Appearances Part 4

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 pa.s.sed, and will pa.s.s 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 a.s.sa.s.sination. 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated; 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 a.s.sembly. It begins as follows:

"To the President, the Cabinet, the Tsan Yi Yuan, the Chung Yi Yuan, and the Press a.s.sociation,--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 a.s.sembly 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 bra.s.s 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 doc.u.ment 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 att.i.tude to life--a belief in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said enough to show that this att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.ses 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 sanct.i.ty 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 Yu 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 pa.s.sed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred to what G.o.d? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the G.o.d as there are worshippers. There are temples here to various G.o.ds: to the mountain himself; to the Lady of the mountain, Pi-hsia-yuen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius--"G.o.ddess 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 G.o.d? 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 ma.s.s of the worshippers on Tai Shan are superst.i.tious, so are, and always have been, the ma.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sionate 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--a.s.sert 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts. 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

j.a.pAN

I

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF j.a.pAN

j.a.pan, 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 subst.i.tute 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 j.a.pan. 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, j.a.pan is j.a.pan 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 pa.s.s 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 st.u.r.dy, 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 j.a.pan, of the j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not believe; which, in its essence, in j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan was finer and more sensitive, if it was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan. 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 j.a.panese, 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 subst.i.tute for the real thing. The real thing is outside, and perhaps it will not intrude; for where we should have gla.s.s windows the j.a.panese 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 cl.u.s.ter 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.