Chương Chương 10 · A CONSERVATIVE

. A CONSERVATIVE

Amazakaru

Hi no iru kuni ni

Kite wa aredo,

Yamato-nishiki no

Iro wa kawaraji.

I

He was born in a city of the interior, the seat of a daimyo of

three hundred thousand koku, where no foreigner had ever been.

The yashiki of his father, a samurai of high rank, stood within

the outer fortifications surrounding the prince's castle. It was

a spacious yashiki; and behind it and around it were landscape

gardens, one of which contained a small shrine of the god of

armies. Forty years ago there were many such homes. To artist

eyes the few still remaining seem like fairy palaces, and their

gardens like dreams of the Buddhist paradise.

But sons of samurai were severely disciplined in those days; and

the one of whom I write had little time for dreaming. The period

of caresses was made painfully brief for him. Even before he was

invested with his first hakama, or trousers,--a great ceremony in

that epoch,--he was weaned as far as possible from tender

influence, and taught to check the natural impulses of childish

affection. Little comrades would ask him mockingly, "Do you still

need milk?" if they saw him walking out with his mother, although

he might love her in the house as demonstratively as he pleased,

during the hours he could pass by her side. These were not many.

All inactive pleasures were severely restricted by his

discipline; and even comforts, except during illness, were not

allowed him. Almost from the time he could speak he was enjoined

to consider duty the guiding motive of life, self-control the

first requisite of conduct, pain and death matters of no

consequence in the selfish sense.

There was a grimmer side to this Spartan discipline, designed to

cultivate a cold sternness never to be relaxed during youth,

except in the screened intimacy of the home. The boys were inured

to sights of blood. They were taken to witness executions; they

were expected to display no emotion; and they were obliged, on

their return home, to quell any secret feeling of horror by

eating plentifully of rice tinted blood-color by an admixture of

salted plum juice. Even more difficult things might be demanded

of a very young boy,--to go alone at midnight to the

execution-ground, for example, and bring back a head in proof of

courage. For the fear of the dead was held not less contemptible

in a samurai than the fear of man. The samurai child was pledged

to fear nothing. In all such tests, the demeanor exacted was

perfect impassiveness; any swaggering would have been judged

quite as harshly as any sign of cowardice.

As a boy grew up, he was obliged to find his pleasures chiefly in

those bodily exercises which were the samurai's early and

constant preparations for war,--archery and riding, wrestling and

fencing. Playmates were found for him; but these were older

youths, sons of retainers, chosen for ability to assist him in

the practice of martial exercises. It was their duty also to

teach him how to swim, to handle a boat, to develop his young

muscles. Between such physical training and the study of the

Chinese classics the greater part of each day was divided for

him. His diet, though ample, was never dainty; his clothing,

except in time of great ceremony, was light and coarse; and he

was not allowed the use of fire merely to warm himself. While

studying of winter mornings, if his hands became too cold to use

the writing brush, he would be ordered to plunge them into icy

water to restore the circulation; and if his feet were numbed by

frost, he would be told to run about in the snow to make them

warm. Still more rigid was his training in the special etiquette

of the military class, and he was early made to know that the

little sword in his girdle was neither an ornament nor a

plaything. He was shown how to use it, how to take his own life

at a moment's notice, without shrinking, whenever the code of his

class might so order(1).

Also in the matter of religion, the training of a samurai boy was

peculiar. He was educated to revere the ancient gods and the

spirits of his ancestors; he was well schooled in the Chinese

ethics; and he was taught something of Buddhist philosophy and

faith. But he was likewise taught that hope of heaven and fear of

hell were for the ignorant only; and that the superior man should

be influenced in his conduct by nothing more selfish than the

love of right for its own sake, and the recognition of duty as a

universal law.

Gradually, as the period of boyhood ripened into youth, his

conduct was less subjected to supervision. He was left more and

more free to act upon his own judgment,--but with full knowledge

that a mistake would not be forgotten; that a serious offense

would never be fully condoned, and that a well-merited reprimand

was more to be dreaded than death. On the other hand, there were

few moral dangers against which to guard him. Professional vice

was then strictly banished from many of the provincial

castle-towns; and even so much of the non-moral side of life as

might have been reflected in popular romance and drama, a young

samurai could know little about. He was taught to despise that

common literature appealing either to the softer emotions or the

passions, as essentially unmanly reading; and the public theatre

was forbidden to his class(2). Thus, in that innocent provincial

life of Old Japan, a young samurai might grow up exceptionally

pure-minded and simple-hearted.

