The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

by W. Somerset Maugham

  Most of the gods that the world has seen have made a somewhat frantic claim that men should have faith in them, and have threatened with dreadful penalties such as could not (whatever their good will) believe. There is something pathetic in the violence with which they denounce those who thwart them in the bestowal of the great gifts they have to offer. They seem deep in their hearts to have felt that it was the faith of others that gave them divinity (as though, their godhead standing on an insecure foundation, every believer was as it were a stone to buttress it) and that the message they so ardently craved to deliver could only have its efficacy if they became god. And god they could only become if men believed in them. But Gautama made only the claim of the physician that you should give him a trial and judge him by results. He was more like the artist who does his work as best he can because to produce art is his function, and having offered his gift to all that are willing and able to take it, passes on to other work, shrugging his shoulders tolerantly if his gift is declined.

  Buddhism is a way of life rather than a religion. It is terribly austere. It is like an unknown sea when the day breaks as though it had never broken before and the colours of the morning steal over the earth as though for the first time and you, your bearings lost, with none to point the way, look with dismay upon the water’s desert wastes. “All is passing,” said the Blessed One, “all is sorrow, all is unreal”; and he never ceased to insist on the transitoriness that embittered life.

  But is it true that because things pass they are evil? For innumerable centuries moralists, divines, and poets have repined because of the transitoriness of created things. But is it not the better part of wisdom to see that change in itself is good? There is a story that Monet, the founder of the impressionists, being troubled with his eyes, went to an oculist, and trying on some spectacles cried, “Good heavens, with these I see the world just like Bouguereau.” It is an instructive little anecdote. It is out of their limitations that men create beauty, and the new and lovely things that have been given to the world have been very often but the result of the conflict of the artist with his shortcomings. I hazard the suggestion that Richard Wagner would never have written the Ring if he had been able to compose as neat a tune as Verdi and that Cézanne would never have painted his exquisite pictures if he had been able to draw as well as the academic Ingres. And so with life. Everything changes, nothing remains in one stay, the rose that poured out its perfume on the air this morning is scattered this eve; and it is but good sense not to bewail this, the necessity of life, nor even to accept it with resignation, but to welcome it; it is the chief of the colours we have to work with, nay, it is the canvas on which we paint, and shall we ignore it, shall we deplore it, shall we complain that it makes it impossible to complete our picture? Does the rose smell less sweet because in an hour it dies? Is love less precious because it passes? Is a song less lovely because we tire of it? If all things are transitory, let us find delight in their transitoriness.

  And that on the whole is what we of the West are at last learning to do. We welcome change for its own sake, and because of the joy we take in it we have added a value to life. I think it is America that has taught us this lesson, and if that is so it is a greater benefit which that country has conferred upon the world than ragtime, cocktails, the phonograph, and the Pullman car.

  But I do not suppose that anyone can wander through these Buddhist countries, Burma, the Shan States, and Siam, without being intrigued by the doctrine of Karma which is so inextricably interwoven with the habits, thoughts and affections of the peoples with whom he is thrown in contact. It is commonly thought that it was invented by the Blessed One, but in fact it was current in India in his time, and he did no more than adopt it with such modifications as were rendered necessary by his disbelief in the soul. For, as everyone knows, the most important point of the Buddha’s teachings was that there was no such thing as a soul or a self. Every person is a putting together of qualities, material and mental; there can be no putting together without a becoming different, and there can be no becoming different without a passing away. Whatever has a beginning also has an end. The thought is exhilarating like a brisk winter morning when the sun shines and the road over the Downs is springy under the feet. Karma (I venture to remind the reader) is the theory that a man’s actions in one existence determine his fate in the next. At death, under the influence of the desire of life, the impermanent aggregation of qualities which was a man reassembles to form another aggregation as impermanent. He is merely the present and temporary link in a long chain of cause and effect. The law of Karma prescribes that every act must have its result. It is the only explanation of the evil of this world that does not outrage the heart.

