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THE ASIAN LEGACY AND AMERICAN LIFE
The “Sea Letter” of the Empress of China , Inaugurating the China Trade in 1783-84. From the Library of Congress.
THE ASIAN LEGACY AND AMERICAN LIFE
ESSAYS
ARRANGED AND EDITED BY
ARTHUR E. CHRISTY
Illustrated
AN ASIA PRESS BOOK
Published in co-operation with The East and West Association
THE JOHN DAY COMPANY • NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1942, 1943, 1945, BY ASIA PRESS, INC.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission.
This book is published simultaneously in the Dominion of Canada by Longmans, Green & Company, Toronto.
Government wartime restrictions on materials have made it essential that the amount of paper used in each book be reduced to a minimum. This volume is printed on liphter paper than would have been used before material limitations became necessary, and the number of words on each page has been substantially increased. The smaller bulk in no way indicates that the text has been shortened.
The chapters “Our Agricultural Debt to Asia” and “Living Religions and a World Faith” have appeared in the magazine Asia and the Americas.
Typography by Robert Josephy
MANU7ACTURSD IV TKK UVITtD IT ATS t 07 AXXftSCA
CONTENTS
FOREWORD vii
THE SENSE OF THE PAST I
ARTHUR E . CHRISTY , Professor of American Literature , University of Illinois
THE ORIENT AND WESTERN MUSIC 56
CURT SACHS, Graduate School, New York Uni- versity; Consultant to the Music Division, New York Public Library
THE ORIENT AND WESTERN ART 70
LAURANCE P. ROBERTS, Director, The Brook- lyn Museum
OUR AGRICULTURAL DEBT TO ASIA 84
WALTER T. SWINGLE, Collaborator, Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture ; Consultant on Tropical Botany, Uni- versity of Miami
TIES THAT BIND I I 5
STEPHEN B. L. PENROSE, JR., former Asso- ciate Director, Near East College Association; and OLIVER J. CALDWELL, former Secretary, As- sociated Boards for Christian Colleges in China
THE ORIENT AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY 1 45
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER, poet , Pulitzer Prize
Winner
TRANSCENDENTALISM IN CONTEMPORARY
LITERATURE 1 75
WILLIAM YORK TINDALL, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia
University
LIVING RELIGIONS AND A WORLD FAITH 1 93
WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING, retired Chair- man, Department of Philosophy, Harvard Univer- sity
UNDERSTANDING AND REUNION: AN ORIENTAL
PERSPECTIVE 2 1 5
ANANDA K. COOMARASWAMY, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
CONCLUSION: EAST AND WEST 2 3 I
PEARL S. BUCK, President, The East and West
Association
APPENDICES 236
ARTHUR E. CHRISTY
REFERENCE NOTES 268
INDEX 27O
Illustrations will be found in three sections following page 7 6, page too, and page 244
FOREWORD
THE occasion for this book is the rise in recent years of numerous governmental and private agencies sponsoring edu- cational programs in intercultural relations. Enlightened states- men and private citizens have at last recognized the fact that isolationism is politically untenable, economically unsound, mor- ally preposterous, and intellectually parochial. One of the most urgent tasks of our day is to arouse interest in the life of foreign peoples, and to dispel ignorance about the interdependence of all the tribes of the human family.
There are three ways in which the study of foreign peoples may be conducted. One is to study them in vacuo , with a sense of complete detachment. Another is to explain the differences between the world’s peoples and their cultures—a study which unhappily leads to invidious contrasts and contributes little to man’s sadly needed store of good will. A third is based on the assumption that as long as the peoples of the earth have some similarities, are blessed with intellectual curiosity, and sincerely share a desire for something approaching the brotherhood of man, mutually beneficial relations can be developed among them. This final approach involves knowing other peoples intimately and acquiring ability to see their interests as well as our own; but above all, it emphasizes the process of cultural interchange.
The question “What can the East give the West?” has long been asked, but few have sought to answer. Some scholars have devoted themselves to the question in terms of European life and civilization, and have sought in such works as the Oxford Legacy series to show the exchange chiefly among peoples of the Medi- terranean littoral. No concerted effort has yet been made to an- swer the question in terms of American life. At no time in history and in no area of the world has there been greater need of such
study than in America. The peoples of the New World, a fluid mixture of races, look out upon the life of the earth from a conti- nent whose coasts are washed by both of the great oceans, beyond which, in ancestral Europe and ancient Asia, are the fountain- heads of their traditions.
The legacies of Israel and Rome in Occidental civilization have been described as the Jordan flowing into the Tiber. In more recent times the Yangtze has flowed into the Thames and the Ganges into the Mississippi. We do not minimize the basic con- tributions of Israel, Greece, and Rome to Western civilization, or the modem European traditions upon which American culture is founded. But we recognize the fact that as the earth has shrunk with the scientific conquest of distance, the world’s peoples no longer live unto themselves and many Asiatic; peoples hitherto re- mote from us have been brought into our intellectual orbit. In- deed, they have in many ways, without many of us being aware of it, influenced our sense of spiritual values and enriched our workaday lives.
Paradoxically, the shrinking of our physical earth has also meant the enlargement of each individual’s world. The neighbors of modern man are no longer those who live in familiar parishes, but those who inhabit the ends of the earth. No one can safely predict, if a world civilization is ultimately to arise, whether it will conform mainly to the standards of Europe. Spenglerian prophets of doom for the West have thought too exclusively of domination or decline. They have ignored the fact that a shuttle of interacting influence is ceaselessly weaving the warp and the weft of the world’s cultural fabric, while other forces are laying foundations under man’s dream of universal brotherhood. It was not sentimentalism that impelled Sisley Huddleston to write in In My Time: “What we must have is a genuine cosmopolitanism, and that means a growing body of really civilized individual men and women in a number of countries, sufficiently enlightened to . . . admire whatever is lovely and of good report in every coun- try, and sufficiently numerous to leaven and color the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”
This book is intended to be a modest contribution to knowl- edge in a generally neglected field of Western cultural history. That it is not exhaustive and does not presume even to survey
viii
many important problems in the history of Oriental-Occidental relations must be emphasized. Its stress is mainly upon processes and values which politicians and economists generally ignore. The contributors are officials and scholars who have been asked to agree upon only one principle, namely, that intercultural ex- change involves more than the commodities or bric-a-brac which cross the oceans on the bottoms of ships, the records compiled by attaches in consular offices overseas, and trade treaties favored by chambers of commerce. That this emphasis needs to be made in American relations with Asiatic peoples cannot be too strongly stated, if we are ever to be fully absolved from the charge of being essentially a materialistic people or curious about the pic- turesque details of foreign life alone.
The emphasis of the book is, furthermore, on contemporary American life, on living issues. The past has not been ignored, however, since historical perspective is needed; and European backgrounds have been emphasized, since what America owes to Asia in many instances came indirectly through our European relations. Following the editor’s contribution, the chapters are arranged in turn to present a varied sense of such vital details of our debt to Asia as the fruits and cereals which have become sta- ples in the economy of American life, the social institutions and the arts which are the chief channels of cultural interchange, and the religious and philosophical issues implicit in the relations be- tween the cultures of the world’s hemispheres. Finally, Dr. Coom- araswamy contributes to the series as a citizen of the world, an Oriental by birth and an Occidental in training and professional life, stating what seem to him the crucial needs and issues.
Readers will discover much information hitherto inaccessible. But the contributors while pointing out trees have also described forests. Skilled at taking pains, they have not forgotten for what purpose alone research and the scholar’s cares are worth the effort, and they have not neglected either the broad view or the deeper understanding and larger interrelations. Since each contributor worked independently, free to select his own facts and draw his own conclusions, the separate chapters reflect individual points of view arrived at through long years of observation, study, and per- sonal experience. The cumulative result is a rich assortment of facts, stimulating ideas, and approaches to one of the most vital
ix
issues in international life today. The editor is confident that both the general and the learned critic will realize that the purpose is not rhetorical effect but the awakening of the American public to a comprehensive view of all that is involved in our relations with non-European peoples.
Among the many satisfactions, encouragement, and help the editor has received in his work, his chief debt is to the interna- tionally known authorities who have contributed to the pages which follow. To speak of their eminence is unnecessary for those who know their work. For those unacquainted with it, the chief facts of interest to the reader have been noted on the contents page. The editor is confident that men who share a common interest and are willing to spend themselves for inter- national understanding cannot fail to find mutual satisfaction in the advancement of the cause. Among collaborators, therefore, the silence of simple pleasure at tasks completed contains a deeper note of satisfaction and gratitude than can be conveyed by words for the public eye. To Pearl S. Buck, founder of the East and West Association, the editor tenders his thanks for the gracious manner in which his first proposal for this book was received and for the chapter which enriches its pages. Finally, to the John Si- mon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies the editor is under debt for encouragement and aid in the development of the field of study which this book rep- resents and of which it is a hint of work in progress. Representa- tive materials quarried from the records of the East India trade in European and American archives are included in the opening chapter or kenneled in an innocuous appendix. Since most of the facts are either new or from unpublished records, specialists may find them informative; and the general public, for whom this book is intended, may be introduced through them to the history of the cultural discovery of the Orient.
Arthur E. Christy
February /,
X
THE ASIAN LEGACY AND AMERICAN LIFE
Arthur E. Christy
THE SENSE OF THE PAST
I
IF IT is true, as Savigny said, that history is the only way to attain a knowledge of one’s condition, a sense of the past is needed in the conduct of cultural relations between European and Asiatic peoples. Indeed the civilization of our modern world is in many ways a product of the interchange between the east- ern and western hemispheres; and there are peculiar reasons why the American manifestations of the reciprocal contacts are par- ticularly worthy of study. The New World, from the time of Columbus, has stood midway between Europe and Asia. It is the laboratory in which many values are tested, the field in which everything from Oriental flora and fauna to exotic modes of life and thought is being domesticated. In John Buchan’s Pilgrim's Way appear pertinent comments on the antiquarian habit of mind which belittles the present and looks backward. It is a vicious business, he wrote, to look backward unless the feet are set stead- fastly on the forward road. Change, inevitable with the passing generations, must be welcomed. Open and flexible minds will rec- ognize the need of transformation and set themselves to appre- hend new conditions. But they will also recognize that the past is “the matrix of present and future, whose potency takes many forms but is not diminished.” They will cherish it scrupulously, labor to read its lessons, and, realizing fully that “in the cycle to which we belong we can see only a fraction of the curve,” will appraise it properly by looking both ahead and backward a few centuries to its beginning.
The vastness of our subject precludes a detailed historical dis- cussion of the Occidental debt to the Orient. Intercourse began
I
in Graeco-Roman times, and it included everything from the commodities of the early caravan trade to modern circus freaks and chinaware, from the art of printing to the mariner’s compass, from gunpowder to the game of chess, from Arabic mathematics and science to the Aristotelianism which Averroes and Avicenna transmitted to the thinkers of the European Renaissance, from Hindu fables to theories of art, from loan-words in our vocabu- laries to materia medica , from wallpaper to theosophies. The his- torian might also consider the beginnings of all “comparative” studies, including linguistics and religion; and if he elects to con- sider the most modern of all problems, he would delve, as has C. G. Jung, into the psychology of the unconscious in the light of the ancient scriptures of the East.
The question of the Occidental debt to the Orient is thus of the greatest significance. The vital issues which it raises for the fu- ture were suggested by the Irish poet George Russell (AE) in The Living Torch. “If Europe,” he wrote, “is to have a new ren- aissance comparable with that which came from the wedding of Christianity with the Greek and Latin culture it must, I think, come from a second wedding of Christianity with the culture of the East.” Romain Rolland in his Prophets of the New India raised a somewhat analogous question as he viewed American life. “It would be a matter of deep interest to know exactly how far the American spirit had been impregnated, directly or indirectly, by the infiltration of Hindu thought during the nineteenth cen- tury,” he wrote, “for there can be no doubt that it has contributed to the strange moral and religious mentality of the United States. . . . It is . . . a psychological problem of the first order, inti- mately connected with the history of our civilization.”
For a brief survey, we do well to begin with the opening up of the world by Columbus and Vasco da Gama and to restrict our- selves to a few of the purely intellectual consequences. The first fact to be noted about the voyagers of the late fifteenth and six- teenth centuries is that they opened the way to self-discovery no less than to unknown lands ripe for economic exploitation. They disclosed to Europeans as never before their ignorance, their pov- erty, and their limited intellectual horizons. At first they appear to have been most impressed by the wealth of the Indies, and the flora and fauna of Oceania and the New World. The Occidental
2
mind, even that of Western Europe, was adjusted to a time when the Mediterranean was the center of civilization. Centuries were to pass before the historical record of all that the various branches of the human family had accomplished and thought were to be unfolded. The discoveries began at a time when almost all Eu- ropeans regarded the Pope as God’s vicar over all the known races of mankind. The record, furthermore, must be viewed against a background of momentous changes in the intellectual life of Europe itself. It embraces all that Occidental peoples have found overseas, domesticated in their homelands, learned about foreign ethical and political systems, sought to formulate for the conduct of their own lives, and finally, are studying with the critical apparatus of modern scholarship.
In the early pages of such a record, wild guesses, errors, and misconceptions are to be expected. But to ignore or minimize the work of the early explorers of Oriental culture is ill-advised. One does well to remember that at first:
Geographers in Afric maps
Make savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er inhabitable downs Place elephants instead of towns.
Ignorance of the physical world before arduous and dangerous exploration led to the inner secrets of unknown continents has never been regarded as a mark of weakness in the European intel- lect. Similar ignorance of the inner spirit or meaning of foreign cultures cannot be fairly regarded as a mark of dullness of mind and insensitivity of soul. Marlowe in Tamburlaine the Great put into the mouth of his dying hero words which clearly epitomize the spirit of the first European explorers:
Give me a map; then let me see how much Is left for me to conquer all the world,
That these, my boys, may finish all my wants.
Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line, Unto the rising of this earthly globe;
Whereas the sun, declining from our sight,
3
Begins the day with our Antipodes!
And I shall die, and this unconquered?
Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing also suggested what such exploration did to the European imagination: “I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on; I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the farthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard. . .
Clearly the Europeans who opened up the world were avid for knowledge. While many were lamentably intent on economic exploitation of foreign peoples and lands, not a small number val- ued more the cultural legacies slowly and simultaneously made known.
ii
The persistent ignoring by cultural historians of the Oriental contribution to the imaginative and spiritual life of Europe stems of course from their sense of values and their home-keeping tendencies. It rises no less from the sentiment that the record con- sists chiefly of manifestations of credulity and ignorance. Such manifestations are, nevertheless, useful suggestions of the realms of human experience in which Orientals and Occidentals will in time discover common ground and realize what they may con- tribute to each other. For perspective, one may turn to the dawn of modern European history and illustrate through a book, a writer, and a saints’ legend, the varying ways in which European thought, literature, and institutions, have been influenced from abroad.
It is a little known but surprising fact that the first book printed in England, entitled the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers and published by William Caxton in 1477, was basically Oriental and reflected the centuries-old European debt to Indian folklore and Arabic wisdom literature. The first compiler, according to the editor of the version published in 1941 by the Early English Text Society, was Abu’l Wefa Mubeschschir ben Fatik, an Arab phi- losopher living in Damascus probably about 1053 A-D* No ques- tion in the history of Oriental-Occidental cultural relations is more intriguing than the origin of the popular sentiment that the East is the treasureJiouse of wisdom, of profound insights, and of
4
occult knowledge. The celebrated Dictes may be taken as sig- nificant evidence of this belief in the literature of Western Eu- rope.
Behind the book is a very complex collection of sources which stem through Arabic and Greek versions of fables, parables, and moral apologues migrating westward from India, of Alexandrine Neo-Platonism, and of the work of Arab philosophers who served as mediators in the intellectual life of Mediterranean peoples. The work on which Caxton based his text appears to have been com- piled in Latin about 1350. It was translated into French in 1410, and the English version was made by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, tutor to the youthful Prince of Wales, who thought it “full necessary to my said lord the understanding thereof.” The time was the tumultuous period of the Wars of the Roses, when the partisans of Edward IV sought refuge at the court of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Caxton had served as “Governor of the English Nation abroad,” that is, as business agent for the Mer- chant Adventurers, and had been able to render frequent aid to his expatriated countrymen, who with him found ample oppor- tunity to acquaint themselves with Oriental fables and proverbs transmitted from Moorish Spain into France. They were doubt- less also introduced to Latin collections of Oriental lore circulat- ing on the Continent. Under these circumstances, it was not by accident that Caxton’s first book should be representative of the literature which had caught the attention of men who lived in days when the changes and chances of life were unpredictable, and when on all sides individuals sought stability. The popularity of the Dictes in England is indicated by the fact that Caxton him- self brought out three editions. Its title is perhaps deceptive, for it was in no sense an exposition of Oriental philosophy. On the con- trary, it contained numerous pleasant stories for the seasoning of conversation, many quotable maxims or proverbial sayings such as one finds appended to iEsopic or Buddhist tales, and parables which are reminiscent of the Apocrypha. This curious and his- torically significant book marks the beginnings in English publish- ing of hundreds of volumes which have presented to Western readers the distillation of ages of human experience in the East. It marks the beginning also of that vague exoticism which has never ceased to be an element in our popular literature. In every
5
subsequent generation some writer of note has sought to satisfy the demands of his contemporaries for the exotic.
Sir Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius, is an excellent example. In 1570 he published The Morall Philosophic of Doniy a book whose title unfortunately fails to suggest its Oriental origin. North used for his translation the Italian work of Antonio Francesco Doni, a journalist of Florence whose interest was in the ancient fabulists of the East and who, like Boccaccio, wove many an oriental tale into the popular nov - elle of his time. The Morall Philosophie is an English version of an Italian adaptation of the Pehlevi version of original Indian col- lections of Buddhist birth-stories and moral apologues. Here is clear indication of the popularity of such stories in the West and of the knotty bibliographical problems involved in tracing their origin, various adaptations, and extensive diffusion. The Oriental materials in such collections as the popular Gesta Romanorum and Seven Wise Masters of the Middle Ages reflect the same interest. In the East had been discovered a storehouse of narrative and maxims which contributed to the exempla of monkish preachers, to the tales of a writer as great as Chaucer, and to later Eliza- bethan dramatists. But North’s Morall Philosophie was more than a collection of incident useful for later writers in the construction of plays and tales. It came from the hand of a great English styl- ist, who possessed the art of saying great things simply, and who contributed richly to the development of Tudor prose. One is tempted to extensive quotation, no less than to an exposition of the ways in which Doni’s Italian vivacity tempered the Oriental gravity of the originals. But brief lines from the apostrophe “To the Reader” will suffice to indicate its foreign source and char- acter:
Of wordes and of examples is a sundrie sort of speache
One selfe same thing to mindes of men in sundrie wise they teache.
Wordes teach but those that understande the language that they heare:
But things, to men of sundrie speache, examples make appeare.
So larger is the speache of beasts, though mens more cer- taine bee:
6
But yet so larger as conceyte is able them to see.
Such largenesse yet at length to bring to certaine use and plane,
God gaue such grace to beasts, that they should Indian speach attaine.
And then they learnde Italian tongue, and now at length they can,
By help of North, speake English well to euery English man.
It is customary to illustrate the appeal of the Orient to the Eu- ropean imagination in the Middle Ages by the popular travel books and diaries of Marco Polo and his contemporaries. There can be doubt neither of the stimulus of such works, nor of the fact that the fictitious Travels of Sir John Mandeville owed its being to the current demand for more works like those of the monks and merchants who on overland journeys to Cathay ob- served the wealth of unknown peoples and reported the wonders they had seen. But the legend of Barlaam and Josaphaty with vari- ants in Greek, Latin, French, German, Swedish, Dutch, and even Icelandic, reveals in a different fashion what the European mind wished to believe and could do with a few meager facts. The legend has been called “the first religious romance published in a Western language.” It contains much of the life of Buddha him- self, birth stories from the Buddhist canon, tales from the Pan - chatantra and other Oriental myths, combined with Christian traditions. Whatever the version by which it entered the Western world, beginning with a Sanskrit prototype and passing from Pchlevi to Arabic to Georgian to Greek and finally into many other European forms, the moral tone of the legend pleased Eu- ropeans. It appears in the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry and also in the Gesta Romanorum . And of all unexpected results—it led to the canonization of its hero, Buddha, as a saint of Rome and By- zantium.
The gist of the story can be briefly told. Christian teaching had found its way into the East, and many converts had been made in the dominions of an Indian king. To this king a son was born, at whose birthday feast Chaldaean oracles prophesied that the in- fant would grow in wisdom, abandon the religion of his fathers,
7
and embrace the true faith. The distressed father tried to keep his son ignorant of the miseries of the world, built for him de- lightful palaces, surrounded him with all that was beautiful, and, as in the legendary life of Buddha himself, gave instructions that the youth should never be shown sickness, old age, and death. A Christian hermit gained access to the young prince and instructed him in Christian doctrines. The prince, converted and baptized, resolved to give up all his wealth and pleasures. In some versions he even converted his own father and many of his subjects. Eventually he followed his teacher into the desert, became a her- mit, and died in the true faith, a Christian saint. Within the frame of this simple tale, there was offered opportunity for storytellers to interweave innumerable parables and Oriental apologues, es- pecially at the debates before the king’s court on the merits of the various religions of the time which preceded the prince’s renunci- ation of the world. In these disputations one may find evidence of an early attempt at “comparative” religion, although the real object of the book was manifestly a simple exposition of the prin- cipal doctrines of the Christian faith.