So grew up the young samurai concerning whom these things are

written,--fearless, courteous, self-denying, despising pleasure,

and ready at an instant's notice to give his life for love,

loyalty, or honor. But though already a warrior in frame and

spirit, he was in years scarcely more than a boy when the country

was first startled by the coming of the Black Ships.

II

The policy of Iyemitsu, forbidding any Japanese to leave the

country under pain of death, had left the nation for two hundred

years ignorant of the outer world. About the colossal forces

gathering beyond seas nothing was known. The long existence of

the Dutch settlement at Nagasaki had in no wise enlightened Japan

as to her true position,--an Oriental feudalism of the sixteenth

century menaced by a Western world three centuries older.

Accounts of the real wonders of that world would have sounded to

Japanese ears like stories invented to please children, or have

been classed with ancient tales of the fabled palaces of Horai.

The advent of the American fleet, "the Black Ships," as they were

then called, first awakened the government to some knowledge of

its own weakness, and of danger from afar.

National excitement at the news of the second coming of the Black

Ships was followed by consternation at the discovery that the

Shogunate confessed its inability to cope with the foreign

powers. This could mean only a peril greater than that of the

Tartar invasion in the days of Hojo Tokimune, when the people had

prayed to the gods for help, and the Emperor himself, at Ise, had

besought the spirits of his fathers. Those prayers had been

answered by sudden darkness, a sea of thunder, and the coming of

that mighty wind still called Kami-kaze,--"the Wind of the Gods,"

by which the fleets of Kublai Khan were given to the abyss. Why

should not prayers now also be made? They were, in countless

homes and at thousands of shrines. But the Superior Ones gave

this time no answer; the Kami-kaze did not come. And the samurai

boy, praying vainly before the little shrine of Hachiman in his

father's garden, wondered if the gods had lost their power, or if

the people of the Black Ships were under the protection of

stronger gods.

(1) "Is that really the head of your father?" a prince once asked

of a samurai boy only seven years old. The child at once realized

the situation. The freshly-severed head set before him was not

his father's: the daimyo had been deceived, but further deception

was necessary. So the lad, after having saluted the head with

every sign of reverential grief, suddenly cut out his own bowels.

All the prince's doubts vanished before that bloody proof of

filial piety; the outlawed father was able to make good his

escape, and the memory of the child is still honored in Japanese

drama and poetry.

(2) Samurai women, in some province, at least, could go to the

public theatre. The men could not,--without committing a breach

of good manners. But in samurai homes, or within the grounds of

the yashiki, some private performances of a particular character

were given. Strolling players were the performers. I know several

charming old samurai who have never been to a public theatre in

their lives, and refuse all invitations to witness a performance.

They still obey the rules of their samurai education.

III

It soon became evident that the foreign "barbarians" were not to

be driven away. Hundreds had come, from the East as well as from

the West; and all possible measures for their protection had been

taken; and they had built queer cities of their own upon Japanese

soil. The government had even commanded that Western knowledge

was to be taught in all schools; that the study of English was to

be made an important branch of public education; and that public

education itself was to be remodeled upon Occidental lines. The

government had also declared that the future of the country would

depend upon the study and mastery of the languages and the

science of the foreigners. During the interval, then, between

such study and its successful results, Japan would practically

remain under alien domination. The fact was not, indeed, publicly

stated in so many words; but the signification of the policy was

unmistakable. After the first violent emotions provoked by

knowledge of the situation,--after the great dismay of the

people, and the suppressed fury of the samurai,--there arose an

intense curiosity regarding the appearance and character of those

insolent strangers who had been able to obtain what they wanted

by mere display of superior force. This general curiosity was

partly satisfied by an immense production and distribution of

cheap colored prints, picturing the manner and customs of the

barbarians, and the extraordinary streets of their settlements.

Caricatures only those flaring wood--prints could have seemed to

foreign eyes. But caricature was not the conscious object of the

artist. He tried to portray foreigners as he really saw them; and

he saw them as green-eyed monsters, with red hair like Shojo(1),

and with noses like Tengu(2), wearing clothes of absurd forms and

colors; and dwelling in structures like storehouses or prisons.

