Louise Jordan Miln

“ China was to me like the land of the mighty magicians; Japan was fairyland.
The Japanese islands are running over with flowers. The Japanese temples are a-tinkle with the music of bells. The soft-voiced people walk among the blossoms, and their fine faces are aglow with the love of beauty, and they themselves are innocently intoxicated with the delight of living.
Nagasaki is so sweetly clean that one cannot wonder that tourists who spend a few hours there rush back to their boats and write to the journals of Europe and America that the Japanese are the cleanest people on earth. ”

“ Japan is often an open book to the foreigner who can read its quaint, graceful characters. The moment you put your foot on Japanese soil you are the guest of all Japan; every Japanese feels himself your host—in duty bound to welcome you and to humour you. Hence it ought to be the easiest thing to learn about their national customs and their home-life. And so it would be, if both were for long the same. The Japanese are as variable as their own rainbow-crêpes. They are as illusive as the colours of the prism. ”

“ We reached Yokohama one night after dark. When I woke in the early morning I dressed quickly and went out for a ramble alone,—as I love to do in a new place. I felt as if I had fallen asleep and dreamed of a fairy land peopled by the figures off my best tea-cups and off my summer fans. Japan is perpetually blessed with an atmosphere as clear as crystal, as soft as down, and as sweet as incense. Nature loves Japan with the tender, yearning love of a mother for a favourite child. On Japan Nature lavishes her most fragrant verdure and her utmost picturesqueness of life. ”

“ And when we wring our emancipated hands over the deplorable condition of the women of Asia we forget that the woman who is loved is all-powerful.
The women of Japan are, I think, supreme in their own homes. They exercise, as a rule, little or no influence on public affairs, but I fancy that their own indifference is the chief cause of this. The Japanese women are not generally industrious nor keenly intellectual. They are as dainty, as beautiful, as fine, as the ivory carvings of Kioto; they are as exquisite, as lovely in tint, as the embroideries of Tokio. ”

“ Can you imagine a woman, who in her old age will not grow childish, because in her mature womanhood she has never ceased to be a child,—can you imagine her, half sitting, half reclining, in a Chinese ’rickshaw, and as the ’rickshaw is pulled through the pungent, hilly woods of Hong-Kong, saying in her wicked cosmopolitan heart, as she munches the peanuts of Cathay, “There are no peanuts but in America, and only an American darky or a naturalised Italian can roast them”? ”

“ I know no other impersonal delight that is so endless as the delight of learning new places. To see new flora, a new type of people having new customs, and then to realise that it is Damascus or Kabul, Calcutta or Canton,—a place which has been to you all your life a meaningless dot on a map, but is now—and for ever will be to you—a vivid, vital reality,—that is an exquisite pleasure, a twofold pleasure, for while it fires your intellect, it feeds your artistic sense, your love of the picturesque. ”

“ Golden pheasants nest among the wild white roses. Snipe and quail thieve fatness from the rice fields. Teal and pigeons cool their feet in the wet, paddy beds, and wee rice-birds plume themselves and swing and sway on the swinging, swaying branches of the purple-flowered wistaria.
Ah, yes, China has grown more beautiful with every passing year, as a woman grows more beautiful whose home-life is loved and loving! Her children grow up; her soft hair whitens; but the loveliness of content and happiness beautifies her features, and she can defy old age, for love and kindness have kept her young. ”

“ Every lantern is lit that can shed one more ray of merry light upon the festivity; every shrill instrument is played that can augment the noise and hubbub. There is only one thing that a Chinaman loves more than hubbub, and that is noise.
After noise and hubbub he adores gambling. At the New Year season he gambles excessively. Gambling is a most deplorable habit; but the Chinese gamble so well, in China gambling is such a fine art, that I must own I loved to watch them play, and could never feel, at their great national weakness, half the horror that I knew I ought to have felt. ”

