The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Soul of the Far East, by Percival Lowell This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Soul of the Far East Author: Percival Lowell Release Date: September 14, 2008 [EBook #1409] Last Updated: February 4, 2013 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST *** Produced by Eric Hutton, and David Widger
You clap your hands. (Enter tea-house maiden.) You. Hai, elder sister, augustly exists there sugar? The T. H. M. The honorable sugar, augustly is it? You. So, augustly. The T. H. M. He (indescribable expression of assent). (Exit tea-house maiden to fetch the sugar.)Now, the "augustlies" go almost without saying, but why is the sugar honorable? Simply because it is eventually going to be offered to you. But she would have spoken of it by precisely the same respectful title, if she had been obliged to inform you that there was none, in which case it never could have become yours. Such is politeness. We may note, in passing, that all her remarks and all yours, barring your initial question, meant absolutely nothing. She understood you perfectly from the first, and you knew she did; but then, if all of us were to say only what were necessary, the delightful art of conversation would soon be nothing but a science. The average Far Oriental, indeed, talks as much to no purpose as his Western cousin, only in his chit-chat politeness replaces personalities. With him, self is suppressed, and an ever-present regard for others is substituted in its stead. A lack of personality is, as we have seen, the occasion of this courtesy; it is also its cause. That politeness should be one of the most marked results of impersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show it to be a fact. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence of the second seems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both in general and in detail. Courtesy increases, as we travel eastward round the world, coincidently with a decrease in the sense of self. Asia is more courteous than Europe, Europe than America. Particular races show the same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most impersonal nation of Europe, is at the same time the most polite. Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to make of man a solitary animal, the absence of it a social one. The more impersonal the people, the more will the community supplant the individual in the popular estimation. The type becomes the interesting thing to man, as it always is to nature. Then, as the social desires develop, politeness, being the means to their enjoyment, develops also. A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That words should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that would seem to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did not strike him as actually immodest. For the absence of gender is simply symptomatic of a much more vital failing, a disregard of sex. Originally, as their language bears witness, the Japanese showed a childish reluctance to recognizing sex at all. Usually a single sexless term was held sufficient for a given species, and did duty collectively for both sexes. Only where a consideration of sex thrust itself upon them, beyond the possibility of evasion, did they employ for the male and the female distinctive expressions. The more intimate the relation of the object to man, the more imperative the discriminating name. Hence human beings possessed a fair number of such special appellatives; for a man is a palpably different sort of person from his grandmother, and a mother-in-law from a wife. But it is noteworthy that the artificial affinities of society were as carefully differentiated as the distinctions due to sex, while ancestral relationships were deemed more important than either. Animals, though treated individually most humanely, are vouchsafed but scant recognition on the score of sex. With them, both sexes share one common name, and commonly, indeed, this answers quite well enough. In those few instances where sex enters into the question in a manner not to be ignored, particles denoting "male" or "female" are prefixed to the general term. How comparatively rare is the need of such specification can be seen from the way in which, with us, in many species, the name of one sex alone does duty indifferently for both. That of the male is the one usually selected, as in the case of the dog or horse. If, however, it be the female with which man has most to do, she is allowed to bestow her name upon her male partner. Examples of the latter description occur in the use of "cows" for "cattle," and "hens" for "fowls." A Japanese can say only "fowl," defined, if absolutely necessary, as "he-fowl" or "she-fowl." Now such a slighting of one of the most potent springs of human action, sex, with all that the idea involves, is not due to a pronounced misogynism on the part of these people, but to a much more effective neglect, a great underlying impersonality. Indifference to woman is but included in a much more general indifference to mankind. The fact becomes all the more evident when we descend from sex to gender. That Father Ocean does not, in their verbal imagery, embrace Mother Earth, with that subtle suggestion of humanity which in Aryan speech the gender of the nouns hints without expressing, is not due to any lack of poesy in the Far Oriental speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied now in the very character of the words he uses. A Japanese noun is a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does it represent that it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather the outcome of a first vague generality. The word "man," for instance, means to them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefinite idea which struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant. It represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact quite innocent of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the Japanese never outgrew. The world continued to present itself to their minds as a collection of things. Nor did their subsequent Chinese education change their view. Buddhism simply infused all things with the one universal spirit. As to inanimate objects, the idea of supposing sex where there is not even life is altogether too fanciful a notion for the Far Eastern mind. Impersonality first fashioned the nouns, and then the nouns, by their very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fettered fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lie latent in the sex with which his forefathers humanized their words, never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetry of nature as much as, indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetry unassociated with man. And this, too, curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only adapted, a singularly sexual philosophy. For possibly, like some