China and the West

Forster, E[dward] M[organ]. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and related writings [ID D27987]. (1934).
If Dickinson visited America in the hope of self-development and India from reasons of curiosity, it was in a very different spirit that he approached China. He came to her as a lover, who had worshipped from afar for years. In a life which contained much disillusionment, Chena never failed him. She stood firm as the one decent civilization, and when he mourned over her it was not because she had disappointed him but because he had lived to see her destroyed by the violence and vulgarity of Europe. In his last years, her fate seemed to epitomize mankind's. If China could have been saved, he would have been persuaded that humanism is indestructible. His was an impersonal love ; no private relationship coloured it, although he became friendly with many individual Chinese. It rested upon natural sympathy and intellectual affinity. He once amused the students at a summer school by saying : "I am speaking to you about China, not because I know anything about the subject nor because I once visited the country, but because, in a previous existence, I actually was a Chinaman !”
Roger Fry suggested that he should try a Chinese setting ; China was in the foreground politically, owing to the Boxer riots and the European expeditions to suppress them, and he had read Giles's Gems of Chinese literature and La cité chinoise by Eugène Simon. The suggestion bore fruit, the painful period of incubation ended, and at the same time as he was writing The meaning of good he produced the first four Letters from John Chinaman and sent them to the Saturday review, where they appeared anonymously. A correspondent of the Saturday review pointed out that the letters could not really be by a Chinese and there the matter seemed to end. He added some more letters, and after he had sailed for America the little volume, soon to be famous, was published by his friend R. Brimley Johnson, with a grotesque picture of a Chinaman on the cover. The presentation copies of this edition followed him over the Atlantic to Niagara of all places, and when he was lying in bed in the hotel there his brother Arthur entered in a state of great animation, saying "that he had been reading the book, and that is was 'wonderful'. He did not know it was mine, and felt a natural disappointment when I revealed the fact"… But the book would, I suppose, have fallen as dead as my others, if George Trevelyan had not quoted it in an article in the Nineteenth century, which excited some attention. People then began to speculate as to whether it was really by a Chinaman, and a good many copies were sold. It then penetrated to America, and there everybody seems to have accepted naïvely is Chinese origin…
Besides being topical, John Chinaman is famous for the beauty of prose, and particularly for the sumptuous yet delicate passage beginning "A rose in a moonlit garden".
When we parted at Chhatarpur, he went via Ceylon to Singapore, made a trip to Java and Sumatra, and then proceeded from Singapore to Hong Kong and Canton. As soon as he was among people whose features and physique were Mongolian, he felt happy. At Canton, Bob Trevelyan left him. Dickinson found Trevelyan a delightful companion, yet he probably gained by being left alone on the threshold of China. He was thrown on his own resources, and was obliged to look at a country about which he had hitherto only read, written and dreamed. Canton he loved. Then came Shanghai and politics and an interview with Sun Yat-sen ; he was too sensitive to be a good interviewer, and 'didn't get much out of him'. Then a solitary voyage of ten days on the Yangtse, in pouring rain, which kept him in his cabin and obliged him to play many games of patience. Then a long railway to Peking. At Peking he stopped several weeks, seeing much both of English and Chinese, and it would be possible, from his diary and letters home, to construct a complete account of his movements. But the movements of a tourist's body are not worth recording unless they generate movements inside his mind. Here are two typical reactions. The first is a rhapsody in free verse, such as often occurred to him while in the Far East. This particular poem records a visit to the Temple of Agriculture at Peking.

A temple
What do they hide ?
The cypress Avenue and the coral wall,
The green and amber roof, what do they hide ?
A wooden plough and an altar consecrate to earth.
An emperor once held the plough,
An emperor made sacrifice.
The coral wall is falling now, falling the amber roof,
The cypresses decay, the alter crumbles ;
Crumbles the altar consecrate to Earth ;
But Earth abides.

On the day previous, he had been taken to visit a very different type of temple. He writes of it to a friend : "Oh, but the most amusing thing I want to tell you, I went to a Chinese banquet, at which 'sing-song-girls' were introduces. They are in fact superior, accomplished and expensive tarts, rather pretty, and I shall suppose attractive to the normal man. But imagine me behaving as is expected on such occasions, with one of them on my knee at one time, and smoking the same cigarette ; really it was rather funny, though very embarrassing. And though the girls are to be had, I gather it is only if they like you, and for large money. Some of them were wearing pearls and diamonds. We adjourned to their house – I suppose really a superior brothel – and had a second feast of Chinese dishes, very trying to a weak stomach. Most people seemed to leave without anything happening. They were all very 'respectable' commercial Chinese.
Leaving Peking with Dr [W. Perceval] Yetts [Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology University of London] on 17 June, he climbed, two days later, the sacred mountain of T'ai Shan. It was dusk when they reached the top. They slept in a temple, saw the full moon rise and the sunrise, and spent the next day wandering about. Moved by the beauty, freshness and antiquity of the mountain, he experienced once more the enhanced sensibility that came to him through scenery. Mistra had turned him to dialogue, the Yosemite has inspired him with the idea of interpreting America. On T'ai Shan his feelings were definitely religious. He desired to worship, like the thousands of pilgrims who had preceded him. To worship whom or what ? He discuees this in 'Appearances'.

The same day he writes another verse rhapsody :
On T'ai Shan
Not for the young alone,
Cuckoo, voice of the spring,
Not for the young alone that liquid note :
But for all whom the years have freed
From the prison of youth and age,
To the one Life freed that is not old nor young,
The Life that on this spot
Thousands of years have adored,
Thousands of years and millions of men, as I now stand and adore,
While you, cuckoo, sing.

He descended from this altitude into rain and realism. They went on to Ch'ü-fou, where Confucius had been born, and were his descendant, the 76th Duke, still lived on a domain secured to him by the Chinese government. Their visit to the Duke had been officially arranged through the British Legation, but he slept, as so often happens in the East. His secretary asked them very politely to do their sight-seeing first, and Dickinson in his naïveté would have consented, but Dr Yetts saw they would 'lose face' and he sent a message that they regretted missing the Duke and would retire. The Confucian Duke was more trammeled by etiquette. He knew that if the visitors went away in this fashion he himself would 'lose face', and he immediately appeared fully dressed with his entourage – a handsomish rip of a man. An interview ensued, carried on amid much linguistic difficulty. How old was Mr Dickinson, why was he not married, why had he no beard, etc. ? Then followed a symbolic incident : the offering of a copy of 'John Chinaman'. What did the representative of Confucius make of the austere little volume ? Not much. An attempt was made to explain to him that the writer was a distinguished western sage, and he was understood to inquire what present he might give the sage in return. Asked for a set of rubbings of the Confucian portraits and inscriptions, he agreed graciously, and after an interminable interval produced some raspberryade. The visitors then took their leave and Dickinson had his first and last experience of a Chinese inn. It was not too terrible, there were no vermin, and he felt happy. A great deal of time was spent in calling on and being called on by 'the mandarin, whose attentions and courtesy were rather overwhelming in our humble shed', and who showed them over the temples and the great cemetery of the K'ung clan. The Duke's present has not yet arrived.