The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition

The Coming Fusion of East and West

153 The Coming Fusion of East and West E r n e s t F e n o l l o s a (1898) I. Western Ignorance of the Ultimate Issue. The character and meaning of the far, alien world we call the East have merely pricked the curiosity of stray scholars, or spurred the ambition of a few adventurous merchants. Most of us read of British diplomacy at Peking with a vague curiosity, as an echo from another planet rather than as the crisis of modern history. Of those who have lived in the very theatre of the East, few were able to discern the plot of the unfolding drama, or attempt to warn their countrymen with pen and speech. The prophet is yet heard sneeringly who claims in Chinese culture vital import for all that our common civilization holds dear. In England this apathy has gone to the point of paralyzing Anglo-Saxon will. Able to interpret words, not men, writers published the narrowness of their own souls in such misstatements as that “there is no vital human interest in Chinese and Japanese history, literature, biography, thought, and morals”; nothing that the West as not already worked out to better purpose; no new light thrown upon the supreme subject—man. And yet, under the blind eyes of these authorities, the most wonderful experiments in practical sociology were testing a unique flexibility of faculty, and a race’s devotion that could be explained only from the concentration into character of its ancient ideals. Where should we study ideals 154 Ernest Fenollosa but in the hearts of living men, and not in the dessicated imagination of mere linguists? And those who, like the author, have known Eastern peoples for years, face to face, in their home life, their inmost aspiration, know that the history and literature of these races are alive today as a working force, aglow with a romantic interest and an illumination of humanity that almost rival the records of ancient Greece. But further danger has been lent to popular ignorance by the endorsement of certain English and American editors, whose judgment a streak of jealous scepticism seems to sour whenever they touch the cosmopolitan values of Eastern races. Of Japan, especially, they declare that the recent progress is a farce, a veneer over barbarism; that her people are liars, conceited, cruel, hungry to “wipe out” foreigners, and even to sweep Europe with a “yellow inundation”; that there is no family feeling among the Japanese, no sweet home life, no true patriotism, but a blind, habitual, animal loyalty; no word for “love” in their language, no chastity among their women, and nothing original in their thought and culture. Such cruel slanders have again and again disgraced the pages of papers like the Spectator and the Athenaeum, the latter of which goes on grossly to assure us that the Japanese takes no true delight in the peculiar beauties of his landscape. Such slanders palsied Lord Salisbury’s hand after the Shimonoseki treaty, and again when Germany and Russia tricked him into sharing their partition of North China. Errors are crimes when they contribute to their country’s downfall. But the last year has witnessed an expected awakening on both sides of the Atlantic. The forcing together of the two halves of our race by the Spanish war, and the unfolding, if only for a glimpse, of a common, unheard-of destiny in the East, are like the very voice of Time suddenly made audible. Such changes come quickly, when the world is ready to reveal its vast, silent preparations. It is no accident, but an inevitable silting of currents as wide as the seven seas. The “balance of power” in Europe, so firm, that it paralyzed her boasted humanity amid Armenian massacres and Turkish triumphs, has split its little Continental shell, and dispersed over the world wild forces, like so many liberated gases, battling along lines of least resistance in Africa and central Asia, until they concentrate their whirling, angry masses over the focus of the China Sea. It is a drama more sudden and mighty than the Macedonian’s transport of Greece to India. And if that former contact of East and West resulted in a union of cultures, from which sprang modern Europe, so must this latter-day meeting issue in a world-wide fusion, from which shall arise a broader manhood. The Coming Fusion...