Appearances: Being Notes of Travel

This, I believe, is one reason for the sterility of America in Art. But it is not the only one. Literature and Art in Europe rest on a long tradition which has not only produced books and pictures, but has left its mark on the language, the manners, the ideas, the architecture, the physical features of the country. The books and the pictures can be transplanted, but the rest cannot. Thus, even though in every art the technical tradition has been interrupted, there remains in Europe what I will call the tradition of feeling; and it is this that is absent in America. Art in Europe is rooted; and there still persists into the present something of the spirit which fostered it in the past. Not only is Nature beautiful, she is humanised by the works of Man. Politics are mellowed by history, business tempered by culture. Classes are more segregated, types more distinct, ideals and aims more varied. The ghost of a spiritual life still hovers over the natural, shadowing it with the beat of solemn wings. There are finer overtones for a sensitive ear to catch; rainbow hues where the spray of life goes up. All this, it is true, is disappearing in Europe; but in America it has never existed. A sensitive European, travelling there, feels at once starved and flayed. Nothing nourishes, and everything hurts. There is natural beauty, but it has not been crowned and perfected by the hand of man. Whatever he has touched he has touched only to defile. There is one pursuit, commerce; one type, the business man; one ideal, that of increasing wealth. Monotony of talk, monotony of ideas, monotony of aim, monotony of outlook on the world. America is industrialism pure and simple; Europe is industrialism superimposed on feudalism; and, for the arts, the difference is vital.

But the difference is disappearing. Not that America is becoming like Europe, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of the imitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes producing similar results. The disease – or shall we say, to use a neutral term – the diathesis of commercialism found in America an open field and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course was hampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it is spreading none the less surely. And the question arises – In the future, when the European environment is as unfavourable to Art as the American, will there be, in the West, any Art at all? I do not know; no one knows; but there is this to remark. What I am calling commercialism is the infancy, not the maturity of a civilisation. The revolution in morals, in manners, and in political and social institutions which must accompany the revolution in industry, has hardly yet begun its course. It has gone further in Europe than in America; so that, oddly enough, Europe is at once behind and in front of this continent, overlaps it, so to speak, at both ends. But it has not gone very far even in Europe; and for generations, I conceive, political and social issues will draw away much of the creative talent that might have been available for Art. In the end, one may suppose, something like a stable order will arise; an order, that is, in which people will feel that their institutions correspond sufficiently with their inner life, and will be able to devote themselves with a free mind to reflecting their civilisation in Art.

But will their civilisation be of a kind to invite such reflection? It will be, if the present movement is not altogether abortive, a civilisation of security, equity, and peace; where there is no indigence, no war, and comparatively little disease. Such society, certainly, will not offer a field for much of the kind of Art that has been or is now being produced. The primitive folk-song, the epic of war, the novel or play inspired by social strife, will have passed irrecoverably away. And more than that, it is sometimes urged, there will be such a dearth of those tense moments which alone engender the artistic mood, that Art of any kind will have become impossible. If that were true, it would not, in my opinion, condemn the society. Art is important, but there are things more important; and among those things are justice and peace. I do not, however, accept the view that a peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual conflict; that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion to love, would begin at last to take their proper place in human life; and would engender the forms of Art appropriate to their expression.

To return to America, what I am driving at is this. America may have an Art, and a great Art. But it will be after she has had her social revolution. Her Art has first to touch ground; and before it can do that, the ground must be fit for it to touch. It was not till the tenth century that the seed of Mediæval Art could be sown; it was not till the thirteenth that the flower bloomed. So now, our civilisation is not ripe for its own Art. What America imports from Europe is useless to her. It is torn from its roots; and it is idle to replant it; it will not grow. There must be a native growth, not so much of America, as of the modern era. That growth America, like Europe, must will. She has her prophet of it, Walt Whitman. In the coming centuries it is her work to make his vision real.

CONCLUDING ESSAY

The preceding pages were written in the course of travel and convey the impressions and reflections of the moment. Whatever interest they may have depends upon this immediacy, and for that reason I have reprinted them substantially as they first appeared. Perhaps, however, some concluding reflections of a more considered nature may be of some interest to my readers. I do not advance them in a dogmatic spirit nor as final judgments, but as the first tentative results of my gropings into a large and complicated subject. I will ask the reader, therefore, be he Western or Oriental, to follow me in a spirit at once critical and sympathetic, challenging my suggestions as much as he will, but rather as a fellow-seeker than as an opponent bent upon refutation. For I am trying to comprehend rather than to judge, and to comprehend as impartially as is compatible with having an attitude of one's own at all.

