The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

by W. Somerset Maugham

  “I took the Ph.D. in Berlin, you know,” he said. “And afterwards I studied for some time in Oxford. But the English, if you will allow me to say so, have no great aptitude for philosophy.”

  Though he put the remark apologetically it was evident that he was not displeased to say a slightly disagreeable thing.

  “We have had philosophers who have not been without influence in the world of thought,” I suggested.

  “Hume and Berkeley? The philosophers who taught at Oxford when I was there were anxious not to offend their theological colleagues. They would not follow their thought to its logical consequences in case they should jeopardize their position in university society.”

  “Have you studied the modern developments of philosophy in America?” I asked.

  “Are you speaking of Pragmatism? It is the last refuge of those who want to believe the incredible. I have more use for American petroleum than for American philosophy.”

  His judgments were tart. We sat down once more and drank another cup of tea. He began to talk with fluency. He spoke a somewhat formal but an idiomatic English. Now and then he helped himself out with a German phrase. So far as it was possible for a man of that stubborn character to be influenced he had been influenced by Germany. The method and the industry of the Germans had deeply impressed him and their philosophical acumen was patent to him when a laborious professor published in a learned magazine an essay on one of his own writings.

  “I have written twenty books,” he said. “And that is the only notice that has ever been taken of me in a European publication.”

  But his study of Western philosophy had only served in the end to satisfy him that wisdom, after all, was to be found within the limits of the Confucian canon. He accepted its philosophy with conviction. It answered the needs of his spirit with a completeness which made all foreign learning seem vain. I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true. If Confucianism gained so firm a hold on the Chinese it is because it explained and expressed them as no other system of thought could do.

  My host lit a cigarette. His voice at first had been thin and tired, but as he grew interested in what he said it gained volume. He talked vehemently. There was in him none of the repose of the sage. He was a polemist and a fighter. He loathed the modern cry for individualism. For him society was the unit, and the family the foundation of society. He upheld the old China and the old school, monarchy, and the rigid canon of Confucius. He grew violent and bitter as he spoke of the students, fresh from foreign universities, who with sacrilegious hands tore down the oldest civilization in the world.

  “But you, do you know what you are doing?” he exclaimed. “What is the reason for which you deem yourselves our betters? Have you excelled us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less profound than yours? Has our civilization been less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed yourselves with skins we were a cultured people. Do you know that we tried an experiment which is unique in the history of the world? We sought to rule this great country not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you? Because he has invented the machine gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenceless horde and you can blow us into eternity. You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order. And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as straight? You have appealed to the machine gun and by the machine gun shall you be judged.”

  But at that moment we were interrupted. A little girl came softly in and nestled close up to the old gentleman. She stared at me with curious eyes. He told me that she was his youngest child. He put his arms round her and with a murmur of caressing words kissed her fondly. She wore a black coat and trousers that barely reached her ankles, and she had a long pigtail hanging down her back. She was born on the day the revolution was brought to a successful issue by the abdication of the emperor.

  “I thought she heralded the Spring of a new era,” he said. “She was but the last flower of this great nation’s Fall.”

  From a drawer in his roll-top desk he took a few cash, and handing them to her, sent her away.

  “You see that I wear a queue,” he said, taking it in his hands. “It is a symbol. I am the last representative of the old China.”

  He talked to me, more gently now, of how philosophers in long past days wandered from state to state with their disciples, teaching all who were worthy to learn. Kings called them to their councils and made them rulers of cities. His erudition was great and his eloquent phrases gave a multicoloured vitality to the incidents he related to me of the history of his country. I could not help thinking him a somewhat pathetic figure. He felt in himself the capacity to administer the state, but there was no king to entrust him with office; he had vast stores of learning which he was eager to impart to the great band of students that his soul hankered after, and there came to listen but a few, wretched, half-starved, and obtuse provincials.

  Once or twice discretion had made me suggest that I should take my leave, but he had been unwilling to let me go. Now, at last, I was obliged to. I rose. He held my hand.

  “I should like to give you something as a recollection of your visit to the last philosopher in China, but I am a poor man and I do not know what I can give you that would be worthy of your acceptance.”

  I protested that the recollection of my visit was in itself a priceless gift. He smiled.

  “Men have short memories in these degenerate days, and I should like to give you something more substantial. I would give you one of my books, but you cannot read Chinese.”

  He looked at me with an amicable perplexity. I had an inspiration.

  “Give me a sample of your calligraphy,” I said.

  “Would you like that?” He smiled. “In my youth I was considered to wield the brush in a manner that was not entirely despicable.”

