VI
JAPAN AND AMERICA
On the reasons, real or alleged, for the hostility of the Californians to the Japanese this is not the place to dwell. At bottom, it is a conflict of civilisations, a conflict which is largely due to ignorance and misunderstanding, and which should never be allowed to develop into avowed antagonism. For with time, patience, and sympathy it will disappear of itself. The patience and sympathy, I think, are not lacking on the side of the Japanese, but they are sadly lacking among the Californians, and indeed among all white men in Western America. The truth is that the Western pioneer knows nothing of Japan and wants to know nothing. And he would be much astonished, not to say indignant, were he told that the civilisation of Japan is higher than that of America. Yet there can, I think, be no doubt that this is the case, if real values be taken as a standard. America, and the "new" countries generally, have contributed, so far, nothing to the world except material prosperity. I do not under-estimate this. It is a great thing to have subdued a continent. And it may be argued that those who are engaged in this task have no energy to spare for other activities. But the Japanese subdued their island centuries, even millenniums, ago. And, having reduced it to as high a state of culture as they required, they began to live – a thing the new countries have not yet attempted.
To live, in the sense in which I am using the term, implies that you reflect life in the forms of art, literature, philosophy, and religion. To all these things the Japanese have made notable contributions; less notable, indeed, than those of China, from whom they derived their inspiration, but still native, genuine, and precious. To take first bare externals, the physical life of the Japanese is beautiful. I read with amazement the other day a quotation from a leading Californian newspaper to the effect that "there is an instinctive sense of physical repugnance on the part of the Western or European races towards the Japanese race"! Had the writer, I wonder, ever been in Japan? Perhaps it would have made no difference to him if he had, for he is evidently one of those who cannot or will not see. But to me the first and chief impression of Japan is the physical attractiveness of the people. The Japanese are perfectly proportioned; their joints, their hands, their feet, their hips are elegant and fine; and they display to the best advantage these natural graces by a costume which is as beautiful as it is simple. To see these perfect figures walking, running, mounting stairs, bathing, even pulling rickshaws, is to receive a constant stream of shocks of surprise and delight. In so much that, after some weeks in the country, I begin to feel "a sense of physical repugnance" to Americans and Europeans – a sense which, if I were as uneducated and inexperienced as the writer in the Argonaut, I should call "instinctive," and make the basis of a campaign of race-hatred. The misfortune is that the Japanese abandon their own dress when they go abroad. And in European dress, which they do not understand, and which conceals their bodies, they are apt to look mean and vulgar. Similarly, in European dress, they lose their own perfect manners and mis-acquire the worst of the West. So that there may be some excuse for feeling "repugnance" to the Japanese abroad, though, of course, it is merely absurd and barbarous to base upon such superficial distaste a policy of persecution and insult.
If we turn from the body to the mind and the spirit, the Japanese show themselves in no respect inferior, and in some important respects superior, to the Americans. New though they are to the whole mental attitude which underlies science and its applications, they have already, in half a century, produced physicians, surgeons, pathologists, engineers who can hold their own with the best of Europe and America. All that the West can do in this, its own special sphere, the Japanese, late-comers though they be, are showing that they can do too. In particular, to apply the only test which the Western nations seem really to accept, they can build ships, train men, organise a campaign, and beat a great Western Power at the West's own game of slaughter. But all this, of science and armaments, big though it bulks in our imagination, is secondary and subordinate in a true estimate of civilisation. The great claim the Japanese may make, as I began by saying, is that they have known how to live; and they have proved that by the only test – by the way they have reflected life.
Japanese literature and art may not be as great as that of Europe; but it exists, whereas that of America and all the new countries is yet to seek. While Europe was still plunged in the darkest of the dark ages, Japanese poets were already producing songs in exquisite response to the beauty of nature, the passion and pathos of human life. From the seventh century on, their painting and their sculpture was reflecting in tender and gracious forms the mysteries of their faith. Their literature and their art changed its content and its form with the centuries, but it continued without a break, in a stream of genuine inspiration, down to the time when the West forced open the doors of Japan to the world. From that moment, under the new influences, it has sickened and declined. But what a record! And a record that is also an incontrovertible proof that the Japanese belong to the civilised nations – the nations that can live and express life.
