Some friends from Manila were looking out of the hall window a little time ago, and said, “What a lovely view. I should never tire of that.” I said we never did, which was quite true.
When I am well again, and if C—— can get away, I hope to be able to go beyond the roads to Jaro and Molo, though they are beautiful and inexhaustible. With all the beauty, however, I begin to have the same sort of feeling about this country that that old friend of ours, General R——, had about the girl at the Aldershot ball. You remember the story he told us of how he saw her exquisite face across the ball-room, and insisted on a common friend introducing him to her? And when he and the friend had got half way across the ball-room, the old general said: “Stop! Take me away. Get me out of it. Her face has never changed and never can change. It isn’t a face. It’s a mask, sir, a mask! It is not a human being. Come away!”
Well, I feel like that about Philippine scenery, which can be dark or light according to the reflections thrown on it, but it has never changed, and even if there is a slight change, when that has passed it will always and for ever be the same greens and the same blue. No alternation to red and yellow autumn, no brown and purple winter, no delicate spring—nothing but perpetual, chromo-lithograph mid-summer, which has always seemed to me the least beautiful season of the year.
When the wet Monsoon blows, I believe that season is counted as a sort of spring, for various trees then come into bloom, but, for the great part, everything just goes on growing and dying, and growing and dying in dull routine, like the natives. In fact I often think the much-abused Filipino is only a prototype, as it were, a sort of reflection, of his country. It seems as if this were so, too, for those who go away to Hong Kong or Japan to be educated, and come back full of civilisation and enthusiasms, soon cast off their energy like a slough and return to the shiftless, slouching habits of the land where it is “always afternoon.” For them such habits are natural, and perhaps necessary, but a worse effect is that white men get like that too, in time, and though they may work well enough at the business by which they live, they become indifferent, shiftless, careless about dress and the niceties of our civilisation; everything is too much trouble, and they just jog along in a half-animal routine. The young ones still fret for the world they have left, which remains fresh in their memories; but this life takes hold on men, and they become so rooted in its ways that they deteriorate and can never live happily anywhere else again—in the same way that a mind deteriorates on the slip-shod mental fare of magazine-reading, and cannot be happy with anything that requires more effort to assimilate. This, then, I find is the secret of that “nameless” fascination of the Far East that one hears and reads so much about—it is the secret of deterioration which is so easy, and elevation which is so hard, so useless, so unnecessary—let us lie in a long chair and drink one whisky peg after the other—who cares what the home papers say—what rot it is to bother about anything but poker and shooting, or why old Wing Chang bought Brown’s pony.
And when you think of the real meaning of “Ship me somewhere east of Suez”—well, you can’t think of it till you live there yourself for a month or two. My refrain is, “Ship me somewhere west of Suez,” where there is health for body and soul—the west of the exquisite thrush and the lilac bush, instead of the empty, gaudy parrot and the flaming, scentless canna.
Heavens! What a tirade!
One woman have I met who likes the Philippines; though many, as I know, love India, and the Straits, and Ceylon. But then those are generally people who go away to “hills” and so on, or take trips home. Here there are no “hills,” and a trip home is a serious life-problem. Just so, this one woman who has been found to like the Philippines happens to be the wife of a missionary, so, of course, she goes every hot season for a “nice long holiday” to Japan.
It occurs to me that you may imagine we have savages here when I speak of missionaries, but that is not the case, in this island at any rate, for these good people are here—oh such a lot of them!—to convert the Filipinos from Roman Catholicism. This is really a work of supererogation, for, though the Spanish priests did ill-treat the Filipinos, the natives are free now from that terror, and this religion, with its mysteries and pomp, appeals to them, and suits their dispositions perfectly.
I am afraid the unbiassed observer would find the missionaries far more convincing in their enthusiasm, if it led them to give up the beautiful houses and comfortable carriages they enjoy here, their tea-parties, lectures, and so on, and go and rough it in some of the other islands, where there are plenty of savages, Mahommedans, devil-worshippers, cannibals, and all sorts of unreclaimed sheep.
Before I left home, I remember a very enthusiastic but woefully ignorant old lady being filled with excitement when she heard I was going to the Philippine Islands, and showing me missionary journals with a great deal written in them about “the good work” being done out here. At first I very naturally thought it was the savages who were being tackled, but—“Oh dear no!” she cried, quite shocked. “The poor Filipinos are being saved from the dreadful influence of the Roman Catholics.”