adorns nature. In the West
everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that
this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent
aesthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of
sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken.
The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. It
implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the
opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate.
Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will
shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly.
Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone,
beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a
funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the
Chinese have written poems in exquisite caligraphy, _they_ will cover
the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of
temples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in the
landscape, _they_ will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs
on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they _will_, because
they _have_ done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment.
Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, our
medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a
price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages
they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive
culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of
civilising China. Would that China could civilise the West!

PART III

JAPAN

I

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN

Japan, surely, must be a mirage created by enchantment. Nothing so
beautiful could be real. Take the west coast of Scotland, bathe it in
Mediterranean light and sun, and let its waves be those of the Pacific.
Take the best of Devonshire, enlarge the hills, extend the plains, and
dominate all with the only perfect mountain in the world--a mountain
that catches at your breath like a masterpiece of art. Make the copses
woods, and the woods forests. For our fields with their hedgerows
substitute the vivid green of rice, shining across the gleam of flooded
plains. Everywhere let water flow; and at every waterfall and cave erect
a little shrine to hallow the spot. Over the whole pour a floo