Ever since Mr. Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous line it has become a commonplace of popular thought in England and America that there is an East and a West, and an impassable gulf between them. But Mr. Kipling was thinking of India, and India is not all the East: he was thinking of England, and England is not all the West. As soon as one approaches the question more particularly it becomes a complicated matter to decide whether there is really an East and a West, and what either stands for. That there is a West, in a real sense, with a unity of its own, is, I think, true. But it must be limited in time to the last two centuries, and in space to the countries of Western Europe and the continent of America. So understood, the West forms, in all the most important respects, a homogeneous system. True, it is divided into different nations, speaking different languages, and pursuing different, and often conflicting, policies; and these distinctions are still so important, that they colour our fears and hopes and sympathies, and take form in the burden of armaments and the menace of war. Nevertheless, seen in the perspective of history, they are survivals, atrophying and disappearing. Behind and despite of them there is a common Western mind and a common Western organisation. Finance is cosmopolitan; industry is cosmopolitan; trade is cosmopolitan. There is one scientific method, and the results achieved by it are common. There is one system of industry, that known as Capitalism; and the problems arising from it and the solutions propounded appear alike in every nation. There is one political tendency, or fact, that of popular government. There are cognate aims and similar achievements in literature and art. There is, in brief, a Western movement, a Western problem, a Western mentality; and the particular happenings of particular nations are all parts of this one happening. Nor is this all. There is in the West a common religion. I do not refer to Christianity, for the religion I mean is held by hundreds and thousands who are not Christians, and indeed does not very readily find in Christianity an expression at once coherent and pure. It has not been formulated in a creed; but it is to be felt and heard in all the serious work and all the serious thought of the West. It is the religion of Good and Evil, of Time and the process in Time. If it tried to draw up a confession of faith perhaps it would produce, as its first attempt, something of this kind: —

"I believe in the ultimate distinction between Good and Evil, and in a real process in a real Time. I believe it to be my duty to increase Good and diminish Evil; I believe that in doing this I am serving the purpose of the world. I know this; I do not know anything else; and I am reluctant to put questions to which I have no answer, and to which I do not believe that anyone has an answer. Action, as defined above, is my creed. Speculation weakens action. I do not wish to speculate, I wish to live. And I believe the true life to be the life I have described."

In saying that this is the real creed of the modern Western man I do not pretend that he always knows or would admit it to be so. But if his actions, his words, and his thoughts be sympathetically interpreted, where all are at their best, I think they will be found to imply something of this kind. And this attitude I call religious, not merely ethical, because of its conviction that the impulse towards Good is of the essence of the World, not only of men, or of Man. To believe this is an act of faith, not of reason; though it is not contrary to reason, as no faith should be or long can be. Many men do not believe it, for many are not religious; others, while believing it, may believe also many other things. But it is the irreducible minimum of religion in the modern West, the justification of our life, the faith of our works. I call it the Religion of Time, and distinguish it thus from the Religion of Eternity.

In this sense, then, this profound sense, of a common aim and a common motive, there is really a West. Is there also an East? That is not so clear. In some important respects, no doubt, the Eastern civilisations are alike. They are still predominantly agricultural. Their industry is manual not mechanical. Their social unit is the extended family. To travel in the East is to realise that life on the soil and in the village is there still the normal life, as it has been almost everywhere and always, throughout civilisation, until the last century in the West. But though there is thus in the East a common way of life, there is not a common organisation nor a common spirit. Economically, the great Eastern countries are still independent of one another. Each lives for the most part by and on itself. And their intellectual and spiritual intercourse is now (though it was not in the past) as negligible as their economic commerce. The influence that is beginning to be strong upon them all is that of Western culture; and if they become alike in their outlook on life, it will be by assimilating that. But, at present, they are not alike. It is easy, in this matter, to be deceived by the outward forms of religion. Because Buddhism originated in India and spread to China and Japan, because Japan took Confucian ideals from China, it is natural to conclude that there is a common religious spirit throughout the East, or the Far East. But one might as reasonably infer that the spirit of the christianised Teutons was the same as that of the Jews or of the Christians in the East. Nations borrow religions, but they shape them according to their own genius. And if I am not very much mistaken the outlook of India is, and always has been, radically distinct from and even opposed to that of China or Japan. These latter countries, indeed, I believe, are far closer to the West than they are to India. Let me explain.

