China and the West

Segalen, Victor. Feuilles de route.
Tagebuch, das er während seiner Expedition führte. Daraus entnahm er Texte für Equipée. Darin enthalten ist ein Abschnitt aus den Mémoires historiques de Sima Qian, den Segalen kopiert hat.

Guido Amedeo Vitale ist Professore di lingua e letteratura cinese des Istituto universitario orientale, Neapel.

Aufführung Sha xiong duo sao = Killing elder brother and marring sister-in-law = Hamlet von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Lin Shu durch die Sichuan Oper Ya’an Chuang Theatre Company unter der Regie von Wang Guoren.

Aufführung von Wosailuo = Othello von William Shakespeare nach Lamb, Charles. Yingguo shi ren yin bian yan yu [ID D10417] durch die Chun liu she (Spring Willow Society).

Die Zeitung Shen bao schreibt über Yuan hu = Bitterness = Much ado about nothing von William Shakespeare :
"In Britain there are theatres which specialize in putting on Shakespeare's plays. You can imagine how expensive the tickets are ! Contract of the flesh has won high acclaim. Today we present 'Bitterness' to you, in which men and women deceive each other from the beginning to the end. The bickering couple become happy foes, and this makes you laugh to death. Later, the bridegroom stirs up trouble in the wedding hall, and the bride screams for justice. This makes you cry your eyes out... Those who are curious hurry up to see this Shakespeare play."

Everhard Ter Laak ist Apostolischer Vikar der Zentral-Mongolei, Bischof von Partecopolis.

Hu Shi sieht eine Aufführung von Ghosts von Henrik Ibsen in Amerika und beginnt sich mit den Werken von Ibsen zu befassen.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Shanghai Chun yang she (Shanghai Spring Willow Society) in Shanghai mit Ouyang Yuqian als Nora. [Erste Aufführung eines Dramas von Ibsen].

Lu, Jingruo. Yibusheng zhi ju [ID D26226].
Henrik Ibsen is considered by Lu Jingruo as a 'great writer', 'a rival of Shakespeare', and 'a significant fighter in drama reform' ; and 'the vitality expressed in his works was so forceful that it became motal'. Lu also gives a summary of the plays written by Ibsen after he was fifty years old.

[Byron, George Gordon]. Ai Xila. Hu Shi yi. (1914). [ID D26396].
Chu Chih-yu : Hu Shi adopted in his translation the Chu ci style.

Edward H. Hume gründet das Hunan-Yale Medical College in Changhsa, Hunan.

Edward H. Hume ist Dekan des Hunan-Yale Medical College in Changsha, Hunan.

E.T.C. Werner macht sinologische Studien in Beijing. Er ist Mitglied des Beijing Union Medical College, Dozent an der Beijing-Universität, Mitglied des Chinese Government's Historiography Bureau, Mitglied der Royal Asiatic Society.