Sold by hundreds of thousands throughout the interior, these

prints must have created many uncanny ideas. Yet as attempts to

depict the unfamiliar they were only innocent. One should be able

to study those old drawings in order to comprehend just how we

appeared to the Japanese of that era; how ugly, how grotesque,

how ridiculous.

The young samurai of the town soon had the experience of seeing a

real Western foreigner, a teacher hired for them by the prince.

He was an Englishman. He came under the protection of an armed

escort; and orders were given to treat him as a person of

distinction. He did not seem quite so ugly as the foreigners in

the Japanese prints: his hair was red, indeed, and his eyes of a

strange color; but his face was not disagreeable. He at once

became, and long remained, the subject of tireless observation.

How closely his every act was watched could never be guessed by

any one ignorant of the queer superstitions of the pre-Meiji era

concerning ourselves. Although recognized as intelligent and

formidable creatures, Occidentals were not generally regarded as

quite human; they were thought of as more closely allied to

animals than to mankind. They had hairy bodies of queer shape;

their teeth were different from those of men; their internal

organs were also peculiar; and their moral ideas those of

goblins. The timidity which foreigners then inspired, not,

indeed, to the samurai, but to the common people, was not a

physical, but a superstitious fear. Even the Japanese peasant has

never been a coward. But to know his feelings in that time toward

foreigners, one must also know something of the ancient beliefs,

common to both Japan and China, about animals gifted with

supernatural powers, and capable of assuming human form; about

the existence of races half-human and half-superhuman; and about

the mythical beings of the old picture-books,--goblins

long-legged and long-armed and bearded (ashinaga and tenaga),

whether depicted by the illustrators of weird stories or

comically treated by the brush of Hokusai. Really the aspect of

the new strangers seemed to afford confirmation of the fables

related by a certain Chinese Herodotus; and the clothing they

wore might seem to have been devised for the purpose of hiding

what would prove them not human. So the new English teacher,

blissfully ignorant of the fact, was studied surreptitiously,

just as one might study a curious animal! Nevertheless, from

his students he experienced only courtesy: they treated him by

that Chinese code which ordains that "even the shadow of a

teacher must not be trodden on." In any event it would have

mattered little to samurai students whether their teacher were

perfectly human or not, so long as he could teach. The hero

Yoshitsune had been taught the art of the sword by a Tengu.

Beings not human had proved themselves scholars and poets(3). But

behind the never-lifted mask of delicate courtesy, the stranger's

habits were minutely noted; and the ultimate judgment, based upon

the comparison of such observation, was not altogether

flattering. The teacher himself could never have imagined the

comments made upon him by his two-sworded pupils; nor would it

have increased his peace of mind, while overlooking compositions

in the class-room, to have understood their conversation:--

"See the color of his flesh, how soft it is! To take off his head

with a single blow would be very easy."

Once he was induced to try their mode of wrestling, just for fun,

he supposed. But they really wanted to take his physical measure.

He was not very highly estimated as an athlete.

"Strong arms he certainly has," one said. "But he does not know

how to use his body while using his arms; and his loins are very

weak. To break his back would not be difficult."

"I think," said another, "that it would be easy to fight with

foreigners."

"With swords it would be very easy," responded a third; "but they

are more skilful than we in the use of guns and cannon."

"We can learn all that," said the first speaker. "When we have

learned Western military matters, we need not care for Western

soldiers."

"Foreigners," observed another, "are not hardy like we are. They

soon tire, and they fear cold. All winter our teacher must have a

great fire in his room. To stay there five minutes gives me the

headache."

But for all that, the lads were kind to their teacher, and made

him love them.

(1) Apish mythological beings with red hair, delighting in

drunkenness.

(2) Mythological beings of several kinds, supposed to live in the

mountains. Some have long noses.

(3) There is a legend that when Toryoko, a great poet, who was

the teacher of Sugiwara-no-Michizane (now deified as Tenjin), was

once passing the Gate called Ra-jo-mon, of the Emperor's palace

at Kyoto, he recited aloud this single verse which he had just

composed:--

"Clear is the weather and fair;--and the wind waves the hair of

young willows."

Immediately a deep mocking voice from the gateway continued the

poem, thus:--

"Melted and vanished the ice; the waves comb the locks of old

mosses."

Toryoko looked, but there was no one to be seen. Reaching home,

he told his pupil about the matter, and repeated the two

compositions. Sugiwara-no-Michizane praised the second one,

saying:--

"Truly the words of the first are the words of a poet;

but the words of the second are the words of a Demon!"

