Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1892-09-15
EDWIN ARN0LD'S WAY
he Shocks Japanese Society as Well
as Missionaries.
ONE OF THE LATTER TELLS WY
The Poet Flew to the Defense of the Almond
Eyed Women.
SERIOUS CHARGES BY REV. BARTLETT

| ESPECIAL TELEGRAM TO THE DIsPArcH.I
CHICAGO, Sept. 14-Rev. Samuel Bart
lett, who attacked the character of Sir
Edwin Arnold at preachers meeting in
this city Monday, was visiting General @.
Fl. Howard in Glencoe to-day. He gradu-
ated half dozen years ago at Dartmouth
College, soon afterward going as mission
ary to Japan. Not long ago he returned to
America, and for fortnight past he had
been the guest of various Chicago friends.
After dinner tonight he threw his
stalwart form into chair and related what
he knew of great Englishmen somewhat
more in detail. He said that in his talk
to the ministers he was led into speaking
of Arnold by question, and that he used
the poets name merely in illustration of a
class of men in Japan who slur the mission
aries work and, by secret approval or con-
nivance, encourage the natives in i'm
moralities that are of course inimical to the
progress of Christianity among them.
WHY He Defended the Women.
At the time Bartlett felt some regret at
having blundered upon Arnold's name, but
he was reassured by the certain testimony
which he possessed, and he proceeded to
make some countercharges to the frequent
mentions in Arnold's writings against the
missionaries. ''Not long ago. he said,
Edwin Arnold, in referring to Japanese
women. spoke of them as half angelic and
undertook to defend their notorious infidel-
-ity on the ground that they were early
forced to marry without love, and hence
were in all purity and innocence led to seek
love elsewhere.
Continuing, Bartlett said that during his
entire stay in Japan, at least when in TOXIC
and at the summer resorts, Edwin Arnold
openly lived like Turk, and it was in de-
tense of his own personal indulgences that
the great author of the ''Light of Asia"
few to the support of the freedom and
laxity and license which were the baneful
characteristics of that Oriental life.
Arnold's immoralities were the frequent
and surprised comment of the Japanese
everywhere, who have been long under the
delusion that Englishmen and Americans
were all Christians and followed puritanic
modes of life. Actuated by the same mo-
tives of shielding the impurities of his own
life Edwin Arnold has made attacks upon
the work of the missionaries.
His Presence Grew Undesirable
Bartlett had been for some time member
of the faculty of the great Doshisa Univer-
sity at Kyito, Japan, when Sir Edwin
Arnold went there to lecture, and he said
that the practices of the poet in his pri-
vate life became so offensive to the
directors of the university that
his services as lecturer, though
marvelously valuable from a scholastic
point of view, were dispensed with In
fact, his presence at the University, which
is in a sense sectarian, was remarked upon
by the Chinese, to whom his modes of lite
were matters of familiar talk.
Bartlett said further that while his own
acquaintance with Sir Edwin was very linn
tied, his information in the more specific
details of the poets conduct was not gossip,
but the word of responsible men whose in
tegrity was unquestioned, and whose testi-
mony was conclusive and the matter of
public record.
The glamorous and poetic, but yet fcti-
tious praise and adulation which Arnold
bestows upon the Japanese women, whose
code of morals is anything but ironclad,
have aroused Christians in the realms of
the Mika1o to feelings of disgust, and they
are much outraged at the gloss of genius
with which Arnold has dressed the shock
ingly prevalent immortality among the
women and men of Japan.