be strong
+upon them all is that of Western culture; and if they become alike in
+their 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 the
+outward forms of religion. Because Buddhism originated in India and
+spread to China and Japan, because Japan took Confucian ideals from
+China, it is natural to conclude that there is a common religious spirit
+throughout the East, or the Far East. But one might as reasonably infer
+that the spirit of the christianised Teutons was the same as that of the
+Jews or of the Christians in the East. Nations borrow religions, but
+they shape them according to their own genius. And if I am not very much
+mistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, radically
+distinct from and even opposed to that of China or Japan. These latter
+countries, indeed, I believe, are far closer to the West than they are
+to India. Let me explain.
+
+India is the true origin and home of what I have called the religion of
+Eternity. That idea seems to have gone out from her to the rest of the
+world. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and passion.
+Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In India
+they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. No
+society, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activity
+in Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the
+direct and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, would
+bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the very
+physical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal was
+first conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the passion to
+realise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the date
+of the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method of
+realisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of the
+temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it
+by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by
+meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and
+all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could
+reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of
+the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Western
+influences have been excluded. Let me illustrate from the words of Sri
+Ramakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late in
+the 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 one
+of intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, or
+super-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains many
+accounts 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, is
+to come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes him
+altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of
+action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints
+and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative
+problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs
+to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends
+upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche,
+assume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; they merely
+attempt 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 be
+appearances conduct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's view
+of this matter? The whole life that we Western men call real is to him a
+mere game played by and for the sake of God, or, to use his phrase, of
+the Divine Mother. For her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, instead
+of free in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates and
+maintains 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 into
+relation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In a
+railway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowly
+burned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his
+misery. What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo innocent
+natives 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 great
+proportion of those who produce the wealth receive less than the wages
+which 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 be
+idle. No Western man could for a moment entertain the view of Sri
+Ramakrishna. To him such a God would be a mere devil. The Indian
+position, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an idealism conditioned
+by defective experience of the life in Time. The saint has chosen
+another experience. But clearly he has not transcended ours, he has
+simply left it out.
+
+Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the most sincere
+representatives of religion in India that Sri Ramakrishna does not
+typify the Indian attitude. Perhaps not, if we take contemporary India.
+But then contemporary India has been profoundly influenced by Western
+thought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen,
+Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly have thought and felt as they did, and
+do, were it not for this influence. The following poem of Rabindranath
+Tagore 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 of
+India, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous to
+the advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this--the
+symbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and the
+prevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wandering
+ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else,
+unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It is
+the religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is the
+religion of the Eternal.
+
+But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produce
+her teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in a
+constant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order
+to live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality
+in the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?
+
+I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggest
+that it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict between
+men's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live not
+because they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Their
+hold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I have
+been told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions against
+plague, that what they have to contend with is not so much the
+resistance as the indifference of the population. "Why worry us?" they
+say, in effect; "life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of
+it." Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escape
+is 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 here
+seek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, all
+no doubt have played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably an
+effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, I
+think, who knows India, would dispute that this attitude is a fact; and
+it is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but from
+the Far East.
+
+For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent still
+have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in
+particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and
+practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had
+Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that
+their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by
+Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude to
+life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out
+from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people
+wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of
+the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social
+duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And
+when 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 art
+purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in
+India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning
+surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this
+same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally
+gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and
+tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like
+Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving
+across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is
+essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable,
+more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms
+of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation
+for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on
+a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built
+on the same foundations.
+
+And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of the
+Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest passion is patriotism. A
+Japanese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the
+splendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he has
+so little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readily
+throws it away. The Japanese are unlike the Chinese and unlike the
+Europeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in
+the world of time and change; and because of this attitude, they and the
+rest 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 be
+preferred, two aspects of the religious impulse. I have called them the
+religion of the Eternal and the religion of Time; and India I suggest
+stands pre-eminently for the one, the West for the other, while the
+other countries of the East rank rather with the West than with India.
+It is not necessary to my purpose to exaggerate this antithesis. I will
+say, 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 plainly
+true. Now, as between these two attitudes, I find myself quite clearly
+and definitely on the side of the West. I have said in the preceding
+pages hard things about Western civilisation. I hate many of its
+manifestations, I am out of sympathy with many of its purposes. I can
+see no point, for instance, in the discovery of the north or the south
+pole, 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 of
+adventure, this it is that is the great contribution of the West. It is
+not the aeroplane that is valuable; probably it will never be anything
+but pernicious, for its main use is likely to be for war. But the fact
+that men so lightly risk their lives to perfect it, _that_ is valuable.
+The West is adventurous; and, what is more, it is adventurous on a
+quest. For behind and beyond all its fatuities, confusions, crimes,
+lies, as the justification of it all, that deep determination to secure
+a society more just and more humane which inspires all men and all
+movements that are worth considering at all, and, to those who can
+understand, gives greatness and significance even to some of our most
+reckless enterprises. We are living very "dangerously"; all the forces
+are loose, those of destruction as well as those of creation; but we are
+living towards something; we are living with the religion of Time.
