Ad Astra * Index: Letters from a Chinese Official, New York, 1903
In venturing to lay the following letters before the American public, I feel that I may be expected to preface them by a word of explanation, if not of apology. Written originally for the English, they touch upon specifically English institutions: and the few references they contain to contemporary history and politics are such as would naturally be of interest rather to European than to American readers. Regarded from this point of view, their publication in the United States might seem to be irrelevant, and even impertinent. And yet I venture to think that, if they have any significance, it is of a kind that should appeal with a peculiar force to Americans. For their interest, such as it is, depends, not upon topical allusions, but upon the whole contrast suggested between Eastern and Western ideals. And America, in a preeminent degree, is representative of the West. For a century past she has drawn to herself, by an irresistible attraction, the boldest, the most masterful, the most practically intelligent of the spirits of Europe; just as, by the same law, she has repelled the sensitive, the contemplative, and the devout. Unconsciously, by the mere fact of her existence, she has sifted the nations; the children of the Spirit have slipped through the iron net of her destinies, but the children of the World she has gathered into her granaries. She has thus become, in a sense peculiar and unique, the type and exemplar of the Western world. Over her unencumbered plains the Genius of Industry ranges unchallenged, naked, unashamed. Whereas, in Europe, it has still to fight for its supremacy; for there it is confronted with the debris of an earlier society, with ideals, habits, institutions, monuments, traditions, alien to its achievement and incomprehensible to its aims. Cathedral churches, gray in the north and sublime as the cliffs and the clouds, exuberant in the south with color and form like the lovely landscape they adorn, testify to the passage of a religion which, whatever its defects, had at least the merit of spiritual audacity. Splendid palaces, manors, and parks, ancient moss-grown cottages, perpetuate the tradition of ranks and orders, ancient, hereditary, and fixed. Titles, forms, manners, habits, a whole ritual of life, proclaim a standard, vanishing no doubt, of merit and of duty, not yet convertible into terms of money. A conception that leisure may be noble, and that activity may be base, that there is an inner, as well as an outer life, and that the latter, on any reasonable estimate, has value only as minister to the former, such a conception still survives, efficient in individual lives, and embodied in works of literature and of art. In Europe, in a word, the modern spirit has to contend with an ancient culture; and its methods and results are modified and transformed by the conflict. But in America it is free; and whatever truth there may be in my analysis of its character and operation, should be illustrated, one would expect, on a larger scale, in bolder and more uncompromising manifestations, on this continent than in any of the countries of Europe. Whether that be so or not, I must leave to the candor of my American readers. But if it be, then, as I cannot but think, a serious issue is raised as to the future not merely of the United States, but of the whole Western world.
For it is impossible not to recognize that the destinies of Europe are
closely bound up with those of this country; and that what is at stake in the
development of the American Republic is nothing less than the success or failure
of Western civilization. Endowed, above all the nations of the world, with
intelligence, energy, and force, unhampered by the splendid ruins of a past
which, however great, does but encumber, in the old world, with fears,
hesitations, and regrets, the difficult march to the promised land of the
future, combining the magnificent enthusiasm of youth with the wariness o'f
maturer years, and animated by a confidence almost religious in their own
destiny, the American people are called upon, it would seem, to determine, in a
pre-eminent degree, the form that is to be assumed by -the society of the
future. Upon them hangs the fate of the Western world. And were I an American
citizen, the thought would fill me, I confess, less with exultation than with
anxious and grave reflection. I should ask myself whether the triumphs gained by
my countrymen over matter and space had been secured at the cost of spiritual
insight and force; whether their immense achievement in the development of the
practical arts had been accompanied by any serious contribution to science,
literature, and art; whether, in a word, the soul had grown with the body, or
was tending to atrophy and decay. And looking back over the long history of
mankind, considering the record of the nations who have borne in succession the
torch of civilization which England, even now, is handing across to America,
considering all that is disappearing in Europe and all that has not yet begun to
show itself here, I should feel that Humanity is standing at the parting of the
ways, that it is confronted with an issue of a gravity and importance
unparalleled, perhaps, since the fall of the Roman Empire. That issue I would
put somewhat as follows: Is that which created the religion, the art, the
speculation of the Past; that insatiable hunger for Eternity which, by a
sacramental mystery, has transubstantiated into the heavenly essence of the
Ideal, the base and quotidian elements of the Actual; that spirit of
unquenchable aspiration which has assumed, in its tireless quest for embodiment,
forms so alluring, so terrible, so divine, which has luxuriated in the jungle of
Hindoo myths, blossomed in the Pantheon of the Greeks, suffered on the cross,
perished at the stake, wasted in the cloister and the cell, which has given life
to marble, substance to color, structure to fugitive sound, which has fashioned
a palace of fire and cloud to inhabit for its desire, and deemed it, for its
beauty, more dear and more real than kingdoms of iron and gold; —is that
hunger, in the future as in the past, to harass and hunt us from our styes? Is
that spirit to urge as of old the reluctant wheels of our destiny? Or are we to
fill our belly with the husks of comfort, security, and peace? To crush in the
dust under our Juggernaut car that delicate charioteer? Are we to be spirits or
intelligent brutes; men or mere machines? That is the question now put, as it
has never been put before, to the nations of the West, and pre-eminently to the
people of these States. Doubtless, were I an American, I should not question the
capacity of my countrymen to answer it, and to answer it in the best and most
fruitful sense. Yet the consciousness of the immensity of the problem would, I
think, check at the birth any tendency which I might otherwise have indulged to
premature exultation. For I should feel that the work had hardly been begun,
that the foundations were barely laid; nay, that the very plan of the building
was not yet drawn out. And looking across the ocean, to Europe and to the far
East, I should be anxious, not indeed to imitate the forms, but to appropriate
the inspiration of that ancient world which created manners, laws, religion,
art, whose history is the record not merely of the body, but of the soul of
mankind, and whose spirit, already escaping from the forms in which it had found
a partial embodiment, is hovering even now at your gates in quest of a new and
more perfect incarnation. Will you not receive it? I do not doubt that you will,
if not to-day, then to-morrow, if not tomorrow, then the day after. And if, in
any smallest way, these few imperfect pages may contribute to prepare for it a
welcome among you, you perhaps will pardon their defects, in recognition of a
sincere intention, and will tolerate, even from a stranger, a certain freedom of
speech which otherwise you might not unnaturally resent as an impertinence.