MODERN EAST AND IMMEMORIAL
WEST s - Western Civilization and the Far East. By Stephen King-Hall. (Methuen and Co., Ltd. 15s.) ALMOST—but, alas ! not quite—Mr. King-Hall has written a really important book. Even as it is his book is of great value. But what a- treasure it might- have been ! - How invaluable would be a comprehensive, sensible, unbiased account of the impact of Western Civilization on the East. And what assets Mr. King-Egli had for the writing of such a book ! He is sen- sitive enough to notice not only that Chinamen are different from Europeans, but also that some Chinamen are different from others ; as, indeed, Chinese travellers have found that Europeans differ amongst themselves. Observant enough to notice the awakening of a continent (not, one supposes, a necessarily easy thing to noticelike same names on the map, it may be written-too big to be seen) ; independent enough to conclude that the "immemorial East" is at the moment about five years- old,- having started a wholly new and rapidly accelerating- movement in an unknown direction in about the year 1919; irritable enough to say that all the judgments of Kipling-fed merchants who have lived hi treaty ports for forty years are, ex hypothesi, worthless, since they all refer to a condition of things which no longer exists except in their own imagination. And yet at the same time no crank, but a practical, hearty, beef-eating Britisher ! It all sounds too good to be true. This must be.the perfect book on East and West that the world needs so ,badly. But, alas ! for human aspirations, there was one thing lacking in Mr. King-Hall. In spite of all these magnificent qualifications for writing this particular hook he lacked one essential cfualifidations—the-ability to write a book at all. Now, writing any book is not as easy as shelling peas, and to write as big and ambitious a book as this one is, merely from a technical point of view, a task of the very greatest difficulty. Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, people do -not consider book construction a craft which -needs learning like any other craft. The only school is experience; but the first lesson, even in that school, should surely be a comparatively short and unambitious one. Unhappily-Mr. King-Hall had to write this, his first, book on air extremely ambitious scale: - We perfectly under- stand that the scale was necessary :if the subject was to be dealt with comprehensively. But the result is, frankly, chaos. The book is arranged neither chronologically nor by subject. We leap from century to century—from China to Japan, from Religion to Railway Statistics. Even within the chapters themselves there is no Order ; a chapter will be headed inno- cently enough, " bomestic Politics in Japan." The first twenty pages will turn out to be a discussion on a modern state religion ; the middle twenty a conscientious account of party fluctuations from year to year ; and the end will often cover the same ground -again as the middle or the beginning, from a different point of view.
Thus it must be admitted that the book is an extremely difficult one to read. There is no central theme running through it, no thesis on which the facts can be hung, so that a coherent whole is constructed. These are the book's faults, and they are grievous. But we must put up with them as best we can, because, in spite of them all, this is the best book we have on the subject. Indeed, except for Mr. Bertrand Russell's admirable Modern China, which deals, it is true, with the same subject, on roughly the same lines, but which is much shorter and slighter and is now two years old, there is no other book that we know Of written from an even reasonably modern point of view on the situation. fins Kis to-day in the Far East.
Qn Japan -especially Mr. King-Hall is much fuller and more Complete than Mr:-Bertrand RUsselt; 'His–main -point is an interesting one. Japan, by the most amazing experiment in artificial nation-building that the world has ever seen; has been turned in sixty years-from a feudarstate Wthe Middle Ages into a first-class aggressive modern Power, armed to the teeth, equipped with all the weapons of modern diplomacy from poison gas to a ready-made philosophy of real politique. This process reached its completion, Mr. King-Hall says, at the end of the Great War. At Paris, Japan had arrived. Her representatives sat in solemn judgment, together with the Allies, over the prostrate bodies of two of the great White Empires, from one of which she had learned her own military system. But irony intervened in the person of President Wilson. Just yawn Japan had grasped the principles, or rather the want of principles, of statecraft ; had learned that in international affairs Might was on every occasion Right ; that the countries of the world lived in that" state of nature" in which the devil did in fact with unerring precision take the hindermost—just as she had learned all this, in came President Wilson with an entirely new set of rules for the great game. The reign of law was to be established—the League of Nations was actually established—international 'good Will, not shining, swords,- was in future to regulate the affairs of men. It was all very baffling to the new Power that had just learned the opposite lessons, and Mr. Stephen King-Hall seems to :think that Japan is finding some difficulty in adjusting herself to this new point of view. Like all arrivistes, she is anxious to live up to her international company, but the fashions seem to change bewilderingly quickly ! There may be a good deal in this, but we cannot help feeling that Mr. King-Hall exag- gerates the difficulty for Japan. Surely her own lessons of real politique in international affairs will still stand her in very good stead, unless it be that our hopes and not our fears about the League of Nations are, after all, to -be fulfilled.
E. J. S.
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