VII
A SACRED MOUNTAIN
It was midnight when the train set us down at Tai-an-fu. The moon was full. We passed across fields, through deserted alleys where sleepers lay naked on the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by halls and pavilions, by shimmering tree-shadowed spaces, up and down steps, and into a court where cypresses grew. We set up our beds in a verandah, and woke to see leaves against the morning sky. We explored the vast temple and its monuments – iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tablet of the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stones inscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after hall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling walls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent of Tai Shan, the most sacred mountain in China, the most frequented, perhaps, in the world. There, according to tradition, legendary emperors worshipped God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, and sighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. The great Chin-Shih-Huang was there in the third century B.C. Chien Lung in the eighteenth century covered it with inscriptions. And millions of humble pilgrims for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep and narrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no détours, but follows straight up the bed of a stream, and the greater part of the five thousand feet is ascended by stone steps. A great ladder of eighteen flights climbs the last ravine, and to see it from below, sinuously mounting the precipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, is enough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least were glad to be chaired some part of the way. A wonderful way! On the lower slopes it passes from portal to portal, from temple to temple. Meadows shaded with aspen and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool to green pool. Higher up are scattered pines Else the rocks are bare – bare, but very beautiful, with that significance of form which I have found everywhere in the mountains in China.
To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. All the way up the rocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctity of the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially, by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. They are models, one is told, of caligraphy as well as of literary composition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not be the one without the other. The very names of favourite spots are poems in themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phœnixes"; another "the fountain of the white cranes." A rock is called "the tower of the quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of the clouds." More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a rock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles," because there some mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarly Chinese!
It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple that crowns it, dedicated to Yü Huang, the "Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; and his image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But we did not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disc, straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the river, five thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim grey levels.
Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after range of lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, with half a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full in view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the great Tang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to drink and make verses. They are still known to tradition as the "six idlers of the bamboo grove"; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upon their symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours passed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There are temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself; to the Lady of the mountain, Pi-hsia-yüen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius – "goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the sky," one inscription calls her – and the kindly mother who gives children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to the Cloud-compeller; to many others. And in all this, is there no room for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or the spirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that some men adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor – is he a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions set up by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run as follows: —
"Without labour, oh Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest things."
"Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world."
"In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord to achieve great works."
These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are as religious as anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of the worshippers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of worshippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and what lies behind it – for the religion of a Wordsworth – they seem to be pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is loveliest – all goes to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in all the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature?
"Great God, I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn."
That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have been wrung from him had he been born in China.
And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of China – "pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the East – assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true – and it is far from being true in any unqualified sense – would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western civilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen, all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent æsthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. It implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the Chinese have written poems in exquisite caligraphy, they will cover the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of temples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in the landscape, they will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they will, because they have done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, our medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of civilising China. Would that China could civilise the West!
PART III
JAPAN
I
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN
Japan, surely, must be a mirage created by enchantment. Nothing so beautiful could be real. Take the west coast of Scotland, bathe it in Mediterranean light and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific. Take the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, and dominate all with the only perfect mountain in the world – a mountain that catches at your breath like a masterpiece of art. Make the copses woods, and the woods forests. For our fields with their hedgerows substitute the vivid green of rice, shining across the gleam of flooded plains. Everywhere let water flow; and at every waterfall and cave erect a little shrine to hallow the spot. Over the whole pour a flood of pure white light, and you have a faint image of Japan. Perhaps it is not, naturally, more beautiful than the British Isles – few countries are. But it is unspoilt by man, or almost so. Osaka, indeed, is as ugly as Manchester, Yokohama as Liverpool. But these are small blots. For the rest, Japan is Japan of the Middle Ages, and lovely as England may have been, when England could still be called merry.
