The Critic in the Orient

Introduction

This book of impressions of the Far East is called "The Critic in the Orient," because the writer for over thirty years has been a professional critic of new books – one trained to get at the best in all literary works and reveal it to the reader. This critical work – a combination of rapid reading and equally rapid written estimate of new publications – would have been deadly, save for a love of books, so deep and enduring that it has turned drudgery into pastime and an enthusiasm for discovering good things in every new book which no amount of literary trash was ever able to smother.

After years of such strenuous critical work, the mind becomes molded in a certain cast. It is as impossible for me to put aside the habit of the literary critic as it would be for a hunter who had spent his whole life in the woods to be content in a great city. So when I started out on this trip around the world the critical apparatus which I had used in getting at the heart of books was applied to the people and the places along this great girdle about the globe.

Much of the benefit of foreign travel depends upon the reading that one has done. For years my eager curiosity about places had led me to read everything printed about the Orient and the South Seas. Add to this the stories which were brought into a newspaper office by globe trotters and adventurers, and you have an equipment which made me at times seem to be merely revising impressions made on an earlier journey. When you talk with a man who has spent ten or twenty years in Japan or China or the Straits Settlements, you cannot fail to get something of the color of life in those strange lands, especially if you have the newspaper training which impels you to ask questions and to drag out of your informant everything of human interest that the reader will care to know.

This newspaper instinct, which is developed by training but which one must possess in large measure before he can be successful in journalism, seizes upon everything and transmutes it into "copy" for the printer. To have taken this journey without setting down every day my impressions of places and people would have been a tiresome experience. What seemed labor to others who had not had my special training was as the breath in my nostrils. Even in the debilitating heat of the tropics it was always a pastime, never a task, to put into words my ideas of the historic places which I knew so well from years of reading and which I had just seen. And the richer the background of history, the greater was my enjoyment in painting with words full of color a picture of my impressions, for the benefit of those who were not able to share my pleasure in the actual sight of these famous places of the Far East.

From the mass of newspaper letters written while every impression was sharp and clear, I have selected what seemed to me most significant and illustrative. It is only when the traveler looks back over a journey that he gets the true perspective. Then only is he able to see what is of general and permanent interest. Most of the vexations of travel I have eliminated, as these lose their force once they have gone over into yesterday. What remains is the beauty of scenery, the grandeur of architecture, the spiritual quality of famous paintings and statues, the appealing traits of various peoples.

The Best Results of Travel in the Orient

This volume includes impressions of the first half of a trip around the world. The remainder of the journey will fill a companion volume, which will comprise two chapters devoted to New York and the effect it produced on me after seeing the great cities of the world. As I have said in the preface, these are necessarily first impressions, jotted down when fresh and clear; but it is doubtful whether a month spent in any of these places would have forced a revision of these first glimpses, set in the mordant of curiosity and enthusiasm. When the mind is saturated with the literature of a place, it is quick to seize on what appeals to the imagination, and this appeal is the one which must be considered in every case where there is an historical or legendary background to give salient relief to palace or temple, statue or painting. Without this background the noblest work seems dull and lifeless. With it the palace stamps itself upon the imagination, the temple stirs the emotions, the statue speaks, the painting has a direct spiritual message.

Certain parts of the Orient are not rich in this imaginative material which appeals to one fond of history or art; but this defect is compensated for by an extraordinary picturesqueness of life and a wonderful luxuriance of nature. The Oriental trip also makes less demand on one's reading than even a hasty journey through Europe. There are few pictures, few statues. Only India and Egypt appeal to the sense of the historical, Japan stands alone, alien to all our ways of life and thought, but so intensely artistic, so saturated with the intellectual spirit that it seems to belong to another world than this material, commercial existence that stamps all European and American life. The new China furnishes an attractive field of study, but unfortunately when I visited the country it was in the throes of revolution and travel was dangerous anywhere outside the great treaty ports.

One of the best results of foreign travel is that it makes one revise his estimate of alien races. When I started out it was with a strong prejudice against the Japanese, probably due to my observation of some rather unlovely specimens whom I had encountered in San Francisco. A short stay in Japan served to give me a new point of view in regard to both the people and the country of the Mikado. It was impossible to escape from the fact that here is a race which places loyalty to country and personal honor higher than life, and this sentiment was not confined to the educated and wealthy classes but was general throughout the nation. Here also is a people so devoted to the culture of beauty that they travel hundreds of miles to see the annual chrysanthemum and other flower festivals. And here is a people so devoted to art for art's sake that even the poor and uneducated have little gardens in their back yards and houses which reveal a refined taste in architecture and decoration. The poorest artisans are genuine artists and their work shows a beauty and a finish only to be found in the work of the highest designers in our country.