other portions of their intellectual wealth, they stole it from India. The Chinese conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea of sex. According to their notions the earth was begotten. It is true that with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, which self-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained, matters proceeded after the analogy of mankind. The two principles at work were themselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most unimpassioned of philosophers. They were simply a positive essence and a negative one, correlated to sunshine and shadow, but also correlated to male and female forces. Through their mutual action were born the earth and the air and the water; from these, in turn, was begotten man. The cosmical modus operandi was not creative nor evolutionary, but sexual. The whole scheme suggests an attempt to wed abstract philosophy with primitive concrete mythology. The same sexuality distinguishes the Japanese demonology. Here the physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensity to appear in pairs. This attributing of sexes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatible with an uninterested disregard of sex where it really exists. It is one thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quite another to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs. How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen from a glance at these same Japanese gods. They are a combination of defunct ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first half required little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made; while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed even less originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. The gods whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customary superhuman strength. If these demigods differed from others of their class, it was only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much with man. Even such personification of natural forces, simple enough to be self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling phenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphic noumena they had begotten. For instance, the sun-goddess, we are informed, was one day lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking in consequence of the provoking behavior of her younger brother, by her curiosity at the sight of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placed before the entrance for the purpose. But no Japanese would dream now of casting any such reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day. The sun has become not only quite sexless to him, but as devoid of personality as it is to any Western materialist. Lesser deities suffered a like unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-god, with his belt of drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the face, is no longer even indirectly associated with the storm. As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited Eastern Asia. Anthropoid foxes and raccoons, wholly lacking in those engaging qualities that beget love, and through love remembrance, take their place. Even Benten, the naturalized Venus, who, like her Hellenic sister, is said to have risen from the sea, is a person quite incapable of inspiring a reckless infatuation. Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, the personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling nature with half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clods grew sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and the beings its own poesy had begotten made merry companionship for man. Then a change crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for want of facts to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burnt themselves out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old belief was consumed. But though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what once had been. The dead gods still live in our language and our art. Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul, for the memories they have left. But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fell in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmed their memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had no claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal as if it had never been born. The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically, number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as plural forms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreign student, were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fell into the fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quite as difficult to memorize, and even more cumbrous to express. Instead of inflecting the noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noun unchanged and add two numerals; thus at times actually employing more words to express the objects than there are objects to express. One of these numerals is a simple number; the other is what is known as an auxiliary numeral, a word as singular in form as in function. Thus, for instance, "two men" become amplified verbally into "man two individual," or, as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, "two piecey man." For in this respect Chinese resembles Japanese, though in very little else, and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such elaborate qualification arises from the excessive simplicity of the Japanese nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a generality that simply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly produce any definite result. No exact counterpart of these nouns exists in English, but some idea of the impossibility of the process may be got from our word "cattle," which, prolific though it may prove in fact, remains obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All Japanese nouns being of this indefinite description, all require auxiliary numerals. But as each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the etiquette of these handles to the names of things. Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions, which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion, instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions. There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two last being conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses, to say nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed on another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb, according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it must be confessed that the Tartars get on very well without any such couplings to their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in their sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only to be pushed, not pulled along. The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition with the noun. That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sense a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A Japanese does not say, "The scenery is fine," but simply, "Scenery, fine." Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "She is beautiful," but "She exists beautifully," would be the Japanese way of expressing his admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula turns out to be merely an impersonal intransitive verb. A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just as a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct contradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, it must be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammatically quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much is common to all tongues, but Japanese carries its positivism yet further. Not only has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative pronouns nor pronominal adjectives,—those convenient keepers of places for the absent. "None" and "nothing" are unknown words in its vocabulary, because the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, not earth-begotten concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things from the point of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another form. Usually it is introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the most part, relate to human actions, and it is man, not nature, who is responsible for the omission in question. After all, it does seem more fitting to say,﹃I am ignorant of everything,﹄than "I know nothing." It is indeed you who are wanting, not the thing. The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subject of impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a Japanese sentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearly the inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of Japanese syntax is, that qualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea is elaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practice places the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as the story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about; but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged to fashion his whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts to speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar etymology. There are in Japanese no relative pronouns and no temporal conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events. The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts. Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives are performed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being made to precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, not unlike those experienced by Alice in her looking-glass journey, are occasioned by this practice. For example,﹃The merry monarch who ended by falling a victim to profound melancholia﹄becomes﹃To profound melancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch,﹄and the sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, when chronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite. A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence of temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added, actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came." Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects that exist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus to connect consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japanese idiom. To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a Japanese sentence is a single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts loosely tied together. It is as much a unit in its composition as a novel or a drama is with us. Such artistic periods, however, are anything but convenient. In their nicely contrived involution they strikingly resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, where entire shells lie closely packed one within another,—a very marvel of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must be antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea entertains us. On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence, and are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence is that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that they not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are much given to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to adopt. Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action, as considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this precedence accorded the impersonal element in language over the personal, we observe again the comparative importance assigned the two. In Japanese estimation, the first place belongs to nature, the second only to man. As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays in their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a common practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea, isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (which means "as to," the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out for distinction is far more likely to be the object of the sentence than its subject. The habit is analogous to the use of our phrase "speaking of,"—that is, simply an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought; only that with them, the practice being the rule and not the exception, no correspondingly abrupt effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from the post of honor, the subject is not even permitted the second place. Indeed, it usually fails to put in an appearance anywhere. You may search through sentence after sentence without meeting with the slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so unusual an anomaly as a motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its mention, not to the fact of being the subject, but because for other reasons it happens to be the important word of the thought. The truth is, the Japanese conception of events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now possess are not represented, for the most part, by pure Japanese, but by imported Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from their foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time. Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal pronoun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German "mann;" on the other, the French "on". While as if to give the official seal to the oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied, without the faintest implication of insult, to men. Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn to cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their subsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know. With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last generation, there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer to fit the childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How great the wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt too keenly ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs which, dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of our very selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our boyish first love, all our early associations send down roots so deep that long after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give them up. Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at the voids they necessarily have left. In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by religion. The worship of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age, that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the lands where it is always morning, and where man has never passed to his prosaic noon. Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its language so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal state to which we all awake first before we become aware of that something we later know so well as self. Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason that also lends it additional interest to us,—because it is their own. Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese imitativeness has caused the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each man starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race had reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The man's mind has done likewise. 1. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The Japanese Language.
"The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers Is also the first to be touched by the fun."The Far Oriental well exemplifies this fact. His art, wherever fun is possible, fairly bubbles over with laughter. From the oldest masters down to Hokusai, it is constantly welling up in the drollest conceits. It is of all descriptions, too. Now it lurks in merry ambush, like the faint suggestion of a smile on an otherwise serious face, so subtile that the observer is left wondering whether the artist could have meant what seems more like one's own ingenious discovery; now it breaks out into the broadest of grins, absurd juxtapositions of singularly happy incongruities. For Hokusai's caricatures and Hendschel's sketches might be twins. If there is a difference, it lies not so much in the artist's work as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits easily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese temperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with catching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in puns which are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on certain consecrated plays on words. From the very constitution of the people there is of course nothing selfish in the national enjoyment. A man is quite as ready to laugh at his own expense as at his neighbor's, a courtesy which his neighbor cordially returns. Now the ludicrous is essentially human in its application. The principle of the synthesis of contradictories, popularly known by the name of humor, is necessarily limited in its field to man. For whether it have to do wholly with actions, or partly with the words that express them, whether it be presented in the shape of a pun or a pleasantry, it is in incongruous contrasts that its virtue lies. It is the unexpected that provokes the smile. Now no such incongruity exists in nature; man enjoys a monopoly of the power of making himself ridiculous. So pleasant is pleasantry that we do indeed cultivate it beyond its proper pale. But it is only by personifying Nature, and gratuitously attributing to her errors of which she is incapable, that we can make fun of her; as, for instance, when we hold the weather up to ridicule by way of impotent revenge. But satires upon the clown-like character of our climate, which, after the lamest sort of a spring, somehow manages a capital fall, would in the Far East be as out of keeping with fancy as with fact. To a Japanese, who never personifies anything, such innocent irony is unmeaning. Besides, it would be also untrue. For his May carries no suggestion of unfulfilment in its name. Those Far Eastern paintings which have to do with man fall for the most part under one of two heads, the facetious and the historical. The latter implies no particularly intimate concern for man in himself, for the past has very little personality for the present. As for the former, its attention is, if anything, derogatory to him, for we are always shy of making fun of what we feel to be too closely a part of ourselves. But impersonality has prevented the Far Oriental from having much amour propre. He has no particular aversion to caricaturing himself. Few Europeans, perhaps, would have cared to perpetrate a self-portrait like one painted by the potter Kinsei, which was sold me one day as an amusing tour de force by a facetious picture-dealer. It is a composite picture of a new kind, a Japanese variety of type face. The great potter, who was also apparently no mean painter, has combined three aspects of himself in a single representation. At first sight the portrait appears to be simply a full front view of a somewhat moon-faced citizen; but as you continue to gaze, it suddenly dawns on you that there are two other individuals, one on either side, hob-nobbing in profile with the first, the lines of the features being ingeniously made to do double duty; and when this aspect of the thing has once struck you, you cannot look at the picture without seeing all three citizens simultaneously. The result is doubtless more effective as a composition than flattering as a likeness. Far Eastern sculpture, by its secondary importance among Far Eastern arts, witnesses again to the secondary importance assigned to man at our mental antipodes. In this art, owing to its necessary limitations, the representation of nature in its broader sense is impossible. For in the first place, whatever the subject, it must be such as it is possible to present in one continuous piece; disconnected adjuncts, as, for instance, a flock of birds flying, which might be introduced with great effect in painting, being here practically beyond the artist's reach. Secondly, the material being of uniform appearance, as a rule, color, or even shading, vital points in landscape portrayal, is out of the question, unless the piece were subsequently painted, as in Grecian sculptures, a custom which is not practised in China or Japan. Lastly, another fact fatal to the representation of landscape is the size. The reduced scale of the reproduction suggests falsity at once, a falsity whose belittlement the mind can neither forget nor forgive. Plain sculpture is therefore practically limited to statuary, either of men or animals. The result is that in their art, where landscape counts for so much, sculpture plays a very minor part. In what little there is, Nature's place is taken by