  On a previous page I informed the kindly reader that it was my habit to start the day with a perusal of a few pages of a metaphysical work. It is a practice as healthy to the soul as the morning bath is healthy to the body. Though I have not the kind of intelligence that moves easily among abstractions and I often do not altogether understand what I read (this does not too greatly distract me since I find that professional dialecticians often complain that they cannot understand one another) I read on and sometimes come upon a passage that has a particular meaning for me. My way is lighted now and then by a happy phrase, for the philosophers of the past often wrote more than ordinarily well, and since in the long run a philosopher only describes himself, with his prejudices, his personal hopes, and his idiosyncrasies, and they were for the most part men of robust character, I have often the amusement of making acquaintance with a curious personality. In this desultory way I have read most of the great philosophers that the world has seen, trying to learn a little here and there or to get some enlightenment on matters that must puzzle everyone who makes his tentative way through the labyrinthine jungle of this life: nothing has interested me more than the way they treat the problem of evil. I cannot say that I have been greatly enlightened. The best of them have no more to say than in the long run evil will be found to be good and that we who suffer must accept our suffering with an equal mind. In my perplexity I have read what the theologians had to say on the subject. After all, sin is their province, and so far as they are concerned the question is simple: if God is good and all powerful why does he permit evil? Their answers are many and confused; they satisfy neither the heart nor the head, and for my part – I speak of these things humbly because I am ignorant, and it may be that though the plain man must ask the question the answer can only be understood by the expert – I cannot accept them.

  Now it happened that one of the books I had brought to read on the way was Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. I had read it before, but had found it difficult and wanted to read it again, but since it was an unwieldy volume I tore off the binding and divided it into sections that I could conveniently put in my pocket when, having read enough, I mounted my pony and rode off from the bungalow in which I had passed the night. It is good reading, and though it scarcely convinces you it is often caustic, and the author has a pleasant gift of irony. He is never pompous. He handles the abstract with a light touch. But it is like one of those cubist houses in an exhibition, very light and trim and airy, but so severe in line and furnished with such austere taste that you cannot imagine yourself toasting your toes by the fire and lounging in an easy chair with a comfortable book. But when I came upon his treatment of the problem of evil I found myself as honestly scandalized as the Pope at the sight of a young woman’s shapely calves. The Absolute, I read, is perfect, and evil, being but an appearance, cannot but subserve to the perfection of the whole. Error contributes to greater energy of life. Evil plays a part in a higher end, and in this sense unknowingly is good. The Absolute is the richer for every discord. And my memory brought back to me, I know not why, a scene at the beginning of the war.

  It was in October, and our sensibilities were not yet blunted. A cold raw night. There had been what those who took part in it thought a battle, but which was so insignificant a skirmish th
at the papers did not so much as refer to it, and about a thousand men had been killed and wounded. They lay on straw on the floor of a country church, and the only light came from the candles on the altar. The Germans were advancing, and it was necessary to evacuate them as quickly as possible. All through the night the ambulance cars, without lights, drove back and forth, and the wounded cried out to be taken, and some died as they were being lifted on to the stretchers and were thrown on the heap of dead outside the door, and they were dirty and gory, and the church stank of blood and the rankness of humanity. And there was one boy who was so shattered that it was not worth while to move him, and as he lay there, seeing men on either side of him being taken out, he screamed at the top of his voice: Je ne veux pas mourir. Je suis trop jeune. Je ne veux pas mourir. And he went on screaming that he did not want to die till he died. Of course this is no argument. It was but an inconsiderable incident the only significance of which was that I saw it with my own eyes, and in my ears for days afterwards rang that despairing cry, but a greater than I, a philosopher and a mathematician into the bargain, if you please, said that the heart had its reasons which the head did not know, and (in the grip of compound things, to use the Buddhist phrase, as I am) this scene is to me a sufficient refutation of the metaphysician’s fine-spun theories. But my heart can accept the evils that befall me if they are the consequence of actions that I (the I that is not my soul, which perishes, but the result of my deeds in another state of existence) did in past time, and I am resigned to the evils that I see about me, the death of the young (the most bitter of all), the grief of the mothers that bore them in anguish, poverty, and sickness and frustrated hopes, if these evils are but the consequence of the sins which those that suffer them once committed. Here is an explanation that outrages neither the heart nor the head; there is only one fault that I can find in it: it is incredible.