IV

Changes came as great earthquakes come, without warning: the

transformation of daimyates into prefectures, the suppression of

the military class, the reconstruction of the whole social

system. These events filled the youth with sadness, although he

felt no difficulty in transferring his allegiance from prince to

emperor, and although the wealth of his family remained

unimpaired by the shock. All this reconstruction told him of the

greatness of the national danger, and announced the certain

disappearance of the old high ideals, and of nearly all things

loved. But he knew regret was vain. By self-transformation alone

could the nation hope to save its independence; and the obvious

duty of the patriot was to recognize necessity, and fitly prepare

himself to play the man in the drama of the future.

In the samurai school he had learned much English, and he knew

himself able to converse with Englishmen. He cut his long hair,

put away his swords, and went to Yokohama that he might continue

his study of the language under more favorable conditions. At

Yokohama everything at first seemed to him both unfamiliar and

repellent. Even the Japanese of the port had been changed by

foreign contact: they were rude and rough; they acted and spoke

as common people would not have dared to do in his native town.

The foreigners themselves impressed him still more disagreeably:

it was the period when new settlers could assume the tone of

conquerors to the conquered, and when the life of the "open

ports" was much less decorous than now. The new buildings of

brick or stuccoed timber revived for him unpleasant memories of

the Japanese colored pictures of foreign manners and customs; and

he could not quickly banish the fancies of his boyhood concerning

Occidentals. Reason, based on larger knowledge and experience,

fully assured him what they really were; but to his emotional

life the intimate sense of their kindred humanity still failed to

come. Race-feeling is older than intellectual development; and

the superstitions attaching to race-feeling are not easy to get

rid of. His soldier-spirit, too, was stirred at times by ugly

things heard or seen,--incidents that filled him with the hot

impulse of his fathers to avenge a cowardice or to redress a

wrong. But he learned to conquer his repulsions as obstacles to

knowledge: it was the patriot's duty to study calmly the nature

of his country's foes. He trained himself at last to observe the

new life about him without prejudice,--its merits not less than

its defects; its strength not less than its weakness. He found

kindness; he found devotion to ideals,--ideals not his own, but

which he knew how to respect because they exacted, like the

religion of his ancestors, abnegation of many things.

Through such appreciation he learned to like and to trust an aged

missionary entirely absorbed in the work of educating and

proselytizing. The old man was especially anxious to convert this

young samurai, in whom aptitudes of no common order were

discernible; and he spared no pains to win the boy's confidence.

He aided him in many ways, taught him something of French and

German, of Greek and Latin, and placed entirely at his disposal a

private library of considerable extent. The use of a foreign

library, including works of history, philosophy, travel, and

fiction, was not a privilege then easy for Japanese students to

obtain. It was gratefully appreciated; and the owner of the

library found no difficulty at a later day in persuading his

favored and favorite pupil to read a part of the New Testament.

The youth expressed surprise at finding among the doctrines of

the "Evil Sect" ethical precepts like those of Confucius. To the

old missionary he said: "This teaching is not new to us; but it

is certainly very good. I shall study the book and think about

it."

V

The study and the thinking were to lead the young man much

further than he had thought possible. After the recognition of

Christianity as a great religion came recognitions of another

order, and various imaginings about the civilization of the races

professing Christianity. It then seemed to many reflective

Japanese, possibly even to the keen minds directing the national

policy, that Japan was doomed to pass altogether under alien

rule. There was hope, indeed; and while even the ghost of hope

remained, the duty for all was plain. But the power that could be

used against the Empire was irresistible. And studying the

enormity of that power, the young Oriental could not but ask

himself, with a wonder approaching awe, whence and how it had

been gained. Could it, as his aged teacher averred, have some

occult relation to a higher religion? Certainly the ancient

Chinese philosophy, which declared the prosperity of peoples

proportionate to their observance of celestial law and their

obedience to the teaching of sages, countenanced such a theory.

