Chapter X: Ex Oriente Lux

What is a barbarian? In many of the Chinese edicts we see the term perpetually applied to those people outside the Celestial Kingdom, and to all those who are not Chinese. The Japanese are far too polite to use such a word. Yet I have spoken to Japanese artists who, in referring to European taste in Art, used a word equivalent to barbarous. The average free-born Briton travelling round the world carries with him, or is supposed to carry with him, his Bible, and a taste for Bass's beer and beefsteak. According as a country does or does not possess these essentials, and according as its own attributes of civilisation are removed from his own standards of perfection, so does he regard its inhabitants as more or less barbarians. (I was rather amused watching a play in Tokio once, where the villain of the piece was a red-whiskered Englishman, in a loud crossbar suit and a fore-and-aft cap, who was always shown on the stage with half a dozen bottles of Bass on a table beside him.) When we bear in mind how much Britishers despise their next-door neighbours across the Channel for their defective beefsteakiali-ties, it is not surprising that such a feeling should be greatly intensified when they come in contact with a civilisation so much more alien and remote from their own as that of China and Japan. It needs only a quiet observation and the smallest degree of intellectual elasticity to be forced to the conclusion that the advantages are not altogether on our side, and that there is great scope for the East to send social missionaries to the West. Socially, I think we have far more to learn from them than they have to learn from us. And, curiously enough, if such a mission were started, it would not be entirely to teach us new things, but in many ways it would be recalling us to points which we have hurried away from in the rapid progress of our material civilisation for the last couple of hundred years.

The central idea, the social pivot, the focus of the life, of the civilisation of the East is to be found in their idea of the home. The home is the centre of gravity of their existence, round which everything else revolves. In China it is the all-pervading, all-vivifying idea of social life, of religion, and of government. The life of the family is not only of to-day, but extends back into a venerable past, and is the hope and care of the future.

For us, the dead past buries its dead, and the flowers that we lay on the newly-made grave quickly wither on the freshly-turned clay on which we have left them--except where the place of natural ones is taken by those deliciously ironical representations in the shape of tin--waterproof imitations which save the mourner the trouble of renewal.

As to the love of the Chinese and Japanese for their children, it has to be seen to be appreciated. Those wise-eyed little mites, who before they can walk sit perpetually enthroned upon their mothers' backs throughout the livelong day, are a source of so much joy and adoration to their parents that one feels no surprise at not hearing them cry as other children do. I only recollect hearing a child cry once during a two months' stay in Japan, and then there was an excuse for its dolorous plaint, because its mother was shaving its little head with a blunt razor and no soap. It must be obvious to the student of our Western civilisation that the cult of family life is on the decline. The ties and obligations which hold children and parents together are visibly slackening, and this is the more obvious amongst those nations which have been taking the lead in the material progress of our time.

Take the United States, for instance. There, up to a certain point, the father is regarded as the dollar-grinding machine. The tendency is for both sons and daughters to cast themselves loose from parental ties, and strike out afresh for themselves. And their parents are as little responsible for them as they are for the maintenance or happiness of their parents.

Any one who is familiar with life in the East End of London will appreciate how little these worn-out toilers, when old age incapacitates them from work, can rely on being kept out of the Union by their children. With the experience of nearly two thousand years of the progress of Christendom, it is not surprising that a short time ago we should hear the present occupant of the Papal Throne raising his aged voice to recall the attention of the West to how rapidly the idea of the family was being lost, as Leo XIII. did in the Encyclical Address to the Catholic Church on the subject of the Holy Family.

From the more important teaching as regards family life, these Oriental missionaries might then endeavour to tell us something of the Fine Arts in the East, and yet more of the spirit which animates their artists. They would be able to show us that "art for art's sake" with them is no empty phrase. It would doubtless surprise many Westerners to know that a Chinese painter would not think of selling his pictures for money, but paints them for his own pleasure, and gives his work as presents to his friends, and would no more dream of selling a picture than an English girl would of selling a kiss.

The Japanese would have a lot to tell us about bringing art, and that their highest and best art, into the utensils of everyday life, and that there is nothing demeaning in expending the best work on things one handles and uses every day. What a lot they would have to tell us of the cultivation and their love of flowers--a love which seems instinct in the poorest peasant, and which in the more cultivated classes is carried to an exquisite degree of refined development! And again, a Japanese incense party, where different qualities of delicately aromatic incense are passed round--and the pastime consists in placing the different qualities in the order of the beauty of their perfume--would almost suggest that the West had neglected the cultivation of one of the five senses.