Many scholars besides T. W. ‘Rhys Davids in his work on Buddhist Birth-Stories have examined the records which pertain to the canonization of Buddha as St. Josaphat. Barlaam, the Chris- tian hermit of the story, need not concern us here. What is sig- nificant is that the legend of the converted Indian prince became widely accepted as authentic, and his name was included in vari- ous local lists of deceased saints and martyrs which were recited in the so-called Canon of the Mass. Religious men of local celeb- rity were often included for that purpose in the local lists or Diptychs, and their names in time became honored throughout Christendom. The confessors and martyrs thus honored in the ‘Canon’ were in that sense said to have been canonized. For a long time local ecclesiastics were permitted to insert such names in their Diptychs. After 1170 Pope Alexander III decreed that the power of canonization, so far as the Roman Church was con- cerned, would be confined to the Pope himself. With the passing centuries the names in various martyrologies were thus no longer inserted in the Canon but were repeated in the part of the service called the ‘Prime,’ although the term ‘canonized’ was still applied to the holy men mentioned in them. Finally, as the increasing
8
number of martyrologies led to confusion and raised doubts about the exclusive power of the Pope to canonize, in 1585-90 Cardinal Baronius drew up a Marty rologium which was to be used throughout the Western Church. In it were included not only the saints canonized at Rome but also those already canonized else- where who were then recognized by the Pope and the College of Rites as saints of the Catholic Church of Christ. Included in this list were “The holy Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, of India, on the borders of Persia, whose wonderful acts Saint John of Damascus has described.”
Behind this story of the Christian canonization of Buddha lie two facts. The first is the legend itself, so impressive in its ac- count of the conversion of the Oriental prince that its authen- ticity was not questioned and the hero became a saint. The second factor involves early linguistic confusion of names. The name Ioasaph is derived from Bodhisattva, the title of one destined to attain the dignity of a buddha. In Arabic Bodhisattva became Bodasaph. Later, since Arabic B and Y differ only by a single dia- critical point under the character, Bodasaph was misread as Iodasaph in Georgian and Ioasaph in Greek. These names were later rendered by Western European adapters of the legend into the more familiar Josaphat or Jehoshaphat.
The amazing vitality and adaptability of Oriental myth, legend, and wisdom-literature are also clearly suggested by the bare facts noted about the work of Caxton and North. The synthetic character of Christianity itself is likewise indicated in the saints' legend of Buddha. These popular signs of ‘orientalism’ in Medie- val Europe are a meager suggestion that the East had contributed to its thought and imagination before the opening of the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. As navigators and merchant mariners in increasing numbers returned from far voyages with the wealth of the Indies in their galleons to enrich the material civilization of Western Europe, they may have been ignorant of the significance of the mystery cults of the eastern Mediter- ranean world and of the extent to which Arab philosophers and Neo-Platonists had considered the ancient philosophies of the East. But they no less represented a cultural tradition that had long been willing to accommodate itself to new modes of thought, and a credulous public whose curiosity had been awak-
9
ened. In the following centuries which have been labeled the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and which form the prelude to contemporary European and American thought, some fearful and a few amazing things were to be done by Europeans with the unfolding knowledge about Oriental peoples and their ways of life.
hi
After the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama in 1492 and 1498, nearly a century and a half passed before Europeans organized anything like systematic study of the “rarities” of the Indies, which consisted chiefly of unknown flora and fauna, and of facts about foreign peoples, their traits, institutions, racial ideals, and religious beliefs. Astronomers, however, soon sailed with the mariners for the purpose of studying eclipses in distant regions, and scientists began to reconsider traditional European knowledge in the light of new facts. Aristotle's system of natural history, it was discovered, accommodated itself inadequately to new specimens of plants and animals found in other areas of the world and hitherto unknown to Europe. Clearly, the progress of Renaissance science was influenced by Eastern discovery.
This scientific interest soon crystallized into organized societies. As early as 1572 a Society of Antiquaries was formed in London and continued until it was dissolved by James I. A Royal Acad- emy was projected in 1616-17; and in 1645 a group of English in- tellectuals, weary of political and religious turmoil, began weekly meetings in Gresham College. From this informal group, called by Sir Robert Boyle the “invisible College,” there eventually grew the Royal Society of London, which was chartered by the King on April 22, 1662. On the Continent similar societies sprang up. In 1666 the French Academy of Science was projected. The extant records of such societies show that their attention was not directed to European antiquities alone.
How systematic and far-reaching were the efforts of the Eng- lish Royal Society to gather new knowledge regarding the over- seas world and its inhabitants may be judged from the “Directions for Sea-men, bound for far Voyages,” published in its Philosophi- cal Transactions on January 8, 1666. In that document appears the following statement:
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It being the Design of the R. Society , for the better attain- ing of the End of their Institution, to study Nature rather than Books, and from the Observations, made of the Phe- nomena and Effects she presents, to compose a History of Her, as may hereafter serve to build a solid and Useful Phi- losophy upon; They have from time to time given order to several of their Members to draw up both Inquiries of things Observable in forrain Countries, and Directions for the Par- ticulars, they desire chiefly to be informed about . . . and set down some Directions for Sea-men going into the East & West Indies, the better to capacitate them for making such observations abroad.
Seamen were instructed “to keep an exact Diary, delivering at their return a fair Copy thereof to the Lord High Admiral,” an- other to the Duke of York, and a third to the Royal Society it- self. The seamen were also to prepare careful accounts “of the Inhabitants themselves, both Natives and Strangers,” and to en- quire “about Traditions concerning all particular things, relating to that Country” and “regarding Learning or Skill in the An- swerer” The Society asserted that the instructions were “thought fit to be publisht, that the Inquisitive and Curious, might, by such Assistance be invited not to delay their searches of matters, that are so highly conducive to the improvement of True Philosophy , and the well fare of Mankind”
As late as 1704, in ChurchilPs Colie ction of Voyages appeared an “Introductory Discourse” in which the writer “set down some general Rules which may concern all Travellers to observe.” The suggestions clearly reveal the wealth of material which those who conscientiously observed the rules were to bring home for study:
They are in the first place to consider, that they do not go into other Countries to pass through them, and divert themselves with the present sight of such Curiosities as they meet with. ... If they will make an advantage of their Trouble and Cost, they must not pass through a Country as if they carried an Express, but make a reasonable stay at all places where there are Antiquities, or any Rarities to be ob- served; and not to think that because others have writ on that ’Subject, there is no more to be said. . . . Let them
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therefore always have a Table-Book at hand to set down every thing worth remembering, and then at night more methodically transcribe the Notes they have taken in the day. The principal Heads by which to regulate their Ob- servations are these, Climate, Government, Power, Places of Strength, Cities of note, Religion, Language, Coins, Trade, Manufactures, Wealth, Universities, Antiquities, Libraries, Collections of Rarities, Arts and Artists, Publick Structures, Roads, Bridges, Woods, Mountains, Customs, Habits, Laws, Privileges, strange Adventures, surprising Accidents, Rarities both natural and artificial, the Soil, Plants, Animals, and whatsoever may be curious, diverting, or Profitable.
These deliberate efforts to secure scientific data regarding for- eign countries and peoples had, however, in a way been antici- pated by the first independent compilers of cosmographies and universal histories. In 1544 Sebastian Munster published at Basel his Cosmographia Universalis , in which he surprised later cartog- raphers by his desire to secure the latest knowledge on the his- tory, ethnography, and geography of the world. Richard Eden’s English translation of this book appeared in 1553. More than two decades earlier a Dutchman, Joannes Boemus, published in Latin, presumably at Antwerp in 1520, The Fardle of Facions which was translated by William Watreman for London publication in 1555 and contained “the aunciente maners, customes, and Lawes, of the peoples enhabiting the two partes of the earth, called Af- fricke and Asie.” This work is described by Edward Godfrey Cox in his copious Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel as “the first scientific approach to ethnology.” Several hundred titles are included in Cox’s two-volume compilation of cos- mographies and travel books. Hakluyt and Purchas were but two of a tribe of compilers who continued their work well into the eighteenth century, collecting the journals of travelers over- seas and publishing them as “curious and entertaining” for an avid public. From these works other compilers set about the task of producing early encyclopedias with such titles as The World 4 Displayed , The Present State of the Universe , and The Travel- lour's Guide and Historian's Faithful Companion .
In the light of these facts it is not historically presumptuous to
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consider anew the amazing revival of utopian literature. The long interval between Plato’s Republic and St. Augustine’s City of God is marked by an amazing dearth of utopian literature. The period following the appearance of the Latin version of More’s Utopia in 1516, on the other hand, is a distinct contrast. Johann Valentin Andreae produced his Christianopolis in 1619; Francis Bacon the New Atlantis in 1627, Tomasso Campanella the City of the Sun in 1637, and James Harrington the Oceania in 1656. Many explanations may be offered for the shift in man’s longing from the heavenly utopia of the Middle Ages to the earthly para- dise of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. To find one ex- planation in the startling discoveries of contrasts between European society and that of overseas peoples, with their differ- ing scales of value and 'modes of thought, is not to overreach the evidence.
From the beginning of the European’s direct contact with civ- ilized Orientals there grew within him a contrasting sense of his own poverty, and even of his social needs and inadequacies. As- tonished by the amazing new facts constantly presented by returning voyagers, European thinkers sensed their own provin- cialism and the artificiality of their society. In the New World were the Amerindians who apparently lived in freedom, without extreme restrictions of law, blessed with nature’s bounties, often disdainful of gold for its own sake, in Edenic conditions conjec- tured to be original with man’s first life on earth. In the Orient were highly civilized peoples who restricted Europeans to a few trading posts on the coastal fringes of their countries and con- stantly demonstrated amazing powers of cultural resistance, ap- parently preferring their own ways of life and thought to those of the white visitors.
It would be preposterous to assert that significant “orientalism” is to be found in More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis. But it is historically accurate to place them in the intellectual context of a time when an exotic dream had seized the European imagina- tion. Few utopian writers of the Renaissance had any scientifically accurate information about the life of Oriental peoples. On the other hand, consider the unequivocal opening sentence of the New Atlantis: “We sailed from Peru, where we had continued for the space of one whole year, for China and Japan, by the
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South Sea, taking with us victuals for twelve months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months space and more.” Researchers have suggested Bacon’s probable debt to William Adams’s letters and reports from Japan to the English East India Company, and have argued that a considerable part of the narrative in Bacon’s book is based on actual travel records. More’s Utopia , furthermore, had in its character Raphael Hythloday a sunburned sailor-philosopher who had sailed the seas and seen for himself the life of foreign lands. Of More’s debt to Vespucci’s Journals there is scant doubt.
The chief themes of the utopian books were of course basically European: the tyranny of princes, the problems of private prop- erty, social equality, class distinctions, education, and the advance- ment of science. But many of the themes were studied in the light of social systems prevailing abroad. The significance of the island “utopias” of the Renaissance is that they marked the first stage, both in their setting in Oceania and in their intellectual outlook, of the progressive tendency of Europeans to think of their own institutions and traditional modes of thought and life in a world context.
Utopian literature was heavily didactic and was not widely read. It was therefore inevitable that from the excitement of the times there should also come another genre of literature, some- what similar in purpose but wider in appeal. The popularity of authentic travel books inevitably suggested to stay-at-home Lon- doners and Parisians the writing of “imaginary” voyages, of which Swift’s Gulliver is a classic example. “Philosophic” voy- ages, distinguished from the imaginary type chiefly in academic terms, also appeared. Armchair travelers have for centuries de- lighted to inform their contemporaries about the maladjustments of the times and the superior ways in which the business of life is conducted abroad. Thus, like the greater utopian writers, many lesser scribblers sought to sugar-coat panaceas for social ills by offering their work in the guise of a popular travel book. Such literature may be likened to the “problem” novels of modern propaganda. They were intended for instruction and as such rep- resented a sophisticated literature, at their worst merely imagi- native potboilers, at their best a new medium of social satire. The expository and historical studies of the literature which have come
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from the pens of scholars like William A. Eddy, Geoffrey At- kinson, and Philip Babcock Gove will offer the interested reader amazing facts regarding the far-reaching excursions of the “imag- inary” voyagers. The significance of their work lies in the reva- lation of the gradual diffusion of knowledge, the suggestion of place of the Orient in the popular consciousness, and indication of the extent to which writers exploited the current interest.
The opinion of a trustworthy observer of the time may suggest both the popularity of travel literature and its influence. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, published in 17 n his Characteristic ks of Men , Manners, Opinions , Times , an il- luminating survey of the taste and fashions of his generation. He noted the audience for which travelers wrote and editors com- piled: “Our relish or taste must of necessity grow barbarous, whilst barbarian customs, savage manners, Indian wars, and won- ders of terra incognita, employ our leisure hours and are the chief materials to furnish out a library.” He added, not too sympa- thetically: “These are in our present days what books of chivalry were in those of our forefathers. I know not what faith our an- cestors may have had in the stories of their giants, their dragons, and St. Georges. But for our faith indeed, as well as our taste in this other way of reading, I must confess I cannot consider it without astonishment.” Shaftesbury also indicated that the the- osophies and Orient-inspired cults of contemporary Europe and America began more than two centuries ago. “It must certainly be something else than incredulity,” wrote the amazed and ob- servant Earl, “which fashions the taste and judgment of many gentlemen whom we hear censured as atheists, for attempting to philosophize after a newer manner than any known of late. . . . I can produce many anathematized authors who, if they want a true Israelitish faith, can make amends by a Chinese or Indian one. If they are short in Syria or the Palestine, they have their full measure in America or Japan. . . . Though Christian mira- cles may not so well satisfy them, they dwell with the highest contentment on the prodigies of Moorish and Pagan countries.”
Shaftesbury’s strictures on the taste of his contemporaries must be considered in the light of the current democratization of knowledge and the heady effects of stimulating ideas and sugges- tions from abroad. The scholasticism of earlier generations had
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created a learned caste and largely limited the intellectual life of Europe to an aristocracy. But after 1500 the world with all its wonders was slowly unfolded before every mentally awake man, however scant his education. Experimental science, as represented by the Royal Society, which had sought the aid of uneducated mariners who knew no Latin and made their reports in the ver- nacular, was no longer restricted to the ancient seats of learning. Once the topics and modes of speculation and contemplation had been removed from everyday subjects. Now the gradual exten- sion of geographical knowledge compelled a shift to other ob- jects of thought. It is not surprising that the common man of Shaftesbury’s day had not the poise and balanced knowledge which would deter him from philosophizing “after a newer man- ner than any known of late.”
It is from the books read by such men, no less than in the rec- ords of scientific societies devoted to the gathering of accurate and useful knowledge, that the beginnings of Oriental-Occidental cultural relations must be traced. Two questions dominated the thought of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The first was the true character of man and the secret of social felicity. The second involved the relation between traditional modes of thought and the new scientific temper. Both were deeply affected by the exploratory spirit of the times. Neither religion nor social dogma had immunity against change. To the medieval records and systems of thought there had been added an immeasurably extended store of useful knowledge by observers who, while not unwilling to embroider a tale in the telling, had much to gain by being accurate. The “virtuosi” of the Renaissance were laying the foundations of methodical investigation and of all branches of modern comparative studies.
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The idealization of China was the first outstanding result of the impact of the Orient upon the European imagination. There had been previous Oriental “vogues” in the minor arts, in personal costume, and even in architecture. Samuel C. Chew’s illuminating study, The Crescent and the Rose , an historical exposition of the relations between Islam and England during the Renaissance,
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Architectural Chinoiserie. From Paul Decker, Chinese Architec- ture, Civil and Ornamental, London, 1759.
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clearly indicates that even though Mohammed was widely con- sidered an impostor and the centuries-old struggle with the infidel had not been forgotten, osmosis had long been active between Moorish and Christian civilizations when they met. But none of its consequences compares in import with the results of the “dis- covery” of Confucius and China.
The reason may not be far to seek. There has always been a close relation between the dominant mood of a time, the themes of its literature, and the trends of its speculative thought. No fact stands out more clearly before the reader of travel-utopian litera- ture and the writings of Europeans viewing mankind “from China to Peru” than the growing concept of the Noble Savage. Rous- seau formulated the idea of the unspoiled child of nature. In the forests of the New World and on the islands of Oceania, explor- ers discovered this child of nature, living by instincts uncorrupted by arbitrary social codes, presumably expressing in his songs Edenic sentiments and in his religion a morality untouched by knavish priests. He became a stock idea of poets who had never seen an Amerindian. The concept of the Noble Sage, with Con- fucius as a model, while not so widely discussed was no less im- pressive, however.
Whether the Noble Sage or the Noble Savage is the more im- portant concept in the literary and intellectual history of the eighteenth century is an unprofitable issue to discuss. The fact is that both concepts existed— and were complementary. If the Noble Savage had more songs inscribed in his honor by poets, the Noble Sage was more exhaustively studied, dignified by debate, and idealized by thoughtful men. The reason can be readily stated. China had a great literature which was gradually being made known; the primitive natives of Oceania and America had no books. China had one of the oldest civilizations of the world, founded upon an ethic and a political philosophy which could be studied both in its textual precedents and in its current opera- tion. The noble savages were simply children of nature offering in comparison meager materials for study save to the European poet whose romantic sentimentalism was awakened by dreams of uninhibited love and freedom from social restraint. Confucius was to become the idol of philosophers who seriously pondered
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a social order founded upon the Deistic concepts of natural good- ness, natural morality, and natural religion.
The neo-classical dictum that “Nature is everywhere the same” had led to the basic assumption that Reason is identical in all men and that in all parts of the world are to be found the truths by which mankind should live. As early as 1594 Bishop Hooker had written in his Ecclesiastical Polity: “The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument.” This proposition was widely accepted both by scho- lastic philosophers and by the more rationalistic orthodox divines. Some agreed that all men shared the light that lighteth everyman coming into the world, but insisted that the light of Nature needed in addition the Gospel for a candlestick. Despite shadings of dif- ference in the interpretations of Hooker’s principle, however, it was widely agreed that the true principles of morality are throughout human nature the same in kind, though different in degree, according to the organization of various minds which had been perverted by prejudice and false associations. By the right analysis of human records the world over, particularly of those standards of taste and conduct which at all times revealed the uncorrupted feelings of men, it was assumed there would be discovered a universal and true principle for the conduct of life. There thus developed during the Enlightenment an appeal to the “Consensus Gentium” in addition to the appeal to Reason.
Charles Blount’s Oracles of Reason , 1693, may be taken as an epitome of Deistic thought, although there were differences and shadings of opinion among its professors. The fundamental tenet of the system appears to have been that: “Natural Religion is the Belief we have of an eternal intellectual Being, and of the duty which we owe him, manifested to us by our Reason, without Revelation or positive Law.” Crucial in the controversies of the Deists with the orthodox divines was the question of the ade- quacy of natural religion to save the heathen who are ignorant of the Christian revelation and who merely “live up to the height of their natural Reason or Religion.” Upon such questions Blount wrote: “I answer; This is to dive too far in God’s secrets, to con- clude them all damned in all Ages, to whom that revealed Light
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came not. The Apostle says, They shall be judged by the Law of Nature . . . In sum, the Deists insisted that God had struck the idea of himself upon the human mind in all times and places. Morality certainly, even religion itself some argued, could be- come a positive science if men would give their effort to ascer- taining its universal manifestations.
The geographical range and the purpose of deistic speculation are suggested in a pamphlet published by Thomas Chubb in 1732 which reveals enough of the argument in its full-length title:
The Sufficiency of Reason in Matters of Religion, far- ther Considered. Wherein is Shewn, That Reason , when carefully used and followed, is to everyman, who is an- swerable to God for his actions, under any or all the most disadvantageous circumstances he can possibly fall into, whether he resides in Chinay or at the Cape of Good Hope , a sufficient guide in matters of religiop; that is, it is suffi- cient to guide him to God’s favor, and the happiness of another World.
There was ample opposition to Deism; and among its professors there were limitations to the use actually made of available knowledge about a “religio generis humani.” Dean Swift, for example, said that the system contained “nothing which could not presently be comprehended by the weakest noodle.”
Despite their claim to universal views, the Deists were clearly creatures of their own age in their agreement that “Enthusiasm” was a temper of mind in which the imagination had got the better of judgment. Boswell’s account of Doctor Johnson’s observations on the “inner light” to which “some methodists pretended” il- luminates the common attitude. The possibility of private revela- tions, said Johnson, was “a principle utterly incompatible with social and civil security,” for if a man lays claim to channels of insight and pretends to a principle of action unknown to other men, “how can I tell what that person may be prompted to do? When a person professes to be governed by a written ascertained law, I can then know where to find him.”
