Greece shone between 478 and 348,--to give the thirteen decades
of her greatest spiritual brightness. Then came India in 321; we
lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties,
but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six
years) until 185. Then China flamed up brilliantly under the
Western House of Han from 194 to 64;--at which time, however, we
shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.
Between these three national epochs there is this difference:
the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I
guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years
before:--three times thirteen decades, with room for three
national flowerings in Europe--among what peoples, who can say?--
We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have
come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle. But in China
we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a
fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age
of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel
no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but
only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about
thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another
day. Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long
pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning
of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle,
Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240
to 1500: twenty-six decades;--whereas the nations that have held
hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.
And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be
at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to
ourselves and the rest of the globe.
Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the
Cities of the Plain? Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for
their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and
bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should
be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised
he would spare them. But ten righteous there were not, nor
nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.
I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without
leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are
strong; the human organisms through which they play are but--as
we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the
Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in
its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of
fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them
played out and mentally--because long since morally--deficient.
So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the
end of racial manvantaras: it is a humanity gone collectively
mad. On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding
work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort
upwards. If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found--but
they must be righteous, and know what they are doing--I will
spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.
(He said nothing about respectabilities. I dare say there was
quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing
folk in the Cities of the Plain.)
And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility--which
perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis--that
a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become
unfit to carry on the work of evolution. It is a matter of
corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice,
excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance. Heaven knows
how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands,
or has stood, so very far, from the brink. And yet it is from
the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be
born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is
intended to flow.--We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead,
and the religions have taken their place: there has been no sure
and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and
its Higher Self. Each succeeding civilization, under these
circumstances, has run a greater risk.
Of what race are we? I say, of no race at all, but can view the
matter as Human Souls, reincarnating egos, prepared to go where
the Law bids us. Races are only temporary institutions set up
for the convenience of the Host of Souls.
We see, I suppose, the results of such a breakdown in Africa.
Atlanteans were segregated there; isolated; and for a million
years degenerated in that isolation to what they are. But their
ancestors, before that segregation began, had better airships
than we have; were largely giants, in more respects than the
physical, were we are pygmies. Now they are--whatever may be
their potentialities, whatever they may become--actually an
inferior reace. And it is a racial stock that shows no signs of
dying out. What then?--I suppose indeed there must be backward
races, to house backward egos;--though for that matter you would
think that our Londons and Chicagos and the rest, with their
slums, would provide a good deal of accommodation.
Or consider the Redskins, here and in South America: whether
Atlanteans, or of some former subrace of the Fifth, at least not
Aryans. Take the finest tribes among them, such as the Navajos.
Here is a very small hereditary stream, kept pure and apart: of
fine physique; potentially of fine mentality; unsullied with
vices of any sort: a people as much nearer than the white man to
natural spirituality, as to natural physical health. It is no
use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were
the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the
Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The
statistics of lunacy--of that alone--are a fearful _Mene, Tekel
Upharsin_ written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision
to read. I think Naure must also take into account these
possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and
racial stocks other than her great and main ones, _in case of
accidents?_ Are the Redskins among these?
_The Secret Doctrine_ seems to hint sometimes that the founders
of our Fifth Root Race were of Lemurian rather than Atlantean
descent. Nowhere is it actually said so; but there are a number
of passages that read, to me, as if they were written with that
idea, or theory, or fact, in mind. Is it, possibly, that a small
pure stream of Lemurian heredity had been kept aloof through all
the years of Atlantis, in reserve;--some stream that may have
been, at one time, as narrow as the tribe of Navajos?--This may
be a very bold conclusion to draw from what is said in _The
Secret Doctrine;_ it may have no truth in it whatever: other
passages are to be found, perhaps, that would at least appear to
contradict it. But if it is true, it would account for what
seems like a racial anomaly--or more than one. Science leans to
the conclusion that the Australian aborigines are Aryan: they
are liker Aryans than anything else. But we know from _The
Secret Doctrine_ that they are among the few last remnants of the
Lemurians. Again, the Ainos of Japan are very like Europeans:
they have many physical features in common with the Caucasians,
and none in common with the peoples of East Asia. Yet they are
very low down in the scale of evolution:--not so low as the
Australian Blackfellow, but without much occasion for giving
themselves airs. A thousand years of contact with the much-
washing Japanese have never suggested to them why God made soap
and water. Like many other people, they have the legend of the
flood: remember, as you may say, the fall of Atlantis; but
unlike us upstarts of the Fourth and Fifth Races, they have also
a legend of a destruction of the world by fire and earthquake--a
cataclysm that lasted, they say, a hundred days. Is it a memory
of the fate of Lemuria?