But perhaps this test may be rejected. Morals, it may be urged, is the touchstone of civilisation, not art. Well, take morals. The question is a large one; but, summarily, where do the Japanese fail, as compared with the Western nations? Is patriotism the standard? In this respect what nation can compete with them? Is it courage? What people are braver? Is it industry? Who is more industrious? It is their very industry that has aroused the jealous fears of the Californians. Is it family life? Where, outside the East, is found such solidarity as in Japan? Is it sexual purity? On that point, what Western nation can hold up its head? Is it honesty? What of the honesty of the West? No; no Westerner, knowing the facts, could for a moment maintain that, all round and on the whole, the morals of the Japanese are inferior to those of Europe or America. It would probably be easier to maintain the opposite. Judged by every real test the Japanese civilisation is not lower, it is higher than that of any of the new countries who refuse to permit the Japanese to live among them.
That, I admit, does not settle the question. Competent and impartial men like Admiral Mahan, who would admit all that I have urged, still maintain that the Japanese ought not to be allowed to settle in the West. This conclusion I do not now discuss. The point I wish to make is that the question can never be fairly faced, in a dry light, and with reference only to the simple facts, until the prejudice is broken up and destroyed that the Japanese, and all other Orientals, are "inferior" races. It is this prejudice which distorts all the facts and all the values, which makes Californians and British Columbians and Australians sheerly unreasonable, and causes them to jump at one argument after another, each more fallacious than the last, to defend an attitude which at bottom is nothing but the childish and ignorant hatred of the uncultivated man for everything strange. If the Japanese had had white skins, should we ever have heard of the economic argument? And should we ever have been presented with that new shibboleth "unassimilable"?
VII
HOME
Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London! What a crescendo of life! What a quickening of the flow! What a gathering intensity! "Whatever else we may think of the West," I said to the young French artist, "it is, at any rate, the centre of life." "Yes," he replied, "but the curious thing is that that Life produces only Death. Dead things, and dead people." I reflected. Yes! The things certainly were dead. Look at the Louvre! Look at the Madeleine! Look at any of the streets! Machine-men had made it all, not human souls. The men were dead, then, too? "Certainly!" he insisted. "Their works are a proof. Where there is life there is art. And there is no art in the modern world – neither in the East nor in the West." "Then what is this that looks like Life?" I said, looking at the roaring streets. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "Steam."
With that in my mind, I crossed to England, and forgot criticism and speculation in the gleam of the white cliffs, in the trim hedgerows and fields, in the sound of English voices and the sight of English faces. In London it was the same. The bright-cheeked messenger boys, the discreetly swaggering chauffeurs, the quiet, competent young men in City offices who reassured me about my baggage, the autumn sun on the maze of misty streets, the vast picturesqueness of London, its beauty as of a mountain or the sea, fairly carried me off my feet. And passing St. Paul's – "Dead," I muttered, as I looked at its derivative facade, – I went in to take breath. From the end of the vast, cold space came the dreary wail I remembered so well. I had heard Church music at Moscow, and knew what it ought to be. But the tremendous passion of that Eastern plain-song would have offended these discreet walls. I was in a "sacred edifice"; and with a pang of regret I recalled the wooden shrines of Japan under the great trees, the solemn Buddhas, and the crowds of cheerful worshippers. I walked down the empty nave and came under the dome. Then something happened – the thing that always happens when one comes into touch with the work of a genius. And Wren's dome proves that he was that. I sat down, and the organ began to play; or rather, the dome began to sing. And down the stream of music floated in fragments visions of my journey – Indians nude like bronzes, blue-coated Chinese, white robes and bare limbs from Japan, plains of corn, plains of rice, plains of scorched grass; snow-peaks under the stars, volcanoes, green and black; huge rivers, tumbling streams, waterfalls, lakes, the ocean; hovels and huts of wood or sun-dried bricks, thatched or tiled; marble palaces and baths; red lacquer, golden tiles; saints, kings, conquerors, and, enduring or worshipping these, a myriad generations of peasants through long millenniums, toiling, suffering, believing, in one unchanging course of life, before the dawn of history on and down to here and now. As they were, so they are; and I heard them sound as with the drone of Oriental music. Then above that drone something new appeared. Late in time, Western history emerged, and – astonishing thing – began to move and change! "Why," I said, "there's something trying to happen! What is it? Is there going to be a melody?" There was not one. But there was – has the reader ever heard the second – or is it the third? – overture to "Leonora"? A scale begins to run up, first on the violins; then one by one the other instruments join in, till the great basses are swept into the current and