Dickinson, G. Lowes. Appearances : notes of travel, East and West [ID D2720]
Pt. II
China
First impressions of China.
Some recent travellers have expressed disappointment or even disgust with what they saw or learned or guessed of China. My own first impression is quite contrary. The climate, it is true, for the moment, inclines one to gloomy views. An icy wind, a black sky, a cold drizzle. March in England could hardly do worse. But in Canton one almost forgets all that. Imagine a maze of narrow streets, more confused and confusing than Venice; high houses (except in the old city) ; and hanging parallel to these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs inscribed with huge, Chinese characters, gold on black, gold on red, red or blue on white, a blaze of colour; and under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream, yellow faces, black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot or borne on chairs, not a cart or carriage, rarely a pony, nobody crowding, nobody hustling or jostling, an even flow of cheerful humanity, inexhaustible, imperturbable, convincing one at first sight of the truth of all one has heard of the order, independence, and vigour of this extraordinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with the street, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and commonly, within, they are cut across by a kind of arch elaborately carved and blazing with gold. Every trade may be seen plying jade-cutters, cloth-rollers, weavers, ringmakers, rice-pounders, a thousand others. Whole animals, roasted, hang before the butchers' shops; ducks, pigs even we saw a skinned tiger! The interest is inexhaustible; and one is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a heavy burden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, so painfully in evidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this native sea. He passes in his chair; but, like one's self, he is only a drop in the ocean. Canton is China, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set me thinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Often in India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly that is the kind of impression India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man, working, marrying, begetting and rearing children, growing middle-aged, growing old, dying and that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but in India, moon or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven. Recall, for example, Benares the fantastic buildings rising and falling like a sea, the stairs running up to infinity, the sacred river, the sages meditating on its banks, the sacrificial ablutions, the squealing temple-pipes, and, in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the body returns to the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing of the dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as something eminently religious. Death and dissolution take place in the midst of life, for death is no more a mystery than life. In the open air, in the press of men, the soul takes flight. She is no stranger, for everything is soul houses, trees, men, the elements into which the body is resolved. Death is not annihilation, it is change of form; and through all changes of form the essence persists. But now turn back to Canton. We pass the shops of the coffin-makers. We linger. But "No stop," says our guide; "better coffins soon." "Soon" is what the guide-books call the "City of the Dead." A number of little chapels; and laid in each a great lacquered coffin in which the dead man lives. I say "lives" advisedly, for there is set for his use a table and a chair, and every morning he is provided with a cup of tea. A bunch of paper, yellow and white, symbolises his money; and perhaps a couple of figures represent attendants. There he lives, quite simply and naturally as he had always lived, until the proper time and place is discovered in which he may be buried. It may be months; it may be, or rather, might have been, years; for I am told that a reforming Government has limited the time to six months. And after burial? Why, presumably he lives still. But not with the life of the universal soul. Oh, no! There have been mystics in China, but the Chinese are not mystical. What he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and, one might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family chapel of the Changs another of the sights of Canton one sees ranged round the walls hundreds of little tablets, painted green and inscribed in gold. These are the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged in three classes, those who pay most being in the first and those who pay least in the third. One can even reserve one's place first, second, or third while one is still alive, by a white tablet. You die, and the green is substituted. And so, while you yet live, you may secure your social status after death. How how British! Yes, the word is out; and I venture to record a suspicion that has long been maturing in my mind. The Chinese are not only Western; among the Western they are English. Their minds move as ours do; they are practical, sensible, reasonable. And that is why as it would seem they have more sympathy with Englishmen, if not with the English Government, than with any other Westerners. East may be East and West West, though I very much doubt it. But if there be any truth in the aphorism, we must define our terms. The East must be confined to India, and China included in the West. That as a preliminary correction. I say nothing yet about Japan. But I shall have more to say, I hope, about China.

