CHAPTER I THE FAR EAST The youth who daily farther from the East And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended. WORDSWORTH: Ode on Intimations of Immortality. The en of Asia. ASIA has always appeared to me to possess a fascination which no country or empire in Europe, still less any part of the Western Hemisphere, can claim. It is believed by many to have been the cradle of chantment our race, and the birthplace of our language, just as it certainly has been the hearthstone of our religion, and the fountainhead of the best of our ideas. Wide as is the chasm that now severs us, with its philosophy our thought is still interpenetrated. The Asian continent has supplied a scene for the principal events, and a stage for the most prominent figures, in history. Of Asian parentage is that force which, more than any other influence, has transformed and glorified mankind—viz. the belief in a single Deity. Five of the six greatest moral teachers that the world has seen-Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Mohammedwere born of Asian parents, and lived upon Asian soil. Roughly speaking, their creeds may be said to have divided the conquest of the universe. The most famous or the wisest of kings-Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Timur, Baber, Akbar-have sat upon Asian thrones. Thither the A greatest conqueror of the Old World turned aside for the sole theatre befitting so enormous an ambition. 'Cette vieille Europe m'ennuie' expressed the half-formed kindred aspiration of the greatest conqueror of modern times. The three most populous existing empires-Great Britain, Russia, and China—are Asian empires; and it is because they are not merely European but Asian, that the two former are included in the category. From Asia also have sprung the most terrible phenomena by which humanity has ever been scourged the Turki Nadir Shah, Sultan Mahmud of Ghuzni, the Mongol Jinghiz Khan. Yet for such crimes as these has Asia paid to us no mean compensation. For to her we owe the noblest Her products. product of all literature, in the Old Testament of the Hebrew Scriptures; the sweetest of lyrics, in the epithalamium of a Jewish king; the embryos of modern knowledge, in the empiricism of Arabian geometers and metaphysicians. In Asia the drama was born. There the greatest writer of antiquity chose a scene for his immortal epic. There, too, the mariner's compass first guided men over the pathless waters. In our own times alone it is with her aid that we have arrived at the evolution of three new sciences-comparative mythology, comparative jurisprudence, and philology. From Asia we have received the architecture of the Moslem-that most spiritual and refined of human conceptions-the porcelain of China, the faience of Persia, Rhodes, and Damascus, the infinitely ingenious art of Japan. On her soil were reared the most astonishing of all cities, Babylon; the most princely of palaces, Persepolis; the stateliest of temples, Angkor Wat; the loveliest of tombs, the Taj Mahal. There too may be found the most wonderful of Nature's productions; the loftiest mountains on the surface of the globe, the most renowned, if not also the largest, of rivers, the most entrancing of landscapes. In the heart of Asia lies to this day the one mystery which the nineteenth century has still left for the twentieth to explore-viz. the Tibetan oracle of Lhasa. neousness. Of course, in displaying this panorama of Asian wonders or Asian charms, while claiming for her an individuality which her vast extent, her historic antiquity, and her geographical features go far to explain, I Homoge do not claim for her any absolute unity of product or form. On the contrary, the distinctions of race, irrespective of climate, are perhaps more profound in Asia than in any other continent. There is, on the whole, less exterior resemblance between a Japanese and a Persian than there is between a Prussian and a Spaniard. A Dutchman is more like a Greek than a Turkoman is like a Malay. There is a wider gap between the finest Aryan type and the aboriginal barbarian in the recesses of Saghalin, Formosa, or Laos, than there is, for example, between the Egyptian and the Hottentot, or between the Frenchman and the Lap. Not less marked are the distinctions of language and habits, of caste and creed. The Western world in the Feudal Ages was less sundered and split up than is Hindustan at the present moment. And yet, after visiting almost every part of Asia, I seem, as soon as I taste her atmosphere or come within range of her influence, to observe a certain homogeneousness of expression, a certain similarity of character, certain common features of political and still more of social organisation, certain identical strains in the composition of man, that differentiate her structure from anything in Europe or even in America, and invest her with a distinction peculiarly her own. The sensation is strengthened by the impression left upon most minds since the days of childhood by the two best books that have ever been written upon the East-viz. the Old Testament and the Arabian Nights. If I strive still further to analyse it, I find that in scenery, as I have elsewhere endeavoured to explain,1 the dominant note of Asian individuality is contrast, in character a general indifference to truth and respect for successful wile, in deportment dignity, in society the rigid maintenance of the family union, in government the mute acquiescence of the governed, in administration and justice the open corruption of administrators and judges, and in every-day life a statuesque and inexhaustible patience, which attaches no value to time, and wages unappeasable warfare against hurry. The impact between this solid amalgam of character and habit, and the elastic and insinuating force which we denominate civilisation, is a phenomenon which with civi- now in many countries I have set myself to exlisation. amine, and which, I venture to think, surpasses Contact all others in human interest. In Asia the combat is between antagonists who are fairly matched. It resembles one of those ancient contests between the gladiator and the retiarius, the man with the rude blade and the man with the supple net, that filled with straining crowds the Imperial arena at Rome. For though craft and agility and superior science will, in the long run, generally get the better of crude force and the naked weapon, yet there are moments when, in the twinkling of an eye, the tables are turned, when the swordsman slashes the netman in twain, when the untutored Oriental makes short shrift with the subtleties and sophistries of the West. If Japan, for instance, illustrates the easy victory of the European, China so far registers an equal triumph for the Asiatic. In Africa and America, 1 Vide Persia and the Persian Question, vol. i. pp. 13-15. where no serious contest has been possible, because of the vast moral and intellectual disparity between the organisms engaged, but where civilisation advances like the incoming tide over the castles built by children with wooden spades in the sand, the spectacle is devoid of any such interest. Moral The same train of reflection may lead us to avoid a common pitfall of writers upon the East-viz. the tendency to depreciate that which we do not ourselves sympathise with or understand, and which we lessons. are therefore prone to mistake for a mark of inferiority or degradation. Mankind has built for its moral habitation different structures in different lands and times. It has adopted many divergent styles of architecture, and has entertained widely opposite views upon material, ornament, and design. Sometimes the fabric would seem to have been erected all aslant, or even to have been turned topsy-turvy in the course of construction. And yet, just as there are certain common laws observed in all building that has endured, so there are points of contact in all civilisations, common principles which lie at the root of every morality, however contradictory its external manifestations. It is among the ancient races of Central Asia and in China that these reflections are chiefly borne home to the traveller's mind. When he meets with civilisation as old as, nay older than our own, when he encounters a history whose heroes have been among the great men of all time, religions whose prophets have altered the course of the world's progress, codes of morals which have endured for centuries and still hold millions within their adamantine grip, a learning which anticipated many of the proudest discoveries of modern science, and a social organisation which has in places solved the very problem of reconciling individual liberty with collective force, whereupon the new-fledged democracies |