The majority of the Deists shared this view, which explains why they quite consistently ignored the religions of India. That they were not entirely ignorant of Vedantic thought may be as-
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sumed, since opportunities for studying the religions and social life of India were no less available than for exploring the ethical foundations of Chinese society. Even Swift mentioned Yoga when in 1710 he published his essay on The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. He noted that “the Jauguis , or enlightened Saints of In- dia, see all their Visions, by help of an acquired straining and pres- sure of the Eyes.” The Deists consistently opposed priests and all ecclesiastical systems based on “mysteries.” They argued that the way to redeem civilization and to promote the moral life of mankind was to strip society of all its social vanities and religions of the accretions of time and prejudice. Thus they ignored the transcendental in the world’s religions. Spiritual disciplines, es- pecially, seemed to them unnecessary and, if directed to idealistic ends, distinctly dangerous. Yoga was but another manifestation of Enthusiasm and was completely irrational.
Thus the practical, social-minded Confucius became the Noble Sage of the Rationalists of the Enlightenment. Like them, he es- chewed the mysteries of religion and transcendental speculation, devoting himself instead to an understanding of man’s moral na- ture and the study of precedents. Confucianism recognized chiefly the guidance of reason and of carefully laid moral tradi- tions. Herein lay its affinity with the current temper. The Deists and their contemporaries, as Professor Arthur O. Lovejoy has pointed out, found in the words Natura and Natio profoundly antithetic connotations, feeling that men should emancipate them- selves from tribal partialities if they are to be true to nature in matters both of religion and of artistic taste. They also attempted, with the scientific temper of the time, to study the world’s reli- gions in the light of newly acquired intelligence and needs. Thus they did much to raise the level of European thinking about for- eign peoples. Despite their prejudices, they made the eighteenth century perhaps the most sincerely cosmopolitan in European history.
Various writers soon turned to China and the Confucian texts for material to support their arguments, whether moral, political, or religious. Voltaire was perhaps the most outspoken of all Eu- ropean admirers of China— with Confucius as its ethical preceptor and the Emperor as its philosopher-king. In his article “De la Chine” in the Dictionnaire philosophique he answered skeptics
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who pointed out Chinese ignorance of Western science. The Chi- nese, he argued, were superior to Europeans in more important things, for they stressed the ethical values upon which the State should be built. “One may be a very poor physicist and an excel- lent moralist,” Voltaire wrote. “Thus it is in morals, in political economy, in agriculture, that the Chinese have perfected them- selves. We have taught them all the rest; but in these matters we ought to be their disciples. . . . The Constitution of their empire is in truth the best that there is in the world.” He recognized the superstition of the lower classes, which travelers had not failed to note, protesting meanwhile “the fact remains that four thousand years ago, when we did not know how to read, they knew every- thing useful of which we boast today.” Voltaire insisted that the pure religion of Nature, which the civilized peoples of Europe had lost, was to be found uncorrupted in China. And he ex- claimed lyrically, “Worship God and practise justice— this is the sole religion of the Chinese literati. . . . O Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Francis, Dominic, Luther, Calvin, canons of Westminster, have you anything better? For four thousand years this religion so simple and so noble, has endured in absolute integrity; and it is probable that it may be much more ancient.”
Such rhapsodies may appear little more than expressions of ad- miration which have no social implications. But among the Physi- ocrats and Encyclopedists of France there was also widespread interest in Confucian ethics and the Chinese theory of govern- ment. Numerous philosophes sought, as Adolf Reichwein has shown in his China and Europe and G. F. Hudson in Europe and China , for an enlightened theory which would justify political absolutism. Travel books and Jesuit missionary reports from abroad, the latter published serially for nearly half a century be- ginning in 1717 as Lettres edifiantes et curieuses , were their chief sources of information. Men like Quesnay, called by his disciples “the Confucius of Europe,” valued Chinese philosophy above the Greek and sought a foundation for the human order in a divine order, a way whereby the Tao of the world or the cosmic realities of Natural Law might be used in France to establish the relations between the people and the monarchy. In the face of growing democratic unrest during the decades preceding the French Rev- olution, there arose a sincere desire to discover for France a moral
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foundation for a revitalized and proper sense of the relation be- tween the citizenry and the monarchy. The Chinese conception of the relation between the masses and the Emperor contributed much to Quesnay’s physiocratic doctrines. He announced that “China is a state founded on science and natural law, whose con- crete development it represents.” So live indeed was French inter- est, and so attractive the Chinese concept of government, that Louis XIV was actually induced to follow the example of the Chinese Emperors, solemnly guiding a plow at a public ceremony opening the Spring tilling.
Enthusiasm for the Chinese theory of the State seems to have been no less great in Germany. Leibnitz had earlier revealed his own interest in Confucian ethics, especially in the De Novissima Sinica which had appeared in 1697. The utterances of Christian Wolff, however, reveal the current view that the Chinese Em- peror represented the Greek ideal of the philosopher-king ac- tually institutionalized among men— and the dangers which proponents of the divine right of kings saw in the concept. In an oration entitled De Sinarum Philosophia Practicay delivered June 12, 1721 before the University of Halle on the occasion of his resignation from the Prorectorship, Wolff aroused a storm of protest. His remarks seem innocuous enough to modem minds: “What the Love of Truth, which Philosophy itself inspires, can effect in Rulers , the Chinese Emperors Yao and Xun are pregnant Instances, who when they would bring the Empire, founded by their Predecessors, to a Pitch of greater Perfection, and yet at- tempt nothing rashly, passing over their own Sons, they chose for Successors, and made Partners of the Empire those they judged equal to so great a Task. . . . Xun was so great a Lover of Truth, that distrusting his own abilities, he would know the Opinions of others both about himself and his Actions. . . . Here you see the Effect of Philosophy in philosophical Rulers, and that the same holds in a ruling Philosopher; Confucius the great Chinese Philosopher shews by his own Example.” Wolff was branded a dangerous, pernicious character and ordered by the King of Prus- sia under pain of immediate death to quit the University of Halle in twenty-four hours, and the kingdom in forty-eight.
In England there were many echoes of the Continental enthusi- asm for Confucian ethics and the Chinese system of government.
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If the emphases differed slightly it was because England was blessed to a greater degree with parliamentary government. Nev- ertheless writers found other reasons for admiring the Chinese and for imitating them in the conduct of life. Eustace Budgell, whose Letter to Cleomenes King of Sparta appeared in 1731, said: “I have observed, that in China no man is a Gentleman by his Birth , but that the Mandarines, or Gentlemen, become such by their own Parts and Learning. These Mandarines, by a fundamen- tal Law of the Chinese Empire, are allowed to tell the Emperor, in respectful, yet in plain terms, whatever they think is amiss in in his Conduct; and we are assured, that whenever they think the Honour of their Prince, or the Good of their Country y makes it necessary, they never fail to make use of their Privilege.”
The Deistic heresy was dignified by receiving the attention of the Church itself. In 1727 appeared The Bishop of London's First Pastoral Letter to the People of His Diocese , . . Occasioned by Some Late Writings in Favor of Infidelity. It was the work of Ed- mund Gibson, then the presiding bishop of the English capital, and was followed by two other letters a few months later. Public in- terest was so great that several large editions appeared in the space of two years. In 1732 the three documents were printed collec- tively, and in 1831 were also published, with additions, in New York. The bishop’s letters are full of pastoral concern for a con- tinuing belief in an exclusive Christian revelation. The modem reader will find in them an impressive marshaling of facts culled from travel reports stressing heathen idolatry and all forms of social immorality which would discredit both the Noble Savage and the Noble Sage— and their “natural” goodness. “These and the like instances of corruption in worship, doctrine, and practice, which have prevailed, and do still prevail, in several parts of the Heathen world, may further show the insufficiency of natural reason to be a guide in religion, and into what monstrous opinions and practices whole nations may be led where that is their guide, without any help from revelation ” wrote the bishop in his second pastoral letter. Notes accompanying the text refer to religious practices in China, Japan, Formosa, Ceylon, and India.
Gibson’s letters did not remain unanswered. Curious is the fact, however, that debate was conducted not upon the merits of the various Oriental systems of belief, but upon the right of free
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thought in England. For example, in 1729 Matthew Tindal, arch- deist of his time, responded in a printed Address to the Inhabi- tants ... of London and Westminster: “If Men in Great Britain no more than Japan,” he argued, owe their religion to chance and education, they are mutually and equally obliged to examine what may be said on all sides. Referring to the Bishop of London he chided: “One wou’d have thought, that a Protestant recommend- ing Sincerity in the Choice of Religion, shou’d not have us’d such Arguments, as any Papist might have urg’d at the Dawn of the Reformation, to hinder its Increase.”
Another curious work, published in London in 1740, was the anonymous An Irregidar Dissertation Occasioned by the Reading of Father Du Halde's History of China. Its manifest purpose was to ridicule the current idealization of China. Brief extracts will suggest the general character of the English Sinophilism— or Sino- mania, if that word is preferred. Proceeding “in the Road of Fooling,” with ill-concealed contempt for the Jesuits, the Deists, and the Chinese, the writer recorded: “I have often heard it made a matter of Wonder, that this wide Empire should have subsisted so very long without any considerable Alteration of Maxims, Customs, Religion, Language, or Habit.” The Jesuits he held sus- pect because they had “sworn allegiance to the Lama of Italy ” and had failed to make clear “the Administration of China to be a little subject to Juggle.” As for the social equalities and felicity of Chinese society, he noted pityingly the “poor Chinesey who being unable to provide for their lnfantsy are forced to leave them in the Streets, as Preys to the first Dog that lights on them.” The book offered many pages of such familiar banalities in European accounts of Oriental life. When, however, the writer turned to what was currently known and regarded as admirable in Chinese ethics, his pages become most enlightening. A serious fault in the Chinese social constitution, he noted, was that Confucian philoso- phers laid “Weight only on the filial Duty, to the unavoidable neglect of every other.” Indeed “they have no Parochial Clergy; but it is the Office of the Mandarin of the Place [merely] to convocate his Charge at stated Times, and there to preach their Duty to them.” This was of course the very trait that men like Voltaire and contemporary priest-baiters found most laudable about the Chinese, But the climax of the book is the disclosure
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that the Chinese “Emperor is the sole priest in his Dominions, a Pope of this Deism.” The conclusion can be readily surmised. European Deists had indeed come to a sorry pass when they could do no better than make the heathen Confucius the high priest, if not the Pope, of their own religion!
In 1786 appeared Ely Bates’s A Chinese Fragment , Containing an Enquiry into the Present State of Religion in England , wherein the author posed as an “intellectual spy” who unceremoniously entered English homes, churches, and Parliament in search of proof that “he that wantonly stabs the morals of his country is a villain.” Probably none of the writers who rose in protest against the current idealization of China was better informed than Bates; certainly few wrote from a background of more extensive read- ing or were more interesting. The Chinese Fragment appeared three-quarters of a century after Shaftsbury’s Characteristicks. As Bates surveyed the state of England in his time, he found much reason for alarm, and like Shaftsbury he was most im- pressed by the advance of infidelity. “A free thinker ,” he wrote, “can easily assume all shapes; which is not surprizing, if we reflect that a man who holds to nothing is best able to act everything; as stage-players who personate all characters are said to have none themselves. He is sometimes seen in the guise of a Chinese, talking notably of Confucius: Anon he is a Turk, and lavishing his praises on Mohammed: Next, perhaps he is a Magian, and then you hear wonderful things of Zoroaster: And thus by turns you may find him a Gymnosophist, a Talapoin, a layman or a priest, a Jew, or even a Christian: His business is to play the opinions of mankind upon one another with an eye to their common destruc- tion, and to erect upon their ruins a monument to Universal Scep- ticism. . • .”
There was doubtless warrant for Bates’s strictures against the colorless religionists of his day who assumed all shapes and conse- quently had no character of their own. C. Delisle Burns recently has wisely pointed out in The Horizon of Experience a fallacy which lay at the heart of not only the Deistic view of religion but also all subsequent efforts to arrive at some sort of universal faith: “To reduce Christianity and Buddhism to some ‘pure re- ligion’ which is neither, would be as fantastic as to grow a flower which was neither a rose nor a lily, but just a flower.” The
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Deists’s dream of a universal religion was therefore unrealistic. All religions and cultures have roots, though the seeds from which they spring may come from far on the wind; and these roots strike deep into the spiritual needs of a people, their tradi- tional ways of thought, and their social milieu. Doubtless the playing of the opinions of mankind upon one another had unset- tling effects. Heterodoxy was inevitable in an age of expanding intellectual horizons, when the outlooks of other peoples were being compared with the European, and new admirations were added to all that convention had institutionalized. But there was also much thoughtless tongue-in-cheek affectation of exotic re- ligious belief, largely uninformed. It would be difficult to deter- mine just where to draw the line between a vague catholicity of view which stemmed from an expanding world consciousness, and actual belief in the essential tenets held by “Gymnosophists” and “Talapoins.” Genuine objectivity in evaluating religions had not appeared.
Time and a slow maturation of insight into the life, social insti- tutions, and religious beliefs of Orientals were to be required before many Europeans could actually imitate or judiciously live by them. Nevertheless the movements and expressions of opinion that have been noted are not without historical significance. They mark the beginnings of our modern temper. Most important of all, they were the result of attraction, a voluntary turning of many Occidentals to the Orient for an ideal of conduct and life which somehow seemed wanting in their own heritage. In many instances we may find the reason for this turning Eastward in quixotism and the capricious human tendency to affect the bizarre or the sensational. But there is even greater warrant for seeing in it a desire by sincere Occidentals to profit by the experience of maturer cultures, to learn how others handle the business of life, and to appropriate from the race’s cultural capital. Men set out to be citizens of the world, not of their native parishes alone. The first steps may have been awkward but they were definitely set in the road which many in subsequent generations were to take.
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V
The general literature of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, no less than the literature of religious controversy, re- flected the impact of the Orient upon the European imagination. Figures of speech based on the East India trade and quotations drawn from Oriental scripture or mythology are evidence of a slowly accumulating body of literary allusion, ornamentation, and reference. In the literature of the Ancients-Moderns controversy, a quarrel which involved the application of modern scientific critical principles to the study of the classics of Greece and Rome, the Orient played no insignificant part.
“Who were the ancients to those who are ancients to us?” was a question Sir William Temple raised in rhetorical defense of the cyclical view of history. If the principle of the cyclical theory was granted, the conclusion seemed obvious: the ancients to the Greeks were the philosophers of India and China. No reader of Temple’s essays can fail to be impressed by his wide search for evidence to prove his thesis. William Wotton, Temple’s opponent in the English phase of the quarrel which began in France, was no less willing to lay under debt the records of travelers who had visited the Orient.
The so-called literature of Primitivism was another reflection of the uses to which Europeans put increasing knowledge of the Orient in the support of a theory. Another subject worthy of study is the literature of chronology. Nearly a century before Lord Monboddo published in 1773 Of the Origin and Progress of Language , Matthew Hale had revealed in his Primitive Origination of Mankind, in 1677, how European chronologers had been stag- gered by reports which implied the apparent discovery, in the dynastic histories of China and mythology of India, of evidence suggesting that man had flourished in the East long before the creation of Adam. If this proved true, the entire Mosaic chron- ology, the authority of the Bible itself, and the foundations of the Christian faith would be undermined.
Similarly the discovery of unknown languages led to wild spec- ulations. What was the original language of the world? Modern scholarship is no longer concerned with Pre-Adamites, or the theory that the ark of Noah eventually rested on mountains tor-
28
dering China, that country being subsequently populated by de- scendants of Noah who were not at the building of Babel. The conclusion that the Chinese language was therefore the primitive and uncorrupted language of the race was seriously argued. Fan- tastic as such theories may seem, they suggest the extent to which Europeans were driven by new discoveries to a reconsideration of their historic relation to other branches of the human family.
In popular literature the extension of the “comparative” out- look is represented by such classics as Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters . The travel observations of Europeans had for more than a century offered to their read- ers critical comments on Oriental institutions and life. Beginning in France about 1684 with Marana’s Letters of a Turkish Spy , Eu- ropean writers turned the tables and anticipated the Orientals of our own day who point out Western fallibility. Assuming the role of skeptics, they created fictional observers who, presumably visiting London or Paris for the first time, affected a disconcert- ing naivete, offered apparently innocent but fundamentally caus- tic comments on European civilization, and raised troublesome questions which cast doubts upon the perfection of its institutions and modes of thought. No literature of the time offers a better reflection of the kind of knowledge about the Orient which had become most challenging to the average Westerner.
The device of the mock-spy also offered matchless opportuni- ties for irony and satire in the hands of men seeking to eradicate absolutist concepts, bad taste sanctioned by the “rules” of the Ancients, intellectual error entrenched in ecclesiastical institu- tions, and social customs or foibles. Much of Goldsmith’s Citi- zen of the World may be trivia; but the careful reader will discover that he admired Confucius and Mencius and put some of their best passages to effective use. In the hands of Voltaire, the mock-spy sketch was devastating. At its best, the genre marks the beginning of an effort to balance sagaciously the social customs and philosophies of the East and West, to point out that concepts of morals and beauty are infinitely diversified in dif- ferent times and places, that truth is relative and not to be ascertained through mere logic. An historian has appropriately observed that the human ant-hill of Europe was at last viewed as merely another ant-hill of the world. Essayists who used Persian,
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Turkish, Chinese, and Armenian “spies” as their spokesmen, by a mixture of flippancy and sagacity demonstrated the unimpor- tance of many domestic deities, ridiculed hollow platitudes, sug- gested that some conventions had no more value than pasteboard, and hinted that all European traditions did not correspond in every detail with universal values.
The mock-spy sketch as a mirror of European self-discovery and of the contrast between cultures cannot be better illustrated than by G. Lowes Dickinson’s Letters from A Chinese Official . The book appeared anonymously in 1903 with the subtitle “Be- ing An Eastern View of Western Civilization.” A Cambridge don who for years had devoted himself to Greek studies, Dickinson through wide reading acquired an admiration for Chinese civili- zation that matched Voltaire’s. His letters were clearly written in imitation of the mock-spy sketch which had persisted through two centuries. Their attack on conventional Christianity, on the economic foundations of European civilization, and on its moral and aesthetic outlooks was regarded by readers familiar with the traditional form in which it appeared as the work of a poet blessed with a richly stored mind and a mellow, kindly spirit. Not so by William Jennings Bryan, who had made little more than a tourist’s visit to China where he was doubtless feted as a great American statesman, impressed by the trade of the treaty ports, and convinced of the justice of extraterritoriality. Having read Dickinson’s book and been completely fooled by the author’s pose, Bryan assumed the role of champion of European civiliza- tion and defender of its faiths. In 1906 his defense appeared under the title Letters To A Chinese Official Being a Western View of Eastern Civilization . “Never having visited China and never hav- ing acquainted myself with Chinese philosophy,” wrote Bryan in his preface, “the absurdity of his [Dickinson’s] contrast between American life and Chinese life was not apparent. Now that I have had an opportunity to test his description by personal observa- tion, I feel that a reply is due to him as well as required from us. . . The Dickinson-Bryan “debate” is a classic illustration of the differences between the appeal of the Orient to a disciplined mind, capable of sensing the inner spirit of a culture, and the im- pact of that culture upon an uninformed observer obsessed with materialistic Occidental achievements. But it should be regarded
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more as the climax of a body of revealing literature than as an ex- ample of Bryan’s gullibility or the insensitivity of diplomatic of- ficialdom.
No survey of “orientalism” in the popular literature of the eighteenth century would be complete which neglects mention of the Arabian Nights and the many imitations which it inspired, following the English translation of Galland’s French rendering in 1704. The perennial appeal of the book is well suggested by Wordsworth:
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby, romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised By youthful squires; adventures endless.
Wordsworth’s enthusiasm, when he discovered as a boy that the volume he had dearly purchased “was but a block hewn from a mighty quarry,” was clearly anticipated by an earlier generation.
Martha P. Conant’s Oriental Tale in England , though incom- plete and occasionally exaggerating the known facts, contains an argument that is worthy of note. The chief elements of narrative art, plot, character, and background, are found in varying de- grees in all literature. But not until the wide circulation of the Arabian Nights in England were they effectively combined by writers of English fiction. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, periodical essayists flourished and works like the “Sir Roger de Coverley” sketches were widely read, but men of let- ters offered their readers almost no plot. As literature, such writ- ings satisfied the cultivated taste of the time; but they could hardly be called adequate fare for the imagination, fancy, and emotions. Later, Samuel Richardson published Pamela in 1741 and Clarissa Harlowe in 1747-48. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews appeared in 1742, and Tom Jones in 1749. Tobias Smollett and Lawrence Sterne are also prominent in the history of the English novel. But the slow-moving “epistolary” style was not designed for readers who liked swiftly moving plot, rapidly changing scenes, and the excitement of pages in which fantastically wealthy sultans, beautiful princesses, and disconsolate heroes worked out their destinies with magic and intrigue. Old heroic romances and
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tales of chivalry, to be sure, could be read for thrilling feats of arms and lovers' escapes in a charming world of medievalism; but it was not the world of the Arabian Nights. An interest in narra- tive action which stems from the enthusiasm aroused by that book, Miss Conant argues, is among the contributions of the Orient to Occidental literature.