Is a new Root-Race developed, not from the one immediately
preceding it, but from the one before? Is Mercury's caduceus,
here too, a symbol of the way evolution is done? Did the Law
keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it
back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the
Atlanteans;--holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity
--and therefore in a kind of pralaya;--at the right moment, to
push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not
parallel to the Atlantean, but _sui generis,_ and to be Aryan
Fifth presently?--Is the Law keeping in reserve a _Sishta_ or
Seed-Race of Atlantean stock, holding that in reserve and apart
all through our Aryan time, to develop from it at last the
beginnings of the Sixth, on the new continent that will appear?
Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one
of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt
heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth
to inhabit?
When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time: when
the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for
the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan
languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more
with them--for languages do become exhausted: we cannot write
English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy
Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because
the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer
take the splendid dyes;--and when that final flowering of
Sanskrit is exhausted too--will the new Sixth Race language, as a
type, be a derivation from the Aryan? Then how?--Or will it,
possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of
Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through
which, during all these millions of years, such great and main
brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have
been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having
lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments
and uses?
All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the
mark. Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no
truth in them at all. And yet I think that if they were true,
they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China.
We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof:
that is, beyond the middle point. And yet one in every four of
the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I
suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or
Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the
world is Atlantean still.
Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic,
or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There
is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head,
the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and
what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles
gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from
nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his
meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but
by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says
he, 'I'm _pater,_ and the subject; set me where you will, and I
am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or,
'Now,' says he, 'I'm _patrem,_ and the object; go look for my
lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next
door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' _Patrem filius
amat,_ or _filius amat patrem,_ or in whatever order it may be,
there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) _suffers_ the
loving.--But now take a word in English. You can still recognise
him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy:
_father_ is no such far cry from _pater:_--but oh what a change
in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head
and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him
move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will
not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him
with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just _lumps_
backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in
him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of
himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the
sentence.--Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the
parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the
Pyrenees; and--pardon me!--the little old time-rounded tiny
Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much
greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged
and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to
them. The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has
lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once
she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few
thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and
summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and
chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and
clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and
heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language
was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the
crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much
worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the
Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round.
There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem.
There are no parts of speech: any word without change can do
duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number:
all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which
there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most
rounded of all, the nasal liquids _n_ and _ng._ There is about as
much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages--you can trace
about as much analogy between them--as you can between a
centipede and a billiard-ball.
There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You
know how the Latin _castrum_ became in English _ciaster_ and then
_chester;_ the change was governed by law. The same law makes
our present-day vulgar say _cyar_ for _car;_ that word, in the
American of the future, will be something like chair. The same
law makes the same kind of people say _donchyer_ for _don't you;_
some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American.
Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times
even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said _Ts'in_
like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say _Ch'in._ So
did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to
do. So we ourselves have turned _Ts'in_ into _China._--And that
is the one little fact--or perhaps one of the two or three little
facts--that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of
kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same
humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.
But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan
might some day--after millions of years--wear down or evolve back
even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is _one
thing;_ and all the differences, the changes rung on that
according to the stages of evolution?