And if the superior force of Western civilization really

indicated the superior character of Western ethics, was it not

the plain duty of every patriot to follow that higher faith, and

to strive for the conversion of the whole nation? A youth of that

era, educated in Chinese wisdom, and necessarily ignorant of the

history of social evolution in the West, could never have

imagined that the very highest forms of material progress were

developed chiefly through a merciless competition out of all

harmony with Christian idealism, and at variance with every great

system of ethics. Even to-day in the West unthinking millions

imagine some divine connection between military power and

Christian belief, and utterances are made in our pulpits implying

divine justification for political robberies, and heavenly

inspiration for the invention of high explosives. There still

survives among us the superstition that races professing

Christianity are divinely destined to rob or exterminate races

holding other beliefs. Some men occasionally express their

conviction that we still worship Thor and Odin,--the only

difference being that Odin has become a mathematician, and that

the Hammer Mjolnir is now worked by steam. But such persons are

declared by the missionaries to be atheists and men of shameless

lives.

Be this as it may, a time came when the young samurai resolved to

proclaim himself a Christian, despite the opposition of his

kindred. It was a bold step; but his early training had given him

firmness; and he was not to be moved from his decision even by

the sorrow of his parents. His rejection of the ancestral faith

would signify more than temporary pain for him: it would mean

disinheritance, the contempt of old comrades, loss of rank, and

all the consequences of bitter poverty. But his samurai training

had taught him to despise self. He saw what he believed to be his

duty as a patriot and as a truthseeker, and he followed it

without fear or regret.

VI

Those who hope to substitute their own Western creed in the room

of one which they wreck by the aid of knowledge borrowed from

modern science, do not imagine that the arguments used against

the ancient faith can be used with equal force against the new.

Unable himself to reach the higher levels of modern thought, the

average missionary cannot foresee the result of his small

teaching of science upon an Oriental mind naturally more powerful

than his own. He is therefore astonished and shocked to discover

that the more intelligent his pupil, the briefer the term of that

pupil's Christianity. To destroy personal faith in a fine mind

previously satisfied with Buddhist cosmogony, because innocent of

science, is not extremely difficult. But to substitute, in the

same mind, Western religious emotions for Oriental, Presbyterian

or Baptist dogmatisms for Chinese and Buddhist ethics, is not

possible. The psychological difficulties in the way are never

recognized by our modern evangelists. In former ages, when the

faith of the Jesuits and the friars was not less superstitious

than the faith they strove to supplant, the same deep-lying

obstacles existed; and the Spanish priest, even while

accomplishing marvels by his immense sincerity and fiery zeal,

must have felt that to fully realize his dream he would need the

sword of the Spanish soldier. To-day the conditions are far less

favorable for any work of conversion than they ever were in the

sixteenth century. Education has been secularized and remodeled

upon a scientific basis; our religions are being changed into

mere social recognitions of ethical necessities; the functions of

our clergy are being gradually transformed into those of a moral

police; and the multitude of our church-spires proves no increase

of our faith, but only the larger growth of our respect for

conventions. Never can the conventions of the Occident become

those of the Far East; and never will foreign missionaries be

suffered in Japan to take the role of a police of morals. Already

the most liberal of our churches, those of broadest culture,

begin to recognize the vanity of missions. But it is not

necessary to drop old dogmatisms in order to perceive the truth:

thorough education should be enough to reveal it; and the most

educated of nations, Germany, sends no missionaries to work in

the interior of Japan. A result of missionary efforts, much more

significant than the indispensable yearly report of new

conversions, has been the reorganization of the native religions,

and a recent government mandate insisting upon the higher

education of the native priest-hoods. Indeed, long before this

mandate the wealthier sects had established Buddhist schools on

the Western plan; and the Shinshu could already boast of its

scholars, educated in Paris or at Oxford,--men whose names are

known to Sanscritists the world over. Certainly Japan will need

higher forms of faith than her mediaeval ones; but these must be

themselves evolved from the ancient forms,--from within, never

from without. A Buddhism strongly fortified by Western science

will meet the future needs of the race.

The young convert at Yokohama proved a noteworthy example of

missionary failures. Within a few years after having sacrificed a

fortune in order to become a Christian,--or rather the member of

a foreign religious sect,--he publicly renounced the creed

accepted at such a cost. He had studied and comprehended the

great minds of the age better than his religious teachers, who

could no longer respond to the questions he propounded, except by

the assurance that books of which they had recommended him to

study parts were dangerous to faith as wholes. But as they could

not prove the fallacies alleged to exist in such books, their

warnings availed nothing. He had been converted to dogmatism by

imperfect reasoning; by larger and deeper reasoning he found his

way beyond dogmatism. He passed from the church after an open

declaration that its tenets were not based upon true reason or

fact; and that he felt himself obliged to accept the opinions of

men whom his teachers had called the enemies of Christianity.

