CHAPTER XVII
THE FUTURE OF BUSHIDO
FEW historical comparisons can be more judiciously made than between
the Chivalry of Europe and the Bushido of Japan, and, if history repeats
itself, it certainly will do with the fate of the latter what it did
with that of the former. The particular and local causes for the decay
of chivalry which St. Palaye gives, have, of course, little application
to Japanese conditions; but the larger and more general causes that
helped to undermine knighthood and chivalry in and after the Middle Ages
are as surely working for the decline of Bushido.
One remarkable difference between the experience of Europe and of
Japan is, that whereas in Europe, when chivalry was weaned from
feudalism and was adopted by the
[paragraph continues]
Church, it obtained a fresh lease of life, in Japan no religion was
large enough to nourish it; hence, when the mother institution,
feudalism, was gone, Bushido, left an orphan, had to shift for itself.
The present elaborate military organisation might take it under its
patronage, but we know that modern warfare can afford little room for
its continuous growth. Shintoism, which fostered it in its infancy, is
itself superannuated. The hoary sages of ancient China are being
supplanted by the intellectual parvenu of the type of Bentham and Mill.
Moral theories of a comfortable kind, flattering to the Chauvinistic
tendencies of the time, and therefore thought well adapted to the need
of this day, have been invented and propounded; but as yet we hear only
their shrill voices echoing through the columns of yellow journalism.
Principalities and powers are arrayed against the Precepts of
Knighthood. Already, as Veblen says, "the decay of the ceremonial
code--or, as it is otherwise called,
the vulgarisation of life--among the industrial classes proper, has
become one of the chief enormities of latter-day civilisation in the
eyes of all persons of delicate sensibilities." The irresistible tide of
triumphant democracy, which can tolerate no form or shape of
trust,--and Bushido was a trust organised by those who monopolised
reserve capital of intellect and culture, fixing the grades and value of
moral qualities,--is alone powerful enough to engulf the remnant of
Bushido. The present societary forces are antagonistic to petty class
spirit, and chivalry is, as Freeman severely criticises, a class spirit.
Modem society, if it pretends to any unity, cannot admit "purely
personal obligations devised in the interests of an exclusive
class." 1
Add to this the progress of popular instruction, of industrial arts and
habits, of wealth and city-life,--then we can easily see that neither
the keenest cuts of samurai sword nor the sharpest shafts shot from
Bushido's boldest bows can aught avail. The state built upon the
rock of Honour and fortified by the same shall we call it the Ehrenstaat,
or, after the manner of Carlyle, the Heroarchy?--is fast falling into
the hands of quibbling lawyers and gibbering politicians armed with
logic-chopping engines of war. The words which a great thinker used in
speaking of Theresa and Antigone may aptly be repeated of the samurai,
that "the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever
gone."
Alas for knightly virtues! alas for samurai pride! Morality ushered
into the world with the sound of bugles and drums, is destined to fade
away as "the captains and the kings depart."
If history can teach us anything, the state built on martial
virtues--be it a city like Sparta or an Empire like Rome--can never make
on earth a "continuing city." Universal and natural as is the fighting
instinct in man, fruitful as it has proved to be of noble sentiments and
manly virtues, it does not comprehend the whole man. Beneath the
instinct to fight there lurks a diviner instinct--to love. We have
seen that Shintoism, Mencius, and Wan Yang Ming, have all clearly taught
it; but Bushido and all other militant types of ethics, engrossed
doubtless, with questions of immediate practical need, too often forgot
duly to emphasise this fact. Life has grown larger in these latter
times. Callings nobler and broader than a warrior's claim our attention
to-day. With an enlarged view of life, with the growth of democracy,
with better knowledge of other peoples and nations, the Confucian idea
of benevolence--dare I also add the Buddhist idea of pity?--will expand
into the Christian conception of love. Men have become more than
subjects, having grown to the estate of citizens; nay, they are more
than citizens --being men. Though war clouds hang heavy upon our
horizon, we will believe that the wings of the angel of peace can
disperse them. The history of the world confirms the prophecy that "the
meek shall inherit the earth." A nation that sells
its birthright of peace, and backslides from the front rank of
industrialism into the file of fillibusterism, makes a poor bargain
indeed!
When the conditions of society are so changed that they have become
not only adverse but hostile to Bushido, it is time for it to prepare
for an honourable burial. It is just as difficult to point out when
chivalry dies, as to determine the exact time of its inception. Dr.
Miller says that chivalry was formally abolished in the year 1559, when
Henry II. of France was slain in a tournament. With us, the edict
formally abolishing feudalism in 1870 was the signal to toll the knell
of Bushido. The edict, issued five years later, prohibiting the wearing
of swords, rang out the old, "the unbought grace of life, the cheap
defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise,"
it rang in the new age of "sophisters, economists, and calculators."
