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                          THE SPIRIT OF JAPAN

                               A LECTURE

                                   BY

                        SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE

           Delivered for the Students of the Private Colleges
             of Tokyo and the Members of the Indo-Japanese
                          Association, at the
                        Keio Gijuku University.

                   PUBLISHED BY THE INDO-JAPANESE
                           ASSOCIATION, TOKYO

                             JULY 2, 1916.

                        Copyrighted in U. S. A.




I am glad to have this opportunity once more of speaking to you before I
leave Japan. My stay here has been so short that one may think I have
not earned my right to speak to you about anything concerning your
country. I feel sure that I shall be told, that I am idealising certain
aspects, while leaving others unnoticed, and that there are chances of
my disillusionment, if I remain here for long. For I have known
foreigners, whose long experience has made them doubtful about your
moral qualifications,--even of your full efficiency in modern equipments
of progress.

But I am not going to be brow-beaten by the authority of long
experience, which is likely to be an experience of blindness carried
through long years. I have known such instances in my own country. The
mental sense, by the help of which we feel the spirit of a people, is
like the sense of sight, or of touch,--it is a natural gift. It finds
its objects, not by analysis, but by direct apprehension. Those who have
not this vision, merely see events and facts, and not their inner
association. Those who have no ear for music, hear sounds, but not the
song. Therefore when, by the mere reason of the lengthiness of their
suffering, they threaten to establish the fact of the tune to be a
noise, one need not be anxious about music. Very often it is mistakes
that require longer time to develop their tangles, while the right
answer comes promptly.

You ask me how I can prove, that I am right in my confidence that I can
see. My answer is, because I see something which is positive. There are
others, who affirm that they see something contrary. It only shows, that
I am looking on the picture side of the canvas, and they on the blank
side. Therefore my short view is of more value than their prolonged
stare.

It is a truism to say that shadows accompany light. What you feel, as
the truth of a people, has its numberless contradictions,--just as the
roundness of the earth is contradicted at every step by its hills and
hollows. Those who can boast of a greater familiarity with your country
than myself, can bring before me loads of contradictions, but I remain
firm upon my vision of a truth, which does not depend upon its
dimension, but upon its vitality.

At first, I had my doubts. I thought that I might not be able to see
Japan, as she is herself, but should have to be content to see the Japan
that takes an acrobatic pride in violently appearing as something else.
On my first arrival in this country, when I looked out from the balcony
of a house on the hillside, the town of Kobe,--that huge mass of
corrugated iron roofs,--appeared to me like a dragon, with glistening
scales, basking in the sun, after having devoured a large slice of the
living flesh of the earth. This dragon did not belong to the mythology
of the past, but of the present; and with its iron mask it tried to look
real to the children of the age,--real as the majestic rocks on the
shore, as the epic rhythm of the sea-waves. Anyhow it hid Japan from
my view, and I felt myself like the traveller, whose time is short,
waiting for the cloud to be lifted to have a sight of the eternal snow
on the Himalayan summit. I asked myself,--'Will the dense mist of the
iron age give way for a moment, and let me see what is true and abiding
in this land?' I was enveloped in a whirlwind of reception, but I had my
misgivings and thought that this might be a violent outbreak of
curiosity,--or that these people felt themselves bound to show their
appreciation of a man who had won renown from Europe, thus doing honour
to the West in a vicarious form.

But the clouds showed rifts, and glimpses I had of Japan where she is
true and more human. While travelling in a railway train I met, at a
wayside station, some Buddhist priests and devotees. They brought their
basket of fruits to me and held their lighted incense before my face,
wishing to pay homage to a man who had come from the land of Buddha. The
dignified serenity of their bearing, the simplicity of their
devoutness, seemed to fill the atmosphere of the busy railway station
with a golden light of peace. Their language of silence drowned the
noisy effusion of the newspapers. I felt that I saw something which was
at the root of Japan's greatness. And, since then, I have had other
opportunities of reaching the heart of the people; and I have come to
the conclusion, that the welcome which flowed towards me, with such
outburst of sincerity, was owing to the fact that Japan felt the
nearness of India to herself, and realised that her own heart has room
to expand beyond her boundaries and the boundaries of the modern time.