  He sat down at his desk, took a fair sheet of paper, and placed it before him. He poured a few drops of water on a stone, rubbed the ink stick in it, and took his brush. With a free movement of the arm he began to write. And as I watched him I remembered with not a little amusement something else which had been told me of him. It appeared that the old gentleman, whenever he could scrape a little money together, spent it wantonly in the streets inhabited by ladies to describe whom a euphemism is generally used. His eldest son, a person of standing in the city, was vexed and humiliated by the scandal of this behaviour; and only his strong sense of filial duty prevented him from reproaching the libertine with severity. I daresay that to a son such looseness would be disconcerting, but the student of human nature could look upon it with equanimity. Philosophers are apt to elaborate their theories in the study, forming conclusions upon life which they know only at second hand, and it has seemed to me often that their works would have a more definite significance if they had exposed themselves to the vicissitudes which befall the common run of men. I was prepared to regard the old gentleman’s dalliance in hidden places with leniency. Perhaps he sought but to elucidate the most inscrutable of human illusions.

  He finished. To dry the ink he scattered a little ash on the paper and rising handed it to me.

  “What have you written?” I asked.

  I thought there was a slightly malicious gleam in his eyes.

  “I have ventured to offer you two little poems of m
y own.”

  “I did not know you were a poet.”

  “When China was still an uncivilized country,” he retorted with sarcasm, “all educated men could write verse at least with elegance.”

  I took the paper and looked at the Chinese characters. They made an agreeable pattern upon it.

  “Won’t you also give me a translation?”

  “Traduttore – tradittore,” he answered. “You cannot expect me to betray myself. Ask one of your English friends. Those who know most about China know nothing, but you will at least find one who is competent to give you a rendering of a few rough and simple lines.”

  I bade him farewell, and with great politeness he showed me to my chair. When I had the opportunity I gave the poems to a sinologue of my acquaintance, and here is the version he made,* I confess that, doubtless unreasonably, I was somewhat taken aback when I read it.

  You loved me not: your voice was sweet;

  Your eyes were full of laughter; your hands were tender.

  And then you loved me: your voice was bitter;

  Your eyes were full of tears; your hands were cruel.

  Sad, sad that love should make you

  Unlovable.

  I craved the years would quickly pass

  That you might lose

  The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin,

  And all the cruel splendour of your youth.

  Then I alone would love you

  And you at last would care.

  The envious years have passed full soon

  And you have lost

  The brightness of your eyes, the peach-bloom of your skin,

  And all the charming splendour of your youth.

  Alas, I do not love you

  And I care not if you care.

  * I owe it to the kindness of my friend Mr. P. W. Davidson.

  THE MISSIONARY LADY

  SHE WAS CERTAINLY fifty, but a life of convictions harassed by never a doubt had left her face unwrinkled. The hesitations of thought had never lined the smoothness of her brow. Her features were bold and regular, somewhat masculine, and her determined chin bore out the impression given you by her eyes. They were blue, confident, and unperturbed. They summed you up through large round spectacles. You felt that here was a woman to whom command came easily. Her charity was above all things competent and you were certain that she ran the obvious goodness of her heart on thoroughly business lines. It was possible to suppose that she was not devoid of human vanity (and this is to be counted to her for grace) since she wore a dress of violet silk, heavily embroidered, and a toque of immense pansies which, on a less respectable head, would have been almost saucy. But my Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar of Whitstable, who had decided views on the proper manner of dress for a clergyman’s wife, never objected to my Aunt Sophie wearing violet, and he would have found nothing to criticize in the missionary lady’s gown. She spoke fluently, with the even flow of water turned on at a tap. Her conversation had the admirable volubility of a politician at the end of an electioneering campaign. You felt that she knew what she meant (with most of us so rare an accomplishment) and meant what she said.

  “I always think,” she remarked pleasantly, “that if you know both sides of a question you’ll judge differently from what you will if you only know one side. But the fact remains that two and two make four and you can argue all night and you won’t make them five. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  I hastened to assure her that she was right, though with these new theories of relativity and parallel lines behaving at infinity in such a surprising manner I was in my heart of hearts none too sure.

  “No one can eat their cake and have it,” she continued, exemplifying Benedetto Croce’s theory that grammar has little to do with expression, “and one has to take the rough with the smooth, but as I always say to the children you can’t expect to have everything your own way. No one is perfect in this world and I always think that if you expect the best from people you’ll get the best.”

  I confess that I was staggered, but I determined to do my part. It was only civil.

  “Most men live long enough to discover that every cloud has a silver lining,” I began earnestly. “With perseverance you can do most things that are not beyond your powers, and after all, it’s better to want what you have than to have what you want.”