+
+So far, I daresay, most Western men will agree with me in the main. But
+they may say, some of them, as the Indian will certainly say, "Is that
+all? Have you no place for the Eternal and the Infinite?" To this I must
+reply that I think it clear and indisputable that the religion of the
+Eternal, as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, is altogether incompatible
+with the religion of Time. And the position of Sri Ramakrishna, I have
+urged, 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 "Sadhana," has put forward a
+mysticism which does, at least, endeavour to allow for and include what
+I have called the religion of Time. To him, and to other mystics of real
+experience, I must leave the attempt to reconcile Eternity and Time. For
+my own part, I can only approach the question from the point of view of
+Time, and endeavour to discover and realise the most that can be truly
+said by one who starts with the belief that that is real. The
+profoundest prophets of the religion of Time are, in my judgment, Goethe
+and George Meredith; and from them, and from others, and from my own
+small experience, I seem to have learned this: the importance of that
+process in Time in whose reality we believe does not lie merely in the
+bettering of the material and social environment, though we hold the
+importance of that to be great; it lies in the development of souls. And
+that development consists in a constant expansion of interest away from
+and beyond one's own immediate interests out into the activities of the
+world at large. Such expansion may be pursued in practical life, in art,
+in science, in contemplation, so long as the contemplation is of the
+real processes of the real world in time. To that expansion I see no
+limit except death. And I do not know what comes after death. But I am
+clear that whatever comes after, the command of Life is the same--to
+expand out of oneself into the life of the world. This command--I should
+rather say this impulse--seems to me absolute, the one certain thing on
+which everything else must build. I think it enough for religion, in the
+case at least of those who have got beyond the infant need for
+certitudes and dogmas. These perhaps are few; yet they may be really
+more numerous than appears. And on the increase in their numbers, and
+the intensity of their conviction and their life, the fate of the world
+seems 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.]
+
+
+
+
+  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+  at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS ON THE EAST
+
+
+THE CIVILISATION OF THE EAST. By Dr. FRITZ HOMMEL. Illustrations and
+Map. Pott 8vo, with Frontispiece, 1s. net.
+
+_JAPAN_--THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN. By OKAKURA-YOSHISAURO.
+Illustrated. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. net.
+
+_INDIA_--THE CIVILISATION OF INDIA. By ROMESH C. DUTT, C.I.E.
+Illustrated. Pott 8vo, with Frontispiece, 1s. net. [_Second Edition_.
+
+THE GREAT EPICS OF ANCIENT INDIA--RAMAYANA: THE EPIC OF RAMA, PRINCE OF
+INDIA; AND MAHA-BHARATA: THE EPIC OF ANCIENT INDIA. Condensed into
+English Verse and Edited by ROMESH DUTT, C.I.E. With an Introduction by
+the Right Hon. F. MAX MUeLLER. With 24 Photogravure Illustrations by E.
+STUART HARDY. Square demy 8vo, L2, 2s. net.
+
+THE MESSAGE OF ZOROASTER. By A. SORABJEE N. WADIA. Crown 8vo, 5s. net.
+
+REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEMS OF INDIA. By A. S. WADIA. Crown 8vo, 4s.
+6d. net.
+
+PICTURESQUE BURMAH, PAST AND PRESENT. By Mrs. ERNEST HART. With 90
+Illustrations in Photogravure, &c., also 2 Maps. Super-royal 8vo, L1,
+1s. net.
+
+RELIGIONS OF INDIA: BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM. By Rev. ALLAN MENZIES,
+D.D. Square crown 16mo, 9d. net.
+
+BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY. By ANNIE H. SMALL. 1s. net.
+
+ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY. By ANNIE H. SMALL. 1s. net.
+
+THE GODS OF INDIA. By E. OSBORN MARTIN. With 60 Illustrations from
+Photographs specially taken. Small crown 8vo, 4s. 6d. net.
+
+
+J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD., LONDON
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
+
+
+Pg. 168, added closing single quote mark for clarity. In this case it
+serves to close a quote within a quote. (speak.'" You can now)
+
+Footnote 3, in the original text, the English translation of Dante's
+poem did not preserve the line breaks in each stanza. The original
+appearance has been retained.
+
+Footnote 3, the reference is given as Dante's "Purgatorio". In actual
+fact the lines of verse come from Dante's "Paradiso". The author's
+original text has been retained.
+
+Pg. 184 and 191, line of verse beginning "My son, the good you....". In
+the original text, the fifth word was an abbreviation comprising a "y"
+and a superscript "o". This is presumed to represent "you" and has been
+expanded as such for readability.
+
+Pg. 192, "poeple" changed to "people". (property of the American
+poeple.)
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Appearances, by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APPEARANCES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 27347.txt or 27347.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/3/4/27347/
+
+Produced by Ronald Lee
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.