Part 3 (1/2)
The central idea, the social pivot, the focus of the life, of the civilisation of the East is to be found in their idea of the home. The home is the centre of gravity of their existence, round which everything else revolves. In China it is the all-pervading, all-vivifying idea of social life, of religion, and of government. The life of the family is not only of to-day, but extends back into a venerable past, and is the hope and care of the future.
For us, the dead past buries its dead, and the flowers that we lay on the newly-made grave quickly wither on the freshly-turned clay on which we have left them-except where the place of natural ones is taken by those deliciously ironical representations in the shape of tin-waterproof imitations which save the mourner the trouble of renewal.
As to the love of the Chinese and j.a.panese for their children, it has to be seen to be appreciated. Those wise-eyed little mites, who before they can walk sit perpetually enthroned upon their mothers' backs throughout the livelong day, are a source of so much joy and adoration to their parents that one feels no surprise at not hearing them cry as other children do. I only recollect hearing a child cry once during a two months' stay in j.a.pan, and then there was an excuse for its dolorous plaint, because its mother was shaving its little head with a blunt razor and no soap. It must be obvious to the student of our Western civilisation that the cult of family life is on the decline. The ties and obligations which hold children and parents together are visibly slackening, and this is the more obvious amongst those nations which have been taking the lead in the material progress of our time.
Take the United States, for instance. There, up to a certain point, the father is regarded as the dollar-grinding machine. The tendency is for both sons and daughters to cast themselves loose from parental ties, and strike out afresh for themselves. And their parents are as little responsible for them as they are for the maintenance or happiness of their parents.
Any one who is familiar with life in the East End of London will appreciate how little these worn-out toilers, when old age incapacitates them from work, can rely on being kept out of the Union by their children. With the experience of nearly two thousand years of the progress of Christendom, it is not surprising that a short time ago we should hear the present occupant of the Papal Throne raising his aged voice to recall the attention of the West to how rapidly the idea of the family was being lost, as Leo XIII. did in the Encyclical Address to the Catholic Church on the subject of the Holy Family.
From the more important teaching as regards family life, these Oriental missionaries might then endeavour to tell us something of the Fine Arts in the East, and yet more of the spirit which animates their artists. They would be able to show us that ”art for art's sake” with them is no empty phrase. It would doubtless surprise many Westerners to know that a Chinese painter would not think of selling his pictures for money, but paints them for his own pleasure, and gives his work as presents to his friends, and would no more dream of selling a picture than an English girl would of selling a kiss.
The j.a.panese would have a lot to tell us about bringing art, and that their highest and best art, into the utensils of everyday life, and that there is nothing demeaning in expending the best work on things one handles and uses every day. What a lot they would have to tell us of the cultivation and their love of flowers-a love which seems instinct in the poorest peasant, and which in the more cultivated cla.s.ses is carried to an exquisite degree of refined development! And again, a j.a.panese incense party, where different qualities of delicately aromatic incense are pa.s.sed round-and the pastime consists in placing the different qualities in the order of the beauty of their perfume-would almost suggest that the West had neglected the cultivation of one of the five senses.
At a dinner-party at a well-known restaurant, the other night, it was forcibly brought to my mind what a lot they would have to teach us regarding the enjoyment of such social functions. A perfect din and rattle of plates and knives filled the air, a mob of undisciplined servants charged about tumultuously, garish lights lit up vulgar ornamentation, and one almost had to shout to be heard across the table, while a band of music outside ineffectually endeavoured to drown the din within. There were flowers, it is true, but their profusion was no compensation for an utter lack of artistic arrangement. But there was a complete absence of that repose, that restfulness, that calm, which is considered, and justly considered, amongst Easterns as the essential atmosphere for the enjoyment of a social repast. The j.a.panese have raised entertainment to the level of a fine art. Their tea ceremonies, as we have badly translated the ”Cha'-no-yu,” but which might be preferably rendered as ”The Fine Art of Welcome and Hospitality,” have been a strong influence in preventing them from drifting into the meretricious gaudiness so blatantly en evidence in restaurants like the Carlton, and minister to that purity and simplicity of taste which is so characteristic of j.a.panese art. Five is considered by them the best number for a dinner-party, as with a larger number separate conversational groups are apt to be formed. The j.a.panese gentleman has rooms specially built for these parties, and rooms only just large enough to hold his guests comfortably. One scroll is hung in the kakemono, and in front of it one ornament, and afterwards a solitary flower. It would be considered by them extremely bad taste to confuse or dissipate the attention by a variety of ornaments.
A j.a.panese lady once showed me a photo of the drawing-room at Sandringham, which greatly amused her, and which she kept as a curiosity. (She was too polite to say as a curiosity of barbarism.) But she said, laughing, ”Is it not just like a curio-dealer's shop?”