II
Nanking
The Chinese, one is still told, cannot and will not change. On the other hand, Professor Ross writes a book entitled The Changing Chinese. And anyone may see that the Chinese educated abroad are transformed, at any rate externally, out of all recognition. In Canton I met some of the officials of the new Government; and found them, to the outward sense, pure Americans. The dress, the manners, the accent, the intellectual outfit all complete! Whether, in some mysterious sense, they remain Chinese at the core I do not presume to affirm or deny. But an external transformation so complete must imply some inward change. Foreign residents in China deplore the foreign-educated product. I have met some who almost gnash their teeth at "young China." But this seems rather hard on China. For nearly a century foreigners have been exhorting her, at the point of the bayonet, to adopt Western ways and Western ideas. And when she begins to do so, the same people turn round and accuse her of unpardonable levity and treachery to her own traditions. What do foreigners want? the Chinese may well ask. I am afraid the true answer is, that they want nothing but concessions, interest on loans, and trade profits, at all and every cost to China. But I must not deviate into politics. What suggested this train of thought was the student-guide supplied me at Nanking by the American missionary college. There he was, complete American; and, I fear I must add, boring as only Americans can bore. Still, he showed me Nanking, and Nanking is worth seeing, though the interest of it is somewhat tragic. A wall 20 to 40 feet thick, 40 to 90 feet high, and 22 miles in circuit (I take these figures on trust) encloses an area larger than that of any other Chinese city. But the greater part of this area is fields and ruins. You pass through the city gate in the train, and find yourself in the country. You alight, and you are still in the country. A carriage takes you, in time, to the squalid village, or series of villages, where are housed the 350,000 inhabitants of modern Nanking. Among them are quartered the khaki-clad soldiers of new China, the new national flag draped at the gate of their barracks. Meantime old China swarms, unregenerate, in the narrow little streets, chaffering, chattering, laughing in its rags as though there had never been a siege, a surrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps and their sores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. Ragged children run for miles beside the carriage, singing for alms; and stop at last, laughing, as though it had been a good joke to run so far and get nothing for it. One monument in all this scene of squalor arrests attention the now disused examination hall. It is a kind of rabbit-warren of tiny cells, six feet deep, four feet broad, and six feet high; row upon row of them, opening on narrow, unroofed corridors; no doors now, nor, I should suppose, at any time, for it would be impossible to breathe in these boxes if they had lids. Here, for a week or a fortnight, the candidates sat and excogitated, unable to lie down at night, sleeping, if they could, in their chairs. And no wonder if, every now and again, one of them incontinently died and was hauled out, a corpse, through a hole in the wall; or went mad and ran amuck among examiners and examinees. For centuries, as is well known, this system selected the rulers of China; and whole lives, from boyhood to extreme old age, were spent in preparing for the examinations. Now all this is abolished; and some people appear to regret it. Once more, what do the foreigners want? The old imperial city, where once the Ming dynasty reigned, was destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion. The Tartar city, where before the revolution 3000 mandarins lived on their pensions, was burnt in the siege of 1911. Of these cities nothing remains but their huge walls and gates and the ruins of their houses. The principal interest of Nanking, the so-called "Ming tombs," lies outside the walls. And the interest is not the tombs, but the road to them. It is lined by huge figures carved out of monoliths. Brutes first lions, camels, elephants, horses, a pair of each lying down and a pair standing; then human figures, military and civil officers. What they symbolise I cannot tell. They are said to guard the road. And very impressive they are in the solitude. Not so what they lead to, which is merely a hill, artificial, I suppose, piled on a foundation of stone. Once, my guide informed me, there was a door giving admission; and within, a complete house, with all its furniture, in stone. But the door is sealed, and for centuries no one has explored the interior. I suggested excavation, but was told the superstition of the inhabitants forbade it. "Besides," said my guide, "the Chinese are not curious." I wonder? Whether or no they are curious, they are certainly superstitious. Apropos, a gunboat ran aground on the Yangtse. The river was falling, and there seemed no chance of getting off for months. The officers made up their minds to it, and fraternised with the priest of a temple on the bank. The priest one day asked for a photograph of the boat. They gave him one, and he asked them to dinner. After dinner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And "would you believe it?" next day a freshet came down and set the vessel afloat. Which shows how superstitions are generated and maintained in a world so little subject to law, on the surface of it, as ours. My anecdote has brought me to the Yangtse, and it is on a river-boat that I write. Hour after hour there passes by the panorama of hills and plain, of green wheat and yellow rape, of the great flood with its flocks of wild duck, of fishers' cabins on the shore and mud-built, thatched huts, of junks with bamboo-threaded sails skimming on flat bottoms, of high cliffs with monasteries perched on perilous ledges, of changing light and shade, of burning sunset and the stars. Travelling by river is the best of all travelling smooth, slow, quiet, and soothingly contemplative. All China, I am informed by some pessimists, is in a state of anarchy, actual or latent. It may be. But it is difficult to believe it among these primitive, industrious people living and working as they have lived and worked for 4000 years. Any other country, I suppose, in such a crisis as the present, would be seething with civil war. But China? When one puts the point to the foreigner who has been talking of anarchy he says, "Ah! but the Chinese are so peaceable! They don't mind whether there's a Government or no. They just go on without it!' Exactly! That is the wonderful thing. But even that seems to annoy the foreigner. Once more, what does he want? I give it up.