I have travelled in many countries and have met with men of all classes,
but never in my travels did I feel the presence of the human so
distinctly as in this land. In other great countries, signs of man's
power loomed large, and I saw vast organisations which showed efficiency
in all their features. There, display and extravagance, in dress, in
furniture, in costly entertainments, are startling. They seem to push
you back into a corner, like a poor intruder at a feast; they are apt
to make you envious, or take your breath away with amazement. There, you
do not feel man as supreme; you are hurled against the stupendousness of
things that alienates. But, in Japan, it is not the display of power, or
wealth, that is the predominating element. You see everywhere emblems of
love and admiration, and not mostly of ambition and greed. You see a
people, whose heart has come out and scattered itself in profusion in
its commonest utensils of everyday life in its social institutions, in
its manners, that are carefully perfect, and in its dealings with things
that are not only deft, but graceful in every movement.

What has impressed me most in this country is the conviction that you
have realised nature's secrets, not by methods of analytical knowledge,
but by sympathy. You have known her language of lines and music of
colours, the symmetry in her irregularities, and the cadence in her
freedom of movements; you have seen how she leads her immense crowds of
things yet avoids all frictions; how the very conflicts in her
creations break out in dance and music; how her exuberance has the
aspect of the fullness of self-abandonment, and not a mere dissipation
of display. You have discovered that nature reserves her power in forms
of beauty; and it is this beauty which, like a mother, nourishes all the
giant forces at her breast, keeping them in active vigour, yet in
repose. You have known that energies of nature save themselves from
wearing out by the rhythm of a perfect grace, and that she with the
tenderness of her curved lines takes away fatigue from the world's
muscles. I have felt that you have been able to assimilate these secrets
into your life, and the truth which lies in the beauty of all things has
passed into your souls. A mere knowledge of things can be had in a short
enough time, but their spirit can only be acquired by centuries of
training and self-control. Dominating nature from outside is a much
simpler thing than making her your own in love's delight, which is a
work of true genius. Your race has shown that genius, not by
acquirements, but by creations; not by display of things, but by
manifestation of its own inner being. This creative power there is in
all nations, and it is ever active in getting hold of men's natures and
giving them a form according to its ideals. But here, in Japan, it seems
to have achieved its success, and deeply sunk into the minds of all men,
and permeated their muscles and nerves. Your instincts have become true,
your senses keen, and your hands have acquired natural skill. The genius
of Europe has given her people the power of organisation, which has
specially made itself manifest in politics and commerce and in
coordinating scientific knowledge. The genius of Japan has given you the
vision of beauty in nature and the power of realising it in your life.
And, because of this fact, the power of organisation has come so easily
to your help when you needed it. For the rhythm of beauty is the inner
spirit, whose outer body is organisation.

All particular civilisation is the interpretation of particular human
experience. Europe seems to have felt emphatically the conflict of
things in the universe, which can only be brought under control by
conquest. Therefore she is ever ready for fight, and the best portion of
her attention is occupied in organising forces. But Japan has felt, in
her world, the touch of some presence, which has evoked in her soul a
feeling of reverent adoration. She does not boast of her mastery of
nature, but to her she brings, with infinite care and joy, her offerings
of love. Her relationship with the world is the deeper relationship of
heart. This spiritual bond of love she has established with the hills of
her country, with the sea and the streams, with the forests in all their
flowery moods and varied physiognomy of branches; she has taken into her
heart all the rustling whispers and sighing of the woodlands and sobbing
of the waves; the sun and the moon she has studied in all the
modulations of their lights and shades, and she is glad to close her
shops to greet the seasons in her orchards and gardens and cornfields.
This opening of the heart to the soul of the world is not confined to a
section of your privileged classes, it is not the forced product of
exotic culture, but it belongs to all your men and women of all
conditions. This experience of your soul, in meeting a personality in
the heart of the world, has been embodied in your civilisation. It is
civilisation of human relationship. Your duty towards your state has
naturally assumed the character of filial duty, your nation becoming one
family with your Emperor as its head. Your national unity has not been
evolved from the comradeship of arms for defensive and offensive
purposes, or from partnership in raiding adventures, dividing among each
member the danger and spoils of robbery. It is not an outcome of the
necessity of organisation for some ulterior purpose, but it is an
extension of the family and the obligations of the heart in a wide field
of space and time. The ideal of "maitri" is at the bottom of your
culture,--"maitri" with men and "maitri" with Nature. And the true
expression of this love is in the language of beauty, which is so
abundantly universal in this land. This is the reason why a stranger,
like myself, instead of feeling envy or humiliation before these
manifestations of beauty, these creations of love, feels a readiness to
participate in the joy and glory of such revealment of the human heart.