In one chapter of the section on Japan, I have dwelt on the ingenious theory that it is their devotion to the garden that has kept the Japanese from being spoiled by the great strides they have made in the last twenty years in commerce and conquest. To take foremost place among the powers of the world without any preliminary struggle is an achievement which well might turn the heads of any people; yet this exploit has simply confirmed the Japanese in the opinion that their national training has resulted in this success that other nations have won only by the expenditure of years of labor and study. When you see the reverence which every one in Japan shows at the tombs of the Forty-seven Ronins, you feel that here is a spiritual force which is lacking in every European country; here is something, whether you call it loyalty or patriotism or fanaticism, which makes even the women and children of Japan eager to sacrifice all that they hold most dear on the altar of their country. No less striking than their loyalty is the courtesy of the Japanese which makes travel in their country a pleasure. Even the poor and ignorant country people show in their mutual relations a politeness that would do credit to the most civilized race, while all exhibit toward foreigners a courtesy and consideration that is often repaid by boorishness and insult on the part of tourists and foreign residents of Japan. Another feature of Japanese life that cannot fail to impress the stranger is the small weight that is given to wealth. In their relations with foreigners the governing class and the wealthy people are sticklers for all the conventional forms; but among themselves the simplicity of their social life is very attractive. Elaborate functions are unknown and changes of costume, which make women's dress so large an item of family expense in any European country, are unnecessary. Some of the rich Japanese are now lavishing money on their homes, which are partly modeled on European plans; but in the main the residences, even of rich people, are very simple and unpretentious. These homes are filled with priceless porcelains, jades, paintings and prints, but there is no display merely for the sake of exhibiting art treasures.

In Manila the American tourist has a good opportunity to contrast what has been done by his countrymen with what the British have accomplished in ports like Hongkong and Singapore. Doubtless the English plan will show the larger financial returns, but it is carried out with a selfish disregard of the interests of the natives which stirs the gorge of an American. The Englishman believes in keeping a wide gulf between the dominant and the humble classes. He does not believe in educating the native to think that he can rise from the class in which he is born. The American scheme in the Philippines has been to encourage the development of character and efficiency, wherever found; and the result is that many public positions are open to men who were head-hunting savages ten years ago. Above all other things in the Philippines we have proved, as we have shown at Panama, that a tropical climate need not be an unhealthful one. We have banished from Manila cholera, yellow fever and bubonic plague – three pests that once made it dreaded in the Orient. This, with an ample water supply, is an achievement worthy of pride, when one contrasts it with the unsanitary sewerage system of Hongkong and Singapore.

The small part of the great Chinese Empire which I was able to see gave me a vivid impression of the activity and enthusiasm of the people in spreading the new Republican doctrines. The way old things have been put aside and the new customs adopted seems almost like a miracle. Fancy a whole people discarding their time-honored methods of examination for the civil service, along with their queues, their caps and their shoes. All the authorities have predicted that China would be centuries in showing the same changes which the Japanese have made in a single generation; but recent events go far to prove that Japan will be outstripped in the race for progress by its slow-going neighbor. What profoundly impresses any visitor to China is the stamina and the working capacity of the common people. Tireless laborers these Chinese are, whether they work for themselves or the European. What they will be able to accomplish with labor-saving machinery no one can predict. Certainly should they accept modern methods of work, with the same enthusiasm that they have adopted new methods of government, the markets of the world will be upset by the product of these four hundred million. China is to-day in transformation – fluctuant, far-reaching, limited only by the capacity of a singularly excitable people to absorb new ideas.

In India great is the contrast to China and Japan. Here is an old civilization, founded on caste: here are many peoples but all joined to the worship of a system that says the son must follow in the footsteps of the father; that one cannot break bread with a stranger of another caste lest he and his tribe be defiled. Nothing more hideous was ever conceived than this Indian caste system, yet it has held its own against the force of foreign learning and probably will continue to fetter the development of the natives of India for centuries to come. Some simple reforms the English have secured, like the abolition of suttee and the improved condition of the child widows; but their influence on the great mass of the people has been pitiably small. India bears the same relation to the Orient that Italy does to Europe. It is the home of temples, palaces and monuments; it is the land of beautiful art work in many materials. Most of its cities have a splendid historical past that is seen in richly ornamented temples and shrines, in the tombs of its illustrious dead and in palaces that surpass in beauty of decoration anything which Europe can boast.