There was great scandal at his "relapse."

The real "relapse" was yet far away. Unlike many with a similar

experience, he knew that the religious question had only receded

for him, and that all he had learned was scarcely more than the

alphabet of what remained to learn. He had not lost belief in the

relative value of creeds,--in the worth of religion as a

conserving and restraining force. A distorted perception of one

truth--the truth of a relation subsisting between civilizations

and their religions--had first deluded him into the path that led

to his conversion. Chinese philosophy had taught him that which

modern sociology recognizes in the law that societies without

priesthoods have never developed; and Buddhism had taught him

that even delusions--the parables, forms, and symbols presented

as actualities to humble minds--have their value and their

justification in aiding the development of human goodness. From

such a point of view, Christianity had lost none of its interest

for him; and though doubting what his teacher had told him about

the superior morality of Christian nations, not at all

illustrated in the life of the open ports, he desired to see for

himself the influence of religion upon morals in the Occident; to

visit European countries and to study the causes of their

development and the reason of their power.

This he set out to do sooner than he had purposed. That

intellectual quickening which had made him a doubter in religious

matters had made him also a freethinker in politics. He brought

down upon himself the wrath of the government by public

expressions of opinion antagonistic to the policy of the hour;

and, like others equally imprudent under the stimulus of new

ideas, he was obliged to leave the country. Thus began for him a

series of wanderings destined to carry him round the world. Korea

first afforded him a refuge; then China, where he lived as a

teacher; and at last he found himself on board a steamer bound

for Marseilles. He had little money; but he did not ask himself

how he was going to live in Europe. Young, tall, athletic, frugal

and inured to hardship, he felt sure of himself; and he had

letters to men abroad who could smooth his way.

But long years were to pass before he could see his native land

again.

VII

During those years he saw Western civilization as few Japanese

ever saw it; for he wandered through Europe and America, living

in many cities, and toiling in many capacities,--sometimes with

his brain, oftener with his hands,--and so was able to study the

highest and the lowest, the best and the worst of the life about

him. But he saw with the eyes of the Far East; and the ways of

his judgments were not as our ways. For even as the Occident

regards the Far East, so does the Far East regard the Occident,

--only with this difference: that what each most esteems in

itself is least likely to be esteemed by the other. And both are

partly right and partly wrong; and there never has been, and

never can be, perfect mutual comprehension.

Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him,--a world

of giants; and that which depresses even the boldest Occidental

who finds himself, without means or friends, alone in a great

city, must often have depressed the Oriental exile: that vague

uneasiness aroused by the sense of being invisible to hurrying

millions; by the ceaseless roar of traffic drowning voices; by

monstrosities of architecture without a soul; by the dynamic

display of wealth forcing mind and hand, as mere cheap machinery,

to the uttermost limits of the possible. Perhaps he saw such

cities as Dore saw London: sullen majesty of arched glooms and

granite deeps opening into granite deeps beyond range of vision,

and mountains of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their

base, and monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered

power slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was

nothing to make appeal to him between those endless cliffs of

stone which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and

the wind. All that which draws us to great cities repelled or

oppressed him; even luminous Paris soon filled him with

weariness. It was the first foreign city in which he made a long

sojourn. French art, as reflecting the aesthetic thought of the

most gifted of European races, surprised him much, but charmed

him not at all. What surprised him especially were its studies of

the nude, in which he recognized only an open confession of the

one human weakness which, next to disloyalty or cowardice, his

stoical training had taught him to most despise. Modern French

literature gave him other reasons for astonishment. He could

little comprehend the amazing art of the story-teller; the worth

of the workmanship in itself was not visible to him; and if he

could have been made to understand it as a European understands,

he would have remained none the less convinced that such

application of genius to production signified social depravity.

And gradually, in the luxurious life of the capital itself, he

found proof for the belief suggested to him by the art and the

literature of the period. He visited the pleasure-resorts, the

theatres, the opera; he saw with the eyes of an ascetic and a

soldier, and wondered why the Western conception of the worth of

life differed so little from the Far-Eastern conception of folly

and of effeminacy. He saw fashionable balls, and exposures de

rigueur intolerable to the Far-Eastern sense of modesty,

--artistically calculated to suggest what would cause a Japanese

woman to die of shame; and he wondered at criticisms he had heard

about the natural, modest, healthy half-nudity of Japanese

toiling under a summer sun. He saw cathedrals and churches in

vast number, and near to them the palaces of vice, and

establishments enriched by the stealthy sale of artistic

obscenities. He listened to sermons by great preachers; and he

heard blasphemies against all faith and love by priest--haters.