Buddha. For there are two classes of statues, divided the one from the other by that step which separates the sublime from the ridiculous, namely, the colossal and the diminutive. There is no happy human mean. Of the first kind are the beautiful bronze figures of the Buddha, like the Kamakura Buddha, fifty feet high and ninety-seven feet round, in whose face all that is grand and noble lies sleeping, the living representation of Nirvana; and of the second, those odd little ornaments known as netsuke, comical carvings for the most part, grotesque figures of men and monkeys, saints and sinners, gods and devils. Appealing bits of ivory, bone, or wood they are, in which the dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows. The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery and lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the serious and the comic in Far Eastern feeling. The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon him in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added beauty that it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world, probably, is she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy means and short extremes, months of spring and months of autumn, with but a few weeks of winter in between; a land of flowers, where the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separate identity in one long self-obliterating kiss.
"Some Xanadu where Kublai can a stately pleasure dome decree,"and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited, or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with what we know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the local. It does not mark the limits of the possible. That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world is evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to examine. We are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a distinction between the search after truth and the search after beauty, calling the one science and the other art. Now while we are not slow to impute imagination to art, we are by no means so ready to appreciate its connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps, to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not involve the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side we may instance painting. Now painting begins its career in the humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed. "This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually, owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved. Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been called into play, although even now pictures are often happy adaptations rather than creations proper. Some masters have been imaginative; others, unfortunately for themselves and still more for the public, have not. For that the art may attain a high degree of excellence for itself and much distinction for its professors, without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident enough on this side of the globe, without travelling to the other. Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average layman, seems peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics. Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a few so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the results of experience. It is none the less imaginative because its discoveries always accord subsequently with fact, since man was not aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's prophetic sight. Once discovered, it requires much less imagination to understand them. With the light coming from in front, it is an easy matter to see what lies behind one. So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been spinning and weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions to the most abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination; for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and even the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at its core. We are too prone to regard the present age of the world as preeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his boyhood. But, and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known. While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself. History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind, imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has been the cause of soul-evolution. The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted, at times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore. The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by discovery. Yet his powers of observation may be marvellously developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe through the forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons most astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path. And all because his forefathers had not the power to imagine something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of the force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat for him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk, to be sure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place, an animal cannot alter its conditions of existence except within very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the world is. What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most imaginative races have proved the greatest factors in the world's advance. Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to the other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental progression implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that imagination is the force at work in the process which Far Eastern civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing this, it explains incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence. We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization which a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a relatively laggard position in the race. We ought, therefore, to find among these people certain other characteristics corroborative of a less advanced state of development. In the first place, if imagination be the impulse of which increase in individuality is the resulting motion, that quality should be at a minimum there. The Far Orientals ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of people. Such is precisely what they are. Their lack of imagination is a well-recognized fact. All who have been brought in contact with them have observed it, merchants as strikingly as students. Indeed, the slightest intercourse with them could not fail to make it evident. Their matter-of-fact way of looking at things is truly distressing, coming as it does from so artistic a people. One notices it all the more for the shock. To get a prosaic answer from a man whose appearance and surroundings betoken better things is not calculated to dull that answer's effect. Aston, in a pamphlet on the Altaic tongues, cites an instance which is so much to the point that I venture to repeat it here. He was a true Chinaman, he says, who, when his English master asked him what he thought of