The dinner, which actually precedes the tea-drinking, is served by the host in person, thus doing away with the intrusion of even their deft and quiet-moving servants. Every cup, every plate, is an individual art treasure, from the G.o.down in which the host's artistic treasures are kept in a seclusion that his most intimate friends have never penetrated. They have probably never seen the same picture or the same ornament twice in the kakemono. From the soft mellow music of the old gong which summons them to the repast, on through its various stages, until the rare and beautiful bowl out of which they have had tea is pa.s.sed round for appreciative inspection, an air of refined repose has characterised the whole proceedings.
General White And Staff On Black Monday.
These social missionaries might progress from giving us some insight into these things to the introduction of another inst.i.tution which would be an unquestionable advantage to our civilisation-I refer to the Geisha. Supposing that they were successful in grafting this j.a.panese idea, the Western edition would work out somewhat thuswise. Take, for instance, a bachelor coming up from Oxford or Cambridge, or, say, a merchant up from Liverpool or Manchester, instead of having a solitary dinner at his club, if he wished for the relaxation of vivacious female companions.h.i.+p, he would go to the telephone, and ring up ”Geishas, Limited,” and send word that he wanted one, or more, for dinner that evening. There would in due course, at the restaurant appointed, appear a girl with the dress, appearance, and manners of a lady. Whatever her looks might be, whatever her attractions, she would unfailingly be bright, intelligent, well-mannered, and, above all, entertaining, for her being entertaining would be her metier, her occupation, her raison d'etre. And, contrary to what is frequently supposed from a mistaken acquaintance with this j.a.panese inst.i.tution, she would not be in the least facile or accessible. Our ideas of feminine j.a.pan are too much based on the circ.u.mscribed experiences of holiday travellers, or books of the bad taste of Pierre Loti's ”Madame Chrysantheme.” We do not judge the women of England by Leicester Square, nor of Paris by those of the Moulin Rouge. Amongst the accomplishments of these Geisha girls music and singing would be most important. There seems much more refinement and comfort in bringing the music and singing to you than in going to the singing and music. A party of men dining together would not be driven to adjourn to a music-hall after dinner. They could order it as part of the menu.
But these Oriental missionaries, in addition to introducing such an inst.i.tution, would have a field for their labours in raising their clients and customers to the standard of j.a.panese civilisation in the enjoyment of it. I present the idea gratis to any enterprising people who are troubled with the question. What to do with our girls!
But Orientals would have little to teach us in what the Chinese call ”make face,” which enters into many of the actions of our daily life quite as much as it does into theirs. How thankful we should be that it does not also enter into our religious life! How thoroughly the Chinese must be impressed with this by their recent experiences of our Latest Crusaders! I was listening the other day to a gentleman descanting ”on the darkness that enveloped those Pagan barbarians,” and I was thinking of another darkness or blindness which prevented the speaker, and many like him, from seeing the least gleam of light in the East. Yet it does not require much hand-shading of our intellectual eyes to see ex Oriente Lux.
XI
NIGHT IN THE CITY OF UNREST
”How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air; No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain Breaks the serene of heaven: In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine Rolls through the dark-blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray The desert-circle spreads Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!”
Night really unrobes her beauty only in silence, the silence of the desert. Never can I forget nights spent in Western Australia, far beyond Kalgoorlie, away back in the Never-Never Land, where no rain falls. That is the land of great thirst, where for hundreds of miles one sees no living thing, where no birds sing, not even the mournful call of the jackal echoes across the waste, and not even the chirping ticking of an insect is to be heard to break the utter stillness. Gum trees, whose roots strike down a hundred feet for water, lift up their spa.r.s.ely-covered branches into the motionless air above, their tongue-like leaves silently saying ”I thirst.” In that stagnant air they remind one of the giant seaweeds that grow in the depths of the great oceans where the water never moves; and the silence there is the silence of ocean depths, and so has been from the beginning. To-day my horse's tracks made five years ago are probably as fresh as were those which I followed that had been made two years before that time. It must be experienced to be realised, that dead silence; when lying on the ground at night the sound of one's heart-beats or the breathing of one's horse, tethered yards away, alone tells one that the sense of hearing is not lost. It must be experienced to be loved, that wonder of a silent world, where the Spirit of Solitude in his own domain for ever almost palpably seems to brood with finger on pressed lips. It is the contrast with the scene that lies below me that forcibly recalls these nights in the desert. Now, as I write, I am at the Antipodes, and focus points of contrast in every sense to these scenes; the same moon that s.h.i.+nes on that far-off desert is the only thing in common.