And this has made me all the more apprehensive of the change, which
threatens Japanese civilisation, as something like a menace to one's own
person. For the huge heterogeneity of the modern age, whose only common
bond is usefulness, is nowhere so pitifully exposed against the dignity
and hidden power of reticent beauty, as in Japan.

But the danger lies in this, that organised ugliness storms the mind and
carries the day by its mass, by its aggressive persistence, by its power
of mockery directed against the deeper sentiments of heart. Its harsh
obtrusiveness makes it forcibly visible to us, overcoming our
senses,--and we bring to its altar sacrifices, as does a savage to the
fetish which appears powerful because of its hideousness. Therefore its
rivalry to things that are modest and profound and have the subtle
delicacy of life is to be dreaded.

I am quite sure that there are men in your nation, who are not in
sympathy with your national ideals; whose object is to gain, and not to
grow. They are loud in their boast, that they have modernised Japan.
While I agree with them so far as to say, that the spirit of the race
should harmonise with the spirit of the time, I must warn them that
modernising is a mere affectation of modernism, just as affectation of
poesy is poetising. It is nothing but mimicry, only affectation is
louder than the original, and it is too literal. One must bear in mind,
that those who have the true modern spirit need not modernise, just as
those who are truly brave are not braggarts. Modernism is not in the
dress of the Europeans; or in the hideous structures, where their
children are interned when they take their lessons; or in the square
houses with flat straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines of
windows, where these people are caged in their lifetime; certainly
modernism is not in their ladies' bonnets, carrying on them loads of
incongruities. These are not modern, but merely European. True
modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence
of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is
science, but not its wrong application in life,--a mere imitation of our
science teachers who reduce it into a superstition absurdly invoking its
aid for all impossible purposes.

Science, when it oversteps its limits and occupies the whole region of
life, has its fascination. It looks so powerful because of its
superficiality,--as does a hippopotamus which is very little else but
physical. Science speaks of the struggle for existence, but forgets that
man's existence is not merely of the surface. Man truly exists in the
ideal of perfection, whose depth and height are not yet measured. Life
based upon science is attractive to some men, because it has all the
characteristics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but is not profound.
When you go a-hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one
object is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the
greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and
scientific. Because, therefore, a sportsman is only a superficial
man,--his fullness of humanity not being there to hamper him,--he is
successful in killing innocent life and is happy. And the life of
science is that superficial life. It pursues success with skill and
thoroughness, and takes no account of the higher nature of man. But even
science cannot tow humanity against truth and be successful; and those
whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition,
that man is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsman,
will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and
skulls. For man's struggle for existence is to exist in the fullness of
his nature,--not by curtailing all that is best in him and dwarfing his
existence itself, but by accepting all the responsibilities of his
spiritual life, even through death and defeat.

I do not for a moment suggest, that Japan should be unmindful of
acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be
allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know
that the real power is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man
who wields those weapons; and when he, in his eagerness for power,
multiplies his weapons at the cost of his own soul, then it is he who is
in even greater danger than his enemies.

Things that are living are so easily hurt; therefore they require
protection. In nature, life protects itself within in coverings, which
are built with life's own material. Therefore they are in harmony with
life's growth, or else when the time comes they easily give way and are
forgotten. The living man has his true protection in his spiritual
ideals, which have their vital connection with his life and grow with
his growth. But, unfortunately, all his armour is not living,--some of
it is made of steel, inert and mechanical. Therefore, while making use
of it, man has to be careful to protect himself from its tyranny. If he
is weak enough to grow smaller to fit himself to his covering, then it
becomes a process of gradual suicide by shrinkage of the soul. And Japan
must have a firm faith in the moral law of existence to be able to
assert to herself, that the Western nations are following that path of
suicide, where they are smothering their humanity under the immense
weight of organisations in order to keep themselves in power and hold
others in subjection.