He saw the circles of wealth, and the circles of poverty, and the

abysses underlying both. The "restraining influence" of religion

he did not see. That world had no faith. It was a world of

mockery and masquerade and pleasure-seeking selfishness, ruled

not by religion, but by police; a world into which it were not

good that a man should be born.

England, more sombre, more imposing, more formidable furnished

him with other problems to consider. He studied her wealth,

forever growing, and the nightmares of squalor forever

multiplying in the shadow of it. He saw the vast ports gorged

with the riches of a hundred lands, mostly plunder; and knew the

English still like their forefathers, a race of prey; and thought

of the fate of her millions if she should find herself for even a

single month unable to compel other races to feed them. He saw

the harlotry and drunkenness that make night hideous in the

world's greatest city; and he marveled at the conventional

hypocrisy that pretends not to see, and at the religion that

utters thanks for existing conditions, and at the ignorance that

sends missionaries where they are not needed, and at the enormous

charities that help disease and vice to propagate their kind. He

saw also the declaration of a great Englishman(1) who had

traveled in many countries that one tenth of the population of

England were professional criminals or paupers. And this in spite

of the myriads of churches, and the incomparable multiplication

of laws! Certainly English civilization showed less than any

other the pretended power of that religion which he had been

taught to believe the inspiration of progress. English streets

told him another story: there were no such sights to be seen in

the streets of Buddhist cities. No: this civilization signified a

perpetual wicked struggle between the simple and the cunning, the

feeble and the strong; force and craft combining to thrust

weakness into a yawning and visible hell. Never in Japan had

there been even the sick dream of such conditions. Yet the merely

material and intellectual results of those conditions he could

not but confess to be astonishing; and though he saw evil beyond

all he could have imagined possible, he also saw much good, among

both poor and rich. The stupendous riddle of it all, the

countless contradictions, were above his powers of

interpretation.

He liked the English people better than the people of other

countries he had visited; and the manners of the English gentry

impressed him as not unlike those of the Japanese samurai. Behind

their formal coldness he could discern immense capacities of

friendship and enduring kindness,--kindness he experienced more

than once; the depth of emotional power rarely wasted; and the

high courage that had won the dominion of half a world. But ere

he left England for America, to study a still vaster field of

human achievement, mere differences of nationality had ceased to

interest him: they were blurred out of visibility in his growing

perception of Occidental civilization as one amazing whole,

everywhere displaying--whether through imperial, monarchical, or

democratic forms--the working of the like merciless necessities

with the like astounding results, and everywhere based on ideas

totally the reverse of Far-Eastern ideas. Such civilization he

could estimate only as one having no single emotion in harmony

with it,--as one finding nothing to love while dwelling in its

midst, and nothing to regret in the hour of leaving it forever.

It was as far away from his soul as the life of another planet

under another sun. But he could understand its cost in terms of

human pain, feel the menace of its weight, and divine the

prodigious range of its intellectual power. And he hated

it,--hated its tremendous and perfectly calculated mechanism;

hated its utilitarian stability; hated its conventions, its

greed, its blind cruelty, its huge hypocrisy, the foulness of its

want and the insolence of its wealth. Morally, it was monstrous;

conventionally, it was brutal. Depths of degradation unfathomable

it had shown him, but no ideals equal to the ideals of his youth.

It was all one great wolfish struggle;--and that so much real

goodness as he had found in it could exist, seemed to him

scarcely less than miraculous. The real sublimities of the

Occident were intellectual only; far steep cold heights of pure

knowledge, below whose perpetual snow-line emotional ideals die.

Surely the old Japanese civilization of benevolence and duty was

incomparably better in its comprehension of happiness, in its

moral ambitions, its larger faith, its joyous courage, its

simplicity and unselfishness, its sobriety and contentment.

Western superiority was not ethical. It lay in forces of

intellect developed through suffering incalculable, and used for

the destruction of the weak by the strong.

And, nevertheless, that Western science whose logic he knew to be

irrefutable assured him of the larger and larger expansion of the

power of that civilization, as of an irresistible, inevitable,

measureless inundation of world-pain. Japan would have to learn

the new forms of action, to master the new forms of thought, or

to perish utterly. There was no other alternative. And then the

doubt of all doubts came to him, the question which all the sages

have had to face: _Is the universe moral?_ To that question

Buddhism had given the deepest answer.