In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily
recognisable: the roots of the words are the same: _Pitri,
pater, vater,_ are clearly but varying pronunciations of the
same word. In the Turanic group, however--Finnish, Hungarian,
Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu--you must expect no such
well-advertised first-cousinship. They are grouped together,
not because of any likeness of roots: not because you could
find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian,
say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for _father_--you
probably could not;--but because there may be syntactical
likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may
be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic--I draw upon
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_--there is a suffix z, preceded
by a vowel, to mean your: _pederin_ is 'father'; 'your father'
becomes _pederiniz;_ _dostun_ means 'friend'; 'your friend'
becomes not _dostuniz,_ but _dostunus;_ and this trick of
assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the
stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish
the relationship of the group. As for likeness of roots,
here is a specimen: _gyordunus_ is the Turkish for the Finnish
_naikke._--So here you see a degree of kinship much more
remote than that you find in the Aryan. Where, say, Dutch
and Gaelic are brothers--at least near relations and bosom
friends,--Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by
marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in
passing. And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the
sons of a common father: according to legends of both peoples,
the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the
Mongols. (Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus
scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit
their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan,
in blood.)
Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group:
Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there
are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship.
They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side,
noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's
existence. They suppose they are akin--through Adam; but whould
tell you that much has happened since then. Their kinship
consists in this: the words are each are billiard-balls--and
yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes.
Thus I should call a Tibetan name like _nGamri-srong-btsan_ a
good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one
like _T'ang Tai-tsong_ a perfectly round smooth one of the kind
we know.--The languages are akin, because each say, where we
should say 'the horse kicked the man,' _horse agent man kicking
completion,_ or words to that effect,--dapped out nearly in
spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words
for _horse_ and _man,_ in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively
as much phonetic likeness as _geegee_ and _equus,_ and _Smith_
and _Jones._ As to the value and possibilities of such
languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers
in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._ One says: "Chinese has the
greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other,
"The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness."
In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred
sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, _shih,_
pronounced like the first three letters in the word _shirt_ in
English. That vocable may mean: _history,_ or _to employ,_ or
_a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time,
poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a
house,_ and all such things as that;--I mention a few out of the
list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said
about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would
think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about
poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little
breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus _Ts'in_ meant one country,
and _Tsin_ another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them,
for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That
would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or
billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite
Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less
cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that
would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest
literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you
come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You
pronounce _shih_ one tone--you sing it on the right note, so to
say, and it means _poetry;_ you take that tone away, and give
it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes _a
corpse:_--as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress
on you it really does.--Of course the hieroglyphs, the written
words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you
have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language
depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of
elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid
words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of
sound-stuff we call letters: _c-a-t_ cat, _d-o-g_ dog, and so
on;--but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on
little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,--and above
all, _musical tones._ Now then, which is the more primitive?
Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the
spiritual, pole?
-------
* _Encyclopaedia Britannica:_ article, China: Language.
-------
More primitive--I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of
Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy;
when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine
fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire
mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies
of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and
kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel
the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were
aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight,
quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;
"They prayed, but their worship was only
The wonder of nights and of days,"
--when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the
poems of the earth was made:--it was song, it was tone, it was
music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was
intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language:
seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps:
and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the
Glory of God. And then--was it like this?--they grew material,
and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit;
and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the
vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving
intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis
with its complex civilization--its infinitely more complex
civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into
being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the
growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing
human brain; and a thousand languages were formed--many of them
to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America--as
much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese:
highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up
and filigreed beyond telling;--and that was at the midmost point
and highest material civilization of Atlantis. And then the
Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the
seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of
the first sub-race;--till you had something in character not
intellectual, but spiritual:--Chinese. And meanwhile--I am
throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second
appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of
them;--meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then
nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in
Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,--
but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to
be chanted, and not dully spoken:--and there, when the time came
for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.
But now for the Sixth Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the
plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things
somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to
something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes
in _The Secret Doctrine,_ and see how the last ones, the sixth
and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and
second. Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the
seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity: when
our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will
flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little
tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of
syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:--until
presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to
sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole
of the Glory of God?
Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away
and ahead of us? Were there first of all billiard-balls; and
did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together;
this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate
to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a
word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or
flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he
wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;--from
monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional,
complex--Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;--then Pyrenean
by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with
crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains;
and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic
laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their
growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier
pronunciation,--stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing
intolerant of changes within itself;--fitting itself to the
weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;--
dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or
with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds
there are;--till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an
Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was
Chinese? Is it primitive, or ultimate? I am almost certain of
this, at any rate: that as a language-type, it stands somewhere
midway between ours and spiritual speech.
How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the
Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the
proud upward arc of the Fifth? And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky
speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of
the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,--Fifth certainly? Is
this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the
Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the
Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya
apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years,
until some time later than 160,000 years ago--the time of the
beginning our our sub-race? A pralaya, like sleep, is a period
of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your
mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits:
whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it
spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright
Immortal Self within. Africa entered such a rest-period from an
orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams
and sorceries, and her people became what they are. But
if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it
would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the
Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu,
the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would
have been--it might have been--with a bent not towards intellectual,
but towards spiritual achievements.
Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the
West. Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all
we have at present.--She attained marvelous heights; but they
were not the same kind of heights the West has attained. Through
her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried
whole provinces of Devachan with her. It was while she was
falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate
meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would
weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she
would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her
gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot
herself to give utterance to the unseemly. There is no line in
her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score. She
worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West
have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity
only in the impersonal and dispassionate: never mistook for its
voice, the voices of the flesh. She sinned much, no doubt; but
not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her worship of Art
and Poetry. She was faithful to the high Gods there. She never
produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our
Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares. But
then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable
to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in
lyricism--one might name a hundred of them--beside whom our Hugos
and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies. Nor have we had any to
compare with her masters of landscape-painting: even the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ comes down flat-footed with the
statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the
world has seen.--And why?--Because it is based on a knowledge of
the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on
the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a
mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists
between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's
curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.' Things seen were an
open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that
window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and
begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the
smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a
natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life
first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of
dynamite. So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you
know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather
coarse and brutal and materialistic to you.
But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare? No Dante or Homer? No
epic--no great drama! Pooh! you say, where is the great
creative energy? Where is the sheer brain force?--
It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is
the highest possible type. Well; it may be: but the deeper you
go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to
become as to the absoluteness of standards. The time to award the
prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of
the differences. Warily let us go to work here!
Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the
West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be
seen as _energies._ I think, through channels nearer this
material plane: nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate.--No:
there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it
has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in
Pope or in Keats? In Pope most emphatically. But off with your
head if you say he gave the greater gift.--Or I will leave Pope,
and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his
net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the
Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he
devised his philosophy: there was a much longer evolution behind
the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the
other's titanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of
brain energies is concerned, there is no question: Bacon was
much the greater man.
So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West
incomparably greater in brain energy. And I am not making such a
foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the
two races. You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the
Han, the T'ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean,
Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze. In the West,
the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more
forcefully with the human intellect: had a much more vigorous
basis in that, I think, to work in and upon. It has reached
lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully--
and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.
We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something
that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought
and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of
the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd. On
the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection.
Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by
religious emotion;--they don't readily gush over a personal god.
It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the
creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality:
have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on
planes less material, nearer their spiritual source. It will
seem so the more because until very recently China has been
constantly misrepresented to us. And yet I think it is pretty
much the truth.
In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting
itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but
through the more subtle perceptions and emotions that lie behind.
It gives us, if we are at all gifted or educated to see, pure
vistas of Itself. Compare Michelangelo's Moses with the Dai Butsu
at Kamakura:--as I think Dr. Siren does in one of his lectures.
The former is a thing of titanic, even majestic energies; but
they are energies physical and mental: a grand triumph on what
is called in Sanskrit philosophy the Rajasic plane. The second
suggests, not energy and struggle, but repose and infinite calm.