It has been said that Japan won her late war with China by means of Murata guns and
[paragraph continues]
Krupp cannon; it has been said the victory was the work of a modern
school-system; but these are less than half-truths. Does ever a piano,
be it of the choicest workmanship of Ehrbar or Steinway burst forth into
the Rhapsodies of Liszt or the Sonatas of Beethoven, without a master's
hand? Or, if guns win battles, why did not Louis Napoleon beat the
Prussians with his Mitrailleuse, or the Spaniards with their
Mausers the Filipinos, whose arms were no better than the old-fashioned
Remingtons? Needless to repeat what has grown a trite saying,--that it
is the spirit that quickeneth, without which the best of implements
profiteth but little. The most improved guns and cannon do not shoot of
their own accord; the most modern educational system does not make a
coward a hero. No! What won the battles on the Yalu, in Corea and
Manchuria, were the ghosts of our fathers, guiding our hands and beating
in our hearts. They are not dead, those ghosts, the spirits of our
warlike ancestors. To those who have eyes to see, they are clearly
visible.
[paragraph continues]
Scratch a Japanese of the most advanced ideas, and he will show a
samurai. The great inheritance of honour, of valour, and of all martial
virtues is, as Professor Cramb very fitly expresses it, "but ours on
trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come,"
and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to bate
one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to
widen its scope as to apply it in all walks and relations of life.
It has been predicted--and predictions have been corroborated by the
events of the last half-century--that the moral system of Feudal Japan,
like its castles and its armouries, will crumble into dust, and new
ethics rise phoenix-like to lead New Japan in her path of progress.
Desirable and probable as the fulfilment of such a prophecy is, we must
not forget that a phœnix rises only from its own ashes, and that it is
not a bird of passage, neither does it fly on pinions borrowed from
other birds. "The Kingdom of
[paragraph continues]
God is within you." It does not come rolling down the mountains,
however lofty; it does not come sailing across the seas, however broad.
"God has granted," says the Koran, "to every people a prophet in its own
tongue." The seeds of the Kingdom, as vouched for and apprehended by
the Japanese mind, blossomed in Bushido. Now its days are closing--sad
to say, before its full fruition--and we turn in every direction for
other sources of sweetness and light, of strength and comfort, but among
them there is as yet nothing found to take its place. The
profit-and-loss philosophy of utilitarians and materialists finds favour
among logic-choppers with half a soul. The only other ethical system
which is powerful enough to cope with utilitarianism and materialism is
Christianity, in comparison with which Bushido, it must be confessed, is
like "a dimly burning wick" which the Messiah was proclaimed not to
quench, but to fan into a flame. Like His Hebrew precursors, the
prophets--notably Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Habakkuk
[paragraph continues]
--Bushido laid particular stress on the moral conduct of rulers and
public men and of nations, whereas the ethics of Christ, which deal
almost solely with individuals and His personal followers, will find
more and more practical application as individualism, in its capacity of
a moral factor, grows in potency. The domineering, self-assertive,
so-called master-morality of Nietsche, itself akin in some respects to
Bushido, is, if I am not greatly mistaken, a passing phase or temporary
reaction against what he terms, by morbid distortion, the humble,
self-denying slave-morality of the Nazarene.
Christianity and materialism (including utilitarianism)--or will the
future reduce them to still more archaic forms of Hebraism and
Hellenism?--will divide the world between them. Lesser systems of morals
will ally themselves to either side for their preservation. On which
side will Bushido enlist? Having no set dogma or formula to defend, it
can afford to disappear as an entity; like the cherry blossom. it is
willing to
die at the first gust of the morning breeze. But a total extinction
will never be its lot. Who can say that stoicism is dead? It is dead as a
system; but it is alive as a virtue: its energy and vitality are still
felt through many channels of life-in the philosophy of Western nations,
in the jurisprudence of all the civilised world. Nay, wherever man
struggles to raise himself above himself, wherever his spirit masters
his flesh by his own exertions, there we see the immortal discipline of
Zeno at work.
Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power
will not perish from the earth; its schools of martial prowess or civic
honour may be demolished, but its light and its glory will long survive
their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four
winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will
enrich life. Ages after, when its customaries will have been buried and
its very name forgotten, its odours will come floating in the air as
from a far-off, unseen hill, "the wayside
gaze beyond";--then in the beautiful language of the Quaker poet,
Footnotes
184:1 Norman Conquest, vol. v., p. 482.
"The traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air."
Of sweetness near, he knows not whence,
And, pausing, takes with forehead bare
The benediction of the air."