“ The faint, clean smell of cherry and of apple blossoms comes with the gentle breeze that stirs the long white veil which the bride wears with the incomparable grace of a Japanese woman. In the West there is a last faint glow of sunset. The maiden’s face is warm with a gentle, well-controlled flush. From behind the rose garden and the honeysuckle vines steals the new moonlight. In the girl’s eyes shines a great, pure glory. The bride’s mother gives a little sob. The girl’s dimpled face quivers for an instant, then she steps into her litter. ”

“ When you think of partly English Hong-Kong in all its regal beauty, when you think of wholly Mongolian Canton in all its super-Asiatic density, think of them with an outer scum—a scum of poverty, a scum of sampans. China, the prolific, has overflowed into the yellow Chinese sea, and it is greatly to the credit of the Chinese overflow that it has found life both palatable and practicable. I saw in China nothing more wonderful than the modus vivendi of the sampan people. They do all that men must do on board their crude, diminutive barks. ”

“ The Chinese have the advantage of the more vivid, picture-like background.
Nature is brilliant and aggressive in China. Chinese architecture is fantastic and often crude. But both are softened. The bold, bright scenery is made lovely and almost gentle by endless trails of dainty vines, great clumps and long lines of feathery bamboo, fields of wild white roses, and ragged masses of chrysanthemums. The grotesque Mongolian architecture is toned to beauty and fitness by its antiquity, and by its quaint tent-like outlines.
There is no city in the world more beautifully situated than Hong-Kong. ”

“ A pretty Tamul mother sat in its shade nursing a rolly-poly black baby. A few feet from her were two yellow-clad priests of Buddha, telling their beads.
We drove by a quiet, irregular, silver lake. We drove through a tangle of tropical undergrowth and Eastern flowers. Here and there the cocoanut trees lifted their supreme heads, and now and again the laughing faces of brown babies peeped out at us from the thick of the bamboo.
We came to the theatre all too soon, for our delight with this old world, so new to us, had quite superseded our professional anxiety. ”

“ I know nothing more characteristic of Japanese good taste and of Japanese kindliness than the place of profitable industry that Japan has found for her blind. In Japan massage is only a less perfect luxury, less perfectly a fine art, than it is in Hindoostan. And what could be more fit, what could speak more trumpet-mouthed of their national delicacy, than that to the blind of that nation has been given the monopoly of massage?
They walk about the streets alone—do the blind shampooers of Japan. They are as fearless as they are safe. ”

“ I would rather face my loneliness alone, in just such an Indian bungalow—alone, but for native servants and books and flowers and pet animals. I was not alone in Khandalah; but society in every ordinary sense I had none. Yet I was never once lonely. And when I ought to have gone to Bombay, I sent my nurse, and curled myself up in my hammock.
It is a privilege to be alone with Nature. Yes, and it is also a privilege, a great privilege, sometimes to be alone with one’s self. ”

“ They exchange long complimentary letters, the writing of which is in China a fine art. Every guest is regaled with tea and refreshments, which range from absurd-looking sweetmeats to tinsel-decked roast pigs.
On New Year’s Day the Chinese wear their dresses of ceremony and their festival dresses. It is every Chinaman’s ambition to be a mandarin. On New Year’s Day every Chinaman apes the dress of a mandarin as closely as the law will allow. On New Year’s Day in Japan—unless we happen, as we sometimes do, to be in their bad graces—every Japanese man rushes into a frock coat and under a silk hat. ”

“ I often wonder how many thousands of charming English people there are in India. There are very many, I know.
Bombay I always associate with Tokio and Vienna. They are the three most lavish cities I have ever seen. And yet, Bombay lacked to me something of the charm of Calcutta. Bombay is undoubtedly the more beautiful of the two cities, but it is far the less dense. Humanity fascinates me more than Nature. I boast of being cosmopolitan. I love several countries as much as, or more than, my own, and yet, the cosmopolitanism of Bombay oppressed me. ”