"That orbed maiden With white fires laden Whom mortals call the moon,"replied, "My thinkee all same lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by the name of pidgin English). Their own tongues show the same prosaic character, picturesque as they appear to us at first sight. That effect is due simply to the novelty to us of their expressions. To talk of a pass as an "up-down" has a refreshing turn to our unused ear, but it is a much more descriptive than imaginative figure of speech. Nor is the phrase "the being (so) is difficult," in place of "thank you," a surprisingly beautiful bit of imagery, delightful as it sounds for a change. Our own tongue has, in its daily vocabulary, far more suggestive expressions, only familiarity has rendered us callous to their use. We employ at every instant words which, could we but stop to think of them, would strike us as poetic in the ideas they call up. As has been well said, they were once happy thoughts of some bright particular genius bequeathed to posterity without so much as an accompanying name, and which proved so popular that they soon became but symbols themselves. Their languages are paralleled by their whole life. A lack of any fanciful ideas is one of the most salient traits of all Far Eastern races, if indeed a sad dearth of anything can properly be spoken of as salient. Indirectly their want of imagination betrays itself in their every-day sayings and doings, and more directly in every branch of thought. Originality is not their strong point. Their utter ignorance of science shows this, and paradoxical as it may seem, their art, in spite of its merit and its universality, does the same. That art and imagination are necessarily bound together receives no very forcible confirmation from a land where, nationally speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first and the last easily last, as nations go. It is to quite another quality that their artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and later the Japanese have accomplished results at which the rest of the world will yet live to marvel, is due to their—taste. But taste or delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing to do with imagination. That certain of the senses of Far Orientals are wonderfully keen, as also those parts of the brain that directly respond to them, is beyond question; but such sensitiveness does not in the least involve the less earth-tied portions of the intellect. A peculiar responsiveness to natural beauty, a sort of mental agreement with its earthly environment, is a marked feature of the Japanese mind. But appreciation, however intimate, is a very different thing from originality. The one is commonly the handmaid of the other, but the other by no means always accompanies the one. So much for the cause; now for the effect which we might expect to find if our diagnosis be correct. If the evolving force be less active in one race than in another, three relative results should follow. In the first place, the race in question will at any given moment be less advanced than its fellow; secondly, its rate of progress will be less rapid; and lastly, its individual members will all be nearer together, just as a stream, in falling from a cliff, starts one compact mass, then gradually increasing in speed, divides into drops, which, growing finer and finer and farther and farther apart, descend at last as spray. All three of these consequences are visible in the career of the Far Eastern peoples. The first result scarcely needs to be proved to us, who are only too ready to believe it without proof. It is, nevertheless, a fact. Viewed unprejudicedly, their civilization is not so advanced a one as our own. Although they are certainly our superiors in some very desirable particulars, their whole scheme is distinctly more aboriginal fundamentally. It is more finished, as far as it goes, but it does not go so far. Less rude, it is more rudimentary. Indeed, as we have seen, its surface-perfection really shows that nature has given less thought to its substance. One may say of it that it is the adult form of a lower type of mind-specification. The second effect is scarcely less patent. How slow their progress has been, if for centuries now it can be called progress at all, is world-known. Chinese conservatism has passed into a proverb. The pendulum of pulsation in the Middle Kingdom long since came to a stop at the medial point of rest. Centre of civilization, as they call themselves, one would imagine that their mind-machinery had got caught on their own dead centre, and now could not be made to move. Life, which elsewhere is a condition of unstable equilibrium, there is of a fatally stable kind. For the Chinaman's disinclination to progress is something more than vis inertiae; it has become an ardent devotion to the status quo. Jostled, he at once settles back to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is punctiliously embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for burial. With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different. Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind. It is a state of neutral equilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly responsive to an impulse from without. Left to their own devices, they are conservative enough, but they instantly copy a more advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. This proclivity on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see the very same apparent contradiction in characters we are thrown with every day. Imitation is the natural substitute for originality. The less strong a man's personality the more prone is he to adopt the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself. The third result, the remarkable homogeneity of the people, is not, perhaps, so universally appreciated, but it is equally evident on inspection, and no less weighty in proof. Indeed, the Far Eastern state of things is a kind of charade on the word; for humanity there is singularly uniform. The distance between the extremes of mind-development in Japan is much less than with us. This lack of divergence exists not simply in certain lines of thought, but in all those characteristics by which man is parted from the brutes. In reasoning power, in artistic sensibility, in delicacy of perception, it is the same story. If this were simply the impression at first sight, no deductions could be drawn from it, for an impression of racial similarity invariably marks the first stage of acquaintance of one people by another. Even in outward appearance it is so. We find it at first impossible to tell the Japanese apart; they find it equally impossible to differentiate us. But the present resemblance is not a matter of first