One needs only to be reminded of the Spanish picaresque novel, to realize the dangers of observing too partially the influ- ence of the Oriental tale. On the other hand, the career of Thomas Simon Gueulette, perhaps the most prolific of all imita- tors, who flourished between 1683 and 1766 and produced col- lections with such titles as Chinese Tales, Mogul Tales, and j Peruvian Tales, is an indication of the popularity of the pseudo- Oriental in both France and England. Many other adapters who followed cared little whether their stories were spurious or far- fetched, so long as the market flourished. Their work as a whole is hardly of genuine literary merit. But from, this subsoil some of the great classics of Western literature grew. Samuel Johnson, financially embarrassed, knew what he was about when in 1759 he produced his Rasselas. Joseph Addison, himself an innovator, wrote his famous Vision of Mirza for the Spectator. Oliver Gold- smith wrote Asern, an Eastern Tale: or a Vindication of the Wisdom of Providence in the Moral Government of the World. William Beckford produced Vathek, one of the best oriental- gothic thrillers of the century. On the Continent Voltaire ele- vated the genre with such classics as Zadig and The Good Brahmin.
The uses of the Oriental tale in American literature may be illustrated by Benjamin Franklin’s little story, An Arabian Tale, which at first glance appears one of the most inconsequential of his writings. But closer examination reveals that it was an expres- sion of Franklin’s spiritual experience, his misgivings about the existence of evil, his inability to justify the ways of God to man, and his honest confession that “the Dispensations of Providence in this World puzzle my weak Reason.” The story is simply that of the magician Albumazar, who having renounced the society of men retired in old age to the mountain of Calabut. Living alone, he was nightly visited by genii and spirits who became his instructors. On one occasion his guest was a great genie named
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Belubel. Albumazar began by confessing that, despite his love and respect for the wisdom and beneficence of God, he could not comprehend how the Most High permitted the existence of evil. Belubel chided Albumazar for attacking such problems with the puny weapons of Reason and advised him to contemplate “the scale of beings, from an elephant down to an oyster.” Then fol- lowed an exposition of the “great chain of being” concept. The plan of the world is one in which “There is no gap, but the grada- tion is complete. Men in general do not know, but thou knowest, that in ascending from an elephant to the infinitely Great, Good, and Wise, there is also a long gradation of beings, who possess powers and faculties of which thou canst yet have no concep- tion.” Thus man may be comforted, for though the gradations of nature may not be apparent, there is warrant for the faith that ultimately they reach an entity whose faculties are infinite. The idea is to be found in Greek thought, and' it persisted through the eighteenth century. Franklin’s acquaintance with the con- cept may be assumed. Its development in An Arabian Tale is an illustration of the manner in which many writers put Western ideas into foreign forms of literary expression. The serious- minded found the Oriental apologue continuously useful.
The browser in the periodical literature of the eighteenth cen- tury will not be long in recognizing the varied purposes to which writers on both sides of the Atl*\ntic put the pseudo-Oriental tale. It became also a vehicle for social and political satire, and in its more imaginative forms was blended with the fairy tale. Tales of adventure of course needed no apology; they were their own excuse for being. But the moral uses of the genre were widely defended. A couplet in the Rambler suggests the values as Doctor Johnson himself saw them;
The cheerful sage, when solemn dictates fail,
Conceals the moral counsel in the tale.
In the title page of the 1736 English edition of Gueulette’s Mogul Tales the same suggestion appears:
In pleasing Tales, the artful Sage can give
Rules, how in Happiness and Ease to live:
Can show that Good should most attract the Mind,
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And how our Woes we from our Vices find;
Delighting, yet instructing thus our Youth,
Who catch at Fable— How to gather Truth.
Obviously no literature so freighted with preachment could long retain its popularity. The exotic tale flourished best when its func- tion was chiefly a fictional device for presenting the platitudes of the Johnsonian and Addisonian essay.
To dismiss the pseudo-Oriental tale as inconsequential may be justified if it is compared with other contemporary literature. But such tales served a purpose which the social historian cannot ignore. The “Discourse on the Usefulness of Romances” in the Mogul Tales by Gueulette contains an apologia that is illumi- nating:
The late Humour of reading Oriental Romances, such as the Arabian, Persian, and Turkish Tales, tho’ I will not contend, it has much better'd our Morals , has how- ever extended our Notions , and made the Customs of the East more familiar to us than they were before , or prob- ably ever would have been , had they not been communi- cated to us by this indirect , and pleasant Way. Now these are certainly very great Advantages , and very valuable Acquirements, even to Men, and many giddy young Fel- lows have been , by amusing themselves with Trifles, taught to conceive clearly , and to converse properly, in relation to Things which otherwise they would have known noth- ing about .
The tales did convey useful knowledge to the European public. Fact was often mixed with fiction, and the pseudo-Oriental vo- cabulary is clear warrant for doubting the authenticity of many details. But many writers also sought widely for information which would give verisimilitude to their work and enable readers to live imaginatively in worlds which later writers like Rudyard Kipling and Pierre Mille, Richard Burton and Pierre Loti were to exploit. The intent and methods of such writers have changed. Moderns like Sax Rohmer and Ernest Brahma, Lin Yutang and Pearl Buck, continue to represent either fantastic and imaginative or idealistic themes, adapting them to various levels of public
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taste. Ultimately all are engaged in creating a world of mystery and adventure or in revealing the essential traits of humble folk in distant lands. Whether fiction dealing with the Orient is finally to be analyzed for its objective sociological truth, or for all the shades of insight and of taste which it contains, is a task which historians and critics must ultimately determine. Of its influence on Western attitudes toward non-European peoples, and its use- fulness in conveying information about them, there can be no doubt.
Fiction was not the only literary form in which the Oriental interests of eighteenth-century men of letters found expression. In the opera and ballet, no less than in drama, the influence can be traced. A competent study by T. Blake Clark entitled Oriental England , published in 1939 in Shanghai, is an impressive exposi- tion of the influence on drama, which indicates that the Mikados and Madame Butterflies and the exotic vaudeville extravaganzas of the modern stage were also anticipated more than two centuries ago. “Writers of heroic drama,” Clark noted after arduous re- search in widely scattered British and American libraries housing rare plays and manuscripts, “were not interested so much in learn- ing from Oriental culture as in ransacking it. They chose Turkish, Persian, Egyptian, and Chinese heroes because Eastern monarchs suited the heroic tradition, which required of a ruler arrogance, boasting, and omnipotence. Audiences, however, grown tired of stale heroics, were attracted to the new scenery, costume, and atmosphere. These new interests had an effect on the plays.” Thus, while the Oriental influences on English dramatic technique were negligible, the interest in character and setting was pro- nounced. Paul Whitehead’s prologue to Arthur Murphy’s Orphan of China , published in 1759 and based on Voltaire’s earlier work which in turn had been derived from a version in the Jesuit Du Halde’s writings, nevertheless suggests that playwrights sought to present Oriental thought to their audiences while they entertained them with exotic costumes and settings.
Enough of Greece and Rome: Th’ exhausted store Of either nation now can charm no more . . .
On eagle wings the poet of to-night Soars for fresh virtues to the source of light;
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To China’s eastern realms: and boldly bears Confucius’ morals to Britannia’s ears.
Poetry also reflected the current taste. The outstanding figure who, before the flourishing of the Romantic Movement, turned his attention to Oriental verse was Bishop Thomas Percy, famed for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Historians intent on his “gothic” researches rarely have noted that the eminent com- piler of the English Reliques did not restrict his antiquarian re- searches to the British Isles. In 1762 Percy published Miscella- neous Pieces Relating to the Chinese , which contained several essays on Chinese drama, poetry, and kindred arts. It was fol- lowed in 1775 by Ancient Songs Chiefly on Moorish Subjects . Scores of other Primitivists made studies in the “originals” of hu- man expression, ignoring the fact that they necessarily devoted themselves to the secondhand versions made available to them by Jesuit scholars and educated travelers.
Among the pre-Romantic poets of England who extended the poetic use of Oriental materials were William Collins, Thomas Chatterton, John Scott, and Eyles Irwin. Their “Oriental Ec- logues” may seem tame or wooden to the modern reader, and there is scant evidence that they took pains to discover the pro- sodic forms or the essential character of the great Oriental litera- tures. It is true that Sir William Jones, one of England’s first great Orientalists and a poet in his own right, had presented the results of years of painstaking study to the public; and John Scott, in- spired as a consequence, had written an apostrophe to Jones of which the following lines are representative:
The Asian Muse, a stranger fair!
Becomes at length Britannia’s care;
And Hafiz’ lays, and Sadi’s strains,
Resound along our Thames’s plains.
Sir William Jones may be regarded as the first outstanding exam- ple in English literature of the happy combination of erudition and literary skill, for he was both linguist and poet. But the work of Chatterton and Collins was distinctly different. Theirs was the self-appointed task, not of translating Oriental tongues into Eng- lish, but of pouring into timeworn molds new knowledge about
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Oriental peoples and their folkways. The artificial pastoral, long kept alive by the mighty names of Virgil, Spenser, Milton, and Pope, had fallen into the hands of a new generation which re- tained its conventional form but insisted on adapting it to new subject matter. The substitution of Orientals for the conventional rude swains and shepherdesses of the pastoral of classical tradition seems startling, almost grotesque. But with a shift in setting to some exotic place, a few descriptive details lifted from a recent history or travel book, a borrowed story of courtship between lovers of feuding Oriental tribes, the poet had no difficulty in producing work which satisfied both the current neo-classical sense of form and the romantic love of the strange.
Thus there were few departments of European intellectual and cultural life which, before 1800, did not to some extent feel the impact of ov'erseas discovery.
VI
To understand the “orientalism” of the nineteenth century we must comprehend the Romantic temper, which included more than mere poetic interest in something “far away and long ago.” It was the expression of a state of mind rather than a literary movement. Hoxie N. Fairchild in The Roma?itic Quest defined the temper as “the endeavor, in the face of growing obstacles, to achieve, to retain, or to justify that illusioned view of the uni- verse and of human life which is produced by an imaginative fusion of the familiar and the strange, the known and the un- known, the real and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural.” It is obvious, if this definition is accepted, that Romanticism may reflect exotic sentimentalism, or an “inspired muddleheadedness” or a search for either an earthly paradise or some City of God. It also touches many chords of human emotion and is inherent in many types of speculation. In its more popular forms, some romantics often substituted dissipa- tion in naturalistic dreams for intellectual or moral discipline, and inevitably many in time discovered little more than surfeit of the emotions. The critical literature of Romanticism is consequently filled with discussion of the fate of minds which sought salvation by grace of nature rather than by grace of God. Rarely is com-
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plete objectivity to be found in the critical literature of such work, and in few fields is there more lively controversy.
In the nineteenth century, it should first be noted, almost all the literary manifestations of the cultural discovery of the Orient are romantic. They can be understood, even if they may not be admired. Several basic facts explain the change in temper and the shift of interest from China to India and the Near East. Europeans with a taste for foreign expressions of human experience and spec- ulation after 1800 were no longer restricted to the secondhand reports of travelers and to inadequate translations. Through learned Oriental Societies, the philosophical literature of the world gradually came into all the major languages, and Europeans had unfolded before them the greatest books of foreign peoples. From these they were free to select themes to be developed and ideas to be pondered.
The second factor was the rise of Anthropology and Darwin- ism. Superstitions fell like autumn leaves and religion became less identified with creedal or national traditions. The futility of fixed doctrinal positions dawned in the minds of generations compelled to adjust their thought to Evolution. There grew simultaneously the realization that the spiritual needs from which religions arise assert themselves in all parts of the world.
The third factor was the Industrial Revolution. The ugliness of smoky industrialism and the deplorable conditions of labor en- couraged the “escapist” tendencies dormant in all men. The world-weary sought imaginatively for Arcadia or spiritually for some vague Nirvana.
Metaphysicians and mystics meanwhile created a new my- thology of the “supernatural” and sought anew to understand physical phenomena or to secure kinship with the life in living things. During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the intel- lectual horizons of Europeans had been broadened. With the progress of the nineteenth century the natural order of human experience followed: after the discovery of new facts, new peo- ples, and new realms of thought and human experience, came the inevitable deepening of insights and understanding. The processes of discovery continued geographically and outwardly with the exploration of the hearts of continents; but they also became in- creasingly inward, as each new translation of great Oriental works
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revealed the dimensions of the mystical and intellectual worlds in which other peoples lived. The guiding principle of European cultural appropriation from the Orient continued to be laissez faire. Like the winds that blow as they list, often unpredictable in origin and indeterminate in direction, the drift of “oriental- ism” continued in startling ways in a different and newer age.
The list of great writers who reflected in varying degrees an interest in or a debt to the Orient increased: Rueckert, Goethe, Heine, and others in Germany; Gautier and Leconte de Lisle in France; Byron, Southey, Moore, and Landor in England; Emer- son, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman in America. All did not write with the same purpose, and they varied in their emphases and in the materials laid under debt. Some merely borrowed from the foreign literatures a metaphysical or symbolical apparatus, and had no intention of exalting the East above the West. Others were sensitive exoticists with a morbidly refined sense of values who nursed their grievances against the workaday world and sought escape from the dullness of Europe in a pseudo-Orient of opium, hashish, or voluptuousness where life, it was imagined, was freer and more abundant. The various worlds sought, de- pending upon the temperament of the writer, ranged from earthly Arcadias to the transcendental Over-Soul, from the Oriental equivalent of the Blue Flower to the world east of Suez where, as Kipling said, a man can raise a thirst.
The nadir of Romantic exoticism is found in the annual “gift book” anthologies published on both sides of the Atlantic. Most of the poems appear to have been the work of poetasters who followed a recipe guaranteed to produce sure-fire best-sellers. The English Keepsake of 1828, for example, suggests the desired hero, essentially Byronic in character:
Next a hero with an air,
Half a brigand— half Corsair.
His vocabulary was pseudo-Oriental and consisted of references to gazelles, bulbuls, peepul trees, Arab tents, and even Chinese bamboo bungalows. Little more was needed than a pale, melan- choly heroine waiting for her Byronic lover. The final touch, contributed by the poet, completed the formula:
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And I give you, mix’d with western sentimentalism,
Some samples of the finest Orientalism.
Much of the doggerel is of no literary value— save to those who like pretty sentiments dressed up in rhyme, or to the highly imagi- native who indulge in dreams of being modern Don Juans kissing Burma maidens before the idol of the great god Buddha, or who like the less adventurous lines of the American poet Clinton Scollard:
Before our eyes will gleam and glance The woven threads of old romance,—
Those fabrics fair that never fade,
Spun by the brave Scheherezade.
And we will list the tranced tales Of plaintive Shiraz nightingales,
Bemoaning love around the tomb Where Hafiz sleeps in scented gloom.
No vintage-draught soe’er, compressed From the broad bosom of the West,
Can yield the keen delight of this Enthralling, roseate cup of bliss.
From such sub-literature, however, flowered later some of the most representative works of the better-known Romantic poets. If only as literary humus, therefore, it has significance. When Byron and some of his friends studied the public taste and literary market of their day, they were not long in realizing the financial profits to be reaped by catering to the vogue. Thus in 1813 Byron wrote in a letter to a friend: “Stick to the East; the oracle, Stael, told me it was the only poetical policy. The North, South, and West have all been exhausted. . . Walter Savage Landor had anticipated the advice and in 1798 produced the Gebir; as had also Robert Southey when in 1801 he published Thalaba , which purported to be an “Epic of Islam,” and in 1810 The Curse of Kehamaj a verse romance based on Hindu materials. Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh , an Oriental tale having much in common with the prose versions of the preceding century, was perhaps in one sense the outstanding work of its type. Written in easy-
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flowing verse ornamented with richly exotic imagery, the poem appeared in 1817 and became instantly popular. It went through six editions in its first year and is said to have commanded the highest price ever paid in England for a copy right— 3, 000 guineas.
Byron was both a mediator between the eighteenth- and nine- teenth-century uses of the Oriental tale and an outstanding pur- veyor of exotic sentimentalism to his public. Even a casual glance through his poetry offers ample evidence; a careful reading of his letters indicates how persistent were his Oriental interests and how frequently he referred to them. His familiar Giaour car- ried the subtitle “A Fragment of a Turkish Tale”; and the “Ad- vertisement” states that the “story . . . contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover. . . .” The Bride of Abydos also had the subtitle “A Turkish Tale.” But Byron’s position is more than that of a poet who saved the vogue from complete mawkishness. His chief significance in the history of literary “orientalism” is that his work marked the point at which slowly diverging streams eventually separated. Rasselas and Don Juan would have been strange bedfellows.
Preaching disappeared in the handling of the Oriental tale by Byron and his school, but exotic moralism did not pass out of fashion. The Occidental tendency to regard the Orient as the home of profound wisdom persisted and reappeared in work best typified by Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem,” a poem long known to schoolboys, which pleased readers who frowned on Byronic corsairs and houris. “Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase!” Hunt’s prayer was abundantly answered. Many readers have found the good sheik’s literary descendants more platitudi- nous than profound. Others may regard the “tribe” as “tripe.” But the growth of the new form was in no way fortuitous.
The best explanation is perhaps to be found in the essays of Theodore Watts-Dunton, who flourished from 1832 to 1914 and represented the average levels of Victorian taste. His Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder , posthumously published in 1916, re- flected the tendency of the average Victorian to be sentimentally mystical rather than metaphysical, and to extend the explorations of the occult into the Vedantic and Sufistic literature which scholars and popularisers had made accessible. Watts-Dunton’s
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essay on “Ethical Poetry,” arguing that the greatest ethical litera- ture of the world was not Hellenic but Buddhistic, is a revealing statement of the trend. His review of Browning’s Ferishtatis Fan- cies in the Athenaeum in 1884 offers the clearest apologia for the pseudo-Oriental moralistic poem. Browning’s work was a sample of parable-poetry, suggested Watts-Dunton, a type which had long been popular in the East and which could profitably be used as epitomes of philosophies of life. The task of such poetry was “to set self-conscious philosophy singing and dancing ... to the tune of a waterfall . . . and the preacher strumming a gypsy’s tambourine.” No critic, except with tongue in cheek, could seri- ously consider Watts-Dunton’s essay as a contribution to critical literature. But it is a useful explanation of the popularity on both sides of the Atlantic of such poems as Browning’s “Ben Kar- shook’s Wisdom” and the better known “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” The Anglo-American poets who wrote such poems are to be num- bered by scores, if not hundreds.
In the popularity of pseudo-Oriental verse may also be found a partial explanation of the amazing reception given in England and America to two of the most widely read poems of the Vic- torian era— Edward Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asiay an epic based on the life of Buddha. It would be difficult to find a more essen- tially incompatible pair than Omar and Buddha: the former a hedonist, the latter the founder of a religion based on complete renunciation. But the two poems represent the many-faceted attraction of the East for the West and the manner in which contradictory outlooks on life may exist side by side in a generation.
The dubious question of Sufistic symbolism in the Rubaiyat manifestly could not have concerned the general reader. Its pop- ularity is explained by the fact that it expressed for a baffled gen- eration some of the problems which occupied men like Thomas Hardy: man’s fate in an inexplicable universe, the moral implica- tions of Darwinism, and the great social issues posed by the Industrial Revolution. Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum,” outwardly an adaptation from the Persian Shah Nameh of Fir- dausi, was more than an episode from a great epic: like “Dover Beach,” it epitomized a world wherein father and son, and ig-
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norant armies, clashed by night, and in which little certitude and help for pain were found. Fitzgerald, through an Oriental, ex- pressed the persisting human longing for release through the bowl and exotic delights. His art made the poem something more than the banal work of preceding poetasters who had mixed sentimen- talism and orientalism for an insatiable public.
Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia y published in 1879 and reported to have gone into sixty editions in England and eighty in Amer- ica, aroused the animosity of many Christian pulpits. But clerics whose theology offered release from life’s troubles only in a heaven achieved after death could not divert readers who longed for a vague Nirvana. Furthermore, Arnold’s sonorous blank verse included Oriental luxuriance and deft Tennysonian heightening of effects. A sympathetic portrayal of the life and teachings of a noble-spirited Indian prince who had solved the problem of evil, the poem contained a theosophy without the fantastic cos- mology of Madame Blavatsky. Its message was clearly for minds staggered by Darwinism and the realization that nature was red in tooth and claw.