But whether moral or immoral the cosmic process, as measured by

infinitesimal human emotion, one conviction remained with him

that no logic could impair: the certainty that man should pursue

the highest moral ideal with all his power to the unknown end,

even though the suns in their courses should fight against him.

The necessities of Japan would oblige her to master foreign

science, to adopt much from the material civilization of her

enemies; but the same necessities could not compel her to cast

bodily away her ideas of right and wrong, of duty and of honor.

Slowly a purpose shaped itself in his mind,--a purpose which was

to make him in after years a leader and a teacher: to strive with

all his strength for the conservation of all that was best in

the ancient life, and to fearlessly oppose further introduction

of anything not essential to national self-preservation, or

helpful to national, self-development. Fail he well might, and

without shame; but he could hope at least to save something of

worth from the drift of wreckage. The wastefulness of Western

life had impressed him more than its greed of pleasure and its

capacity for pain: in the clean poverty of his own land he saw

strength; in her unselfish thrift, the sole chance of competing

with the Occident. Foreign civilization had taught him to

understand, as he could never otherwise have understood, the

worth and the beauty of his own; and he longed for the hour of

permission to return to the country of his birth.

(1)"Although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage state in

intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in

morals.... It is not too much to say that the mass of our

populations have not at all advanced beyond the savage code of

morals, and have in many cases sunk below it. A deficient

morality is the great blot of modern civilization.... Our whole

social and moral civilization remains in a state of barbarism....

We are the richest country in the world; and yet nearly one

twentieth of our population are parish paupers, and one thirtieth

known criminals. Add to these the criminals who escape detection,

and the poor who live mainly or partly on private charity (which,

according to Dr. Hawkesley, expends seven millions sterling

annually in London alone), and we may be sure that more than ONE

TENTH of our population are actually Paupers and Criminals."

--ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

VIII

It was through the transparent darkness of a cloudless April

morning, a little before sunrise, that he saw again the mountains

of his native land,--far lofty sharpening sierras, towering

violet-black out of the circle of an inky sea. Behind the steamer

which was bearing him back from exile the horizon was slowly

filling with rosy flame. There were some foreigners already on

deck, eager to obtain the first and fairest view of Fuji from the

Pacific;--for the first sight of Fuji at dawn is not to be

forgotten in this life or the next. They watched the long

procession of the ranges, and looked over the jagged looming into

the deep night, where stars were faintly burning still,--and they

could not see Fuji. "Ah!" laughed an officer they questioned,

"you are looking too low! higher up--much higher!" Then they

looked up, up, up into the heart of the sky, and saw the mighty

summit pinkening like a wondrous phantom lotos-bud in the flush

of the coming day: a spectacle that smote them dumb. Swiftly the

eternal snow yellowed into gold, then whitened as the sun reached

out beams to it over the curve of the world, over the shadowy

ranges, over the very stars, it seemed; for the giant base

remained viewless. And the night fled utterly; and soft blue

light bathed all the hollow heaven; and colors awoke from sleep;

--and before the gazers there opened the luminous bay of

Yokohama, with the sacred peak, its base ever invisible, hanging

above all like a snowy ghost in the arch of the infinite day.

Still in the wanderer's ears the words rang, "_Ah! you are

looking too low!--higher up--much higher!_"--making vague rhythm

with an immense, irresistible emotion swelling at his heart. Then

everything dimmed: he saw neither Fuji above, nor the nearing

hills below, changing their vapory blue to green, nor the

crowding of the ships in the bay; nor anything of the modern

Japan; he saw the Old. The land-wind, delicately scented with

odors of spring, rushed to him, touched his blood, and startled

from long-closed cells of memory the shades of all that he had

once abandoned and striven to forget. He saw the faces of his

dead: he knew their voices over the graves of the years. Again he

was a very little boy in his father's yashiki, wandering from

luminous room to room, playing in sunned spaces where

leaf-shadows trembled on the matting, or gazing into the soft

green dreamy peace of the landscape garden. Once more he felt the

light touch of his mother's hand guiding his little steps to the

place of morning worship, before the household shrine, before the

tablets of the ancestors; and the lips of the man murmured again,

with sudden new-found meaning, the simple prayer of the child.

XI