The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

by W. Somerset Maugham

  “Tiens, where did you get hold of this?”

  I told him that I had found it in the bungalow and had been glancing through it. It was that selection of Verlaine’s poems which has for a frontispiece Carrière’s misty but not uninteresting portrait of him.

  “I wonder who the devil can have left it here,” he said.

  He took up the volume and, idly fingering the pages, told me various gross stories about the unhappy poet. They were not new to me. Then his eyes caught a line that he knew, and he began to read.

  “Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches

  Et puis voici mon cœur qui ne bat que pour vous.”

  And as he read his voice broke and tears came into his eyes and ran down his face.

  “Ah, merde,” he said, “ça me fait pleurer comme un veau.”

  He flung the book down and laughed and gave a little sob. I poured him out a drink of whisky, for there is nothing better than alcohol to still, or at least to enable one to endure, that particular heartache from which at the moment he was suffering. Then we played piquet. He went to bed early, since he had a long day before him and was starting at dawn, and by the time I got up he was gone. I did not see him again.

  But as I rode along in the sunshine, bustling and quick like women gossiping at their spinning wheels, I thought of him. I reflected that men are more interesting than books but have this defect, that you cannot skip them; you have at least to skim the whole volume in order to find the good page. And you cannot put them on a shelf and take them down when you feel inclined; you must read them when the chance offers, like a book in a circulating library that is in such demand that you must take your turn and keep it no more than four and twenty hours. You may not be in the mood for them then or it may be that in your hurry you miss the only thing they had to give you.

  And now the plain spread out with a noble spaciousness. The rice fields were no longer little patches laboriously wrested from the jungle, but broad acres. The days followed one another with a monotony in which there was withal something impressive. In the life of cities we are conscious but of fragments of days; they have no meaning of their own but are merely parts of time in which we conduct such and such affairs; we begin them when they are already well on their way and continue them without regard to their natural end. But here they had completeness, and one watched them unroll themselves with stately majesty from dawn to dusk; each day was like a flower, a rose that buds and blooms and, without regret but accepting the course of nature, dies. And this vast sun-drenched plain was a fit scene for the pageant of that ever-recurring drama. The stars were like the curious who wander upon the scene of some great event, a battle or an earthquake, that has just occurred, first one by one timidly and then in bands, and stand about gaping or looking for traces of what has passed.

  The road became straight and level. Though here and there deep with ruts, and when a stream crossed it, muddy, great stretches could have been traversed by car. Now it is all very well to ride a pony at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day when you go along mountain paths, but when the road is broad and flat this mode of travel sorely tries your patience. It was six weeks now that I had been on the way. It seemed endless. Then on a sudden I found myself in the tropics. I suppose that little by little, as one uneventful day followed another, the character of the scene had been changing, but it had been so gradual that I had scarcely noticed it, and I drew a deep breath of delight when, riding into a village one noon, I was met, as by an unexpected friend, with the savour of the harsh, the impetuous, the flamboyant South. The depth of colour, the hot touch of the air on one’s cheek, the dazzling yet strangely veiled light, the different walk of the people, the lazy breadth of their gestures, the silence, the solemnity, the dust – this was the real thing, and my jaded spirits rose. The village street was bordered by tamarinds, and they were like the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne, opulent, stately, and self-possessed. In the compounds grew plantains, regal and bedraggled, and the crotons flaunted the riches of their sepulchral hues. The coconut trees with their dishevelled heads were like long lean old men suddenly risen from sleep. In the monastery was a grove of areca palms, and they stood, immensely tall and slender, with the gaunt precision and the bare, precise, and intellectual nakedness of a collection of apothegms. It was the South.

  BANGKOK

  A FEW HOURS later I was in Bangkok.

  It is impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain malaise. They are all alike, with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din. They have no history and no traditions. Painters have not painted them. No poets, transfiguring dead bricks and mortar with their divine nostalgia, have given them a tremulous melancholy not their own. They live their own lives, without associations, like a man without imagination. They are hard and glittering and as unreal as a backcloth in a musical comedy. They give you nothing. But when you leave them it is with a feeling that you have missed something, and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you. And though you have been a trifle bored you look back upon them wistfully; you are certain that they have after all something to give you which, had you stayed longer or under other conditions, you would have been capable of receiving. For it is useless to offer a gift to him who cannot stretch out a hand to take it. But if you go back the secret still evades you and you ask yourself whether after all their only secret is not that the glamour of the East enwraps them. Because they are called Rangoon, Bangkok, or Saigon, because they are situated on the Irrawaddy, the Menam, or the Mehkong, those great turbid rivers, they are invested with the magic spell that the ancient storied East has cast upon the imaginative West. A hundred travellers may seek in them the answer to a question they cannot put and that yet torments them; only to be disappointed, a hundred travellers more will continue to press.