One reason for the popularity of the Light of Asia in America was doubtless the fact that its readers represented a generation of New Englanders who had lost faith in both its hope and an- cestral traditions. Unitarianism had become a “sucked eggshell”; its positive content had been lost. Restless striving seemed pur- poseless, without direction; life had been emptied of spiritual meaning. “As I see the entire world today,” wrote Henry Adams in a letter to his brother, “it has already reached its lowest level, and is likely to stay there. ... It can’t get much flatter. . . . Artists of course disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.” For men like William Sturgis Bigelow, Percival Lowell, John La Farge, Henry Adams, the Spanish- Yankee of Salem, Ernest Fenollosa, and the cosmopolitan Lafcadio Hearn, Japan and Buddhism offered quiet, solace, and escape. Such men gravitated to Japan or China for various reasons, as art collectors or as mere travelers, but all sought for a true spiritual home where the whirlwinds of life are calmed and absolute truth might be found. Only a minority of Americans, to be sure, sympathized with their quest. In 1886 Henry Adams and John La Farge, en route to Japan, were interviewed by a reporter in Nebraska. Ad-
43
ams wrote in a letter to his friend John Hay: “At Omaha a young reporter got the better of us; for when in reply to his inquiry as to our purpose in visiting Japan, La Farge beamed through his spectacles the answer that we were in search of Nirvana, the youth looked up like a meteor, and rejoined: ‘It’s out of season!’ ” When later La Farge published An Artist's Letters from Japan , he dedicated the book to Adams and concluded with this melan- choly note: “If only we had found Nirvana— but he was right who warned us that we were late in this season of the world.”
The significant fact is that representative Americans of the nine- ties thought in these terms. The Nirvana which the disillusioned of New England sought is best defined in the Ingersoll Lecture which Bigelow gave at Harvard in 1908 on Buddhism and Im- mortality. That book, with La Farge’s An Artist's Letters from Japan , Percival Lowell’s The Soul of the Far Easty Lafcadio Hearn’s pages of spiritual autobiography, and the less historical passages of Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art , ex- press the mood of the generation for whom the Western spiritual tradition had lost its force. It was not, however, merely a passing temper which was to leave no mark on American art and literature.
When La Farge visited Japan with Adams, he had been com- missioned to paint the mural above the altar of the Church of the Ascension in New York. His letters to the art critic, Royal Cortissoz, in part printed in the latter’s biography John La Fargey suggest one of the practical purposes of the journey. La Farge sought as a background for the figure of the ascending Christ a mountainous place where rocks and clouds would readily suggest the miraculous. He had a vague belief that in Japan he would find “certain conditions of line in the mountains which might help me. Of course the Judean mountains were entirely out of question, all the more that they implied a given space.” In Japan, furthermore, was an atmosphere, both natural and spiritual, in which the appearance and disappearances of Buddhist saints could be sensed as normal events— and the ascension of Christ could be conceived as perfectly fitting, because the natural and the super- natural were never dissociated. Having found the site which sat- isfied him, La Farge made his background experiments and returned to New York to work. As he painted, his friend Okakura
44
talked with him, he wrote to Cortissoz, “about spiritual manifesta- tions and all that beautiful wonderland” which the Japanese cher- ished and “where spiritual bodies take form and disappear again and the edges of the real and the imaginary melt.” La Farge apparently met only one serious objection. It came from a lady “who was troubled by certain news she had heard,” namely, that “I made these studies of clouds in a pagan country.” His comment was: “A true Episcopalian would make them, I suppose, in England.”
The mural in the Church of the Ascension was not, however, the only result of La Farge’s Oriental interests. He was later com- missioned to paint panels to be placed in the Court House at Baltimore. Confucius was the subject of one. He was asked also to undertake four paintings for the Supreme Court Room in the State Capitol of Minnesota, and for “The Recording of the Precedents” he again used as the central figure Confucius busy with his pupils in the collation and transcription of ancient docu- ments. Cortissoz wrote: “The figures were true types of Eastern intellectuality and spirituality.” Reference to such works as these by La Farge suggests the moot question of the significance of the work of a host of lesser artists who have turned to the Orient for subjects and background. The results have never been system- atically studied by specialists, and consequently no historian is in a position to damn with faint praise or to state with enthusiasm that in such American art there has appeared a happy meeting of the East and West. But the problem awaits the study of judicious critics. The famous monument which Henry Adams commis- sioned Saint-Gaudens to execute for his wife’s grave at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington is another landmark in the spiritual quest of one of the most sensitive spirits ever to appear in Amer- ica. Goaded by sorrow at the loss of his wife, Adams often called the statue Nirvana, and others have vaguely suggested that it was inspired by the Chinese Goddess of Mercy. Obviously the influence of the Orient upon our artists who work with brush and chisel cannot be ignored.
The work of Ernest Fenollosa in the preservation of ancient art in Japan itself, and in encouraging its collection and study in America, is also worthy of note. He played no small part in making Boston and its famous museum one of the richest centers in the world. Fenollosa was also an influence in encouraging the
45
study of Oriental literature. His work on the Noh drama of Japan was revised and published after his death by Ezra Pound under the title Certain Noble Plays of Japan. Of even greater significance was Fenollosa’s essay on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry , an “ars poetica” written in conscious realization that modern man “not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chap- ter” which will involve “world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe” and “undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.” Few books threw clearer light on the essential interests of the Imagists who later turned to the Orient for inspiration and method.
It is not only in what Van Wyck Brooks has called the “Indian Summer” of New England culture that our representative men turned to the Orient for spiritual or intellectual support. The earlier period of the “flowering” of New England is significant for many reasons. One is that the temper of Emersonian Concord was positive, not negative. Another is that some of its most char- acteristic thought was the result of Yankee roots striking into Oriental humus and deriving therefrom rich nutriment. (In The Orient in American Transcendentalism I have offered an expo- sition of the outstanding manifestations.)
The grammarian Donatus once cried: “Damn those who said what we mean, before us!” But such men as Emerson and Tho- reau, instead of feeling despair at discovering that great seers of the past had expressed their thoughts before them, were delighted. They trusted their own intuitions and fell back upon experience which, to use Emerson’s phrase, affirmed the existence of the One Bottom in the universe. Their chief Oriental interest was in the Vedanta and they were led to the Hindus for proof of the fact that the “eminent men of each church” in both hemispheres “think and say the same thing.” There can be little doubt of the reasons behind Emerson’s orientalism, when one reads such words from his pen as: “In the history of intellect no more important fact than the Hindu theology, teaching that the beatitude or su- preme good is to be attained through science: namely, by the perception of the real and the unreal, setting aside matter, and qualities and affections or emotions and persons, as Maias or illu- sions, and thus arriving at the contemplation of the one eternal
4 6
Life and Cause, and a perpetual approach and assimilation to Him ”
The Transcendentalists were not system makers. They were men who sought an ethic and therapeutically useful religious phi- losophy at a time when European thinkers were wrestling with rationalistic Sensationalism and romantic Idealism. Both the Deists and the Transcendentalists sought a universal substrate for religion and ethics; but each started with totally different premises. In terms of their Oriental leanings they are differentiated by all that distinguishes social China from mystic India. The search of the Transcendentalists was for glimpses of the Over-Soul, of mystic insights and illumination which like glints of gold in a lump of ore shone through the plethora of the world about them and in man’s beliefs.
This is the explanation of the numerous Oriental “lustres” or quotations which fill many pages of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s writings, as well as Ttye Dial, official organ of the communion published from 1840 to 1844. The proverbs of strange peoples, pithy sayings which reveal the sharp-edged observations and uni- versal insights of men into the nature of the world and the moral conduct of life, were valued for their undulled freshness and dis- tilled proofs of the moral sentiment in man. Above all, when they were most orphic, proverbs revealed the universality of moral law and proved that the natural interest of man is in the ideal. Thus, Emerson and his followers welcomed with joy the evi- dence that the Over-Soul had spoken through men in divers times and places. Throughout their lives they sought the echoes.
If the contemporaries of the Concordians found their thought iconoclastic, it was because of their catholicity and not because of any negation of essential Christianity. This can be amply dem- onstrated in the writings of Thoreau. In his unpublished com- monplace book entitled Paragraphs Mostly Original appears a note which clearly suggests his attitude toward the world’s re- ligions: “If the Roman— the Greek— and the Jew have a character in history, so has the Hindoo. He may help to balance Asia which is still too one-sided with its Palestine.” Thoreau was not essen- tially anti-Christian. On April 3, 1850, he disclosed in a letter to his friend Blake the result of his reading of the Christian scrip- tures and his thoughts as he viewed the world: “I lived in Judaea
47
eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries!” On another occasion he wrote in the Week: “What are time and space to Christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world?— that the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to make a New York bishop so bigoted.,, If such sentiments are anti-Christian, Thoreau might have shouted, let the world make the most of them! A mind like his had no interest in the purely temporal; it lived in worlds wherein the great-hearted were always welcomed and could feel at home. “I know, for instance,” he wrote in his Journal of 1852, “that Sadi entertained once identically the same thought that I do, and thereafter I can find no essential difference between Sadi and myself. He is not Persian, he is not ancient, he is not strange to me. By the identity of his thoughts with mine he still survives.” In the light of such passages must be interpreted the often-quoted confession of Thoreau to his literary executor, Harrison Blake: “Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. ... To some extent, and at rare in- tervals, even I am a yogi .” Manifestly such words from the pen of a Yankee jack-of-all-trades cannot be taken literally. To think of Thoreau contemplating his navel is preposterous. His real in- terest can best be suggested by other phrases from his .writings: To live a “balanced life, acceptable to nature and to God”; to breathe a “divine perfume” and in serenity of mind and spirit to “enjoy our inheritance”; to make way “with our petty selves, wish no ill to anything. Apprehend no ill, cease to be but as the crystal which reflects the ray”— that was his conception of Yoga. “There is a kindred principle at the bottom of all affinities,” he wrote in his Journal in 1840, half a decade before his retreat to Walden; and afterwards he recorded that while in solitude he “dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.” The reasons for the orientalism of the American Transcendentafists are to be found in these words. It was not the result of a desire to escape anything. Theirs was an intellectual quest, a search for historical evidence and experience to vindicate the fundamental principles of their thought. The most luminous pages of Emerson and Thoreau are filled with proof that in the great Oriental scriptures they discovered their affinities. To distinguish their mood from that of Henry Adams
and his contemporaries, it is necessary only to note that their favorite Bible was the Bhagavadgita and not the books of the Buddhists.
Kipling’s assertion that the East and the West will never meet is the easy conclusion of an imperialist. He was the dean of An- glo-Indian fiction writers and the composer of Tommy Atkins’ barrack-room songs. His interest was never in the realms Thoreau occupied, or in the Arcadia of the world-weary, or in the the- osophies which today are offered as a solution for all religious contradictions. Clearly, at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing into our own day, the Occidental imagination created for itself two worlds which are romantically “oriental.” One was a world of untrammeled nature, exotic mystery, and unchecked passions. The other consisted of the mysticism of the Sufis, Bud- dha, the Upanishadic seers, and Lao-tzu. It remained for the Neo-Humanists of the twentieth century, particularly Irving Bab- bitt and Paul Elmer More, to point out that the popular imagi- nation of the West could not consistently live in both worlds. “If the temple bells are calling the British private to ‘raise a thirst,’ ” wrote Babbitt in an essay on “Buddha and the Occident” published together with his translation of The Dhammapada , “to what, one may enquire, are they calling the native Burman?” Babbitt answers: “Certainly not to be ‘lazy’ and irresponsible . . . a central admonition of Buddha may be summed up in the phrase: Do not raise a thirst!”
Whatever may be said about Neo-Humanism, its amorphous character, and the emphases which differ with its various expo- nents, the writings of Babbitt and More clearly indicate a debt to the Orient. As a conservative literary movement, it was character- ized by an intense hatred of Rousseauism and both literary ‘nat- uralism’ and exoticism. Modern fiction, said More, consisted chiefly of explosions in cesspools. The majority of the Neo- Humanist communion sought in the “wisdom of the past” for an “inner-check” to curb contemporary interest in sex and natural passion. As a religion, if Babbitt’s works may be taken as represent- ative, Neo-Humanism was Puritanism superimposed upon a Bud- dhistic sense of the worthlessness and impermanence of human attachments, and a search for moral disciplines, a higher will and
49
imagination to balance the natural will, the senses and their appe- tites, and the lower imagination.
For the historian interested in the values discovered by Occi- dentals in the Orient, the Neo-Humanism of Babbitt and More is a rewarding study. In their work there appeared, at last, an “orientalism” based on sound scholarship and an acquaintance with Sanskrit and Pali. Trained at Harvard under eminent philo- logians, for long years thereafter continuing to study Oriental languages with a view to translating and publishing their repre- sentative classics for the public at large, and eventually bent on the formulation of a social ethic if not a new religion for their generation, these high priests of the movement released their criticism of contemporary life through the most respectable jour- nals of their day. Their quarrels during the 1920’s with literary critics resulted in manifestoes and symposia like Humanism and America , edited by Norman Foerster for the communion, and The Critique of Humanism , edited by* C. Hartley Grattan. Younger critics probably would have raised no voice in protest if the Neo-Humanists had been satisfied with the role of anti- quarians crying “Mahabharata” from rooftops. But they rose in defense of modernism against the erudite attacks of the academi- cians and characterized their utterances as “Mahabracadabra.” Outwardly the controversy seemed to many observers a tempest in a teapot. Seen in perspective, however, and studied in the light of the complete writings of Babbitt and More, it can with justice be regarded as the clash between an essentially Hindu sense of human values and a civilization hell-bent for the economic debacle of 1929.
VII
The lessons which may be drawn from a brief survey of the past in Oriental-Occidental cultural relations are many and varied. Few of the giants of European and American intellectual history have thus far devoted themselves to a consideration of Oriental cultures per se. Yet the Orient has increasingly colored their intellectual and cultural milieu. This is the first fact to be noted in conclusion.
It is in the popular literature of Europe and America that the impact of the Orient upon our traditional thought may most
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effectively be traced. Popular literature is a weathercock which points the direction of all the winds of opinion that blow. This is its significance. It is the expression in words of the intellectual complex of an age, the summation of its culture in terms of ideas, activities, and impulses to action, and the revealer of the cultural dialects which paradoxically may appear side by side in the minds of representative men in any generation. Without benefit of the professoriat, average Occidentals have in varying ways been “orientalized” since the beginnings of contacts between the peoples of the East and the West.
To many this fact is the cause of alarm, and of a foreboding that our culture may lose its integrity. It was not so for Boling- broke, who realized before Wordsworth that human nature’s daily food is infinitely varied and that there are both physical and spiritual hungers. Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History , published in 1752 at a time when the Orient was unfolding before a generation priding itself on its cosmopolitan outlook, contains a rational observation which should be con- sidered by all who would encourage cultural exchange between peoples or who, contrariwise, would preserve the “purity” of their cultural heritage. “The study of history will prepare us for action and observation,” Bolingbroke wrote. “History is the an- cient author: experience is the modern language. We form our taste on the first; we translate the sense and reason, we transfuse the spirit and force: but we imitate only the particular graces of the original; we miitate them according to the idiom of our own tongue , that is, we substitute often equivalents in lieu of them, and are far from affecting to copy them servilely.” Time has demonstrated the truth of Bolingbroke’s observation.
A second fact is that there are more things in heaven and earth than merchants dream of. “What have death, and the cholera, and the immortal destiny of man, to do with the shipping interests?” asked Thoreau on one occasion, and his question suggests prob- lems too frequently ignored. In contrast to his view it may be noted that in the September, 1933, Pacific Affairs a Dutch econ- omist wrote: “I am unwilling to allow any artificial separation of the cultural factor from other factors, and am even convinced that I am right in posing the thesis that the relations between Eastern and Western peoples are primarily economic and that
51
cultural activities are only an appendage .” For such forthright honesty there can be nothing but admiration, although one may doubt the writer’s knowledge of cultural history and his sense of the relative importance and permanence of the forces loose in the world today.
The dangerous tendency of the typical Occidental to self- glorification and pride is abetted by many compelling facts which divert attention from his own debt to the Orient. It is necessary only to mention the influence of modern science, education, forms of government, and industrialism upon Asiatic life to realize what the white man has done to his neighbors. In India and China factories now belch smoke as black as any in Pitts- burgh and Manchester; labor unions provoke strikes hitherto unknown in the so-called brooding East; the imported cinema has subverted native modes of life and sense of values. Obviously nothing comparable can be found for the influence of the Orient on the Occident. Commercial relations appear dominant, and the cultural traffic seems mainly bound in one direction. But such facts blind the Westerner as he faces the dawn of a new age in which ideas, philosophies, and theories of art will embark upon conquests of their own, and settle colonies without the aid of economic processes.
Certainly few of the Occidental thinkers and writers who have been challenged by the Orient have had the remotest interest in trade. They have overleaped geographical and racial frontiers chiefly because they discovered artistic, intellectual, spiritual values which they admired. Whether the resulting manifestations of “orientalism” in European culture are to be deplored or con- sidered trivial is an academic question. That they are prophetic cannot be doubted. The process of appropriation cannot be thwarted by those who fear that it will neutralize the essential genius of a culture. If the materialistic civilization of the world will continue to be enriched and the physical life of all peoples made more comfortable, as the physical resources of continents, from materia medica to raw materials, are widely distributed, it is to be expected that men everywhere will similarly appropriate from the world’s store other values which may make their lives more beautiful or give it depth.
A third fact is suggested by Doctor Johnson’s observation that
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“the good and evil of eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit.” This is demonstrated in any popular literature which re- flects an Oriental influence. Much ignorance and misuse of Ori- ental thought prevails, and some fearful and amusing facts are to be found in the record. For example, an American insurance company recently advertised: “Buddha, who was born a prince, gave up his name, succession, and heritage to attain serenity. But we do not need to give up the world; we have only to see a life- insurance agent who can sell us serenity for the future, the most direct step to peace of mind.” Such words might suggest that America is the land of the half-educated. Only those with lim- ited imaginations, however, will think of them as a reflection of credulity or ignorance alone. They indicate, rather, a want of stability. As men sense the artificiality and limitations of their lives today, feeling like trees with thin rootage in a high wind, they grope for sound footing and hunger for certitude. “Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact,” wrote Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soidy “that man has never yet been able sin- glehanded to hold his own against the powers of darkness— that is, of the unconscious. Man has always stood in need of the spiritual help which each individual’s own religion held out to him. ... It is this which lifts him out of his distress.”
The Christian clergy may profitably consider the reasons be- hind the flourishing of Orient-inspired cults in Europe and Amer- ica. Apparently in their parishes are hungry sheep who look up and are not fed; and many find in the exotic gospels of swamis some therapeutic value which they miss in their own religious heritage. The Thoreauvian insistence that the world is round, not lopsided, and that the Orient has both a character in history and a contribution to make, is a challenge to all who would be healers of souls that find no comfort in logic or Christian apolo- getics or tradition, whose spiritual problems are untouched by social gospels, and who desire above all else to believe that the enterprise of life is a worthwhile process and that in the end man will not dissolve like snowflakes in the stream of material- ism. Underlying our contemporary faith in the curative powers of the psychoanalyst is the persisting desire to believe that man’s spirit is continuous with a larger spirituality from whose univer- sality are to be derived confidence, courage, and cosmic security.
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Men who feel so find that the psychiatric therapies directed to- ward the adjustment of the outward business of life are also often superficial and inadequate. The intelligentsia may scorn them; but they are legion. They are those who in the truest sense live in a culture, and it is in their minds that the most significant meet- ting of the East and the West is taking place.
A fourth fact is that among other sincere, thoughtful, and edu- cated Occidentals there has also grown the belief that the world’s great religions are not hostile systems but are revealers of funda- mental psychological needs and universal moral laws. Some con- sequently seek to reconcile contradictions in the world’s faiths. Others find satisfaction in their great separate affirmations, be- lieving that the best in the universe is the revelation of the deep- est or most beautiful in it. A hymn by George Matheson, sung in many liberal churches of Protestant Christendom, serves as an illustration:
Thine is the mystic life great India craves;
Thine is the Parsee’s sin-destroying beam;
Thine is the Buddhist’s rest from tossing waves;
Thine is the empire of vast China’s dream.
Thine is the Roman’s strength without his pride;
Thine is the Greek’s glad world without its graves;
Thine is Judea’s law with love beside,
The truth that censures and the grace that saves.
Such lines suggest no careless heterodoxy, and the Oriental allusions clearly represent much more than mere poetic ornamen- tation. Indeed they were written in 1890 by the poet who gave to his fellow-believers the better-known hymn, “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go.” There are increasingly deeper levels of experience which the ordinary folk of our workaday world must face. Duplicating in their own lives the varied experience of the race, it is inevitable that they should also discover, as knowledge of the great Oriental cultures increases, essential insights and values in all departments of human endeavor which they will make their own. The vaunted modernity of the present genera- tion consists more in what it does than in what it believes. To future generations, as to our own, the records of the past are
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clearly a source of something more significant than amusing read- ing for an idle summer's day.
So long as we can imagine, there will be recurrent turning to the Orient for the material satisfactions of this world, for literary themes and artistic design, for the foundations of utopias, and for passports to the cities of God. As mankind struggles for the brotherhood of men, the trend will be toward the integration of the individual in the unity of the world’s experience.
The sense of the past is therefore plain. The task of interna- tional democracy is to underwrite its dream with a world-wide political organization. Any structure it might raise, however, will be but a house of cards if it is not cemented with knowledge of the interdependence of peoples and their contributions to the common heritage of mankind. The spiritual foundations upon which the world society of the future is to be built must consist of a knowledge of all the affinities which exist between peoples and the ways in which they may complement each other. The history of the cultural discovery of the Orient by the West is simply the story of a search for values which will give life flavor, zest, and completeness. It contains much that is silly and absurd, but that is inevitable in any record that began with man’s ignorance about his fellows and reaches from spices to God.
