China and the West

Woolf, Virginia. Chinese stories. In : Times literary supplement ; 1 May (1913). In : The essays of Virginia Woolf. (London : Hogarth Press, 1986-2011). Vol. 2.
Review of P'u Sung-ling [Pu Songling]. Strange stories from the lodge of leisures. [ID D31533].
According to Mr George Soulié, the translator of these stories, we seriously mistake the nature of the ordinary Chinaman if we imagine him any more exclusively occupied with the great classics of his literature than we are with ours. If we see him with a book in his hand it is likely to be 'a novel like the History of the Three Kingdoms or a selection of ghost stories'. Like us they have a hunger for novels and stories, which they read over and over again, so that, although in the West nothing is known about it, the influence of such light literature upon the Chinese mind 'is much greater than the whole bulk of the classics'. They may resemble us in their craving for something lighter, nearer to the life they know than the old and famous books, but in all else how different they are! The twenty-five stories in Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisure, translated from the Chinese by George Soulié, were written in the second half of the eighteenth century by P'ou Song-Lin, at a time, that is, when with Fielding and Richardson our fiction was becoming increasingly robust and realistic. To give any idea of the slightness and queerness of these stories one must compare them to dreams, or the airy, fantastic, and inconsequent flight of a butterfly. They skim from world to world, from life to death. The people they describe may kill each other and die, but we cannot believe either in their blood or in their dissolution. The barriers against which we in the West beat our hands in vain are for them almost as transparent as glass. 
"Some people (one of the stories begins) remember every incident of their former existences; it is a fact which many examples can prove. Other people do not forget what they learned before they died and were born again, but remember only confusedly what they were in a precedent life. Wang, the acceptable of the yellow peach-blossom city, when people discussed such questions before him used to narrate the experience he had had with his first son."
And the story which occupies three little pages tells how a boy had once been born a student, then a donkey, and then a boy again. Very often these stories are like the stories a child will tell of a sight which has touched its imagination for no reason that we can discover, lacking in point where we expect the point to come, suddenly breaking off and done with, but somehow memorable. Or it may be they are extravagantly sensational, or of the nature of fairy stories, where all is miraculously set right in the end, or again purposeless and callous as a child's stories, the good man being killed merely to make an end. But they all alike have a quality of fantasy and spirituality which sometimes, as in 'The Spirit of the River' or 'The River of Sorrows', becomes of real beauty, and is greatly enhanced by the unfamiliar surroundings and exquisite dress. Take, for example, the following description of a Chinese ghost:
"He went farther and farther: the moving lights were rarer; ere long he only saw before him the fire of a white lantern decorated with two red peonies. The paper globe was swinging to the steps of a tiny girl clothed in the blue linen that only slaves wore. The light behind showed the elegant silhouette of another woman, this one covered with a long jacket made in a rich pink silk edged with purple. As the student drew nearer the belated walker turned round, showing an oval face and big long eyes wherein shone a bright speck cruel and mysterious."
So queer and topsy-turvy is the atmosphere of these little stories that one feels, when one has read a number of them, much as if one had been trying to walk over the bridge in a willow pattern plate.