run and scale too. So it was here. The West began; but the East caught it up. The unchanging drone began to move and flow. Faster and faster, louder and louder, more and more intensely, crying and flaming towards – what? Beethoven knew, and put it into his music. We cannot put it into ideas or words. We can see the problem, not the solution; and the problem is this. To reconcile the Western flight down Time with the Eastern rest in Eternity; the Western multiformity with the Eastern identity; the Western energy with the Eastern peace. For God is neither Time nor Eternity, but Time in Eternity; neither One nor Many, but One in Many; neither Spirit nor Matter, but Matter-Spirit. That the great artists know, and the great saints; the modern artists and the modern saints, who have been or who will be. Goethe was one; Beethoven was one; and there will be greater, when the contact between East and West becomes closer, and the sparks from pole to pole fly faster.
I had dropped into mere thinking, and realised that the organ had stopped. I left the great church and came out upon the back of Queen Anne, which made me laugh. Still, it was quite religious; so were the 'buses, and the motor-cars, and the shops and offices, and the Law Courts, and the top-hats, and the crossing-sweepers. "Dear people," I said, "you are not dead, any more than I am. You think you are, as I too often do. When you feel dead you should go to church; but not in a 'sacred edifice.' Beethoven, even in the Queen's Hall, is better."
PART IV
AMERICA
I
THE "DIVINE AVERAGE"
The great countries of the East have each a civilisation that is original, if not independent. India, China, Japan, each has a peculiar outlook on the world. Not so America, at any rate in the north. America, we might say, does not exist; there exists instead an offshoot of Europe. Nor does an "American spirit" exist; there exists instead the spirit of the average Western man. Americans are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Putting aside the negroes and a handful of orientals, there is nothing to be found here that is not to be found in Western Europe; only here what thrives is not what is distinctive of the different European countries, but what is common to them all. What America does, not, of course, in a moment, but with incredible rapidity, is to obliterate distinctions. The Scotchman, the Irishman, the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, even, I suppose, the Czech, drops his costume, his manner, his language, his traditions, his beliefs, and retains only his common Western humanity. Transported to this continent all the varieties developed in Europe revert to the original type, and flourish in unexampled vigour and force. It is not a new type that is evolved; it is the fundamental type, growing in a new soil, in luxuriant profusion. Describe the average Western man and you describe the American; from east to west, from north to south, everywhere and always the same – masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic, at once good-natured and brutal, kind if you do not cross him, ruthless if you do, greedy, ambitious, self-reliant, active for the sake of activity, intelligent and unintellectual, quick-witted and crass, contemptuous of ideas but amorous of devices, valuing nothing but success, recognising nothing but the actual, Man in the concrete, undisturbed by spiritual life, the master of methods and slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naïf, precociously accomplished brute.
One does not then find in America anything one does not find in Europe; but one finds in Europe what one does not find in America. One finds, as well as the average, what is below and what is above it. America has, broadly speaking, no waste products. The wreckage, everywhere evident in Europe, is not evident there. Men do not lose their self-respect, they win it; they do not drop out, they work in. This is the great result not of American institutions or ideas, but of American opportunities. It is the poor immigrant who ought to sing the praises of this continent. He alone has the proper point of view; and he, unfortunately, is dumb. But often, when I have contemplated with dreary disgust, in the outskirts of New York, the hideous wooden shanties planted askew in wastes of garbage, and remembered Naples or Genoa or Venice, suddenly it has been borne in upon me that the Italians living there feel that they have their feet on the ladder leading to paradise; that for the first time they have before them a prospect and a hope; and that while they have lost, or are losing, their manners, their beauty and their charm, they have gained something which, in their eyes, and perhaps in reality, more than compensates for losses they do not seem to feel, they have gained self-respect, independence, and the allure of the open horizon. "The vision of America," a friend writes, "is the vision of the lifting up of the millions." This, I believe, is true, and it is America's great contribution to civilisation. I do not forget it; but neither shall I dwell upon it; for though it is, I suppose, the most important thing about America, it is not what I come across in my own experience. What strikes more often and more directly home to me is the other fact that America, if she is not burdened by masses lying below the average, is also not inspired by an élite rising above it. Her distinction is the absence of distinction. No wonder Walt Whitman sang the "Divine Average." There was nothing else in America for him to sing. But he should not have called it divine; he should have called it "human, all too human."
