[GLIMPSES OF NATIVE LIFE]
A just appreciation of sentiments and motives repugnant to our own is among the most difficult of intellectual feats. The Germans express their sense of this truth by a concise and vigorous, if not altogether elegant saying: "No man can get out of his own skin, and into his neighbour's." A difference of colour between the said skins, it may be added, withholds even adventurous souls from attempting the temporary transmigration. And the wisdom of nations, brown and white, sanctions this diffidence. In Java Occidentals and Orientals have been dwelling together for about three centuries. They have become conversant with each other's language, opinions, and affairs; they are brought into a certain mutual dependence, and into daily and hourly contact; there is no arrogance or contempt on the one side, no abject fear or hatred on the other; no wilful prejudice, it would seem, on either. But the Hollanders do not understand the Javanese, nor do the Javanese understand the Hollanders, in any true sense of the word. So that it seems the part of wisdom to acknowledge this at the outset, merely stating that the notions of nice and nasty, fair and foul, right and wrong, such as they obtain among the two nations are antagonistic. Anyway, on the part of a casual observer, such as the present writer, any further criticisms would be presumptuous and almost inevitably unjust; therefore, they will be refrained from.
But, whereas I freely confess that the inner life of the Javanese has remained hidden from me, their outward existence has become familiar enough. The Javanese practically live out-of-doors. They take their bath in the river; perform their toilet under some spreading warigin tree, hanging a mirror as big as the hand on the rugged stem; and squat down to their meal by the roadside. After nightfall, dark figures may be discerned around the stalls of fruit-vendors, fantastically lit up by the uncertain flame of an oil-wick. And, in the dry season, they often sleep on the moonlit sward of some garden, or on the steps of an untenanted house.
This life seems strange to us Northerners, self-constituted prisoners of roofs and walls. But we have only to look at a Malay, and the intuitive conviction flashes on us, that it is eminently right and proper for him to live in this manner. He is a creature of the field. His supple, sinewy frame, his dark skin, the far-away look in his eyes, the very shape of his feet, with the short, strong toes, well separated from one another—his whole appearance—immediately suggest a background of trees and brushwood, running water, sunlit, wind-swept spaces, and the bare brown earth. And the scenery of Java with its strange colouring, at once violent and dull, its luxuriant vegetation, and its abrupt changes in the midst of apparent monotony, lacks the final, completing touch in the absence of dusky figures moving through it. Landscape and people are each other's natural complement and explanation. Hence, the picturesque and poetic charm of the Javanese out-of-doors.