ROMANTICISM AND THE ORIENT hy IRVING BABBITT

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the contrary, a type of nationalistic self-assertion is beginning to appear in various oriental lands that is only too familiar to us in the West. Japan in particular has been disposing of her Buddhas as curios and going in for battleships. The lust of domination, which is almost the ultimate fact of human nature, has been so armed in the Occident with the machinery of scientific efficiency that the Orient seems to have no alternative save to become efficient in the same way or be reduced to economic and political vassalage. This alternative has been pressing with special acuteness on China, the pivotal country of the Far East. Under the impact of the West an ethos that has endured for thousands of years has been crumbling amid a growing spiritual bewilderment. In short, the Orient itself is losing its orientation. The essence of this orientation, as I have already suggested, may be taken to be the affirmation in the religious form of the truths of the inner life. Our interpretation of this religious side of the East has often been unduly coloured during the past century or more by romanticism. I am especially struck by this romantic misinterpretation in the case of the Orient of which I have made some first-hand study, namely ancient India, more particularly Buddhist India. The matter is of some consequence, if it be true, as I am inclined to think, that Buddha is the ultimate Oriental.

It is the Orient, says Professor W. F. Giese of this latter work, seen from Les BatignoUes: "turbaned Turks, piratical Greeks, lovely odalisks, glittering scimitars, comparadjis, spahis, timariots, bloody janissaries, black eunuchs, scented harems, azure seas with women in sacks splashing into them from the windows of marble palaces, wars, murders, massacres^and pictures". Nowadays anyone with a thirst for the exotic can satisfy it in a more authentic form by taking a world cruise or at the very least by turning the pages of the magazine Asia. A more important romantic trait for our subject is the desire to escape from an unpalatable present into some land of heart's desire. The romantic not infrequently places the bower of dreams into which he flees from the here and now in the Orient. Here is an extreme example from the Paris symposium. "As for me," says Mme Alice LouisBarthou, "it is very simple. I look upon the Occident with abomination. It represents for me fog, grayness, chill, machinery, murderous science, factories with all the vices, the triumph of noise, of hustling, of ugliness. . . . The Orient is calm, peace, beauty, colour, mystery, charm, sunlight, joy, ease of life and revery; in fine the exact opposite of our hateful and grotesque civilization. I am reactionary, retrograde and antediluvian as much as one can be. So you must not ask my opinion on these matters. If I had my way, I should have a Chinese Wall built between the Orient and the Occident to keep the latter from poisoning the former; I should have the heads of all the giaours cut off, and I should go and live where you can see clearly and where there are no Europeans. Voilal" The romantic quality of imagination that appears in such passages has been combined since Rousseau with the cult of a subrational spontaneity. This Rousseauistic romanticism

I take up first the more superficial aspects of romantic orientalism. What interests the romantic in the East as elsewhere is the picturesque surfaces of life rather than its constant elements. This pursuit of local colour is what one finds in the volumes of the early romantics dealing with the Eastfor example, in hes Orientales of Victor Hugo.

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