Or is it divine? Divine somehow in its potentialities? Divine to a deeper vision than mine? I was writing this at Brooklyn, in a room that looks across the East River to New York. And after putting down those words, "human, all too human," I stepped out on to the terrace. Across the gulf before me went shooting forward and back interminable rows of fiery shuttles; and on its surface seemed to float blazing basilicas. Beyond rose into the darkness a dazzling tower of light, dusking and shimmering, primrose and green, up to a diadem of gold. About it hung galaxies and constellations, outshining the firmament of stars; and all the air was full of strange voices, more than human, ingeminating Babylonian oracles out of the bosom of night. This is New York. This it is that the average man has done, he knows not why; this is the symbol of his work, so much more than himself, so much more than what seems to be itself in the common light of day. America does not know what she is doing, neither do I know, nor any man. But the impulse that drives her, so mean and poor to the critic's eye, has perhaps more significance in the eye of God; and the optimism of this continent, so seeming-frivolous, is justified, may be, by reason lying beyond its ken.
II
A CONTINENT OF PIONEERS
The American, I said, in the previous letter, is the average Western man. It should be added, he is the average man in the guise of pioneer. Much that surprises or shocks Europeans in the American character is to be explained, I believe, by this fact. Among pioneers the individual is everything and the society nothing. Every man relies on himself and on his personal relations. He is a friend, and an enemy; he is never a citizen. Justice, order, respect for law, honesty even and honour are to him mere abstract names; what is real is intelligence and force, the service done or the injury inflicted, the direct emotional reaction to persons and deeds. And still, as it seems to the foreign observer, even in the long-settled east, still more in the west, this attitude prevails. To the American politician or business man, that a thing is right or wrong, legal or illegal, seems a pale and irrelevant consideration. The real question is, will it pay? will it please Theophilus P. Polk or vex Harriman Q. Kunz? If it is illegal, will it be detected? If detected, will it be prosecuted? What are our resources for evading or defeating the law? And all this with good temper and good conscience. What stands in the way, says the pioneer, must be swept out of it; no matter whether it be the moral or the civil law, a public authority or a rival in business. "The strong business man" has no use for scruples. Public or social considerations do not appeal to him. Or if they do present themselves, he satisfies himself with the belief that, from activities so strenuous and remarkable as his, Good must result to the community. If he break the law, that is the fault of the law, for being stupid and obstructive; if he break individuals, that is their fault for being weak. Vae victis! Never has that principle, or rather instinct, ruled more paramount than it does in America.
To say this, is to say that American society is the most individualistic in the modern world. This follows naturally from the whole situation of the country. The pioneer has no object save to get rich; the government of pioneers has no object save to develop the country quickly. To this object everything is sacrificed, including the interests of future generations. All new countries have taken the most obvious and easy course. They have given away for nothing, or for a song, the whole of their natural resources to anybody who will undertake to exploit them. And those who have appropriated this wealth have judged it to be theirs by a kind of natural right. "These farms, mines, forests, oilsprings – of course they are ours. Did not we discover them? Did not we squat upon them? Have we not 'mixed our labour with them'?" If pressed as to the claims of later comers they would probably reply that there remains "as much and as good" for others. And this of course is true for a time; but for a very short time, even when it is a continent that is being divided up. Practically the whole territory of the United States is now in private ownership. Still, the owners have made such good use of their opportunities that they have created innumerable opportunities for non-owners. Artisans get good wages; lawyers make fortunes; stock and share holders get high dividends. Every one feels that he is nourishing, and flourishing by his own efforts. He has no need to combine with his fellows; or, if he does combine, is ready to desert them in a moment when he sees his own individual chance.