And the people are lovely, too. I do not speak of facial beauty. Some may think, in that respect, the English or the Americans handsomer. But these people have the beauty of life. Instead of the tombstone masques that pass for faces among Anglo-Saxons, they have human features, quick, responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiff integuments, they have active members, for the most bare or moving freely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, machine-like emission of sound they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical. Their children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, so cheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely to walk in the streets and look at them. It is a pure happiness, I might almost say, to look at anyone, so gay is their greeting, so radiant their smile, so full of vitality their gestures. I do not know what they think of the foreigner, but at least they betray no animosity. They let his stiff, ungainly presence move among them unchallenged. Perhaps they are sorry for him; but I think they are never rude. I am speaking, of course, of Old Japan, of the Japan that is all in evidence, if one lands, as I did, in the south, avoids Osaka, and postpones Yokohama and Tokio. It is still the Japan of feudalism; a system in which I, for my part, do not believe; which, in its essence, in Japan as in Europe, was harsh, unjust, and cruel; but which had the art of fostering, or at least of not destroying beauty.
And in this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare with the living-rooms of Japan. Suites of these dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are to be seen in Kyoto and elsewhere. And till I saw them I had no idea how exquisite human life might be made. The Japanese, as is well known, discovered the secret of emptiness. Their rooms consist of a floor of spotless matting, paper walls, and a wooden roof. But the paper walls, in these old palatial rooms, are masterpieces by great artists. From a background of gold-leaf emerge and fade away suggestions of river and coast and hill, of peonies, chrysanthemums, lotuses, of wild geese and swans, of reeds and pools, of all that is elusive and choice in nature; decorations that are also lyric poems, hints of landscape that yet never pretend to be a substitute for the real thing. The real thing is outside, and perhaps it will not intrude; for where we should have glass windows the Japanese have white paper screens. But draw back, if you choose, one of these screens, and you will see a little landscape garden, a little lake, a little bridge, a tiny rockery, a few goldfish, a cluster of irises, a bed of lotus, and, above and beyond, the great woods. These are royal apartments; but all the cost, it will be seen, is lavished on the work of art. The principle is the same in humbler homes.
People who could so devise life, we may be sure, are people with a fineness of perception unknown to the West, unless it were once in ancient Greece. The Japanese indeed, I suspect, are the Greeks of the East. In the theatre at Kyoto this was curiously borne in upon me. On the floor of the house reclined figures in loose robes, bare-necked and barefooted. On the narrow stage were one or two actors, chanting in measured speech, and moving slowly from pose to pose. From boxes on either side of the stage intoned a kind of chorus; and a flute and pizzicato strings accompanied the whole in the solemn strains of some ancient mode. I have seen nothing so like what a Greek play may have been, though doubtless even this was far enough away. And still more was I struck by the resemblance when a comedy succeeded to the tragedy, and I found the young and old Japan confronting one another exactly as the young and old Athens met in debate, two thousand years ago, in the Frogs of Aristophanes. The theme was an ascent of Mount Fuji; the actors two groups of young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they meet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, like those of Aristophanes, were with the old school. It is the pilgrims who reach the top and the modern young women who collapse. And the modern young man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and frightened by a ghost. The playwright had at least Aristophanes' gift of lampoon, though I doubt whether he had a touch of his genius. Perhaps, however, he had a better cause. For, I doubt, modern Japan may deserve lampooning more than the Athens of Aristophanes. For modern Japan is the modern West. And that – well, it seemed to be symbolised to me yesterday in the train. In my carriage were two Japanese. One was loosely wrapt in a kimono, bare throat and feet, fine features, fine gestures, everything aristocratic and distinguished. The other was clad in European dress, sprigged waistcoat, gold watch-chain, a coarse, thick-lipped face, a podgy figure. It was a hot July day, and we were passing through some of the loveliest scenery in the world. He first closed all doors and windows, and then extended himself at full length and went to sleep. There he lay, his great paunch sagging – prosperity exuding from every pore – an emblem and type of what in the West we call a "successful" man. And the other? The other, no doubt, was going downhill. Both, of course, were Japanese types; but the civilisation of the West chose the one and rejected the other. And if civilisation is to be judged, as it fairly may be, by the kind of men it brings to the top, there is much to be said for the point of view of my Tory playwright.