India is the true origin and home of what I have called the religion of Eternity. That idea seems to have gone out from her to the rest of the world. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and passion. Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In India they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. No society, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activity in Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the direct and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, would bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the very physical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal was first conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the passion to realise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the date of the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method of realisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of the temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Western influences have been excluded. Let me illustrate from the words of Sri Ramakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late in the nineteenth century.

First, for the claim to pass directly into union with the Eternal:

"I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! Why then should I reason? I do actually see that it is the Absolute Who has become all these things about us; it is He who appears as the finite soul and the phenomenal world. One must have such an awakening of the Spirit within to see this Reality… Spiritual awakening must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of this world."5

And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi is merely one of intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, or super-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains many accounts of its effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them:

"He is now in a state of Samadhi, the superconscious or God-conscious state. The body is again motionless. The eyes are again fixed! The boys only a moment ago were laughing and making merry! Now they all look grave. Their eyes are steadfastly fixed on the master's face. They marvel at the wonderful change that has come over him. It takes him long to come back to the sense world. His limbs now begin to lose their stiffness. His face beams with smiles, the organs of sense begin to come back each to its own work. Tears of joy stand at the corners of his eyes. He chants the sacred name of Rama."6

The object, then, of this saint, and one he claims to have attained, is to come into union with the Infinite by a process which removes him altogether from contact with this world and from all possibility of action in it. This world, in fact, is to him, as to all Indian saints and most Indian philosophers, phenomenal and unreal. Of the speculative problems raised by this conception I need not speak here. But it belongs to my purpose to bring out its bearing upon conduct. All conduct depends upon the conception of Good and Evil. Anti-moralists, like Nietzsche, assume and require these ideas, just as much as moralists; they merely attempt to give them a new content. If conduct is to have any meaning, Good and Evil must be real in a real world. If they are held to be appearances conduct becomes absurd. What now is Sri Ramakrishna's view of this matter? The whole life that we Western men call real is to him a mere game played by and for the sake of God, or, to use his phrase, of the Divine Mother. For her pleasure she keeps men bound to Time, instead of free in Eternity. For her pleasure, therefore, she creates and maintains Evil. I quote the passage:

"My Divine Mother is always in Her sportive mood. The world, indeed, is Her toy. She will have Her own way. It is Her pleasure to take out of the prisonhouse and set free only one or two among a hundred thousand of her children!

"A Brahmo: Sir, She can if She pleases set everybody free. Why is it then, that She has bound us hand and foot with the chains of the world?

"Sri Ramakrishna: Well, I suppose it is her pleasure. It is her pleasure to go on with Her sport with all these beings that She has brought into existence. The player amongst the children that touches the person of the Grand-dame, the same need no longer run about. He cannot take any further part in the exciting play of Hide and Seek that goes on.

"The others who have not touched the goal must run about and play to the great delight of the Grand-dame."7

Thus the Indian saint. Let us now try to bring his conception into relation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In a railway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowly burned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his misery. What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo innocent natives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tortured, and murdered, that shareholders in Europe may receive high dividends. What is this? The sport of God! In the richest countries of the West a great proportion of those who produce the wealth receive less than the wages which would suffice to keep them in bare physical health. What is this? Once more the sport of God! One might multiply examples, but it would be idle. No Western man could for a moment entertain the view of Sri Ramakrishna. To him such a God would be a mere devil. The Indian position, no doubt, is a form of idealism; but an idealism conditioned by defective experience of the life in Time. The saint has chosen another experience. But clearly he has not transcended ours, he has simply left it out.

Now I am aware that it will be urged by some of the most sincere representatives of religion in India that Sri Ramakrishna does not typify the Indian attitude. Perhaps not, if we take contemporary India. But then contemporary India has been profoundly influenced by Western thought; modern Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, could hardly have thought and felt as they did, and do, were it not for this influence. The following poem of Rabindranath Tagore may aptly symbolise this breaking in of the West upon the East, though I do not know that that was the author's intention:

