Landing at Jolo (one pronounces it Holo), the capital of Sulu island, we found ourselves in a small decaying Spanish town. There were public gardens with fountains and a group of comically sublime and allegorical modern statuary. A noise of nasal singing issued from a church; we looked in and saw a choir of small brown urchins being taught by a brown choirmaster to chant the canticles and responses. Filipino ladies, dressed like the beauties whose portraits one sees on the inside of cigar-box lids, swam past. Their long trailing skirts were looped up on one side to show the under petticoat. Their bodices of stiff muslin were amazing relics of the eighteenth century, sweepingly cut to reveal a brown décolleté and fitted with enormous puffed sleeves, like the wings of butterflies or the fins of some more than usually improbable kind of tropical fish.
While the girls and the younger women wore their hair “up,” their elders, preposterously, kept it hanging in a long black cataract down their backs. As for the men, those who were not Filipinos and wearing the most elegant of white duck suits, were dressed—it depended upon their tribal and national affinities—either in skin-tight fleshings, a gaudily coloured sash or belt, a little toreador jacket and a coloured bandana for the head, or else—flying to the other sartorial extreme—in more than Oxford, more even than Mexican trousers of brightly coloured silk (pale pink, green, yellow, orange), a larger sash, generally ornamented with an enormous kris, a still more handsome bull-fighter’s jacket and, over the bandana, a colossal hat.
Fantastic garments! But surely not of indigenous devising. Nowhere but in the Philippines do the Malays dress themselves as toreadors and cowboys. The least original of people, they have borrowed their clothes from their conquerors and enemies. The fancy dress of the Sulus and the fierce proud Moros, who were the Spaniards’ most dangerous foes, has been taken from a Spanish-Mexican wardrobe. And that extraordinary swagger, those noble attitudes—those too are Spanish. And then the language. The country folk, of course, have never learnt it. But it rumbles nobly in the urban streets and shops. Nor, as we discovered, is it the Filipinos alone who speak it.
We had made our way along the rickety wooden pier on which, perched above the sea, the Chinese traders have their shops and dwelling-houses, and were seeking to buy some of those enormous pearl shells for which the island of Sulu is celebrated. We found them after much searching in the back rooms of a Chinese shop—mountainous heaps of the shining nacreous shells. We sifted the treasure and selected as many as we wanted. Then came the time to pay. We turned to the Chinaman. He knew no English. Our two words of Malay were spoken in vain. In despair we tried Spanish. He responded. English and yellow Celestial, we conducted our little haggle in pidgin Castilian.
MANILA
Manila is the capital of an American colony. That is a fact of which I was not for long permitted to remain in doubt. Within three hours of my landing, I had been interviewed by nine reporters, representing the entire press, English and Spanish, of the city. I was asked what I thought of Manila, of the Filipino race, of the political problems of the islands—to which I could only reply by asking my interviewers what they thought about these subjects and assuring them, when they had told me, that I thought the same. My opinions were considered by all parties to be extraordinarily sound.
When this sort of thing happens—and fortunately it very seldom happens except on United States territory—I am always set thinking of that curious scale of values by which, in this preposterous world, men and things are appraised. Take, for example, the case of the literary man. (I am a literary man myself, and so the matter interests me.) The literary man is invested, it seems to me, with a quite disproportionate aura of importance and significance. Literary men fairly pullulate in Who’s Who. They are more numerously represented in that remarkable book than any other class of notorieties, with the possible exception of peers and baronets. Almost nobody who has sold five thousand copies and had a good review in the Times Literary Supplement, is missing from its pages. A dispassionate observer from Mars would be led, by a study of Who’s Who, to suppose that a certain gift of the gab was the most important quality an inhabitant of this planet could possess. But is it?
Art and the artist have become tremendously important in our modern world. Art is spoken of with respect, almost with reverence as though it were something sacred; and every adolescent aspires to be an artist, as regularly and inevitably as every child aspires to be an engine-driver. Art is one of the things that have flowed in to fill the vacuum created in the popular mind by the decay of established religion. The priest, whose confessional functions have passed to the lawyer and the doctor, has bequeathed his mystical prestige, his dignity as a guardian of the sacraments, to the artist. Hence the enormous number of literary names in Who’s Who. Hence the interviewers who flock to ask the wandering novelist his opinion about things of which he must necessarily be incompetent to speak.
The obscure scientist, whose mental equipment may be incomparably superior to that of the literary man, is left in peace. The public, being incapable of understanding what he is talking about, takes no interest in him. He must achieve something spectacular before hostesses ask him out and reporters come to meet him at the station. The practical man is hardly more esteemed (unless, of course, he happens to be immensely rich) than the man of science. To many people a man who writes poetry (even very bad poetry) and has an opinion about post-impressionism, is necessarily more intelligent than even a first-class engineer, or capable official, or the organiser of a great industry. Doctors and mill owners, government servants and lawyers can cross the seas without running the slightest risk of being buttonholed at every port by a crowd of newspaper men.
They may be more intelligent than the man of letters, they may be better men doing work infinitely more valuable than his. They may be qualified by special knowledge to speak with authority about the things which reporters love to discuss; but they will be permitted to land unmolested. Their work lacks the prestige which attaches to art; moreover it is private work, confined to one place and to the actual time of its achievement. The novelist’s work is public; it exists simultaneously in many thousands of places: it can be looked at over a long space of time—as long indeed (if his vogue lasts) as wood pulp can hold together.
As a mere spectator of the world, not an actor in it—one who looks on and forms opinions of what other people are doing, but does nothing himself—I feel the profoundest admiration for those who act, who impress their will on stubborn things, not merely on yielding ideas, who wield power over men directly, and not impersonally as the writer does by wielding power over weak words. I admire and envy; but I do not aspire to be their rivals. Born a spectator, I should make the poorest performer. I have a certain talent for using the opera-glasses and making appropriate comments. I have none for acting.
It is better to be content with doing what one can do, than to make a fool of oneself by trying to do what one can’t. If I were set down to do some of the serious practical work that has to be done in order that spectators can watch the comedy in safety and comfort, I should behave like that Burmese king of whom it is written in the Glass Palace Chronicle: “For the sake of his concubines he composed the Paramatthabinda, that they might know of mind and the qualities of mind, matter, nirvana, forms of being and personality. He would not even lend an ear to the affairs of the villages or kingdom. Whenever there was an enquiry to be made, power exercised, or point of law determined, he caused his son, Uzana, the heir apparent, to dispose thereof.”
I admire Uzana; but oh! I understand, I sympathise with, I have a fellow-feeling for his poor father. How infinitely pleasanter, if one happens to be born with a speculative mind and a gift of the gab, to chat with one’s concubines about nirvana and the qualities of mind than to bother oneself with the affairs of the villages! Uzana was undoubtedly the better man; but his father, the distinguished author of “Metaphysics in the Harem” and “Kant for Concubines” must have been the one whom everybody wanted to meet, who received letters from distant female correspondents, who got asked out to dinner, interviewed on the wharf and snapshotted walking with a friend in the Park. All these things would happen to him; and he—for I take it that he had really and seriously thought about the qualities of mind and the forms of matter—he would be astonished every time and, thinking of Uzana, he would feel embarrassed and even rather ashamed, as though he were an impostor.
PART III The Pacific
SHANGHAI
I have seen places that were, no doubt, as