II
A "NO" DANCE
On entering the theatre I was invaded by a sense of serenity and peace. There was no ornament, no upholstery, no superfluity at all. A square building of unvarnished wood; a floor covered with matting, exquisitely clean, and divided into little boxes, or rather trays (so low were the partitions), in which the audience knelt on their heels, beautiful in loose robes; running out from the back wall a square stage, with a roof supported by pillars; a passage on the same level, by which the actors entered, on the left; the screens removed from the outer walls, so that the hall was open to the air, and one looked out on sky and trees, or later on darkness, against which shone a few painted lanterns. Compare this with the Queen's Hall in London, or with any of our theatres, and realise the effect on one's mood of the mere setting of the drama. Drama was it? Or opera? Or what? It is called a "dance." But there was very little dancing. What mainly remains in my mind is a series of visual images, one more beautiful than another; figures seated motionless for minutes, almost for half-hours, with a stillness of statues, not an eyelash shaking; or passing very slowly across the stage, with that movement of bringing one foot up to the other and pausing before the next step which is so ridiculous in our opera, but was here so right and so impressive; or turning slowly, or rising and sitting with immense deliberation; each figure right in its relation to the stage and to the others. All were clothed in stiff brocade, sumptuous but not gorgeous. One or two were masked; and all of them, I felt, ought to have been. The mask, in fact, the use of which in Greek drama I had always felt to be so questionable, was here triumphantly justified. It completed the repudiation of actuality which was the essence of the effect. It was a musical sound, as it were, made visible. It symbolised humanity, but it was not human, still less inhuman. I would rather call it divine. And this whole art of movement and costume required that completion. Once I had seen a mask I missed it in all the characters that were without it.
To me, then, this visual spectacle was the essence of the "No" dance. The dancing itself, when it came, was but a slight intensification of the slow and solemn posing I have described. There was no violence, no leaping, no quick steps; rather a turning and bending, a slow sweep of the arm, a walking a little more rhythmical, on the verge, at most, of running. It was never exciting, but I could not say it was never passionate. It seemed to express a kind of frozen or petrified passion; rather, perhaps, a passion run into a mould of beauty and turned out a statue. I have never seen an art of such reserve and such distinction. "Or of such tediousness," I seem to hear an impatient reader exclaim. Well, let me be frank. Like all Westerners, I am accustomed to life in quick time, and to an art full of episode, of intellectual content, of rapid change and rapid development. I have lost to a great extent that power of prolonging an emotion which seems to be the secret of Eastern art. I am bored – subconsciously, as it were – where an Oriental is lulled into ecstasy. His case is the better. But also, in this matter of the No dance he has me at a disadvantage. In the first place he can understand the words. These, it is true, have far less importance than in a drama of Shakspere. They are only a lyric or narrative accompaniment to the music and the dance. Still they have, one is informed, a beauty much appreciated by Japanese, and one that the stranger, ignorant of the language, misses. And secondly, what is worse, the music failed to move me. Whether this is my own fault, or that of the music, I do not presume to decide, for I do not know whether, as so often is the case, I was defeated by a convention unfamiliar to me, or whether the convention has really become formal and artificial. In any case, after the first shock of interest, I found the music monotonous. It was solemn and religious in character, and reminded me more of Gregorian chants than of anything else. But it had one curious feature which seemed rather to be primitive and orgiastic. The two musicians who played the drums accompanied the performers, almost unceasingly, by a kind of musical ejaculation, starting on a low note and swooping up to a high, long-held falsetto cry. This over and over again, through the dialogue and through the singing. The object, I suppose, and perhaps, to Japanese, the effect, is to sustain a high emotional tone. In my case it failed, as the music generally failed. My interest, as I began by saying, was maintained by the visual beauty; and that must have been very great to be able to maintain itself independently of the words and the music.
As to the drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in which we have come to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction," no knot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession of scenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy, or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be called epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it most obviously differs from the Greek drama. It has no intellectual content, or very little. And, perhaps for that reason, it has had no development, but remains fossilised where it was in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, these actors, I felt, are the only ones who could act Greek drama. They have, I think, quite clearly the same tradition and aim as the Greeks. They desire not to reproduce but to symbolise actuality; and their conception of acting is the very opposite of ours. The last thing they aim at is to be "natural." To be unnatural rather is their object. Hence the costume, hence the mask, hence the movement and gesture. And how effective such "unnaturalness" can be in evoking natural passion only those will understand who have realised how ineffective for that purpose is our "naturalness" when we are concerned with Sophocles or Shakspere. The Japanese have in their No dance a great treasure. For out of it they might, if they have the genius, develop a modern poetic drama. How thankful would hundreds of young men be, starving for poetry in England, if we had as a living tradition anything analogous to work upon!