At a dinner-party at a well-known restaurant, the other night, it was forcibly brought to my mind what a lot they would have to teach us regarding the enjoyment of such social functions. A perfect din and rattle of plates and knives filled the air, a mob of undisciplined servants charged about tumultuously, garish lights lit up vulgar ornamentation, and one almost had to shout to be heard across the table, while a band of music outside ineffectually endeavoured to drown the din within. There were flowers, it is true, but their profusion was no compensation for an utter lack of artistic arrangement. But there was a complete absence of that repose, that restfulness, that calm, which is considered, and justly considered, amongst Easterns as the essential atmosphere for the enjoyment of a social repast. The Japanese have raised entertainment to the level of a fine art. Their tea ceremonies, as we have badly translated the "Cha'-no-yu," but which might be preferably rendered as "The Fine Art of Welcome and Hospitality," have been a strong influence in preventing them from drifting into the meretricious gaudiness so blatantly _en évidence_ in restaurants like the Carlton, and minister to that purity and simplicity of taste which is so characteristic of Japanese art. Five is considered by them the best number for a dinner-party, as with a larger number separate conversational groups are apt to be formed. The Japanese gentleman has rooms specially built for these parties, and rooms only just large enough to hold his guests comfortably. One scroll is hung in the kakemono, and in front of it one ornament, and afterwards a solitary flower. It would be considered by them extremely bad taste to confuse or dissipate the attention by a variety of ornaments.

A Japanese lady once showed me a photo of the drawing-room at Sandringham, which greatly amused her, and which she kept as a curiosity. (She was too polite to say as a curiosity of barbarism.) But she said, laughing, "Is it not just like a curio-dealer's shop?"

The dinner, which actually precedes the tea-drinking, is served by the host in person, thus doing away with the intrusion of even their deft and quiet-moving servants. Every cup, every plate, is an individual art treasure, from the Godown in which the host's artistic treasures are kept in a seclusion that his most intimate friends have never penetrated. They have probably never seen the same picture or the same ornament twice in the kakemono. From the soft mellow music of the old gong which summons them to the repast, on through its various stages, until the rare and beautiful bowl out of which they have had tea is passed round for appreciative inspection, an air of refined repose has characterised the whole proceedings.

These social missionaries might progress from giving us some insight into these things to the introduction of another institution which would be an unquestionable advantage to our civilisation--I refer to the Geisha. Supposing that they were successful in grafting this Japanese idea, the Western edition would work out somewhat thuswise. Take, for instance, a bachelor coming up from Oxford or Cambridge, or, say, a merchant up from Liverpool or Manchester, instead of having a solitary dinner at his club, if he wished for the relaxation of vivacious female companionship, he would go to the telephone, and ring up "Geishas, Limited," and send word that he wanted one, or more, for dinner that evening. There would in due course, at the restaurant appointed, appear a girl with the dress, appearance, and manners of a lady. Whatever her looks might be, whatever her attractions, she would unfailingly be bright, intelligent, well-mannered, and, above all, entertaining, for her being entertaining would be her _métier_, her occupation, her _raison d'être_. And, contrary to what is frequently supposed from a mistaken acquaintance with this Japanese institution, she would not be in the least facile or accessible. Our ideas of feminine Japan are too much based on the circumscribed experiences of holiday travellers, or books of the bad taste of Pierre Loti's "Madame Chrysanthème." We do not judge the women of England by Leicester Square, nor of Paris by those of the Moulin Rouge. Amongst the accomplishments of these Geisha girls music and singing would be most important. There seems much more refinement and comfort in bringing the music and singing to you than in going to the singing and music. A party of men dining together would not be driven to adjourn to a music-hall after dinner. They could order it as part of the menu.

But these Oriental missionaries, in addition to introducing such an institution, would have a field for their labours in raising their clients and customers to the standard of Japanese civilisation in the enjoyment of it. I present the idea gratis to any enterprising people who are troubled with the question. What to do with our girls!

But Orientals would have little to teach us in what the Chinese call "make face," which enters into many of the actions of our daily life quite as much as it does into theirs. How thankful we should be that it does not also enter into our religious life! How thoroughly the Chinese must be impressed with this by their recent experiences of our Latest Crusaders! I was listening the other day to a gentleman descanting "on the darkness that enveloped those Pagan barbarians," and I was thinking of another darkness or blindness which prevented the speaker, and many like him, from seeing the least gleam of light in the East. Yet it does not require much hand-shading of our intellectual eyes to see EX ORIENTE LUX.