Curt Sachs
THE ORIENT AND WESTERN MUSIC
I
AT THE beginning of our era, the Greek geographer Strabo stated: “Those writers who have consecrated the whole of Asia, as far as India, to Dionysus, derive the greater part of music from there. And one writer says, ‘striking the Asiatic cithara’; another calls flutes ‘Berecynthiaa’ and ‘Phrygian’; and some of the instruments have been called by barbarian names, ‘nablas,’ ‘sambyke,’ ‘barbitos,’ ‘magadis,’ and several others.” 1
This is the earliest acknowledgment of Western indebtedness to Asiatic music.
Strabo could have added: that the two main tonalities and modes after the Dorian were called Phrygian and Lydian; that not “some,” but all Greek instruments had Asiatic names, includ- ing the two leading lyres kithara and lyra ; that the “national” Dorian mode itself was a filled-in enharmonic mode, as they called it, with two major thirds and two semitones in the scale of seven notes, and that this enharmonic mode still exists in Mongolia, India, Java, Bali, and, above all, as the “national” mode of Japan; and many other details.
Strabo also should have mentioned the peculiar ideology of Greek music from the later fifth century on, with the theory of ethos as the climax. It teaches that music must not be looked at as an indifferent matter of entertainment. It is intimately con- nected with the Universe and acts on man’s character, either stimulating and exciting, or soothing and even enfeebling. More specifically, it gives courage and mental vigor or inspires religious devotion, or lasciviousness, or effeminacy, according to the tonali- ties, rhythms, and instruments used. Therefore the nation is in-
<6
terested in an educational system that gives music the first place, but, while it stresses desirable qualities, eliminates those types likely to damage morale. However, exactly the same ideas had existed in China long before, and Confucius, who lived a hundred years before Plato, expressed them nearly in the words that the great Hellenic philosopher used. Plato himself, who probably did not know how much he owed to Chinese thinking, referred to the priests of Egypt as his teachers in music as a problem of edu- cation and res publica ?
ii
Doubtless, Asiatic elements have contributed to the music of prehistoric Europe long before Greek and Roman times. Unfor- tunately, most problems of prehistoric relations between the two continents have not yet been solved; however, anthropology and history are agreed on several migrations westward. There is, for example, the so-called birch-bark civilization (to which the alp- horn belongs), shared by certain peoples of Siberia and those of the European Alps, and also the remarkable migration that brought the horse and religious horse rituals to Europe. It is hardly possible that such vast movements, in which objects of everyday life and beliefs with their ceremonials were included, should not have carried the songs of worship and dance from the old to the new homes in the West.
Recently, the author was indeed able to show that the typical style of old-European melody, preserved in ten thousands of medieval notations and folksongs of our days all over the con- tinent, from Iceland and Scandinavia to Spain and the Balkans, follows the same principle of chains of thirds, alternately major and minor, on which the music of the Ugro-Finnish peoples and other North Asiatic groups are based.3*4 That these chains of thirds reappear among North American Indians, who likewise derive from archaic North Asia, is a valuable confirmation. Some years before my research in prehistoric thirds, I had outlined a method of musical chronology in ancient Europe.5 Work in this direction would be one of the most fascinating tasks of musical archaeology.
Another question of prehistory is whether there has been a formative influence from Asia on Mediterranean music long be-
57
fore the times of Greece and Arabia. The author often heard vintage songs in Anacapri above Capri, which were quite un- European both in style and in the way in which they were sung; and one should keep in mind that Anacapri in its building style still shows the traces of Phoenician colonization. The same is true of Balearic songs, of which Catalan scientific missions have made an impressive number of records (preserved in the phonographic archives at Barcelona); they, too, have nothing to do with Euro- pean music and hardly anything with Moorish music. Thus, the tentative suggestion of an extremely old, say, Phoenician style might at least be acceptable as a working hypothesis. A careful investigation on all Mediterranean isles should be made as soon as possible after the war before it is too late; the results would be as important for the history of mankind as any archaeological excavation.
Ill
%
The earliest foothold for a discussion of post-Grecian influence from the East is the liturgical music of both the Byzantine and the Roman Churches. Neglecting the Christian music of Byzan- tium, which has been much less important in the history of West- ern music, we turn to the melodies of the Roman Church.
The cantillation of the Catholic Church has been called the Gregorian chant or chorale, in honor of Pope Gregory I the Great (590-604) who is credited with unifying and codifying the musical liturgy. The melodies and the singing style that the pope had written down in a definite and obligatory form had come from various stocks: Italian and Greek folksongs, but, above all, the Jewish synagogue. Some melodies of the latter stock must have existed in the Palestinian homeland before 600 b.c., since the late Abraham Z. Idelsohn, Professor at the Hebrew Union Col- lege in Cincinnati, found the exact counterparts of several Gre- gorian melodies in the isolated Jewish congregations of Yemen in Arabia, Babylonia, and Persia, which had been separated from Palestine and the further development of Jewish ceremonial music after the destruction of the First Temple and the abduction of the Jews into the Babylonian Exile (597 b.c.).
The Oriental elements of the Gregorian chant clashed with the quite different traditions and potentialities of Western music
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with its chains of thirds, its syllabic nature, and its ever-growing tendency toward harmony and polyphony. They had to tol- erate the infiltration of third melodies; they had to accept the dissection of the most fluid coloraturas into syllabic configura- tions with additional texts, because, as Roman church singers in Charlemagne’s time complained, the Franconians with an artless, barbaric, bestial voice crushed the melodies in their throats; and nine hundred years ago, the tradition of Gregorian rhythm was lost for good when part singing began to undermine the free melodic style of Eastern cantillation.
Yet, the ascendancy of Gregorian music was tremendous. With the fourth as an essential interval, the church modes gave a new structural principle that the West had little known before and that became helpful when the native chains of thirds were slowly twisted into octaves of major or minor character. Gregorian chant also preserved its innate independence from metric patterns and the fetters of beaten time, its freer forms, and its even and yet dynamic flow. This kind of singing and shaping, with which medieval men were familiar from early childhood on, has prob- ably had a decisive influence on the secular solo music of Europe. The art of the troubadours , trouveres , and minnesdngery that musicologists of our time have mistakenly interpreted as run- ning in an eternal limping triple time, is in the most important treatise of the thirteenth century expressly characterized as noti ita praecise wiensnrata (‘not so precisely measured’), that is, just as free in rhythm as the Gregorian chorale. This explains why all the secular songs of that time were written down in the same rhythmically non-committal notation that the chant has used, though the composers had a ‘mensural’ notation at hand.
This notation, too, had been devised in the western Orient and was only later adapted to the specific needs of European music. Temple musicians of the Eastern worlds between the Mediterra- nean and the Indian Ocean had developed various notations in order to secure an unadulterated and unadulterable singing of the holy texts in times of crisis, when oral tradition was in danger of being lost. They were different in their symbols, but similar in principle. Most of them ignored the single, isolated note (c or d or e), but provided signs for short, ever-recurring ‘melodicles* or basic turns out of which the melody was composed in the way
59
a mosaic is put together— a second, or third, or fourth,, upward or downward, empty or with fillers, straight or bent, plain or trilled. To put it philosophically, the ancient Oriental composers felt that melody, as a sounding movement, was composed of movements, not of stops. Best known of the symbols are the little hooks, dashes, and angles, called nginot or masoretic accents of Palestinian-Jewish cantillation, which still are printed above or below the corresponding syllables of the text in all Hebrew Bibles.
The neumes that European monks used for many centuries in the holy books of Christian service were an outgrowth of the old accents. There was the pes or podatus , a step upward; the clivisy a step downward; the scandicus , an ascending triplet; the clima - cuSy a descending triplet; the climacus resupmus flexus, a quin- tuplet of a particular form; and a score of other combinations of dots and vertical and oblique dashes to be written above the texts. Neither did they express the pitches, nor the exact distances and intervals, or the relative time values of the individual notes; the direction of the melodic movement was paramount.
Still, there were certain difficulties in imposing such notation 6n the West, even on Western church music. Here again, the syl- labic tradition of most European countries was often imperative enough to chop the easy flow of Gregorian melodies into units of a more stationary character, and these in turn required suitable means of writing and memorizing. For notation, a way out was found in the eleventh century when the neumes were written on staves, which would be modern had they not had four lines only (as still in today’s antiphonaries, hymnals, and missals): every neume is split into two or more stationary notes the exact pitches of which had to be strictly observed in singing.
Assistance in memorizing was particularly necessary because from note to note there could be the distance now of a whole tone, now of a semitone; because the place of the semitone among whole tones differed in the eight church modes, and sometimes even within the same mode; and because any mistake would de- stroy the tonality of the mode. As a remedy, so we learn, Guido of Arezzo (d. ca. 1050) invented solmization: the choir boys memorized the melodies by singing them, not with their texts, but on the since \yell-known syllables ut re mi fa sol lay which had to
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of Chinoiserie in garden architecture.
Old Battersea Bridge,” lithograph by James A. McNeill Whistler. Courtesy , Brooklyn Museum.
/ilight Moon at Ryogoku,” wood-block color print by Utagawa Hiroshige. Courtesy,
plate 4 “Morning Glories in Flowers and Buds,” wood-block color print by Katsushika Hokusai. Courtesy , Brooklyn Museum .
plate 5 “Les Grenouilles,” woodcut by Charles Houdard. Cour- tesy, Brooklyn Museum .
be alined so that any semitone fell upon the step mi-fa. The word “invented,” however, is inadequate. Not only had practically all Oriental nations known some kind of solmization (although on different syllables); not only did it play an outstanding role in the musical education of Greece. Abbot Odo of Cluny, who died in 942— more than a hundred years before Guido of Arezzo— had in his Tonarius mentioned certain queer names of notes, and among them re> scembs , caemar > caphe , asel, which, though slightly disfigured by the Latin-writing author, are easily recog- nizable as Semitic words— particularly scembs , the Arabic word for ‘sun’ being shams or shems, and the Hebrew word, shemesh. Thus, European monks knew Oriental solmization before 1000; and this fact becomes even more remarkable as the only three- letter syllable in Guido’s solmization, sol, means ‘sun’ in Latin.
Guido also is generally credited with having devised the fa- mous ‘hand,’ a method used far into modern times to facilitate solmization in melodies of a more elaborate character. This is the method: every note throughout the whole range had a fixed place on one of the various joints of the fingers; so the pupils, touching them with a finger of the other hand while they sang, were pre- vented from going astray. However, this method, too, had prece- dents in the Orient. The Chinese have used the hand to memorize the four types of tonal inflection in their language and, conse- quently, their music: they touch the third phalange of the fore- finger to indicate the level tone; the tip of the same finger for the rising tone; the tip of the ring finger for the falling tone; and the third phalange of the same finger for the dialectal (and musically meaningless) shortening of any of the foregoing movements. One of the Hindu methods of memorizing the cantillation of the holy Vedas was even more similar to Guido’s hand; with the right index, the singers touched a certain place on the left hand where the note to be sung was situated. There were five such places: the small finger, for the lowest note; the lower end of the forefinger, for the following note; then the ring finger; and fi- nally the index again for both the fourth and fifth notes.
A paragraph on the Oriental sources of the Gregorian chant, its performance, and its auxiliary means, would not be complete without discussing antiphony. Hebrew and other West-Oriental poems were conceived in a peculiar parallelism— parallelismus
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memborum is the scientific term— every half verse being answered by another half verse which expressed either an intensification of the first idea or else an antinomy, not exactly in the same poetic meters, but in similar words. The beginning of the well-known psalm Nineteenth, for example, reads:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
And the firmament showeth His handiwork,
Day unto day uttereth speech,
And night unto night revealeth knowledge.
Such parallel lines were sung either by two alternating half choruses or by a soloist and an answering chorus. In both forms, alternation passed to the Christian Church, as antipho?iy and as response . Antiphony played so important a role in the Oriental church that one of the Church Fathers, St. Basil, who lived in the fourth century, defended the singing X>f the psalms both an- tiphonally and responsorially, as did “the Egyptians, Libyans, Thebans, Palestinians, Phoenicians, Syrians, and the dwellers by the Euphrates’’— that is, all congregations in the Western Orient. In the same century. Pope Damasus (366-384) introduced an- tiphony into the Roman liturgy. The Church had kept it for about eleven hundred years when the famous Flemish director of mu- sic at St. Mark’s in Venice, Adriaen Willaert (d. 1562), adapted the old Oriental-Gregorian antiphony to extra-liturgical works written in the polyphonic style of the Palestrina age: two half choruses were stationed in the two organ lofts, which, in St. Mark’s, face each other, and sang, now alternately, now together, in sharp contrasts and in mystic chiaroscuro . This innovation met the stylistic needs of the later sixteenth century so well that Venetian and Roman composers did not hesitate to follow Wil- laert’s example and to use the polychoral style both in religious and secular music. Often, the choruses were of different pitches, one clearer, without basses, one darker, without sopranos; or else, one was entirely or partially vocal, and the other instrumental; if both were instrumental, one of them would be composed of brass instruments, that is, cornets and trombones, and one of bowed strings. However, the grandiosity and love for color and shades after the Renaissance and particularly in the Baroque did
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not rest satisfied with two choruses. Three and four choruses be- came frequent, and many times even four did not suffice; indeed, Queen Elizabeth’s court organist, Thomas Tallis (d. 1585) wrote a motet, Spem in aliam nunquam habuiy for no less than forty voice parts in eight choruses. The polychoral climax seems to have been reached sometime in the first half of the eighteenth century with a composition for forty-eight voices by Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni (d. 1743), maestro di cappella at St. Peter’s and the Lateran. It certainly must have been embarrassing to give adequate places to so many choruses; but, making a virtue of ne- cessity, the composers added to the effect by fully utilizing all ad- vantages that the architecture of churches and palaces granted. Thus, Virgilio Mazzocchi (d. 1628) wrote a much admired, im- pressive musicone for St. Peter’s in Rome and placed its twelve or sixteen choruses, partly on the ground floor under the dome, partly on the gallery on the level of the roof, and partly in the dizzying height of the lantern above the dome.
But this was a long, long way from the simple antiphony that the Bible describes: “And the women sang one to another in their play, and said: ‘Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.’ ”
Two relics of Oriental trends in church music in the first thou- sand years a.d. are the organ and bell chimes, such as the one on the tower of Riverside Church at New York. The organ seems to have been created in the second century b.c. in Egypt; small specimens reached Western Europe as gifts from Eastern rulers about a thousand years later in the times of Pipin and Charle- magne. Bell chimes came to Europe about the same time and were often depicted in the miniatures of psalters to illustrate the last psalm —Laudate Eum cum cymbalis—the (not quite appropriate) name cymbala being the one that the monks gave to the bell chime.
The arrival of the organ and the bell chime were important, in- deed decisive, as they were the first instruments with fixed pitches in the West, able, and actually used, to introduce fixed standard pitches and intervals where players of fretless stringed instru- ments and singers had been blindly groping from note to note. Organs made constant retuning imperative, and both organs and bell chimes were at an ever-faster rate copied and reproduced to
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meet the increasing demand of monasteries and churches. This implied recipes, experiments, and mathematical calculation. In other words, medieval Europe had for the first time to face the grave problem how to establish music on fixed ratios instead of caprice and anarchy. To appreciate the vital importance of the two instruments, one must have seen how many among the trea- tises on music written throughout the Middle Ages deal with this problem.
IV
The following tide of Oriental influence came from the civili- zation of Islam, from nations speaking Arabic and Persian, and it lasted during the almost eight hundred years of Moorish and Arabian domination in Spain (711-1492), in which Oriental cul- ture was not only combated, but also eagerly imitated and ab- sorbed.
All the instruments that wc have used' in modern times once came from Asia, some via Byzantium, some as a consequence of the crusades, but most of them through the Iberian gateway: flutes, oboes, and clarinets; bagpipes, trumpets, and kettledrums; the violin, the mandolin, and the guitar; cymbals, xylophones, and glockenspiele . Even the harpsichord and the piano, apparently so fully European, are Western only as far as keyboards and actions are concerned; the instruments themselves on which these devices have been grafted are the psaltery and the dulcimer of the Mid- dle East. The poetic literature of the fourteenth century is full of Arabic names of instruments: canon , en?norache> naquaires , atam- boresy guitarra moriscay rabe moriscOy exabcvay albogony anafles , atabaleSy cors sarrazinoisy and many others. The lute still bears an Arabic name ( abud ); the word tambour is Persian; pandora and bandurria can be traced back to Sumerian terms.
Europe’s achievement has been the variation and improvement of Asiatic instruments— either by altering and fusing Oriental types, as with the bassoon, the saxophone, and the hybrid brasses of the cornet and the tuba families; or by perfecting their techni- cal contrivances, ranges, and sonorities. However, these fusions and perfections set in at a comparatively late time, at the end of the Middle Ages, when the musical situation had posed problems to European instrument makers that their Oriental predecessors
<54
had not known— particularly the extension of the musical range and the ever-growing polyphonic and harmonic tendencies.
Long after that time of de-Orientalization, Europe still had the old Oriental bipartition into musica alta and rmisica bassa— outdoor and indoor music. Clamorous, indeed deafening was the outdoor music of shrill oboes, brasses, and stick-beaten drums; the indoor music of strings and flutes was soft, restrained, limpid, yet more trenchant than modern Western music is. The poets of the fourteenth century keep them carefully apart, and so do the painters: on the Sienese Lippo Memmi’s little “Coronation of the Virgin” in the museum at Munich, the indoor music is strictly separated from the outdoor band.
I just dared to characterize the indoor ensemble as soft and yet slightly more trenchant than modern Western music. Indeed, the similarity of such ensembles, recorded by either poets or painters, with groups that we hear today in North Africa, Syria, or Iraq is so close that we are able to compare the timbres of medieval European and modern Arabian music.
Even vocal music must have had the Oriental character: the angels forming chorus on van Eyck’s famous altarpiece at St. Bavo’s in Ghent ( ca . 1425), obviously modeled after the choir singers of Flemish cathedrals at the beginning of the fifteenth century, betray the nasaling style of the East in the wrinkles around their noses and mouths (a trait that commercial photo- graphs of the painting rarely show).
It has generally been claimed that a wandering instrument car- ries its music along, in other words, that instruments transplanted into new climates were prone to retain the customary styles that they had possessed in their home lands. But all attempts at finding direct traces of Oriental melodies, forms, or styles in Europe proper have failed, including the latest ones by Henry George Farmer. The reason is evident. Most Oriental instruments were detained many decades, and often centuries, in the Iberian quar- antine before they were allowed to cross the Pyrenees and Had all the time necessary to acclimate themselves and to conform to the style of Europe.
At the time the instruments were absorbed, Europe had defi- nitely shifted from unaccompanied to accompanied melody, and this process had necessarily destroyed the characteristic features
<55
of melody in its proper sense. It was then that organs, mono- chords, and psalteries were given keyboards, and that Persian lutes lost the quill plectra with which they had been plucked, since either transformation facilitated chordal and polyphonic playing. Under such conditions, Arabian melody could hardly influence the music of the West.
There might be one curious exception in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in France and, of all things, in polyphony. The phenomenon itself has a decent Greek name: isometry . It means that a certain melody follows two different cyclic laws. The melody itself or, better, the set of notes that form the melody might be, say, ten measures long and then be re- peated as often as the text requires. But there also is a certain rhythmical pattern— a peculiar arrangement of, say, half notes, dotted quarter notes and regular quarter notes, which in a similar way is repeated over and over again to the end of the piece. The rhythmical period does not necessarily coifrcide with the melodic period— it would be twelve or sixteen measures long and therefore start its repetition when the melody is already in its third or sev- enth measure; and its second repetition would begin still later in the second repetition of the melody. Thus the two periods over- lap each time in a different way and the notes of the melody ap- pear each time in a different rhythmical arrangement.
Rhythmical patterns have never been a trait of European music; but they are of basic importance in the Islamic Orient, and particularly in India, where all pieces are headed by the indi- cation of both their melodic pattern or rdga and their rhythmical pattern or tala . Moreover, the medieval musicians, writing in Latin, called the rhythmical period taleay a word non-Latin, in- deed un-Latin, but closely reminiscent of the correct Sanskrit name, tala. The melodic pattern was given a true Latin name, color; but the Sanskrit term, rdgay also meant ‘color/ This is so striking a coincidence that a connection between the Indian and the European conceptions can hardly be doubted.
v
There was hardly a trace of Oriental influence in the follow- ing four or five hundred years. However, European self-suffi-
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ciency changed with the exotic fashions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which concentrated on themes Chinese and Turkish. At about 1700, when Turkish armies no longer threat- ened the peace of Europe, the armies of the West began to imi- tate the Turkish bands, the intoxication of which they had ex- perienced in more than two hundred years of warfare in Eastern Europe. The newly organized ‘Turkish’ or ‘Janissaries’ music of European regiments provided a first stronghold to noisy percus- sion, such as bass drums, cymbals, triangles, and jingling cres- cents, which before had been used only as a rmisica irregularis for masquerades and similar occasions.