"With days of hard travail I raised a temple. It had no doors or windows, its walls were thickly built with massive stones.I forgot all else, I shunned all the world, I gazed in rapt contemplation at the image I had set upon the altar.It was always night inside, and lit by the lamps of perfumed oil. The ceaseless smoke of incense wound my heart in its heavy coils.Sleepless, I carved on the walls fantastic figures in mazy bewildering lines – winged horses, flowers with human faces, women with limbs like serpents.No passage was left anywhere through which could enter the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, or the hum of the busy village.The only sound that echoed in its dark dome was that of incantations which I chanted.My mind became keen and still like a pointed flame, my senses swooned in ecstasy.I knew not how time passed till the thunderstone had struck the temple, and a pain stung me through the heart.The lamp looked pale and ashamed; the carvings on the walls, like chained dreams, stared meaningless in the light, as they would fain hide themselves.I looked at the image on the altar. I saw it smiling and alive with the living touch of God. The night I had imprisoned spread its wings and vanished."8

The closed temple, I believe, is a true image of the spiritual life of India, if not at all times, at any rate for many centuries previous to the advent of the English. Everything seems to point to this – the symbolic character of Indian art; the absence of history and the prevalence of religious legend; the cult of the fakir and the wandering ascetic. In India one feels religion as one feels it nowhere else, unless it were in Russia. But the religion one feels is peculiar. It is the religion that denies the value of experience in Time. It is the religion of the Eternal.

But, it will be urged, how can that be, when India continues to produce her teeming millions; when these perforce live their brief lives in a constant and often vain struggle for a bare livelihood; when, in order to live at all, it is necessary at every point to be straining vitality in the pursuit of temporal goods or the avoidance of temporal evils?

I make no attempt to disguise or to weaken this paradox. But I suggest that it is but one of the many paradoxes set up by the conflict between men's instinct for life and their conscious beliefs. Indians live not because they believe in life, but because they cannot help it. Their hold on life is certainly less than that of Western men. Thus I have been told by administrators of famine relief or of precautions against plague, that what they have to contend with is not so much the resistance as the indifference of the population. "Why worry us?" they say, in effect; "life is not worth the trouble. Let us die and be rid of it." Life is an evil, that is the root feeling of India; and the escape is either, for the mass, by death; or for the men of spiritual genius, by a flight to the Eternal. How this attitude has arisen I do not here seek to determine; race, climate, social and political conditions, all no doubt have played their part. The spiritual attitude is probably an effect, rather than a cause, of an enfeebled grip on life. But no one, I think, who knows India, would dispute that this attitude is a fact; and it is a fact that distinguishes India not only from the West but from the Far East.

For China and Japan, though they have had, and to a less extent still have, religion, are not, in the Indian sense, religious. The Chinese, in particular, strike one as secular and practical; quite as secular and practical as the English. They have had Buddhism, as we have had Christianity; but no one who can perceive and understand would say that their outlook is determined by Buddhism, any more than ours is by Christianity. It is Confucianism that expresses the Chinese attitude to life, whenever the Chinese soul, becoming aware of itself, looks out from the forest of animistic beliefs in which the mass of the people wander. And Confucianism is perhaps the best and purest expression of the practical reason that has ever been formulated. Family duty, social duty, political duty, these are the things on which it lays stress. And when the Chinese spirit seeks escape from these primary preoccupations, it finds its freedom in an art that is closer to the world of fact, imaginatively conceived, than that of any other race. Chinese art purifies itself from symbolism to become interpretation; whereas in India the ocean of symbolism never ceases to roll over the drowning surface of the phenomenal world. Chinese literature, again, has this same hold upon life. It is such as Romans or Englishmen, if equally gifted, might have written. Much of it, indeed, is stupidly and tediously didactic. But where it escapes into poetry it is a poetry like Wordsworth's, revealing the beauty of actual things, rather than weaving across them an embroidery of subjective emotions The outlook of China is essentially the outlook of the West, only more sane, more reasonable, more leisured and dignified. Positivism and Humanity, the dominant forms of thought and feeling in the West, have controlled Chinese civilisation for centuries. The Chinese have built differently from ourselves and on a smaller scale, with less violence and less power; but they have built on the same foundations.

And Japan, too, at bottom is secular. Her true religion is that of the Emperor and his divine ancestors. Her strongest passion is patriotism. A Japanese, like an Indian, is always ready to die. But he dies for the splendours and glories of this world of sense. It is not because he has so little hold on life, but because he has so much, that he so readily throws it away. The Japanese are unlike the Chinese and unlike the Europeans and Americans; but their outlook is similar. They believe in the world of time and change; and because of this attitude, they and the rest of the world stand together like a mountain in the sun, contemplating uneasily that other mysterious peak, shrouded in mist, which is India.