Appearances Part 2

"'Once upon a time a small quant.i.ty of opium was given to a certain peac.o.c.k at four o'clock in the afternoon. Well, punctually at four the next afternoon who should come in but the selfsame peac.o.c.k, longing for a repet.i.tion 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 G.o.d-man says is indeed perfectly true. What business have I to go about preaching to others? Have I myself known G.o.d?

Do I love G.o.d? About G.o.d 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 G.o.d! 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses to her children, but the father's pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 s.e.xes. 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 s.e.xes 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 seash.o.r.e and its tumbling waves. One studies inst.i.tutions, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 nave 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 ma.s.ses of its followers.

It meant, surely, not the denial of the soul or of G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.ses; strength pa.s.ses; life pa.s.ses. 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 pa.s.sion.

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 amus.e.m.e.nts. 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 s.p.a.ce"; 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sembled inhabitants had sung us hymns composed by their native saint. And I remembered that everywhere, in Egypt, in India, in Java, in Sumatra, in j.a.pan, 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, n.o.body crowding, n.o.body 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 s.p.a.cious, 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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.s 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 sn.o.b. 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 cla.s.ses, 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 subst.i.tuted. 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.