In considering India it must always be borne in mind that here was the original seat of the Aryan civilization and that, though the Hindoo is as dark as many of the American negroes, he is of Aryan stock like ourselves. In comparison with the men who carried Aryan civilization throughout the world, the Hindoo of to-day is as far removed as is the modern Greek from the Greek of the time of Pericles and Phidias. Yet he shows all the signs of race in clear-cut features and in small hands and feet.

The journey throughout India is one which calls for some philosophy, as the train arrangements are never good and, unless one has the luck to secure a competent guide, he will be annoyed by the excessive greed of every one with whom he comes in contact. But aside from such troubles the trip is one which richly repays the traveler. If one has time it is admirable to go off the beaten track to some of the minor places which have fine historical remains; but a good idea of India may be obtained by taking the regular route from Calcutta to Bombay, by way of Delhi.

In Benares the tourist first meets the swarms of beggars that make life a burden. Aged men, with loathsome sores, stand whining at corners beseeching the favor of a two-anna piece; blind men, led by small, skinny children, set up a mournful wail and then curse you fluently when you pass them by, and scores of children rise up out of hovels at the roadside and pursue your carriage with shrill screams. All are filthy, clamorous, greedy, inexpressibly offensive. If you are soft hearted and give to one, then your day is made hideous by a swarm of mendicants, tireless in pursuit and only kept from actual invasion of the carriage by fear of the driver's whip.

The feature which makes travel on Indian railways a weariness of the flesh is the roughness of the cars. Each truck on the passenger cars is provided with two large wheels, exactly like those on freight cars, and these wheels have wooden felloes and spokes. With poor springs the result is that though the road-bed is perfect the cars are as rough as our freight cars. When the speed is over twenty-five miles an hour or the road is crooked, the motion of the cars is well nigh intolerable. Ordinarily the motion is so great that reading is difficult and writing out of the question. At night the jar of the car is so severe that one must be very tired or very phlegmatic to get any refreshing sleep. When one travels all day and all night at a stretch – as in the journey from Jeypore to Bombay – the fatigue is out of all proportion to the distance covered. In fact Americans have been spoiled by the comforts of Pullman sleeping-cars, in which foreign critics find so many flaws. Probably the chief annoyance to our party of Americans, aside from the jar of the cars, was the dust and soot which poured in day and night. The engines burn soft coal and the dust on the road-beds is excessive. A system of double windows and well-fitting screens would remove this nuisance, but apparently the British in India think dust and grime necessary features of railway travel, for no effort is made to eliminate them.

No Oriental trip would be complete without a visit to Egypt, and especially a ride on the Nile. It is more difficult to make anyone realize the charm of Egypt than of any other country of the Orient. The people are dirty, ignorant, brutish: their faces contain no appeal because they are the faces of Millet's "The Man With the Hoe." Centuries of subjection have killed the pride which still lingers in the face and bearing of the poorest Arab; the Egyptian peasant does not wear the collar of Gurth, but he is a slave of the soil whose day of freedom is afar off. Yet these degenerate people are seen against a background of the most imposing ruins in the world. Luxor and Karnak and the tombs of the kings near old Thebes contain enough remains of the splendor of ancient Egyptian life to permit study for years. The mind is appalled by this mass of temples, monuments, obelisks and colossal statues. It is difficult to realize that the same people who are seen toiling in the fields to-day raised these huge monuments to perpetuate the names of their rulers. A climate as dry as that of the Colorado desert has preserved these remains, so that in the rock tombs one may gaze upon brightly painted hieroglyphs of the time of Moses that look as though they were carved yesterday.

In this Oriental tour the stamp of strange religions is over all the lands. The temple is the keynote of each race. And religion with the Oriental is not a matter of one day's worship in seven: it is a vital, daily function into which he puts all the dreamy mysticism of his race. The first sight of several Mohammedans bowed in the dust by the roadside, with their faces set toward Mecca, gives one a strange thrill, but this spectacle soon loses its novelty. Everywhere in the Far East religion is a matter of form and ceremony: it includes regular visits to the temple and regular prayers and offerings to the deities enshrined in these houses of worship. But it also includes a daily ritual that must be observed at certain fixed hours, even though the believer may be in the midst of the crowded market place. The spiritual isolation of an Oriental at his prayers in any big city of the Far East is the most significant feature of this life – so alien to all the mental, moral, and religious training of the Occident. Vain is it for one of Anglo-Saxon strain to attempt to bridge this abyss that lies between his mind and that of the Burman or the Parsee. Each lives in a spiritual world of his own and each would be homesick for heaven were he transferred to the ideal paradise of the other. So the traveler in the Orient should give heed to the temples, for in them is voiced the spiritual aspirations of the people, who have little of comfort or hope to cheer them in this world.

JAPAN, THE PICTURE COUNTRY OF THE ORIENT