Slowly, military percussion made its way to the regular or- chestra. Cymbals had already appeared in Nicolaus Adam Strungk’s opera Esther (Hamburg 1680); and triangles were used in 1710 in the Hamburg opera and 1717 in the court orchestra at Dresden. At first, they merely provided local color for subjects taken from the Orient, which from the eighteenth century on have so much attracted the composers of operas, and particu- larly of comic operas— Gluck’s Cadi dupe ( 1761 ) and La Rencon- tre imprevue (1764), Mozart’s Seraglio (1781), Weber’s Abu Hassan ( 1 8 1 1 ) and Oberon (1825), Peter Cornelius’ Barber of Bagdad (1858), Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (1924), Henry Rabaud’s Marouf (1914), and hundreds more of ‘Oriental’ operas and ballets.
The Romantic period, eager to add new shades to its musical palette, did not hesitate to give permanent seats to the guests from Asia, even when no Oriental theme was in need of exotic colors. From the first quarter of the nineteenth century on, the Turkish music is dissolved in its components and has merged with the orchestra.
The same is true of the symphonic orchestra. In Joseph Haydn’s Military Symphony (1794), the Turkish music was still a merely characterizing factor; in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth , it was no longer military, but in a more gen- eral way suggestive of enthusiasm and resolute energy; the Ro- mantic symphony, like the Romantic opera, embodied it whole- heartedly as a coloristic agent.
It is obvious that the composers of Oriental operas and sym- phonies did not rest satisfied with Turkish music, but also tried
<57
to orientalize their melodies— in the eighteenth century, as they thought Oriental melody might be, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as they knew it was. But from the point of view of our survey, it is entirely meaningless that Weber wrote his Turandot overture on a genuine Chinese melody taken from some book on China; that Cornelius indulged in the augmented seconds of the Arabian maqam Higdz; or that Puccini’s Madame Butterfly sings in the major thirds of Japanese pentatonism. They drew from Oriental music without transforming the music of the West.
VI
But the general trends in Western music around 1900 became different, at first in France. The world’s fairs at Paris from 1889 to 1900 presented excellent examples of Oriental music from all parts of North Africa and Asia. Certainly not for the first time. But European music had entered a critical stage in which sensi- tivity and receptivity were extraordinarily increased. On the one hand, Wagner’s Tristan had irrevocably dissolved the narrow- limited dualism of major and minor; on the other hand, the young Frenchmen tended away from the opaque grandiloquence of the German school and from both Classicism and Romanticism; the fundaments of the nineteenth century were shaken, and the world was waiting for something new to be born. Oriental music was no longer listened to with the supercilious self-satisfaction of the arrive , but with the humbler eagerness of the unprejudiced open mind. As a little-known pioneer, Louis-Albert Bourgault- Ducoudray in Paris published Greek and Oriental melodies in the 1870’s, “hoping to extend the horizon among the musicians of Europe.” Some twenty years later, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is said to have taken his famous whole tone scale from a Javanese orchestra at the world’s fair, which is probably true with the re- striction that the Javanese salendro scale (which must be the one that inspired the French master) consisted of five more or less equal six-fifths of tones, while Debussy’s scale comprised six whole tones. But the true Oriental experience might have been different.
Faced with Oriental music, the world of 1900 began to realize the limitations of Western music. Maybe for the first time, it
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dawned upon the European musician and critic that the great achievement in harmony, polyphony, and orchestration had meant sacrifices in other fields; that the unbelievable riches of modes which the Orient still possessed had burnt down to major and minor; that under the strait) acket of harmonic function mel- ody proper had become a poor connecting line between related chords; that rhythm had become an all too simple time-beating.
It was a wholesome shock to realize that our music was not the only real thing in the middle of what we had thought to be the primitive babble of less advanced nations. And it seems that the shock has even been stronger in this country than in Europe; America’s estrangement from chordal music is more radical. Her predilection for modern Russian and Negro music hints to the Orient, though only indirectly: both the Russians and the Afri- can Negroes have in thousands of years absorbed Oriental influ- ences, and both have brought us a restoration of innate motor impulse and melodic freedom. We will not be foolish enough to imitate Oriental music or to forget the glorious traditions of our own world. But we are trying to widen our scope and re-win grounds lost and forgotten— lost and forgotten in the lands of the West, but alive and faithfully kept in the East.
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Laurance P. Roberts
THE ORIENT AND WESTERN ART
CHINA
RELATIONS between Europe and China have a long but broken history, dating back to the third century before Christ with the Han dynasty. In the beginning Chinese silk, car- ried overland across Central Asia and distributed to the Mediter- ranean world by the Parthians, was the medium of exchange. This silk, quite literally worth its weight in gold, was, until the outbreak of present hostilities in the Pacific, one of the major ex- ports of the East to the Occident.
Wars and civil unrest and the resulting unsettled conditions closed this overland trade at different times, though it was thriv- ing in the T‘ang dynasty (618-906) and again under the Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1260-1368). But with the coming of the Ming Emperors of China, who did not rule over Central Asia as the Mongols had done, the overland trade route was once more closed and it was left to the Arabs to carry on a combined land and sea trade through the Near East and the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese as a result of their exploratory voyage in the late six- teenth century were the first European nation to open direct sea- borne trade via the Cape of Good Hope to Canton. The English, French, and Dutch soon followed with their East India Com- panies founded, respectively, in 1600, 1664, and 1602, with the English eventually getting the largest share of the business. The United States entered the trade in the early nineteenth century. Its clipper ships, which were faster than the English East India- men, made the American flag famous in the Far East and soon
70
flooded the Eastern seaboard states with a variety of Chinese goods.
Finds of Han textiles on the overland trade routes and four- teenth century Chinese silk stuffs still in European church treas- uries bear witness to the continuing importance of silk as the primary export from China to the West. But the influence of Chinese silk was much greater on the economic life of the Occi- dent than on the artistic. Even in the Renaissance the designs found on Western silks are those of the Near East.
Next in importance to silk as an export commodity were the porcelains and ceramics. The presence of T‘ang ceramics at Sa- marra near Bagdad, a capital of the Abbasid Khalifs from 838 to 883 a.d., shows an early regard for the superior Chinese ware. Under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), porcelain began to rival silk as an export commodity since its weight and bulk were not the problem to the new sea traffic that they had been to overland caravans. During the last forty years, examples of Ming celadon ware have been found in the Philippines, in India, on the West coast of Africa, and on the narrowest part of the Malay peninsula over which they were transshipped from the Gulf of Siam to the Bay of Bengal. The famous Wareham bowl in England, dated ca. 1530 by its English silver mount, is of celadon, and in the Na- tional Museum in Constantinople is a famous collection of blue and white ware, begun by the Sultans of Turkey during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth cen- tury, Augustus the Strong of Saxony, a contemporary of K‘ang Hsi in China, made a large collection of famille verte, and Mme. de Pompadour, as befitted one of the biggest stockholders in the French East India Company, did her best to popularize Chinese Porcelains. Eventually in the late seventeenth and early eigh- teenth century blue and white became so popular that the manu- facturers of Delft ware in Holland quickly copied it to save part of the home market for themselves. It was Johann F. Bottger’s discovery in 1709 of the method of making porcelain that saved the European ceramic industry from the overwhelming Chinese competition. A number of the more popular shapes and designs continued to be Chinese, and Chinese porcelain remained in great demand.
The cargo ships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
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centuries were laden with dinner sets, mantel garnitures, punch bowls, and a variety of other household porcelains as well as with lacquered furniture, wallpaper, silks, and ivory trinkets. It was these household wares which, in the eighteenth century, most affected European taste and finally produced a fanciful but wholly charming “style chinoise” in all forms of decorative art. This “Chinoiserie,” with overtones of present political signifi- cance, has but lately been revived, and the familiar design of the small Chinese figures against a background of pagodas and wil- lows is once again seen in fabrics, wall coverings, prints, and por- celains. Although these are Occidental interpretations of the Orient with no real understanding of the aesthetics or philosophy behind them, they have much that is truly delightful. Thus by the end of the great days of the China Trade in the mid-nine- teenth century, supercargoes on the clipper ships and the Chi- nese merchants in Canton had spread Chinese goods, even though in many cases deliberately manufactured to standards of Euro- pean taste and for the European market, to the homes of Europe and America.
Despite all this trade the importers had not dealt in fine porce- lains made for the Chinese taste, old bronzes, paintings, or samples of calligraphy. It is probable that no Chinese objet (Tart was ever brought home as a curio by a New England captain, for such ob- jects were not for export, even if the captain had had the taste to appreciate them. It remained for the art dealer, both Occi- dental and Oriental, to take advantage of the distressed economic conditions in China from the last years of the nineteenth century until the present war and to bring these things to the growing group of collectors and museums interested in Chinese art. This group, however, was and remains but a minute fraction of the Occidental population that since the eighteenth century has used the Chinese exports made for the Western trade. Connoisseurs today know more of Chinese art and taste than ever before, but the effect of this knowledge on the artistic life of the West is al- most negligible.
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JAPAN
The influence of Japan on recent Western art has been greater than that of any other Far Eastern country. But the results of this influence are restricted almost entirely to the French art of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Since 1909, with the exception of minor interest in the fields of architecture, interior decoration, garden planning, and flower arrangements, the artists of Europe have not turned to Japan for inspiration. Inasmuch as the Japanese color print was the medium for the influence of Japa- nese on French art, it might be well to relate briefly the history of Japanese print collecting in the West, with specific examples of just what elements of this art the French artists of the late nineteenth century adopted.
Until its failure in 1797, the Dutch East India Company had for two centuries traded with the Japanese at the island of Deshima in the harbor of Nagasaki. The goods exported from Japan were primarily lacquers and Imari ware porcelains, both decorated with elaborate patterns calculated to please the European taste. Paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles were unknown to this trade and although, on the death in 1814 of Isaac Titsingh, for- mer chief of the Dutch East India Company at Deshima, nine Japanese prints were found among his belongings, in general the Dutch trade did not handle paintings, sculptures, prints, and tex- tiles. Prints, in particular, remained unknown to collectors and artists until after Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853 had opened the way to modern trading methods.
The London Exposition of 1862 boasted a Japanese court and it was here that prints were first shown publicly. Later in the same year these prints were sent to Paris where an art shop kept by one Houseil in the Rue de Rivoli seems to have been the French outlet for them. Almost at once they were noticed by Alfred Stevens, Whistler, Diaz, Fortuny, and Legros. Manet, Fantin-La- tour, Degas, and Monet as well as the engravers Bracquemont and Jacquemart also came under their spell. Japanese art became bet- ter known to the public at the Paris Exposition of 1867. In the same year the “Jongleur,” a society of artists, began weekly meet- ings at the home of M. Solon, the director of the ceramic factory at Sevres, to study this new art. Although the great paintings and
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sculptures of Japan were still unknown to the most eager French collectors and students, the prints became their all-absorbing passion. The story of those great collecting years, especially those of the eighties and nineties, has been charmingly told by the late M. Raymond Koechlin. His pages are filled with the excitement of the discovery of this hitherto unsuspected and rich art world.
The movement grew rapidly and in 1873 there was a Universal Exposition in Vienna which spread the knowledge of Japanese prints still further. In the Paris fair of 1878 there was a Japanese section organized by a Japanese dealer, Wakai, and in 1888 the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London had a Japanese print show' followed two years later in Paris by a special show. By then the roster of collectors contained the names of men important in all fields of artistic endeavor: Louis Gonse, Charles Edward Havi- land, A. Rouart, Galimard, Koechlin, Isaac de Camondo, Guimet, de Goncourt, Champfleury, Zola, and Villot. Another Japanese dealer, Hayashi, was in charge of the Exposition in Paris in 1900, for which the Japanese government lent really good sculptures and paintings. Although these rare examples of the real Japanese art returned to Japan at the end of the exhibition, they opened another new vista to those interested in the Orient. This fervid admiration for Japanese art is reflected in the tenuous and wavy style of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings. It also found expression in the so-called “Style Nouveau” of interior decoration. This style adapted to wrought iron and other decorative materials the same Japanese influence that was expressed in the art of Beardsley. The art dealer, S. Bing, decorated his shop in this style and a room at the Invalides of about 1 900 also represents it. But it was a sterile form and, within a few years, a dead one.
The first important sale of Japanese art was that of the Gon- court collection in 1897. In 1902 and 1903 Hayashi offered his collection at auction and in 1904 Villot followed suit. The Bing sale in 1906 brought to an end the great period of Japanese art in France. Buyers from other countries built up their collections from these sales. Charles Freer of Detroit, Otto Kummel of the Far Eastern Museum at Berlin, Mosle at Leipzig, and Olden at Dusseldorf entered the Oriental field. From 1 909-1 914 there was a series of six print shows at the Pavillion de Marsan for which Charles Vignier and Hogitaro Inada did the catalogues. These
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exhibitions also included lacquers, potteries, and sculptures, and nearly all the private collectors lent for the occasion. These fa- mous shows reviewed twenty-five years of collecting, and al- though there were no paintings, since these were kept'in Japan, it was clear that Paris was the center for Occidental knowledge of Japanese minor arts. It was these minor arts in truth that had the greatest influence on European design, an influence which is still felt in the fields of the graphic arts and in textile and ceramic design. With the retirement of Bing and Hayashi, the domina- tion of the Oriental art field by Japan was at an end and the new dealers and new collectors turned to ancient China. Hayashi in- deed had had a few Chinese bronzes, but the pieces came too high for the Paris collectors and eventually went to Gonse at Freiburg. A few others of the old Japanese group, among whom were Alexis Rouart and Isaac de Camondo, admitted Chinese objects to their collections, but in general France remained the center for Japanese collectors while Chinese collecting became international.
The first name that comes to most minds when the subject of the influence of Japanese prints on European art is under dis- cussion is probably that of James Whistler, the American painter who worked in England. The results of his contact with this new art form were twofold: a new subject matter in his paintings and a stylistic influence in his prints. “La Princesse de le Pays de Porcelain,” done in 1864 and now hanging in the Freer Gallery in Washington, is an example of his introduction of Japanese ac- cessories into a painting that is primarily European in style, while his series of prints of the Thames are close in feeling and tech- nique to the best of the Japanese print-makers.
If one compares such a print as “Old Battersea Bridge” (PL 2) to the Hiroshige “Twilight Moon at Ryogoku” (PL 5) this derivation is at once apparent, for the similarity not only in subject matter but in the treatment of the component parts is clear. There are even such particular details as the “butterfly signature” placed under the left of the bridge in the Whistler to compare to the calligraphic signature in the upper right of the Hiroshige.
There were other artists who very strongly felt the impact of this new art with its bold design and strong, clear colors. The
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Impressionists, officially launched in 1863 with Monet as their sponsor, had been struggling with the problems of pure color and light. They now added to their findings the new and fas- cinating angular composition which they discovered in Japanese prints. Clear examples of their borrowing are Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge,” now in the Adolph Lewisohn collection, and any one of Degas’ ballet compositions.
Startling evidence of European borrowing of subject matter and style from the Japanese is to be found by comparison of the three illustrations of prints in Plates 4, 5, and 6. Plate 4 is a print by the great Japanese artist Hokusai. Here we have the continuation of realism and flat areas of pattern which are so characteristic of all Japanese work. In Plate 5, a woodcut done in 1894 by Charles Houdard and called “Les Grenouilles,” we find in the artist’s rendering of the iris and water a deliberate borrowing of stylistic treatment, and although the frogs are more naturalistic in the use of light and Shade than the one in the Hokusai, the general effect is so similar as to give the feeling that the artist was deliberately working in a foreign style. There is even the detail of the artist’s initials, rendered calligraphically and placed in a cartouche in the upper right-hand corner.
The resemblance is, perhaps, even more striking when we study the lithograph of Henri Rachou dated 1892 (PL 6)\ for the areas of flat color with no cast shadows, the use of a calligraphic line, and even such a trick as the inverted signature in the cartouche are, when combined with the subject matter, a direct borrowing from the Japanese. Or take such an example as the Utamaro reproduced in Plate 7 and compare it with the Mary Cassatt in Plate 8. Here we have the same broad treat- ment of the figures, the same diagonal design, and almost the same flat colors.
Another French artist working under this influence was Paul Gauguin, and although his late works done in the South Seas have a palette produced by that environment, his early Breton work has not only the general pattern but the subdued coloring of the Japanese work.
But the artist who made the Japanese contribution most par- ticularly his own was Toulouse-Lautrec. There is almost no print of his which does not owe something to the basic Japanese
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plate 7 “Kaiyoikomachi,” wood-block color print by Kitagawa Utamaro. Courtesy, Brooklyn Museum.
platf, 8 “The Fitting,” drypoint by Mary Cassatt. Courtesy , Brooklyn Museum.
plate 9 “Au Moulin Rouge,” color lithograph by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Courtesy, Brooklyn Museum.
concept of large, flat areas of pure color, no shadows, and an ingenuity of design that is found in such print-makers as Sharaku and Bunsho.
In addition to those outward resemblances Toulouse-Lautrec was also greatly influenced by the technical genius of the Japa- nese print-makers. In the lithograph reproduced in Plate 8 there is a brilliant example of the omission of what in a Japanese wood- block print would be the key block. This can be seen in the passage of the woman’s hand against her waist and in the outline of the neck of the dress. Such tricks as those were, of course, the ultimate refinements of an incredibly complicated process. In a late Japanese print sometimes as many as fifty different blocks are used, one for each color or shade, and the technical skill re- sponsible for the perfection of printing has only recently been matched in the Western world by the development of highly complicated printing machines.
Toulouse-Lautrec, more than any of the contemporary French artists, understood the brilliance of this new influence and its adaptability to what was then, in Europe, the new art of the poster. Inasmuch as many of the Japanese prints had been origi- nally designed as advertisements for individual actors or the more famous Geisha it was not too extraordinary that Lautrec’s series on Jean Avril and Loie Fuller, to mention only two, should have come into being.
It is, moreover, from this original source, distilled through French taste and training, that the best of our contemporary poster work derives.
Several attempts have been made to graft Japanese architecture onto European design. Some have been more successful than others, the best being those where the architect has tried to make use of the principles of Japanese building rather than to repro- duce the “quaint” or “charming” effect of a Japanese house.
These principles of Japanese architecture can be described in a somewhat oversimplified generalization as an approach to building by means of post and lintel, a type of structure in which there is the closest relation between exterior and interior; a type of residence in which, in a country where overpopulation and lack of dwelling space are two irreconcilable facts, the greatest
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possible use is made of each square foot. The modern flat with its one-room combination of living-, bedroom, and sometimes kitchen too, is the European equivalent of the Japanese house in which screens are used to subdivide the one large area used as a communal living-room during the day, into the more or less requisite number of bedrooms, or more properly speaking sleep- ing quarters, at night. It is, of course, a truism that the lack of furniture simplifies the Japanese problem. As a corollary to the use of this basic type of building, we have the fact that the prin- ciple distinction between the home of the very rich noble and that of the very humble farmer is one of quality of materials and size of dwelling; the architectural style remains the same. The exceptions are the results of the attempts on the part of the wealthy to imitate European period or modern architectural de- signs with almost universally disastrous results.
The book by the German architect Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan (London, Gifford, 193^8), is the most compre- hensive study by a European of Japanese methods of construc- tion and the way in which the Japanese house fits the Japanese life and climate. It is true that the ideal climate for such building is found in the south or tropical zones, but several houses have been built in Southern California in the last few years making excellent use of the Japanese principle of relating the house to the gardens in order to derive the greatest benefit from both.
Among the elements of Japanese architecture of which Euro- pean and American designers have made use the most important adaptations seem to me to be: the window running from ceiling to floor which can be either lowered or moved to one side to open up one or more sides of a room to the lawn or garden; the experimentation with texture and design in the building materials and decorating fabrics; and, in some cases, the actual use of paper screens copied from the shoji. The next step may well be when the mural artist is called in as collaborator with the architect to decorate in seemly fashion these paper walls.
There is one great fallacy in this field which should perhaps be corrected at this time. The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, on which rests much of Frank Lloyd Wright’s fame, is, contrary to the accepted version, most decidedly not the result of any study of Japanese architecture. There are few dwellings less suitable to
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the regional climatic conditions or in which the problems of a hotel such as circulation and service have been less successfully solved. To be sure, it stood through the great earthquake of 1923, but it sagged badly as a result, and it should be mentioned that a block of 1890 red brick houses adjoining the hotel and the Tokyo station of the same period not too far away, stood intact while many buildings of purely Japanese design suffered no dam- age whatever.
It is, obviously, impossible for the West to adopt completely a style of architecture which gives no thought to central heating and plumbing, but the basic Japanese elements of simplicity, appropriateness, and quality of materials may well be important contributions to our present somewhat muddled and eclectic architectural styles.
