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