“ The marriage yoke rests as easily upon the Burmese necks as a wreath of roses—for the man and wife pull equally, pull together. Each does his or her fair part. Each remembers always the rights of the other. Courtesy and justice are big ingredients in Burmese married life. Small wonder that in Burmah marriage is a big success.
If the position of the Burmese women is unique, the position of the Burmese children is unparalleled and almost indescribable. Filial piety is almost as much a matter of religion in Burmah as in China. ”

“ Can we blame the Chinese for their allegiance to a form of religion which has satisfied their extremest ethical need for thousands of years? I, for one, cannot unqualifiedly condemn them for their cruel inhospitality, when I recall scenes I have seen in the Chinese quarters of San Francisco and of Melbourne. I have seen a joss house demolished by the hands of civilised Anglo-Saxons; but I deplore that China’s not unnatural retaliation should fall upon a self-sacrificing body of men who only seek the good of China and the glory of the God in whom they earnestly believe. ”

“ No one is more charming, more admirable, than a charming American. I know Americans whom the children of no other nation can excel. If patriotism consists in praising the shrilly cackling, over-diamonded women, and the ill-educated, shallow, opinionated men of our hoi polloi—why then I am not patriotic. They, beyond everything else human, set my teeth on edge, do Americans the vulgar. But because I cry out at them with genuine American acrimony, it does not follow that I am stupid enough to think them the only Americans. ”

“ I have seen strong men weep in Dresden and in Rome, moved to a new emotion by some gigantic achievement of Occidental art,—an achievement that was great, but far from faultless. The great proportion of Japanese art is faultless, but far from great.
After all, I have no right to decide what constitutes greatness. Is a forest greater than a maple leaf? I doubt it. Art is so infinite,—all artists are so finite! ”

“ There is nothing so characteristic of the Chinese as thoroughness. The Chinese are the least beautiful of all civilised peoples; but when they undertake to be beautiful—even in the mere matter of their women’s feet—they do it thoroughly. They don’t put a heel in the middle of a shoe to make a foot look small, nor do they point absurdly an empty satin toe. No! They bend four of the human toes back and leave the one big toe to do apparent duty as a lovely, diminutive foot.
To us the small-footed women of China appear twofold martyrs. ”

“ We have conquered the Burmese; true, but they have conquered the marriage question, they have solved it,—they have conquered it and solved it without knowing of its existence. They are heathens; true, but they are happy in their home lives. May they never learn the weird Western secret of marital misery. There is much for us to learn in the Orient, but none of it is more important than the beautiful lesson of married happiness that is taught by Burmah. There is much in Burmah that is most imperfect, but in the relative positions of the sexes it is ideal. ”

“ Nature laughs and revels in Penang; and there, too, is native life most varied, most picturesque. A dozen different races live in Penang. Their places of worship, their houses, their garments, are insistently differentiated. Penang is one big garden of exotics; among them, we found one sweet home-rose—the rose of English hospitality. From Penang we went to Singapore.
I have no pleasanter memories than my memories of Singapore. No place could be more beautiful, nor more interesting; and I thought that nowhere in the East was there such pleasant European society. ”

“ The artists of Japan embroider with their pencils, and paint with their needles. They follow their own art ideal. Because it appeals to us less, it is not necessarily a smaller ideal than our own.
The very delicacy of touch and mind that makes the Japanese the most exquisite of all workmen, makes them the most sensitive of all peoples, the most petulantly resentful of criticism. I fear that it would be impossible for a European to write an article about Japan that would be inoffensive to the Japanese, unless it were an article of unqualified praise. ”

“ I had been told—worse than that, my husband had been told—that I could not go into the native city without the protecting presence of numerous Englishmen. Nevertheless, every day for two weeks I spent several hours in Old Peshawar with only my ayah, our chokera, and our gharri wallah and sais. I did not suffer the least inconvenience from my foolhardiness.
To a woman there is nothing more delightful in being in India than the delight of buying, for a few pence, a something that she feels sure will be to her an artistic delight, for many years of colourless Western residence. ”