In the Moses, we sense warfare, with victory, to attain and to
hold its attainment; in the Dai Butsu, something that has passed
through all that aeons ago. In which is the greater sum of
energies included? In the Dai Butsu certainly; wherein we see no
sign of what we commonly call energies at all. The one is human
struggling up towards Godhood; the other, Godhood looking down
with calm limitless compassion upon man. Such need no engines
and dynamics to remove the mountains: they bid them rise up, and
be cast into the sea; and are obeyed.
Or take a great Chinese landscape and a great Western one: a Ma
Yuan, say, and a--whom you please. To the uninstructed it seems
ridiculous to compare them. This took a whole year to paint; it
is large; there is an enormous amount of hard work in it; huge
creative effort, force, exertion, went to make it. That--it was
done perhaps in an hour. That mountain is but a flick of the
brush; yonder lake but a wash and a ripple. It is painted on a
little trumpery fan--a mere square foot of silk. Yes; but on
that square foot, by the grace of the Everlasting Spirit, are 'a
thousand miles of space': much more--there is Infinity itself.
Watch; and that faint gray or sepia shall become the boundless
blue; and you shall see dim dragons wandering: you shall see
Eternal Mystery brooding within her own limitless home. Far, far
more than in the western work, there is an open window into the
Infinite: that which shall remind us that we are not the poor
clay and dying embers we seem, but a pat of the infinite
Mystery. The Spirit is here; not involved in human flesh and
intellection, but impersonal and universal. What do you
want:--to be a great towering personality; or to remember
that you are a flame of the Fire which is God? Oh, out upon
these personal deities, and most ungodly personalities of
the West! I thank China for reminding me that they are cheap
and nasty nothingnesses at the best!
We rather demand of our art, at its highest, that it shall be a
stimulant, and call to our minds the warfare in which we are
engaged: the hopeless-heroic gay and ever mournful warfare of
the soul against the senses. Well; that battle has to be
fought; there is nothing better than fighting it--until it is
won. Let us by all means hear the snarling of the trumpets; let
us heed the battle-cries of the Soul. But let us not forget that
somewhere also the Spirit is at peace: let us remember that
there is Peace, beyond the victory. In Chinese art and poetry we
do not hear the war-shouts and the trumpets: broken, there, are
the arrow and the bow; the shield, the sword, the sword and the
battle.--But--_the Day-Spring from on high hath visited us._
What element from the Divine is in it, does not concern itself
with this earth-life; tells you nothing in criticism of life.
There is naught in it of the Soul as Thinker, nor of the Soul as
Warrior. But surely it is something for us, immersed here in
these turbid Rajasika regions, to be reminded sometimes that the
Sattvic planes exist; it is something for us to be given
glimpses of the pure quietudes of the Spirit in its own place. I
am the better, if I have been shown for an instant the delicate
imperishable beauty of the Eternal.
"We are tired who follow after
Truth, a phantasy that flies;
You with only look and laughter
Stain our hearts with richest dyes."--
They do indeed; with look and laughter--or it may be tears.
Now, what does it all mean? Simply this, I think: that the West
brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought
and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and
shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of
the Spirit. We do not as a rule allow the validity of the
Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough
Chinaman, 'merely beautiful.'
I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary
instincts will rise with a brief for the West. But the truth is
that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and
does this through the one, that through the other. When I read
_Hamlet,_ I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that
ever lived. When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think
that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this
Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang. I forget the Voice that
cried 'Sleep no more!' and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her
final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the
Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid: she seems to me
to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike
detachment and wonder as this:
"The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since;
but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle. He
and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never
grow weary of gazing";
--the 'lonely cloud' being, of course, Li Po himself. He has shown
me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him.
The mountains can speak for themselves.
He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the
Hills of T'ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a
beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr.
Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in _feng_ and
_ya,_--by which we may understand, for present purposes, much
what Matthew Arnold meant by 'criticism of life.' But does it
not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be
lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten: that
we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we
have lost? Li Po died a child at sixty: a magical child:
always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts,
especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay
for our naughtiness,--exile from the wonder-world, and submersion
in these intolerable personalities. You read Milton, and are
cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the
Spirit beating through. You read Li Po-type of hundreds of
others his compatriots--and you are also cleaned of your
personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried
up out of it into the diamond ether. It seems to me that both
affirmed the Divine Spirit. Milton waged grand warfare in his
affirmation. Li Po merely said what he saw.