Therefore I cannot think that the imitation of the outward aspects of
the West, which is becoming more and more evident in modern Japan, is
essential to her strength or stability. It is burdening her true nature
and causing weakness, which will be felt more deeply as time goes on.
The habits, which are being formed by the modern Japanese from their
boyhood,--the habits of the Western life, the habits of the alien
culture,--will prove, one day, a serious obstacle to the understanding
of their own true nature. And then, if the children of Japan forget
their past, if they stand as barriers, choking the stream that flows
from the mountain peak of their ancient history, their future will be
deprived of the water of life that has made her culture so fertile with
richness of beauty and strength.

What is still more dangerous for Japan is, not this imitation of the
outer features of the West, but the acceptance of the motive force of
the Western civilisation as her own. Her social ideals are already
showing signs of defeat at the hands of politics, and her modern
tendency seems to incline towards political gambling in which the
players stake their souls to win their game. I can see her motto, taken
from science, "Survival of the Fittest," writ large at the entrance of
her present-day history--the motto whose meaning is, "Help yourself, and
never heed what it costs to others"; the motto of the blind man, who
only believes in what he can touch, because he cannot see. But those who
can see, know that men are so closely knit, that when you strike others
the blow comes back to yourself. The moral law, which is the greatest
discovery of man, is the discovery of this wonderful truth, that man
becomes all the truer, the more he realises himself in others. This
truth has not only a subjective value, but is manifested in every
department of our life. And nations, who sedulously cultivate moral
blindness as the cult of patriotism, will end their existence in a
sudden and violent death. In past ages we had foreign invasions, there
had been cruelty and bloodshed, intrigues of jealousy and avarice, but
they never touched the soul of the people deeply; for the people, as a
body, never participated in these games. They were merely the outcome of
individual ambitions. The people themselves, being free from the
responsibilities of the baser and more heinous side of those adventures,
had all the advantage of the heroic and the human disciplines derived
from them. This developed their unflinching loyalty, their single-minded
devotion to the obligations of honour, their power of complete
self-surrender and fearless acceptance of death and danger. Therefore
the ideals, whose seats were in the hearts of the people, would not
undergo any serious change owing to the policies adopted by the kings or
generals. But now, where the spirit of the Western civilisation
prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood, to foster
hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means,--by the manufacture of
half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation
of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them,
by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake
of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil
menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. This is
poisoning the very fountain-head of humanity. It is discrediting the
ideals, which were born of the lives of men, who were our greatest and
best. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal
religion for all nations of the world. We can take anything else from
the hands of science, but not this elixir of moral death. Never think
for a moment, that the hurts you inflict upon other races will not
infect you, and the enmities you sow around your homes will be a wall of
protection to you for all time to come. To imbue the minds of a whole
people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to
take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth, to
perpetuate humiliation of defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won
from war, and using these in schools in order to breed in children's
minds contempt for others, is imitating the West where she has a
festering sore, whose swelling is a swelling of disease eating into its
vitality.

Our food crops, which are necessary for our sustenance, are products of
centuries of selection and care. But the vegetation, which we have not
to transform into our lives, does not require the patient thoughts of
generations. It is not easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by
process of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let them revert to their
primitive state of wildness. Likewise the culture, which has so kindly
adapted itself to your soil,--so intimate with life, so human,--not only
needed tilling and weeding in past ages, but still needs anxious work
and watching. What is merely modern,--as science and methods of
organisation,--can be transplanted; but what is vitally human has fibres
so delicate, and roots so numerous and far reaching, that it dies when
moved from its soil. Therefore I am afraid of the rude pressure of the
political ideals of the West upon your own. In political civilisation,
the state is an abstraction and relationship of men utilitarian. Because
it has no roots in sentiments, it is so dangerously easy to handle. Half
a century has been enough for you to master this machine; and there are
men among you, whose fondness for it exceeds their love for the living
ideals which were born with the birth of your nation and nursed in your
centuries. It is like a child, who, in the excitement of his play,
imagines he likes his playthings better than his mother.

Where man is at his greatest, he is unconscious. Your civilisation,
whose mainspring is the bond of human relationship, has been nourished
in the depth of a healthy life beyond reach of prying self-analysis. But
a mere political relationship is all conscious; it is an eruptive
inflammation of aggressiveness. It has forcibly burst upon your notice.
And the time has come, when you have to be roused into full
consciousness of the truth by which you live, so that you may not be
taken unawares. The past has been God's gift to you; about the present,
you must make your own choice.