  And who can so describe a city as to give a significant picture of it? It is a different place to everyone who lives in it. No one can tell what it really is. Nor does it matter. The only thing of importance – to me – is what it means to me; and when the money lender said, “You can ’ave Rome,” he said all there was to be said, by him, about the Eternal City.

  I put my impressions on the table, as a gardener puts the varied flowers he has cut in a great heap, leaving them for you to arrange, and I ask myself what sort of pattern I can make out of them. For my impressions are like a long frieze, a vague tapestry, and my business is to find in it an elegant and at the same time moving decoration. But the materials that are given me are dust and heat and noise and whiteness and more dust.

  The New Road is the main artery of the city, five miles long, and it is lined with houses, low and sordid, and shops, and the goods they sell, European and Japanese for the most part, look shop-soiled and dingy. A leisurely tram, crowded with passengers, passes down the whole length of the street, and the conductor never ceases to blow his horn. Gharries and rickshaws go up and down ringing their bells, and motors sounding their klaxons. The pavements are crowded, and there is a ceaseless clatter of the clogs the people wear. Clopperty-clop, they go, and it makes a sound as insistent and monotonous as the sawing of the cicadas in the jungle.

  There are Siamese. The Siamese, with short bristly hair, wearing the panaung, a wide piece of stuff which they tuck in to make baggy and comfortable breeches, are not a comely race, but old age gives them distinction; they grow thin, emaciated even, rather than fat, and grey rather than bald, and then their dark eyes peer brightly out of a ravaged, yellow, and wrinkled face; they walk well and uprightly, not from the knees as do most Europeans, but from the hips. There are Chinese, in trousers white, blue, or black, that come to just above the ankle, and they are innumerable. There are Arabs, tall and heavily bearded, with white hats and a hawklike look, who walk with assurance, leisurely, and in their bold eyes you discern contempt for the race they ex
ploit and pride in their own astuteness. There are turbaned natives of India with dark skins and the clean, sensitive features of their Aryan blood; as in all the East outside India they seem deliberately alien and thread their way through the host as though they walked a lonely jungle path: their faces are the most inscrutable of all those inscrutable faces. The sun beats down, and the road is white, and the houses are white, and the sky is white; there is no colour but the colour of dust and heat.

  But if you turn out of the main road you will find yourself in a network of small streets, dark, shaded, and squalid, and tortuous alleys paved with cobble-stones. In numberless shops, open to the street, with their gay signs, the industrious Chinese ply the various crafts of an Oriental city. Here are druggists and coffin shops, money changers and tea houses. Along the streets, uttering the raucous cry of China, coolies lollop swiftly, bearing loads, and the peddling cook carries his little kitchen to sell you the hot dinner you are too busy to eat at home. You might be in Canton. Here the Chinese live their lives apart and indifferent to the Western capital that the rulers of Siam have sought to make out of this strange, flat, confused city. What they have aimed at you see in the broad avenues, straight dusty roads, sometimes running by the side of a canal, with which they have surrounded this conglomeration of sordid streets. They are handsome, spacious, and stately, shaded by trees, the deliberate adornment of a great city devised by a king ambitious to have an imposing seat; but they have no reality. There is something stagey about them so that you feel they are more apt for court pageants than for the use of every day. No one walks in them. They seem to await ceremonies and processions. They are like the deserted avenues in the park of a fallen monarch.

  It appears that there are three hundred and ninety wats in Bangkok. A wat is a collection of buildings used as a Buddhist monastery, and it is surrounded by a wall, often crenellated so as to make a charming pattern, like the walled enclosure of a city. Each building has its own use. The main one is called a bote, it is a great and lofty hall, with a central nave, generally, and two aisles, and here the Buddha stands on his gilded platform. There is another building, very like the bote, called the vihara and distinguished from it by the fact that it is not surrounded by the sacred stones; which is used for feasts and ceremonies and assemblies of the common folk. The bote, and sometimes the vihara, is surrounded by a cloister. Then there are shelters, libraries, bell towers, and the priests’ dwellings. Round the main buildings in due order are pagodas, large and small; (they have their names, Phra Prang and Phra Chedi;) some contain the ashes of royal or pious persons (it may be even of royal and pious persons), and some, merely decorative, serve only to acquire merit for those that built them.

  But not by this list of facts (which I found in a book on the architecture of Siam) can I hope to give an impression of the surprise, the stupefaction almost, which assailed me when I saw these incredible buildings. They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of the things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this sombre earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldness of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmers had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day’s work needs doing. I do not know that in fact they achieved art; I do not know that these Siamese wats have beauty, which they say is reserved and aloof and very refined; all I know is that they are strange and gay and odd, their lines are infinitely distinguished, like the lines of a proposition in a schoolboy’s Euclid, their colours are flaunting and crude, like the colours of vegetables in the greengrocer’s stall at an open-air market, and, like a place where seven ways meet, they open roads down which the imagination can make many a careless and unexpected journey.