So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in
and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among
the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream,
but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression. A great drama
or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working
in a human mind. A great lyric comes of the escape of the
consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit. The West has
produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the
view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in
these forms. Very likely the West is right; but I shall not
think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k'ung T'u--or Keats.
And I have seen small mild Japanese jujitsu men 'put it all
over,' as they say, big burly English wrestlers without seeming
to exert themselves in any way, or forgoing their gentle methods
and manner; and if you think of jujitsu rightly, it is, to our
wrestling and boxing, much what Wu Taotse and Ku Kai-chih are to
Rembrandt and Michelangelo, or the Chinese poets to ours.
If we go into the field of philosophy, we find much the same
thing. Take Confucianism. It is inappropriate, in some ways, to
call Confucius a great thinker (but we shall see that he was
something very much more than that). He taught no religion;
illuminated in nowise the world of mind; though he enabled
millions to illumine it for themselves. He made hardly a ripple
in his own day; and yet, so far as I can see, only the Buddha
and Mohammed, of the men whose names we know, have marshaled
future ages as greatly as he did. _Flow his way!_ said he to
history; and, in the main, it did. He created an astral mold
for about a quarter of humanity, which for twenty-four centuries
has endured. He did it by formulating a series of rules for the
conduct of personal and national life; or rather, by showing
what kind of rules they should be, and leaving others to
formulate them;--and so infused his doctrine with his will and
example, that century after century flowed into the matrix he had
made for them. To create such a stable matrix, the Aryan mind, in
India, worked through long spiritual-intellectual exploration of
the world of metaphysics: an intensive culture of all the
possibilities of thought. We in the West have boggled towards the
same end through centuries of crass political experiment.
Confucius, following his ancient models, ignored metaphysics
altogether: jumped the life to come, and made his be-all and his
end-all here:--in what was necessary, in deeds and thought and
speech, to make individual, social, and political life staid,
sincere, orderly, quiet, decent, and happy. He died a broken-
hearted failure; than whom perhaps no man except the Lord Buddha
ever succeeded more highly.
Laotse is his complement. Laotse's aim is not the activity, but
the quiescence of mind, self, intellect: "in the NO THING
seeking the lonely Way." You forgo everything--especially
selfhood;--you give up everything; you enter upon the heritage
of No Thing;--and you find yourself heir to the Universe, to
wonder, to magic. You do with all your complicated egoity as the
camel did with his cameltiness before he could enter the needle's
eye; then--heigh presto!--it is the Elixir of Life you have
drunk; it is freedom you have attained of the roaming-place
of Dragons!--It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan
Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates
immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently
into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, _You see how
easy it is!_ And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with
the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.
Then from Japan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics
or dogma. The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic
of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity. Taoism,
Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations,
in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind. There
have been, indeed, profound thinkers and metaphysicians both
in Japan and China; but their mental activities have been
for the most part fruitage from the Aryan seed of Buddhism.
A word here as to that phrase 'Altaic mind.' What business has
one to class the Chinese and Japanese together, and to speak of
them (as I shall) as 'Altaic'--the _Altaic Race?_ In the first
place this term, like 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon,' has the virtue of
being quite meaningless. It is utterly silly and inappropriate
from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and
all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from
her, I shall beg leave to use it. Neither Japanese nor Corean
belong to the billiard-ball group of languages. There is a
syntactical likeness between these two, but none in vocabulary;
where the Japanese vocabulary came from, Omniscience perhaps may
know.--A syntax outlasts a vocabulary by many ages: you may hear
Celts now talk English with a syntax that comes from the sub-race
before our own: Iberian, and not Aryan. So we may guess here a
race akin to the Coreans conquered at some time by a race whose
vocables were Japanese--whence they came, God knows. Only one
hears that in South America the Japanese pick up the Indian
languages a deal more easily than white folk do, or than they do
Spanish or English. But this is a divergence; we should be a
little more forward, perhaps, if we knew who were the Coreans,
or whence they came. But we do not. They are not Turanic--of the
Finno-Turko-Mongol stock (by language); they are not speakers of
billiard-balls, allied to the Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetans.