So the questions you have to put to yourselves are these,--"Have we read
the world wrong, and based our relation to it upon an ignorance of human
nature? Is the instinct of the West right, where she builds her national
welfare behind the barricade of a universal distrust of humanity?"

You must have detected a strong accent of fear, whenever the West has
discussed the possibility of the rise of an Eastern race. The reason of
it is this, that the power, by whose help she thrives, is an evil power;
so long as it is held on her own side she can be safe, while the rest of
the world trembles. The vital ambition of the present civilisation of
Europe is to have the exclusive possession of the devil. All her
armaments and diplomacy are directed upon this one object. But these
costly rituals for invocation of the evil spirit lead through a path of
prosperity to the brink of cataclysm. The furies of terror, which the
West has let loose upon God's world, come back to threaten herself and
goad her into preparations of more and more frightfulness; this gives
her no rest and makes her forget all else but the perils that she
causes to others, and incurs herself. To the worship of this devil of
politics she sacrifices other countries as victims. She feeds upon their
dead flesh and grows fat upon it, so long as the carcasses remain
fresh,--but they are sure to rot at last, and the dead will take their
revenge, by spreading pollution far and wide and poisoning the vitality
of the feeder. Japan had all her wealth of humanity, her harmony of
heroism and beauty, her depth of self-control and richness of
self-expression; yet the Western nations felt no respect for her, till
she proved that the bloodhounds of Satan are not only bred in the
kennels of Europe, but can also be domesticated in Japan and fed with
man's miseries. They admit Japan's equality with themselves, only when
they know that Japan also possesses the key to open the floodgate of
hell-fire upon the fair earth, whenever she chooses, and can dance, in
their own measure, the devil dance of pillage, murder, and ravishment of
innocent women, while the world goes to ruin. We know that, in the early
stage of man's moral immaturity, he only feels reverence for the god
whose malevolence he dreads. But is this the ideal of man which we can
look up to with pride? After centuries of civilisation nations fearing
each other like the prowling wild beasts of the night time; shutting
their doors of hospitality; combining only for purpose of aggression or
defence; hiding in their holes their trade secrets, state secrets,
secrets of their armaments; making peace offerings to the barking dogs
of each other with the meat which does not belong to them; holding down
fallen races struggling to stand upon their feet; counting their safety
only upon the feebleness of the rest of humanity; with their right hands
dispensing religion to weaker peoples, while robbing them with their
left,--is there anything in this to make us envious? Are we to bend our
knees to the spirit of this civilisation, which is sowing broadcast over
all the world seeds of fear, greed, suspicion, unashamed lies of its
diplomacy, and unctuous lies of its profession of peace and good-will
and universal brotherhood of Man? Can we have no doubt in our minds,
when we rush to the Western market to buy this foreign product in
exchange for our own inheritance? I am aware how difficult it is to know
one's self; and the man, who is intoxicated, furiously denies his
drunkenness; yet the West herself is anxiously thinking of her problems
and trying experiments. But she is like a glutton, who has not the heart
to give up his intemperance in eating, and fondly clings to the hope
that he can cure his nightmares of indigestion by medicine. Europe is
not ready to give up her political inhumanity, with all the baser
passions of man attendant upon it; she believes only in modification of
systems, and not in change of heart.

We are willing to buy their machine-made systems, not with our hearts,
but with our brains. We shall try them and build sheds for them, but not
enshrine them in our homes, or temples. There are races, who worship the
animals they kill; we can buy meat from them, when we are hungry, but
not the worship which goes with the killing. We must not vitiate our
children's minds with the superstition, that business is business, war
is war, politics is politics. We must know that man's business has to be
more than mere business, and so have to be his war and politics. You had
your own industry in Japan; how scrupulously honest and true it was, you
can see by its products,--by their grace and strength, their
conscientiousness in details, where they can hardly be observed. But the
tidal wave of falsehood has swept over your land from that part of the
world, where business is business, and honesty is followed in it merely
as the best policy. Have you never felt shame, when you see the trade
advertisements, not only plastering the whole town with lies and
exaggerations, but invading the green fields, where the peasants do
their honest labour, and the hill-tops, which greet the first pure light
of the morning? It is so easy to dull our sense of honour and delicacy
of mind with constant abrasion, while falsehoods stalk abroad with proud
steps in the name of trade, politics and patriotism, that any protest
against their perpetual intrusion into our lives is considered to be
sentimentalism, unworthy of true manliness.