The city of New York is in the form of a wedge, the point of the wedge being the down-town end, a great black ma.s.s that now looks driven into the moonlit water. Down here, as if with sheer weight of pressure of crowding humanity, the houses seem driven upward. There being not enough room on the end of the wedge for the people, they are forced upwards for room, as one would squeeze paint from an artist's tube. They rise up in tall, irregular-shaped shafts of various heights, as a child might stand its long toy bricks on end anyhow. As I write I am looking down from the thirtieth story of one of the highest, feeling as if I had been ”set on the pinnacle of the Temple” (of Mammon?). The great city lies below me, but though it is night it does not appear to lie in repose. If it sleeps, it is a restless, troubled sleep. The air is vocal with many noises that come up from below as an exhalation; white flames of steam wave from the tops of buildings below me. Up here on this giddy height a hot wind of the upper air is blowing, and a vibrating, murmurous throbbing pulsates through the building itself. This latter is caused by the elevators, those veins and arteries of the structure, and their motion must never cease or else a clot of humanity would be left marooned in the upper storeys. Across the river on the west side a row of lights are moving in one direction, and alongside them a row moving in the opposite, like ants at work. These are the trolly-cars crossing Brooklyn Bridge. North and south, to the sound of a jangling rattle, the trams on the Elevated are moving, and along the streets the trolly-cars, with their booming note, which crescendoes up the scale with increasing speed and diminuendoes with the slackening of it. Out on the water the red and green lights of the steamers move about in irregular tracks. The booming, mournful call of these steamers, like the lowing of a cow for her lost calf, goes on for ever. There are times in the desert when the coyote and the jackal are silent; on forlorn coasts in the hours before the first of dawn the seagulls cease their screaming; but these voices are never silent, calling, circling, and cawing, calling around the City of Unrest. Different notes they sound-the angry scream of the steam siren, the deep boom of the incoming ocean liner, and the note one hears oftenest-a mournful, lost wail, as of a d.a.m.ned soul calling out, ”Custos, quid de nocte?” ”Custos, quid de nocte?” The feverish hours pa.s.s troublously, but there is no response in the night of the City of Unrest.
Now a great change has come over the scene; the moon has been curtained off by a heavy ma.s.s of clouds, and its light is shut off from the water. The lights of the city s.h.i.+ne out with increased distinctness; the moonlight that whitened the sides of the buildings now has left them black ma.s.ses of vague shadow, and all at once one gets the impression of looking down into an inverted firmament studded with countless stars of as various magnitudes as in the heavens, from the bright electric arc-lights to tiny gaslights; and from this height of over 400 feet one gets the impression, familiar to those who have looked at the world from a balloon, that the rim of the horizon rises all round. ”Around the circle of the desert spreads,” but the desert now is of the cloud-covered sky, and far as the eye can reach are the stars of this great city, and now through that firmament of stars there is a dark path in an unilluminated Milky Way which marks the course of the river.
As one looks down from here and listens to the combination of throbbing sounds that come up from below, there is a certain impressiveness in the thought of being in the centre of such focused activity. One seems to be pressing the ear close to the heart of a great country. I wonder what that other city looked like from the pinnacle of whose temple He looked down on the other great cities that had their day? What Carthage looked like? The present edition of Rome and Paris and London, and Pekin from the Imperial paG.o.das on the top of Coal Hill, I have looked down on at night, but none of them is like this. From the Capitol Rome lies quietly wrapped in the memories of past greatness; from the hill of Montmartre the electric lights here and there give suggestive glimpses of the City of Pleasure. In Pekin, looking across the lotus-pond and the marble bridges, all that is squalid in the city is shrouded in a veil of foliage, and above the tops of the trees only what is beautiful emerges, and the city sleeps in the enjoyment of thoroughly Oriental repose; and, like a solidly-built, healthy man, London sleeps soundly; but the strenuous, restless activity of this city can hardly be said to sleep. I watched it make an attempt at a pause for five minutes on the day of the President's funeral. At an appointed time all the street traffic was supposed to stand still. My! what an effort it was! It was not a real pause; it seemed more like the gasping holding of the city's breath, holding for these five minutes as if something were going to burst; and then at the second when the clock marked the end of the five minutes on went everything spinning with a feeling of absolute relief. As one looks down from here one cannot help speculating as to what is to be the future of what lies below. Is it going to be the greatest city that the world has ever seen-in real greatness, or only in acute development of material civilisation; and are the mult.i.tudes that populate it going to get more happiness from the arcs of their little lives than those of Carthage and Rome, or Pekin, or Babylon, or London? Or are they going at the pace that kills? Or at least the pace that tires into premature exhaustion?
But leaving these speculations, as it is now one o'clock, I get into the cage of the elevator and drop down whirring as the floors toss upwards beyond me-”Down twenty-eight,” and we pull up with a jerk, and a pale-faced man gets in. ”Down twelve,” and two tired-looking women and a small boy get on board; and then the floor on which is a newspaper office, and a crowd is waiting to descend. The paper is just going to press, and their work is done. And then right down below the level of the street I go to see the paper actually printed. Immense rolls of paper are being lowered from the street level and handled as easily as if they were of no more weight than a lead pencil, put before machines which devour them to a deafening noise of machinery. The room reminds one of the lower deck of an ironclad in action, and the workers there seem fighting for their lives-fighting against time, fighting against the machine, fighting against the paper, which would fill up the room if it were left at the discharging end of the machines without being sent rapidly aloft; and there on the floor above the men are fighting hand to hand with great bundles of papers that must be sent out in time for the morning trains. Outside in the square stand horses sufficient for the artillery of an army corps awaiting their burdens, and as I go up town by the surface car, although there is not yet any sign of light, I pa.s.s hundreds of men on their way down town to make an early start in the battle struggle of a new day in the City of Unrest.
XII