  I thought her eyes were glazed with a sudden perplexity when I made this confident statement; but I daresay it was only my fancy, for she nodded vigorously.

  “Of course, I see your point,” she said. “We can’t do more than we can.”

  But my blood was up now and I waved aside the interruption. I went on.

  “Few people realize the profound truth that there are twenty shillings in every pound and twelve pence in every shilling. I’m sure it’s better to see clearly to the end of your nose than indistinctly through a brick wall. If there’s one thing we can be certain about it is that the whole is greater than the part.”

  When, with a hearty shake of the hand, firm and characteristic, she bade me farewell, she said:

  “Well, we’ve had a most interesting chat. It does one good in a place like this, so far away from civilization, to exchange ideas with one’s intellectual equals.”

  “Especially other people’s,” I murmured.

  “I always think that one should profit by the great thoughts of the past,” she retorted. “It shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain.”

  Her conversation was devastating.

  THE PLAIN

  THE INCIDENT WAS, of course, perfectly trivial, and it could be very easily explained; but I was surprised that the eyes of the spirit could blind me so completely to what was visible to the eyes of sense. I was taken aback to find how completely one could be at the mercy of the laws of association. Day after day I had marched among the uplands and today I knew that I must come to the great plain in which lay the ancient city whither I was bound; but when I set out in the morning there was no sign that I approached it. Indeed the hills seemed no less sheer, and when I reached the top of one, thinking to see the valley below, it was only to see before me one steeper and taller yet. Beyond, climbing steadily, I could see the white causeway that I had followed so long, shining in the sunlight as it skirted the brow of a rugged, tawny rock. The sky was blue and in the west hung here and there little clouds like fishing boats becalmed towards evening off Dungeness. I trudged along, mounting all the time, alert for the prospect that awaited me, if not round this bend, then round the next, and at last, suddenly, when I was thinking of other things, I came upon it. But it was no Chinese landscape that I saw, with its padi fields, its memorial arches and its fantastic temples, with its farmhouses set in a bamboo grove and its wayside inns, where, under the banyan trees, the poor coolies may rest them of their weary loads; it was the valley of the Rhine, the broad plain all golden in the sunset, the valley of the Rhine with its river, a silvery streak, running through it, and the distant towers of Worms; it was the great plain upon which my young eyes rested, when, a student in Heidelberg, after walking long among the fir-clad hills above the old city, I came out upon a clearing. And because I was there first conscious of beauty; because there I knew the first glow of the acquisition of knowledge (each book I read was an extraordinary adventure); because there I first knew the delight of conversation (oh, those wonderful commonplaces which each boy discovers as though none had discovered them before); because of the morning stroll in the sunny Anlage, the cakes and coffee which refreshed my abstemious youth at the end of a strenuous walk, the leisurely evenings on the castle terrace, with the smoky blue haze over the tumbled roofs of the old town below me; because of Goethe and Heine and Beethoven and Wagner and (why not?) Strauss with his waltzes, and the beer-garden where the band played and girls with yellow plaits walked sedately; because of all these things – recollections which have all the force of the appeal of sense – to me not only does the word plain mean everywhere and exclusively the val
ley of the Rhine; but the only symbol for happiness I know is a wide prospect all golden in the setting sun, with a shining stream of silver running through it, like the path of life or like the ideal that guides you through it, and far away the grey towers of an ancient town.

  A STUDENT OF THE DRAMA

  HE SENT IN a neat card of the correct shape and size, deeply bordered in black, upon which, under his name, was printed Professor of Comparative Modern Literature. He turned out to be a young man, small, with tiny, elegant hands, with a larger nose than you see as a rule in the Chinese and gold-rimmed spectacles. Though it was a warm day he was dressed, in European clothes, in a suit of heavy tweed. He seemed a trifle shy. He spoke in a high falsetto, as though his voice had never broken, and those shrill notes gave I know not what feeling of unreality to his conversation. He had studied in Geneva and in Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and he expressed himself fluently in English, French, and German.

  It appeared that he lectured on the drama and he had lately written, in French, a work on the Chinese theatre. His studies abroad had left him with a surprising enthusiasm for Scribe, and this was the model he proposed for the regeneration of the Chinese drama. It was curious to hear him demand that the drama should be exciting. He was asking for the pièce bien faite, the scène à faire, the curtain, the unexpected, the dramatic. The Chinese theatre, with its elaborate symbolism, has been what we are always crying for, the theatre of ideas; and apparently it has been perishing of dullness. It is true that ideas do not grow on every gooseberry bush, they need novelty to make them appetizing, and when they are stale they stink as badly as stale fish.