And it has come to pass, that the children of those heroes, who would
keep their word at the point of death, who would disdain to cheat men
for vulgar profit, who even in their fight would much rather court
defeat than be dishonourable, have become energetic in dealing with
falsehoods and do not feel humiliated by gaining advantage from them.
And this has been effected by the charm of the word 'modern.' But if
undiluted utility be modern, beauty is of all ages; if mean selfishness
be modern, the human ideals are no new inventions. And we must know for
certain, that however modern may be the proficiency, which clips and
<DW36>s man for the sake of methods and machines, it will never live to
be old.

When Japan is in imminent peril of neglecting to realise where she is
great, it is the duty of a foreigner like myself to remind her, that she
has given rise to a civilisation which is perfect in its form, and has
evolved a sense of sight which clearly sees truth in beauty and beauty
in truth. She has achieved something, which is positive and complete.
It is easier for a stranger to know what it is in her, which is truly
valuable for all mankind,--what is there, which only she, of all other
races, has produced from her inner life and not from her mere power of
adaptability. Japan must be reminded, that it is her sense of the rhythm
of life and of all things, her genius for simplicity, her love for
cleanliness, her definiteness of thought and action, her cheerful
fortitude, her immense reserve of force in self-control, her
sensitiveness to her code of honour and defiance of death, which have
given her the power to resist the cyclonic storm of exploitation that
has sprung from the shores of Europe circling round and round the world.
All these qualities are the outcome of a civilisation, whose foundation
is in the spiritual ideals of life. Such a civilisation has the gift of
immortality; for it does not offend against the laws of creation and is
not assailed by all the forces of nature. I feel it is an impiety to be
indifferent to its protection from the incursion of vulgarity of power.

But while trying to free our minds from the arrogant claims of Europe
and to help ourselves out of the quicksands of our infatuation, we may
go to the other extreme and blind ourselves with a wholesale suspicion
of the West. The reaction of disillusionment is just as unreal as the
first shock of illusion. We must try to come to that normal state of
mind, by which we can clearly discern our own danger and avoid it,
without being unjust towards the source of that danger. There is always
the natural temptation in us of wishing to pay back Europe in her own
coin, and return contempt for contempt and evil for evil. But that again
would be to imitate Europe in one of her worst features which comes out
in her behaviour to people whom she describes as yellow or red, brown or
black. And this is a point on which we in the East have to acknowledge
our guilt and own that our sin has been as great, if not greater, when
we insulted humanity by treating with utter disdain and cruelty men who
belonged to a particular creed, colour or caste. It is really because we
are afraid of our own weakness, which allows itself to be overcome by
the sight of power, that we try to substitute for it another weakness
which makes itself blind to the glories of the West. When we truly know
the Europe which is great and good, we can effectively save ourselves
from the Europe which is mean and grasping. It is easy to be unfair in
one's judgment when one is faced with human miseries,--and pessimism is
the result of building theories while the mind is suffering. To despair
of humanity is only possible, if we lose faith in the power which brings
to it strength, when its defeat is greatest, and calls out new life from
the depth of its destruction. We must admit that there is a living soul
in the West which is struggling unobserved against the hugeness of the
organisations under which men, women and children are being crushed, and
whose mechanical necessities are ignoring laws that are spiritual and
human,--the soul whose sensibilities refuse to be dulled completely by
dangerous habits of heedlessness in dealings with races for whom it
lacks natural sympathy. The West could never have risen to the eminence
she has reached, if her strength were merely the strength of the
brute, or of the machine. The divine in her heart is suffering from the
injuries inflicted by her hands upon the world,--and from this pain of
her higher nature flows the secret balm which will bring healing to
those injuries. Time after time she has fought against herself and has
undone the chains, which with her own hands she had fastened round
helpless limbs; and though she forced poison down the throat of a great
nation at the point of sword for gain of money, she herself woke up to
withdraw from it, to wash her hands clean again. This shows hidden
springs of humanity in spots which look dead and barren. It proves that
the deeper truth in her nature, which can survive such career of cruel
cowardliness, is not greed, but reverence for unselfish ideals. It would
be altogether unjust, both to us and to Europe, to say that she has
fascinated the modern Eastern mind by the mere exhibition of her power.
Through the smoke of cannons and dust of markets the light of her moral
nature has shone bright, and she has brought to us the ideal of
ethical freedom, whose foundation lies deeper than social conventions
and whose province of activity is world-wide.

