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.