But this is only a phase; and inevitably, by the logic of events, there supervenes upon it another on which, it would appear, America is just now entering. With all her natural resources distributed among individuals or corporations, and with the tide of immigration unchecked, she begins to feel the first stress of the situation of which the tension in Europe has already become almost intolerable. It is the situation which cannot fail to result from the system of private property and inheritance established throughout the Western world. Opportunities diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste of wage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of property-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; and substantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration and simplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians. American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of European society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is a repetition of the old on a larger scale. And, curiously, she is less "new" than the other new countries. Australia and New Zealand for years past have been trying experiments in social policy; they are determined to do what they can to prevent the recurrence there of the European situation. But in America, there is no sign of such tendencies. The political and social philosophy of the United States is still that of the early English individualists. And, no doubt, there are adequate causes, if not good reasons for this. The immense wealth and size of the country, the huge agricultural population, the proportionally smaller aggregation in cities has maintained in the mass of the people what I have called the "pioneer" attitude. Opportunity has been, and still is, more open than in any other country; and, in consequence, there has hardly emerged a definite "working class" with a class consciousness. This, however, is a condition that cannot be expected to continue. America will develop on the lines of Europe, because she has European institutions; and "labour" will assert itself more and more as an independent factor in politics.
Whether it will assert itself successfully is another matter. At present, as is notorious, American politics are controlled by wealth, more completely, perhaps, than those of any other country, even of England. The "corporations" make it a main part of their business to capture Congress, the Legislatures, the Courts and the city governments; and they are eminently successful. The smallest country town has its "boss," in the employ of the Railway; the Public Service Corporations control the cities; and the protected interests dominate the Senate. Business governs America; and business does not include labour. In no civilised country except Japan is labour-legislation so undeveloped as in the States; in none is capital so uncontrolled; in none is justice so openly prostituted to wealth. America is the paradise of plutocracy; for the rich there enjoy not only a real power but a social prestige such as can hardly have been accorded to them even in the worst days of the Roman Empire. Great fortunes and their owners are regarded with a respect as naïf and as intense as has ever been conceded to birth in Europe. No American youth of ambition, I am told, leaves college with any less or greater purpose in his heart than that of emulating Mr. Carnegie or Mr. Rockefeller. And, on the other hand, it must be conceded, rich men feel an obligation to dispose of their wealth for public purposes, to a degree quite unknown in Europe. By these lavish gifts the people are dazzled. They feel that the millionaire has paid his ransom; and are ready to forgive irregularities in the process of acquiring wealth when they are atoned for by such splendid penance. Thus the rich man in America comes to assume the position of a kind of popular dictator. He is admired on account of his prowess and forgiven on account of his beneficence. And, since every one feels that one day he may have the chance of imitating him, no one judges him too severely. He is regarded not as the "exploiter," the man grown fat on the labour of others. Rather he is the type, the genius of the American people; and they point to him with pride as "one of our strong men," "one of our conservative men of business."
Individualism, then, is stronger and deeper rooted in America than elsewhere. And, it must be added, socialism is weaker. It is an imported article, and it does not thrive on the new soil. The formulæ of Marx are even less congenial to the American than to the English mind; and American conditions have not yet given rise to a native socialism, based on local conditions and adapted to local habits of thought. Such a native socialism, I believe, is bound to come before long, perhaps is arising even now. But I would not hazard the assertion that it is likely to prevail. America, it would seem, stands at the parting of the ways. Either she may develop on democratic lines; and Democracy, as I think, demonstrably implies some kind of socialism. Or she may fossilise in the form of her present Plutocracy, and realise that new feudalism of industry which was dreamt of by Saint-Simon, by Comte, and by Carlyle. It would be a strange consummation, but stranger things have happened; and it seems more probable that this should happen in America than that it should happen in any European country. It is an error to think of America as democratic; her Democracy is all on the surface. But in Europe, Democracy is penetrating deeper and deeper. And, in particular, there can be little doubt that England is now more democratic than the United States.