The East has instinctively felt, even through her aversion, that she has
a great deal to learn from Europe, not merely about the materials of
power, but about its inner source, which is of mind and of the moral
nature of man. Europe has been teaching us the higher obligations of
public good above those of the family and the clan, and the sacredness
of law, which makes society independent of individual caprice, secures
for it continuity of progress, and guarantees justice to all men of all
positions in life. Above all things Europe has held high before our
minds the banner of liberty, through centuries of martyrdom and
achievement,--liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and action,
liberty in the ideals of art and literature. And because Europe has won
our deep respect, she has become so dangerous for us where she is
turbulently weak and false,--dangerous like poison when it is served
along with our best food. There is one safety for us upon which we
hope we may count, and that is, that we can claim Europe herself, as our
ally, in our resistance to her temptations and to her violent
encroachments; for she has ever carried her own standard of perfection,
by which we can measure her falls and gauge her degrees of failure, by
which we can call her before her own tribunal and put her to shame,--the
shame which is the sign of the true pride of nobleness.

But our fear is, that the poison may be more powerful than the food, and
what is strength in her to-day may not be the sign of health, but the
contrary; for it may be temporarily caused by the upsetting of the
balance of life. Our fear is that evil has a fateful fascination, when
it assumes dimensions which are colossal,--and though at last, it is
sure to lose its centre of gravity, by its abnormal disproportion, the
mischief which it creates before its fall may be beyond reparation.

Therefore I ask you to have the strength of faith and clarity of mind to
know for certain, that the lumbering structure of modern progress,
riveted by the iron bolts of efficiency, which runs upon the wheels of
ambition, cannot hold together for long. Collisions are certain to
occur; for it has to travel upon organised lines, it is too heavy to
choose its own course freely; and once it is off the rails, its endless
train of vehicles is dislocated. A day will come, when it will fall in a
heap of ruin and cause serious obstruction to the traffic of the world.
Do we not see signs of this even now? Does not the voice come to us,
through the din of war, the shrieks of hatred, the wailings of despair,
through the churning up of the unspeakable filth which has been
accumulating for ages in the bottom of this civilisation,--the voice
which cries to our soul, that the tower of national selfishness, which
goes by the name of patriotism, which has raised its banner of treason
against heaven, must totter and fall with a crash, weighed down by its
own bulk, its flag kissing the dust, its light extinguished? My
brothers, when the red light of conflagration sends up its crackle of
laughter to the stars, keep your faith upon those stars and not upon the
fire of destruction. For when this conflagration consumes itself and
dies down, leaving its memorial in ashes, the eternal light will again
shine in the East,--the East which has been the birth-place of the
morning sun of man's history. And who knows if that day has not already
dawned, and the sun not risen, in the Easternmost horizon of Asia? And I
offer, as did my ancestor rishis, my salutation to that sunrise of the
East, which is destined once again to illumine the whole world.

I know my voice is too feeble to raise itself above the uproar of this
bustling time, and it is easy for any street urchin to fling against me
the epithet of 'unpractical.' It will stick to my coat-tail, never to be
washed away, effectively excluding me from the consideration of all
respectable persons. I know what a risk one runs from the vigorously
athletic crowds to be styled an idealist in these days, when thrones
have lost their dignity and prophets have become an anachronism, when
the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of the market-place. Yet
when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling
with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your
southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad
hills,--with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden
horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance,--the music of
eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky
and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the
poets and idealists, and not with the marketsmen robustly contemptuous
of all sentiments,--that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity,
man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world,
which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the
modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.




                           Transcriber Notes:

On page 11, "sacrificesstet" was replaced with "sacrifices".

On page 20, "imitaing" was replaced with "imitating", and "its
vitality," was replaced with "its vitality.".





End of Project Gutenberg's The Spirit of Japan, by Sir Rabindranath Tagore

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