The minor arts of Japan, such as lacquer, basketry, landscape gardening, and flower arrangement, have had some influence on European living, though the Japanese forms have, in many cases, been lifted bodily from their native habitat and set down with- out understanding or real appreciation in a foreign environment. The Japanese garden, so permanently symbolized by the small arrangement in a flat dish of mirrors, pebbles, rocks, moss, and arched red wooden bridges with sometimes a Tori and small figures, has only recently come into prominence as the ideal solution for the minute plot of ground of a city dwelling. The West has, however, a long way to go before it reaches the Japa- nese freedom from non-essential elements whether in its homes, its paintings, or its flower arrangement.
The art of flower arrangement, about which so much has been written and said and so little comprehended, has in Japan strong religious overtones and is often tied to the canons of Buddhism, which demand above all else simplicity and naturalness. Here again the American housewife, whether she spends several dollars for handsomely bound and illustrated books or a dime for a pamphlet on the art of flower arrangement, has yet to learn the fundamental rule of Japanese flower arrangement, which is that the flowers, except in the formal or ritualistic arrangements, must approach as closely as possible the natural appearance of those same flowers when actually growing.
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The various Japanese styles of flower arrangement are far too complex and too subtle for an American, untrained in Japan and with a different type of home to decorate. Yet the Japanese em- phasis on flower arrangement has spurred Americans to attempt something more in the way of interior decoration than the tight bunch of posies so popular in the Victorian era. Today every flower show has its flower-arrangement section, there is consid- erable literature on the subject, including many books on the Japanese style, and the field is a fertile one for lectures. Ameri- cans as a people are temperamentally unable to duplicate the economy and subtlety of the best Japanese work, as could be seen when American and Japanese work was exhibited side by side at Yamanaka’s in New York in the early spring of 1941. But under the inspiration of Japan, our arrangements are achieving more variety and interest than before.
INDIA
The early story of Indian artistic influence on the West paral- lels rather closely that of China. In the eighteenth century, when England had taken over most of the East Indian trade at the expense of Portugal and France, Indian cottons were in great demand and the incredibly fine textiles, like the Dacca muslins, were rightly regarded as treasures of the East. The small all-over floral patterns with which the cottons were printed soon set the fashion and were copied in Europe on woolens, linens, and silks. In the nineteenth century, the infant American textile industry adopted the craze and did a thriving business with sprigged cot- tons of local manufacture as well as with plain white but in- credibly sheer muslins made for Empire dresses but technically inspired by Indian weaves. At the same time, Kashmir shawls be- came fashionable, and the Scottish Paisley shawl business grew up to meet the demand for a similarly patterned but cheaper article.
Like the Chinese porcelains and Japanese lacquers, the Indian trade goods gained wide acceptance and inspired a host of imita- tors, but they had nothing to do with the great arts of Indian sculpture or painting. With the exception of the short-lived architectural style in Portugal, a relic of Portuguese maritime trade in the seventeenth century, Europe and America have known
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little of these Indian arts until modern times. Then, as in the case of China and Japan, the knowledge of the specialist grew side by side with the increase of the art collections, but little of this knowledge trickled through to the general public. One looks in vain for traces of Indian influence in contemporary fashion or art.
The story of Indian collections begins with the British Museum, which was an early nineteenth century repository for certain Indian sculptures, especially the superb reliefs from Amara- vati. The Victoria and Albert Museum honors its Indian objects by housing them in a separate building. But until 1937 when the collection was happily regrouped, nineteenth-century presents to Queen Victoria were exhibited in preference to those pieces which better illustrated the true Indian taste. It remained for the Boston Museum under the curatorship of Dr. Anarida K. Coomaraswamy and with the support of Dr. Denman W. Ross to show Indian painting and sculpture most adequately to the Western world. The Boston collection, together with its pub- lished catalogues and other books by Dr. Coomaraswamy, affords an unrivaled survey to which every student of the subject must turn. The Metropolitan Museum also has an Indian collection, and there are fine Indian things in Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City, Brooklyn, and several other museums, but there are no great American or European private collectors in this field.
It is especially disappointing to find Indian art not more warmly appreciated in England. Perhaps the Anglo-Saxon tem- perament shrinks from the frankly sensual quality of Indian sculp- ture and is equally repelled by the jungle-like complexity of the multiple heads, arms, and symbols of many Plindu deities. At any rate, in a book like E. B. Havell’s Indian Sculpture you find almost a hostility to the subject, which certainly does not help to interpret to the Western mind Indian sculpture and the Indian religious concepts which they embody. The English evidently have liked the Mughal miniature paintings, for there are good collections of them in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in private hands.* But this type of painting, a combination of Per- sian and European influences grafted on a native style and used to portray and glorify the Mughal emperors and their countries, is not truly Indian. In the West, it is only at the Boston Museum * For instance, the superb group belonging to Sir Chester Beatty.
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and in a few other collections on the eastern seaboard that one can see more than a scattering of the older Indian paintings from Nepal and the Jain monasteries, or the more recent and wholly charming paintings from Rajputana and the Hill States that il- lustrate Hindu mythology and poetry.
It is not too much to hope that the archaic strength of the earliest Indian sculpture or the sweetness and charm of the early nineteenth-century paintings from the Hill States may introduce the more interested public to an appreciation and understanding of the fine achievements of India’s artists.
SOUTH PACIFIC
The arts of the South Pacific islands have had absolutely no influence, to my knowledge, on contemporary Western artists, although the Western world has known of them for more than two centuries and now, thanks to museum collections, offers a better view of the South Pacific cultures than can be found in situ. Wood carvings, masks, painted shields, and textiles from these regions have been seen in England since the eighteenth-century voyages of Captain Cook, for the “curiosities” he collected were soon placed in the British Museum. American clipper-ship cap- tains occasionally picked up South Sea things in their China trade. The cabinets in the houses of their New England descendants were full of them a generation ago, as shown by the fact that the larger part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Melanesian material was purchased from Connecticut houses about 1906.
Serious collecting, chiefly in the field, has followed the growth of museums in the last forty years. At Leyden, the Dutch have superb textiles, masks, paintings, sculpture, and weapons from their East Indian Empire. The Germans, especially at Hanover, have collected with typical diligence. And the British Museum, perhaps as a result of the acquisitiveness of the early English ex- plorers, has excellent material from the entire region. Indeed the value of these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pieces cannot be overestimated, for they show the art forms of the islands com- pletely untouched by the white man’s trade goods or missionary principles.
The Bishop Museum in Honolulu, as befits its geographical
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location, specializes completely in the Southern Pacific cultures. In the United States, the collections of the Field Museum are prominent, with those of the American Museum of Natural His- tory in New York, the University Museum in Philadelphia, the Peabody at Cambridge, the Smithsonian in Washington, and the Brooklyn Museum following close behind. In many cases, how- ever, these collections are treated as ethnology rather than as art, and are not accorded the same position or presentation as the products of India, Japan, or China. To the public they remain outlandish curiosities, with the same heathen tinge that they had for the clipper-ship captains. Perhaps some artist will discover the primitive force of Maori wood carving or the bold stylization of a painted New Guinea shield, and we shall have such a brief flurry in the painters’ world as occurred when Picasso in the twenties took up African art; but the day has not yet come.
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Walter T. Swingle
OUR AGRICULTURAL DEBT TO ASIA
DO WE have an agricultural debt to Asia? Many peo- ple would answer no, since many, yes, most of the cultivated plants and' domesticated animals which constitute the backbone of our agriculture came to us via Europe and had been utilized so long in Europe as to seem like native European plants and animals. Most of us do not realize that they are, almost all of them, of Asiatic origin.
As a matter of fact all of our cereals except maize, sorghum, and some forms of oats, originated in Asia. Almost all of our vegetable crops are likewise Asiatic plants. All of our common temperate-zone fruit trees, except the pecan and the native per- simmon, came from Asia, and all citrus fruits too. Horses, don- keys, cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, and chickens are all Asiatic animals. Our debt to Asia is enormous. Without Asiatic plants and animals, our agriculture and that of the whole Western Hemi- sphere could not have developed properly, as we would have no domestic animals except the llama, an ill-tempered brute, and the turkey. We would have a few good food plants, potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, lima and kidney beans, and the tomato, but no green vegetables, no important fruit trees except the subtropical avocado, and a few plums, grapes, and berries.
If we should suddenly be deprived by some malicious magic of all the Asiatic plants and animals we now use we would at first be amazed, then terrified, and soon starved unless we could at once mobilize all the transportation facilities of the world to bring us food, as well as wool for winter clothing, leather for shoes, and a host of near-necessities we use every day.
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CHINA, OUR CHIEF AGRICULTURAL CREDITOR
Few Americans realize that our chief agricultural creditor is China. We are indebted to the1 Chinese not only for the best va- rieties of oranges which we grow, but also for many other fruits and vegetables grown commercially in the United States. The soy bean (PL na ), whose extraordinary food value is now at last beginning to be appreciated throughout this country, was one of the five sacred grains believed to have been given the Chinese people by the semimythical Emperor Shen-nung, “The Divine Husbandman,” about the twenty-ninth century b.c. Rice (PL /o), wheat, proso (millet) (PL nb , c ), and barley, the other four of the five sacred “cereals,” were grown in China many centuries before they were known in Europe; and the same can be said of many vegetables that we commonly regard as European.
From the beginning of American intercourse with China, orna- mental plants such as the gardenia, the camellia, and the Cherokee rose were brought from China and grew well in our Southern states. A few handsome trees were also introduced such as the ginkgo and the camphor. As American merchants and missionaries gradually penetrated into China, they sent home more and more plants and trees. The Arnold Arboretum, organized and directed by the great tree expert, C. S. Sargent, financed extensive trips to the Orient to obtain botanical specimens and seeds of ornamental trees and shrubs as well as photographs of them as they grew in their native habitat. These trees and shrubs revolutionized the garden and park plantings of the northern parts of the United States. The illustrated, popular books of E. H. Wilson, who made many trips to the Orient for the Arnold Arboretum, helped to arouse interest in the very rich arboreal flora of China. The Ar- nold Arboretum also sponsored scientific technical works such as Plantae Wilsonianae and numerous botanical articles on the trees and shrubs of China.
The Plant Introduction Service of the U. S. Department of Agriculture was organized by David Fairchild in 1897; he did very extensive exploring for foreign economic and ornamental plants from 1898 on, and directed the Plant Introduction Service from 1907 to 1928. I was fortunate enough to be one of the first “agricultural explorers,” as they are called, commissioned for for-
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eign work in the new service, though my field at first lay in the Mediterranean regions and not in the Far East. Early in this cen- tury other agricultural explorers were already sending to Wash- ington thousands of packages of seeds and hundreds of bales of living plants from China. Of these men Frank N. Meyer and P. H. Dorsett were outstanding, not only for the number and value of the plants they secured, but also for the detailed and ac- curate descriptions of every plant they sent to Washington.
P. H. Dorsett, some years later, in the early twenties, traveled widely in North China, taking many fine photographs of Chinese crop plants and writing descriptions of the culture, harvesting, and curing of each. On these trips he collected many varieties of soy beans (PL na , /^), largely through the utilization of a new and potent method of securing the willing co-operation of all edu- cated Chinese people. A complete translation, prepared by Mi- chael J. Hagerty under my direction in 1917, of the chapter on soy beans contained in a standard Chinese work on economic plants (the Chih Wu Ming Shih T‘u K‘ao by Wu Ch‘i-chiin) had been furnished the plant explorers looking for soy bean va- rieties. This translation, covering eighty-two pages, discussed several hundred varieties, telling where they were largely grown. In all cases the name of the variety and the name of the locality where it was grown were not only spelled out in English letters, but also written carefully in Chinese characters. An index made it easy to turn to any variety under discussion and see what was said about its culture.
This was a turning point in field explorations in China. Such indexed translations in the hands of foreign plant explorers in- sured the attention of all educated Chinese, who gladly directed the explorer to the nearest source of the various named varieties. I had learned this at first hand in 1915 when studying varieties of Citrus in southern China. Surprise and skepticism about the for- eigner’s knowledge of Chinese books gave way to astonishment and warm approbation. The detailed indices of these translations made it possible for the traveling American experts to ask intelli- gent questions and often to check the accuracy of the replies. Without such annotated lists of varieties and with no knowledge or appreciation of Chinese works of reference the agricultural explorer got very different treatment— polite reception accom-
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panied with profound doubt of the foreigner’s knowledge of the subject. He could buy seeds or plants actually on hand for sale, but no active effort was made to point out to him other, perhaps superior, varieties, which grew in other districts, even if these districts were near by. The peasants of China have always been profoundly influenced by the attitude of the gentry, and a for- eigner who can get the respect and confidence of both the gentry and the peasants can go far, very far, in China.
China will probably continue to be the chief donor of new crop plants, of new foods, and of new dietetic uses of vegetable foods for the United States. The main reasons for this preferred position of China as a source of new and useful crops are:
( 1 ) China has the largest array of crop plants of any temperate- zone country because it has by far the largest flora of any tem- perate-zone region of the whole world.
(2) Because of the essentially agricultural civilization of the Chinese, their long occupation of China, and their enormous pop- ulation, every useful plant has been utilized to the full.
(3) Recurring famines, coupled with poor transportation over mountain barriers or flooded plains, have forced the Chinese to utilize for food every wild plant not actually poisonous.
(4) The great importance given to dietetics by the Chinese since ancient times— an importance probably equaling that given to medicine— has led to the very efficient use of innumerable food plants which grow wild or are cultivated in all parts of China.
(5) The climatic conditions prevailing in southeastern China are very similar to those of the east central and southeastern United States.
(6) The United States is the only country with a population of European origin having numerous widely distributed Chinese restaurants which already serve hundreds of thousands of Ameri- can clients. These restaurants are eager to make use of the nu- merous Chinese food and flavoring plants. And this makes it easy for Americans to introduce these plants into their own kitchens as they are doing now, more every year.
The soy bean is a striking example of the introduction of a new crop. China has known the soy bean for fifty centuries (in ancient times it was called shuy or pulse; now it is known as ta ton, or “big bean”). Soy beans were sent from China to France
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as early as 1740, and from 1779 were grown in the famous Botanic Garden of Paris. Benjamin Franklin, who had been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 1772, sent seeds back to the United States while he was the United States Ambassador to France, and urged that they be given a trial. But in spite of his plea, the soy bean remained merely a curiosity in this country for more than a century.
In the late eighties Prof. C. C. Georgeson brought soy bean seeds from Japan, where he had been teaching at the Agricultural College at Komaba, and planted them in a field on the campus of the Kansas State Agricultural College. I could see the stunted soy bean plants from the windows of the botanical laboratory where I was a teen-age research assistant. This variety, adapted to the perpetual spring climate of Komaba near Tokyo, did not do well on the bare Kansas hills, often swept by hot dry winds. And nothing happened. Soy beans did not arouse interest among Kan- sas farmers until many years after this failure.
In the third decade of the twentieth century Dorsett sent to Washington more than 800 named soy bean varieties from China, Manchuria and Japan. These, together with shipments secured by Dr. David Fairchild from his numerous correspondents in the Old World, especially in Asia, amounted by 1928 to a total of more than 2,800 packages of soy beans, almost all named varieties but many of them duplicated, some of them many times. Mean- time tests made by W. J. Morse, in charge of soy bean culture for the Bureau of Plant Industry, showed that many varieties had a narrow range of adaptability. Accordingly, from 1929 to 1931, Morse joined Dorsett in the Orient and these two experts, with trained Chinese helpers, brought to this country the largest single collection of soy bean varieties ever assembled. As soon as Morse returned from studying soy beans in Asia and attacked the prob- lem of finding which Asiatic varieties were adapted to the differ- ent regions and of selecting and breeding to make them fit various American soils and climates, a remarkable change occurred in soy bean culture. Yields went up and plantings increased year by year. In 1924, 1,782,000 acres were planted to soy beans in the United States and the average yield was 1 1 bushels per acre. In 1942 the acreage is estimated by Morse to have been 15,102,000 (this was more than 25 per cent increase over the 1941 acreage)
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and the part of the crop harvested for beans was worth over $200,000,000. About half of the total acreage was not harvested for beans (PL 14 ), but grazed or cut for hay. The yield per acre reached 18.7 bushels per acre, an increase of 847 per cent in acre- age and 17 per cent in yield!
Soy bean culture for seed-crop production has, for the past few years, attained a relatively stable position as is indicated by the estimates published annually by the Soy Bean Association.
In 1943 the acreage was up 7 per cent above that of 1942 but the yield per acre was down about 6.6 per cent; in 1944 the acreage was up 1 per cent above 1943 but the yield per acre was 7.7 per cent less. Prices per bushel have shown only small varia- tion. Mr. W. J. Morse’s estimates show the price per bushel was up about 8.4 per cent in 1943 over 1942. The soy bean crop is now one of the seven or eight major crops of the United States. As our people learn to utilize more fully what the Chinese have discovered during the last 4,000 years about making delicious, nourishing, and easily digested food from soy beans, this crop may even rise to fifth or sixth place in our agriculture.
This growth of soy bean culture in the United States has been rendered possible by a rapidly expanding market for more and more soy bean products. Soy bean oil, which makes up about 18 per cent of the weight of the bean, is used on a very large scale for making shortening, oleomargarine, and other edible products. Such uses, even in 1935, absorbed 63,613,000 pounds, while 13,-
003.000 pounds were used in the paint and varnish industry,
4.816.000 pounds in making linoleum, oilcloth and waterproof goods, including artificial leather, and finally 2,549,000 pounds for soap. Year by year much larger amounts are being used for these purposes.
One of the best-known industrial uses of soy bean proteins is for making a water-resistant glue. No less than 30,000 tons of soy bean glue were made in 1942 by a single firm and its licensees annually, most of it being used in the rapidly growing plywood industry. Soy bean proteins have been enthusiastically used by Henry Ford in his automobiles, being mixed with the more ex- pensive phenolic resins, thereby reducing costs and also yielding a more plastic, freer-flowing mixture which takes dyes better.
Soy beans are also employed on a large scale as green manure
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to build up the fertility of the soil. Unlike cotton, soy beans fix the free nitrogen of the air and, if the plants are plowed under, the soil is enriched. Hay fed to livestock is usually re- turned to the soil in the form of manure.
Soy bean products contain certain amino acids, essential for human nutrition, of the kinds usually found in meat and not occurring abundantly in vegetables other than soy beans. In fact the use of soy beans probably enables China to support twice as many people as would otherwise be possible. As N. Gist Gee, a well-known American naturalist, who spent many years in China, wrote of the Chinese in 1918: “They do not use milk and butter as we do, and it is very difficult indeed to supply meat for the entire population, even if they were all able to buy it. Yet in spite of these facts, they make up a splendid balanced ration at a most reasonable price by the large use of the bean.”
Soy beans contain small amounts (2 to 3 per cent) of a valuable constituent, one of the phosphatids (a complex compound of phosphoric acid, an organic base choline and other substances) which is called lecithin. Lecithin has been found very useful in facilitating the mixing and preserving of foods such as margarine, chocolate and other candies and ice cream. It is said to help in conserving vitamin A along with the fat in which it is dissolved. Lecithin contains the organic base, choline, which poultry hus- bandmen have found to be almost indispensable in raising chick- ens, especially in enabling the hens to make good laying records. In a test made recently at the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, at Gainesville, Florida, it was found that young hens well fed except for choline laid on the average only 5 eggs during the first 3 months of laying, while comparable hens given choline in small amounts laid 35 eggs (7 times as many) during the same period.
The soy bean proteins, which constitute 40 per cent of the weight of the beans, are used on a rapidly increasing scale for human food and for feed for hogs and poultry. Some 61,377,000 pounds of soy bean flour were supplied to the United Nations under the lend-lease and 5,000,000 pounds were distributed to schools eligible to receive school lunch commodities by the Agri- cultural Marketing Administration at Washington, during the year ending August, 1942. The Army is now using soy bean flour
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in the K ration as K biscuits, and also employs many soy beans in the Army pork link sausages because such use permits “stretch- ing of available meat supplies, a saving in connection with fat release,” and because “from a nutritional standpoint the product is improved and the cost to the Army lowered.” Some 25 million pounds of soya flour and grits were sold in 1940, no million in 1942 and by 1943 no less than 290 million pounds were used. Very recent research by D. Breese Jones and J. P. Devine, of the Bureau of Chemistry and Agricultural Engineering, U. S. Depart- ment of Agriculture, has shown that the addition of as little as 10 per cent of soy bean flour to ordinary bread produces bread much like white bread in appearance but slightly firmer in texture and of better keeping qualities, and that such bread, fed to rats for six weeks, gives almost four times as much growth as ordinary white bread. If 1 5 per cent soy bean flour is used, five times the growth- promoting value of white bread is obtained. No doubt such bread will come rapidly into use in feeding the people of post-war Europe.
Soy bean milk is made cheaply and rapidly by grinding the beans between millstones with a small flow of water between them. The milk is boiled, coagulated, and the slightly yellowish curd is sold in cakes about three inches square and an inch thick. This tofu has the smooth texture of baked custard. It has a very mild flavor and is not only very nutritious but also easily digesti- ble. It blends with soft meat dishes like calves’ brains or stews. As long ago as 1917-1918 Dr. Yamei Kin set up under my general supervision for the United States Department of Agriculture a soy bean mill in New