  THE FEVER

  THE HOTEL FACED the river. My room was dark, one of a long line, with a veranda on each side of it; the breeze blew through, but it was stifling. The dining room was large and dim, and for coolness’ sake the windows were shuttered. One was waited on by silent Chinese boys. I did not know why, the insipid Eastern food sickened me. The heat of Bangkok was overwhelming. The wats oppressed me by their garish magnificence, making my head ache, and their fantastic ornaments filled me with malaise. All I saw looked too bright, the crowds in the street tired me, and the incessant din jangled my nerves. I felt very unwell, but I was not sure whether my trouble was bodily or spiritual (I am suspicious of the sensibility of the artist, and I have often dissipated a whole train of exquisite and sombre thoughts by administering to myself a little liver pill), so to settle the matter I took my temperature. I was startled to see that it was a hundred and five. I could not believe it, so I took it again; it was still a hundred and five. No travail of the soul can cause anything like that. I went to bed and sent for a doctor. He told me that I had probably got malaria and took some of my blood to test; when he came back it was to say that there was no doubt about it and to give me quinine. I remembered then that towards the end of my journey down Siam the officer in command of the post had insisted that I should stay in his own house. He gave me his best bedroom and was so anxious that I should sleep in his grand European bed, of varnished pitch pine and all the way from Bangkok, that I had not the heart to say that I preferred my own little camp bed, which had a mosquito net, to his, which had not. The Anopheles snatched at the golden opportunity.

  It was apparently a bad attack, since for some days the quinine had no effect on me: my temperature soared to those vertiginous heights that are common in malaria, and neither wet sheets nor ice packs brought it down. I lay there, panting and sleepless, and shapes of monstrous pagodas thronged my brain, and great gilded Buddhas bore down on me. Those wooden rooms with their verandas made every sound frightfully audible to my tortured ears, and one morning I heard the manageress of the hotel, an amiable creature but a good woman of business, in her guttural German voice say to the doctor: “I can’t have him die here, you know. You must take him to the hospital.” And the doctor replied: “All right. But we’ll wait a day or two yet.” “Well, don’t leave it too long,” she replied.

  Then the crisis came. The sweat poured from me so that soon my bed was soaking, as though I had had a bath in it, and well-being descended upon me. I could breathe easily. My head ached no longer. And then, when they carried me on to a long chair and I was free from pain, I felt extraordinarily happy. My brain seemed wonderfully clear. I was as weak as a newborn child and for some days could do nothing but lie on the terrace at the back of the hotel and look at the river. Motor launches bustled to and fro. The sampans were innumerable. Large steamers and sailing vessels came up the river, so that it had quite the air of a busy port; and if you have a passion for travel it is impossible to look at the smallest, shabbiest, dirtiest sea-going tramp without a thrill of emotion and a hankering to be on it and on the way to some unknown haven. In the early morning, before the heat of the day, the scene was gay and lively; and then again towards sundown it was rich with colour and vaguely sinister with the laden shadows of the approaching night. I watched the steamers plod slowly up and with a noisy rattling of chains drop their anchors, and I watched the three-masted barques drop silently down with the tide.

