368 GEOGRAPHIC LITERATURE 



break off a piece of it, and the worms break too. Canton was that 

 sponge. . . . Hongkong showed me how the Chinaman could work. 

 •Canton explained why he set no value on life. The article was cheaper 

 than in India. I hated the Chinaman before ; I hated him doubly as I 

 choked for breath in his seething streets, where nothing short of the pesti- 

 lence could clear a way. . . . The Hindu is a sanitating saint com- 

 pared to the Chinaman. . . . 



"The march of the Mongol is a pretty thing to write about in maga- 

 zines. Hear it once in the gloom of an ancient curio shop ; hear the 

 tramp of the feet on the granite blocks of the road, and the breaking wave 

 of speech that is not human! Watch the yellow faces that glare at you 

 between the bars, and you will be afraid, as I was afraid." 



After five days' study Mr Kipling gave up that "oilskin mystery, the 

 Chinaman," and sought the secrets of Hongkong's wealth and splendor, 

 that magnificent city of truly palaces by the sea, to which " Calcutta is 

 but a hamlet;" and then he took ship to Japan, where all of his finer 

 and poetic susceptibilities were aroused, and everything — the landscapes, 

 houses, men, women, little children, and works of art — is exquisitely 

 transmuted into phrases by the magic of his mind. " I was satisfied. 

 . . . Fujiyama was exactly as I had seen it. ... I would not 

 have sold my sight of it for the crest of Kinchunjunga, flushed with the 

 morning. Fujiyama is the keynote of Japan. When you understand the 

 one you are in a position to learn something about the other." 



His praises fall justly and discriminatingly, and his description of old 

 Hari Shin's remarkable conglomeration of a curio shop in Kobe and of 

 that "blackwood cabinet" in Kioto, where Nammikawa creates his won- 

 derful cloisonne enamels, are not better in their way than his summing 

 up of Osaka castle: "Castles in India I know, and the forts of great 

 emperors I had seen, but neither Akbar in the north nor Scindia in the 

 south had built after this fashion— without ornament, without color, but 

 with a single eye to savage strength and the utmost purity of line." 



"The Chinaman's a native ; that's the look on a native's face ; but the 

 Jap isn't a native, and he isn't a sahib, either." There Mr Kipling met 

 the greatest puzzle of the Far East, and, like scores of the globe-trotting 

 and all other kind, left before he had solved the racial enigma. " Japan 

 is a great people," he finally says. "Her masons play with stone, her 

 carpenters with wood, her smiths with iron, and her artists with life, 

 death, and all the eye can take in. Mercifully, she has been denied the 

 last touch of firmness in her character which would enable her to play 

 with the whole round world. We possess that — we, the nation of the 

 glass flower shade, the pink worsted mat, the red and green china puppy 

 dog, and the poisonous Brussels carpet. It is our compensation." 



Before he reaches California Mr Kipling found that " the American is 

 objectionable; and yet how pleasant in every way is a nice American 

 whose tongue is cleansed of ' right there,' ' all the time,' ' noos,' ' revoo,' 

 '. iaound,' and the Falling Cadence." 



In slight, unconscious reprisal Hon. T. B. Reed, interviewed but this 

 same month in London, avers that England would be a nice place if all 

 Englishmen did not all the time use the Rising Inflection. 