But the fact is that neither blood-affinity nor speech-affinity
is much to the purpose here; we have to do with affinities of
culture. During the period 240 B. C.--1260 A. D. a great
civilization rose, flowered, and waned in the Far East; it had
its origin in China, and spread out to include in its scope
Japan, Corea, and Tibet; probably also Annam and Tonquin, though
we hear less of them;--while Burma, Assam, and Siam, and those
southerly regions, though akin to China in language, seem
to have been always more satellite to India. Mongols and
Manchus, though they look rather like Chinese, and have lived
rather near China, belong by language and traditionally by
race to another group altogether--to that, in fact, which
includes the very Caucasian-looking Turks and Hungarians;
as to what culture they have had, they got it from China
after the Chinese manvantara had passed.
The Chinese themselves are only homogeneous in race in the sense
that Europe might be if the Romans had conquered it all, and
imposed their culture and language on the whole continent. The
staid, grave, dignified, and rather stolid northern Chinaman
differs from the restless and imaginative Cantonese not much less
than the Japanese does from either. This much you can say:
Chinese, Japanese, and Coreans have been molded into a kind of
loose unity by a common culture; the peoples of China into a
closer homogeneity by a common culture-language, written and
spoken,--and by the fact that they have been, off and on during
the last two thousand years, but most of the time, under the same
government. As to Corea, though in the days of Confucius it was
unknown to the Chinese, the legends of both countries ascribe the
founding of its civilization and monarchy to a Chinese minister
exiled there during the twelfth century B. C. Japanese legendary
history goes back to 600 B. C.;--that is, to the closing of the
Age of the Mysteries, and the opening of that of the Religions:--
I imagine that means that about that time a break with history
occurred, and the past was abolished: a thing we shall see
happen in ancient China presently. But I suppose we may call
Shotoku Daishi the Father of historical Japan;--he who, about the
end of the sixth century A. D., brought in the culture impetus
from the continent. About that time, too, Siam rose to power; and
soon afterwards T'ang Taitsong imposed civilization on Tibet.--So
there you have the 'Altaic' Race; Altaic, as Mr. Dooley is
Anglo-Saxon. To speak of them as 'Mongolian' or 'Mongoloid,' as
is often done, is about as sensible as to speak of Europeans and
Americans as 'Hunnoid,' because the Huns once conquered part of
Europe. It conveys derogation--which Altaic does not.
I have compared their achievement with that of the West: we have
one whole manvantara and a pralaya of theirs to judge by, as
against two fragments of western manvantaras with the pralaya
intervening. It is not much; and we should remember that there
are cycles and epicycles; and that Japan, or old China herself,
within our own lifetime, may give the lie to everything.
But from the evidence at hand one is inclined to draw this
conclusion: That in the Far East you have a great section of
humanity in reserve;--in a sense, in a backwater of evolution:
nearer the Spirit, farther from the hot press and conflict of the
material world;--even in its times of highest activity, not in
the van of the down-rush of Spirit into matter, as the western
races have been in theirs;--but held apart to perform a different
function. As if the Crest-Wave of Evolution needed what we might
call Devachanic cycles of incarnation, and found them there
during the Altaic manvantaras of manifestation. Not that their
history has been empty of tragedies; it has been very full of
them; and wars--some eight or nine Napoleons in their day have
sat on the Dragon Throne. But still, the worlds of poetry,
delight, wonder, have been nearer and more accessible to the
Chinaman, in his great ages, than to us in ours; as they have
been, and probably are now, nearer to the Japanese. And I do
not know how that should be, unless the Law had taken those
Atlanteans away, kept them apart from the main stream--not
fighting the main battle, but in reserve--for purposes that the
long millenniums of the future are to declare.