impressions. The fact is patent historically. The men whom Japan reveres are much less removed from the common herd than is the case in any Western land. And this has been so from the earliest times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius is fully paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths of preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure of individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;—so much alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope for disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries have not met with any marked success among the natives, this less deserving class of enthusiastic disseminators of an all-possessing belief might do well to attempt it. They would find there a very virgin field of a most promisingly dead level. It is true, human opposition would undoubtedly prevent their tilling it, but Nature, at least, would not present quite such constitutional obstacles as she wisely does with us. The individual's mind is, as it were, an isolated bit of the race mind. The same set of traits will be found in each. Mental characteristics there are a sort of common property, of which a certain undifferentiated portion is indiscriminately allotted to every man at birth. One soul resembles another so much, that in view of the patriarchal system under which they all exist, there seems to the stranger a peculiar appropriateness in so strong a family likeness of mind. An idea of how little one man's brain differs from his neighbor's may be gathered from the fact, that while a common coolie in Japan spends his spare time in playing a chess twice as complicated as ours, the most advanced philosopher is still on the blissfully ignorant side of the pons asinorum. We find, then, that in all three points the Far East fulfils what our theory demanded. There is one more consideration worthy of notice. We said that the environment had not been the deus ex materia in the matter; but that the soul itself possessed the germ of its own evolution. This fact does not, however, preclude another, that the environment has helped in the process. Change of scene is beneficial to others besides invalids. How stimulating to growth a different habitat can prove, when at all favorable, is perhaps sufficiently shown in the case of the marguerite, which, as an emigrant called white-weed, has usurped our fields. The same has been no less true of peoples. Now these Far Eastern peoples, in comparison with our own forefathers, have travelled very little. A race in its travels gains two things: first it acquires directly a great deal from both places and peoples that it meets, and secondly it is constantly put to its own resources in its struggle for existence, and becomes more personal as the outcome of such strife. The changed conditions, the hostile forces it finds, necessitate mental ingenuity to adapt them and influence it unconsciously. To see how potent these influences prove we have but to look at the two great branches of the Aryan family, the one that for so long now has stayed at home, and the one that went abroad. Destitute of stimulus from without, the Indo-Aryan mind turned upon itself and consumed in dreamy metaphysics the imagination which has made its cousins the leaders in the world's progress to-day. The inevitable numbness of monotony crept over the stay-at-homes. The deadly sameness of their surroundings produced its unavoidable effect. The torpor of the East, like some paralyzing poison, stole into their souls, and they fell into a drowsy slumber only to dream in the land they had formerly wrested from its possessors. Their birthright passed with their cousins into the West. In the case of the Altaic races which we are considering, cause and effect mutually strengthened each other. That they did not travel more is due primarily to a lack of enterprise consequent upon a lack of imagination, and then their want of travel told upon their imagination. They were also unfortunate in their journeying. Their travels were prematurely brought to an end by that vast geographical Nirvana the Pacific Ocean, the great peaceful sea as they call it themselves. That they would have journeyed further is shown by the way their dreams went eastward still. They themselves could not for the preventing ocean, and the lapping of its waters proved a nation's lullaby. One thing, I think, then, our glance at Far Eastern civilization has more than suggested. The soul, in its progress through the world, tends inevitably to individualization. Yet the more we perceive of the cosmos the more do we recognize an all-pervading unity in it. Its soul must be one, not many. The divine power that made all things is not itself multifold. How to reconcile the ever-increasing divergence with an eventual similarity is a problem at present transcending our generalizations. What we know would seem to be opposed to what we must infer. But perception of how we shall merge the personal in the universal, though at present hidden from sight, may sometime come to us, and the seemingly irreconcilable will then turn out to involve no contradiction at all. For this much is certain: grand as is the great conception of Buddhism, majestic as is the idea of the stately rest it would lead us to, the road here below is not one the life of the world can follow. If earthly existence be an evil, then Buddhism will help us ignore it; but if by an impulse we cannot explain we instinctively crave activity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; for to abandon self—egoism, that is, not selfishness is the true vacuum which nature abhors. As for Far Orientals, they themselves furnish proof against themselves. That impersonality is not man's earthly goal they unwittingly bear witness; for they are not of those who will survive. Artistic attractive people that they are, their civilization is like their own tree flowers, beautiful blossoms destined never to bear fruit; for whatever we may conceive the far future of another life to be, the immediate effect of impersonality cannot but be annihilating. If these people continue in their old course, their earthly career is closed. Just as surely as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are these races of the Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before the advancing nations of the West. Vanish they will off the face of the earth and leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers where the day declines. Unless their newly imported ideas really take root, it is from this whole world that Japanese and Koreans, as well as Chinese, will inevitably be excluded. Their Nirvana is already being realized; already it has wrapped Far Eastern Asia in its winding-sheet, the shroud of those whose day was but a dawn, as if in prophetic keeping with the names they gave their homes,—the Land of the Day's Beginning, and the Land of the Morning Calm.
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