  The royal wat is not a wat but a city of wats; it is a gay, coloured confusion of halls and pagodas, some of them in ruins, some with the appearance of being brand new; there are buildings, brilliant of hue though somewhat run to seed, that look like monstrous vegetables in the kitchen-gardens of the djinn; there are structures made of tiles and encrusted with strange tile flowers, three of them enormous, but many small ones, rows of them, that look like the prizes in a shooting gallery at a village fair in the country of the gods. It is like a page of Euphues, and you are tickled to death at the sesquipedalian fancy that invented so many sonorous, absurd, grandiloquent terms. It is a labyrinth in which you cannot find your way. Roof rises upon roof, and the roofs in Siamese architecture are its chief glory. They are arranged in three tiers, the upper one steeply pitched, and the lower ones decreasing in angle as they descend. They are covered with glazed tiles, and their red and yellow and green are a feast to the eye. The gables are framed with Narga, the sacred snake, its head at the lower eaves and its undulating body climbing up the slope of the roof to end in a horn at the apex; and the gables are decorated with reliefs in carved wood of Indra on the Elephant or Vishnu on the Garuda; for the temples of Buddha extend without misgiving shelter to the gods of other faiths. It is all incredibly rich with the gilding and the glass mosaic of the architraves and door jambs and the black and gold lacquer of the doors and shutters. It is huge, it is crowded, it dazzles the eyes and takes the breath away, it is empty, it is dead; you wander about a trifle disconsolate, for after all it means nothing to you, the “oh” of surprise is extorted from you, but never the “ah” of emotion wrung; it makes no sense; it is an intricacy of odd, archaic, and polysyllabic words in a crossword puzzle. And when in the course of your rambles you step up to look over a tall balustrade and see a rockery it is with relief that you enter. It is made about a small piece of artificial water, with little rustic bridges built over it here and there; it looks like the stony desert in which an ancient sage in a Chinese picture has his hermitage, and on the artificial rocks by the water’s edge are monkeys and wild cats in stone and little dwarfish men. A magnolia grows there and a Chinese willow and shrubs with fat, shining leaves. It is a pleasantly fantastic retreat where an Oriental king might fitly meditate, in comfort and peace, on the transitoriness of compound things.

  But there is another wat, Suthat by name, that gives you no such impression of pell-mell confusion. It is clean and well swept and empty and quiet, and the space and the silence make a significant decoration. In the cloisters, all round, sitting cheek by jowl are gilded Buddhas, and as night falls and they are left to undistracted meditation, they are mysterious and vaguely sinister. Here and there in the court shrubs grow and stumpy gnarled trees. There is a multitude of rooks, and they caw loudly as they fly. The bote stands high on a double platform, and its whitewash is stained by the rain and burned by the sun to a mottled ivory. The square columns, fluted at the corners, slope slightly inwards, and their capitals are strange upspringing flowers like flowers in an enchanted garden. They give the effect of a fantastic filigree of gold and silver and precious gems, emeralds, rubies, and zircons. And the carving on the gable, intricate and elaborate, droops down like maidenhair in a grotto, and the climbing snake is like the waves of the sea in a Chinese painting. The doorways, three at each end and very tall, are of wood heavily carved and dully gilt, and the windows, close together and high, have shutters of faded gilt that faintly shines. With the evening, when the blue sky turns pink, the roof, the tall steep roof with its projecting eaves, gains all kinds of opalescent hues, so that you can no longer believe it was made by human craftsmen, for it seems made of passing fancies and memories and fond hopes. The silence and the solitude seem about to take shape and appear before your eye
s. And now the wat is very tall and very slender and of an incredible elegance. But, alas, its spiritual significance escapes you.

  BUDDHA

  IT SEEMED TO me that there was more of this in the humble little monasteries that I had passed on the road hither. With their wooden walls and thatched roofs and their small tawdry images there was a homeliness about them, but withal an austerity, that seemed to suit better the homely and yet austere religion that Gautama preached. It is, to my fancy, a religion of the countryside rather than of the cities, and there lingers about it always the green shade of the wild fig tree under which the Blessed One found enlightenment. Legend has made him out to be the son of a king, so that when he renounced the world he might seem to have abandoned power and great riches and glory; but in truth he was no more than the scion of a good family of country gentlemen, and when he renounced the world I do not suppose he abandoned more than a number of buffaloes and some rice fields. His life was as simple as that of the headman of any of the villages I had passed through in the Shan States. He lived in a world that had a passion for metaphysical disquisition, but he did not take kindly to metaphysics, and when he was forced by the subtle Hindu sages into argument he grew somewhat impatient. He would have nothing to do with speculations upon the origin, significance, and purpose of the Universe. “Verily,” he said, “within this mortal body, some six feet high, but conscious and endowed with mind, is the world and its origin and its passing away.” His followers were forced by the Brahman doctors to defend their positions with metaphysical arguments and in course of time elaborated a theory of their faith that would satisfy the keen intelligence of a philosophic people, but Gautama, like all the founders of religion, had in point of fact but one thing to say: “Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.”