  For some reason that I forget I had not been able to see the palace, but I did not regret it, since it thus retained for me the faint air of mystery which of all the emotions is that which you can least find in Bangkok. It is surrounded by a great white wall, strangely crenellated, and the crenellations have the effect of a row of lotus buds. At intervals are gateways at which stand guards in odd Napoleonic costumes, and they have a pleasantly operatic air, so that you expect them at any minute to break into florid song. Towards evening the white wall becomes pink and translucent, and then above it, the dusk shrouding their garishness with its own soft glamour, you see, higgledy-piggledy, the gay, fantastic, and multi-coloured roofs of the palace and the wats and the bright-hued tapering of the pagodas. You divine wide courtyards, with lovely gateways intricately decorated, in which officials of the court, in their sober but distinguished dress, are intent upon secret affairs; and you imagine walks lined with trim, clipped trees and temples sombre and magnificent, throne halls rich with gold and precious stones, and apartments, vaguely scented, dark, and cool, in which lie in careless profusion the storied treasures of the East.

  And because I had nothing to do except look at the river and enjoy the weakness that held me blissfully to my chair I invented a fairy story.

  ANGKOR

  ONE THING THAT makes a visit to Angkor an event of unusual significance – preparing you to enter into the state of mind proper to such an experience – is the immense difficulty of getting there. For once you have reached Phnom-Penh – itself a place sufficiently off the beaten track – you must take a steamer and go a long way up a dull and sluggish river, a tributary of the Mehkong, till you reach a wide lake; you change into another steamer, flat bottomed, for there is no great depth, and in this you travel all night; then you pass through a narrow defile and come to another great stretch of placid water. It is night again when you reach the end of it. Then you get into a sampan and are rowed among clumps of mangroves up a tortuous channel. The moon is full, and the trees on the banks are sharply outlined against the night, and you seem to traverse not a real country but the fantastic land of the silhouettist. At last you come to a bedraggled little village of watermen, whose dwellings are houseboats, and landing you drive down by the riverside through plantations of coconut, betel, and plantain, and the river is now a shallow little stream (like the country stream in which on Sundays in your childhood you used to catch minnows and put them in a jam pot), till at length, looming gigantic and black in the moonshine, you see the great towers of Angkor Wat.

  But now that I come to this part of my book I am seized with dismay. I have never seen anything in the world more wonderful than the temples of A
ngkor, but I do not know how on earth I am going to set down in black and white such an account of them as will give even the most sensitive reader more than a confused and shadowy impression of their grandeur. Of course, to the artist in words, who takes pleasure in the sound of them and their look on the page, it would be an opportunity in a thousand. What a chance for prose, pompous and sensual, varied, solemn, and harmonious; and what a delight to such a one it would be to reproduce in his long phrases the long lines of the buildings, in the balance of his paragraphs to express their symmetry, and in the opulence of his vocabulary their rich decoration! It would be enchanting to find the apt word and by putting it in its right place give the same rhythm to the sentence as he had seen in the massed grey stones; and it would be a triumph to hit upon the unusual, the revealing epithet that translated into another beauty the colour, the form, and the strangeness of what he alone had had the gift to see.

  Alas, I have not the smallest talent for this sort of thing, and – doubtless because I cannot do it myself – I do not very much like it in others. A little of it goes a long way with me. I can read a page of Ruskin with enjoyment, but ten only with weariness; and when I have finished an essay by Walter Pater I know how a trout feels when you have taken him off the hook and he lies on the bank flapping his tail in the grass. I admire the ingenuity with which, little piece of glass by little piece of glass, Pater fitted together the mosaic of his style, but it bores me. His prose is like one of those period houses, all Genoese velvet and carved wood, that they used to have in America twenty years ago, and you looked round desperately for a corner on which to put down your empty glass. I can bear it better when this kind of stately writing is done by our forefathers. The grand style became them. I am awed by the magnificence of Sir Thomas Browne, it is like staying in a great Palladian palace with frescoes by Veronese on the ceilings and tapestries on the walls. It is impressive rather than homely. You cannot see yourself doing your daily dozen in those august surroundings.