III
In the Yangtse gorges
At the upper end of the gorge poetically named "Ox Liver and Horse Lungs" I watched the steamboat smoking and splashing upstream. She had traversed in a few hours the distance I, in my houseboat, had taken three days to cover; and certainly she is much more convenient and much more comfortable. That, however, is not necessarily an advantage. What may be urged with some force is that travelling by steamboat is more humane. It dispenses with human labour of a peculiarly dangerous and strenuous kind. Twenty-eight boatmen are attached to my single person. A big junk may have a crew of two hundred. When the wind is not fair they must row or tow; and towing is not like towing along the Thames ! Suddenly you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Presently they appear high above, creeping with the line along a ledge of rock. And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, "Plenty coolie fall here. Too high place." Or they are clambering over boulders, one or two told off to disentangle the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling along a greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly able to advance a step or even to hold their own. As a labour-saving machine one must welcome the advent of the steamboat, as one is constrained to welcome even that of the motor-omnibus. But from the traveller's point of view it is different. Railways and steamboats enable more of us to travel, and to travel farther, in space. But in experience he travels farthest who travels the slowest. A mediaeval student or apprentice walking through Europe on foot really did see the world. A modern tourist sees nothing but the inside of hotels. Unless, that is, he chooses to walk, or ride, or even cycle. Then it is different. Then he begins to see, as now I, from my houseboat, begin to see China. Not profoundly, of course, but somehow intimately. For instance, while my crew eat their midday rice, I stroll up to the neighbouring village. Contrary to all I have been taught to expect, I find it charming, picturesque, not so dirty after all, not so squalid, not so poor. The people, too, who, one thought, would insult or mob the foreigner, either take no notice or, if you greet them, respond in the friendliest way. They may, of course, be explaining to one another that you are a foreign devil, but nothing in their countenance or manner suggests it. The children are far better-mannered than in most European countries. They may follow you, and chatter and laugh; but at least they have not learnt to beg. Curiosity they have, and gaiety, but I detect no sign of hostility. I walk down the long street, with its shops and roomy houses far roomier and more prosperous-looking than most Indian villages and come to the temple. Smilingly I am invited to enter. There are no mysteries in Chinese religion. I begin to wonder, indeed, whether there is any religion left. For everywhere I find the temples and monasteries either deserted or turned into schools or barracks. This one is deserted. It is like a series of lumber rooms, full of dusty idols. The idols were once gaudy, brightly painted "to look like life," with beards and whiskers of real hair. But now their splendour is dimmed. The demons scowl to no purpose. To no purpose the dragons coil. No trespasser threatens the god behind his dingy curtains. In one chamber only a priest kneels before the shrine and chants out of a book while he taps a bronze vessel with a little hammer. Else, solitude, vacuity, and silence. Is he Buddhist or Taoist? I have no language in which to ask. I can only accept with mute gestures the dusty seat he offers and the cup of lukewarm tea. What has happened to religion? So far as I can make out, something like the "disestablishment of the Church." The Republic has been at work; and in the next village I see what it has been doing. For there the temple is converted into a school. Delightedly the scholars show me round. On the outside wall, for him who runs to read, are scored up long addition sums in our Western figures. Inside, the walls are hung with drawings of birds and beasts, of the human skeleton and organs, even of bacteria! There are maps of China and of the world. The children even produce in triumph an English reading-book, though I must confess they do not seem to have profited by it much. Still, they can say "cat" when you show them a picture of the creature; which is more than I could do in Chinese. And China does not change? Wait a generation! This, remember, is a tiny village in the heart of the country, more than 1000 miles from the coast. And this is happening all over the Celestial Empire, I suppose. I start to return to my boat, but have not gone a quarter of a mile before I hear a shout, and looking back find half the school following me and escorting their teacher, who speaks English. He regrets to have missed my visit; will I not return and let him show me the school? I excuse myself, and he walks with me to the boat, making what conversation he can. One remark I remember "China a good place now; China a republic." And I thought, as we exchanged cards, that he represented the Republic more essentially than the politicians whom foreigners so severely criticise. Anyhow, Republic or no, China is being transformed. And there is something other than steamboats to attest it. Which brings me back to my starting-point. On the steamboat you have no adventures. But on the houseboat you do. For instance, the other day the rope broke as we were towing up a rapid, and down we dashed, turning round and round, and annihilating in five minutes the labour of an hour. I was afraid, I confess; but the boatmen took it as a matter of course. In some way, incomprehensible to me, they got us into the bank, and, looking up, the first thing I saw was an embankment in construction the railway from Ichang to Chungking. When it is finished we shall go by train not even by steamboat and so see nothing except tunnels. Certainly, we shall not be compelled to pass the night in a small village; nor permitted to see the sunset behind these lovely hills and the moon rising over the river between the cliffs of the gorge. Nor shall we then be delayed, as I was yesterday, till the water should run down, and so tempted to walk into the country. I made for a side valley, forded a red torrent, and found myself among fields and orchards; green of mulberries, green of fruit trees, green of young corn; and above, the purple hills, with all their bony structure showing under the skin of soil. I followed a high path, greeted by the peasants I met with a charming smile and that delightful gesture whereby, instead of shaking your hand, they clasp theirs and shake them at you. I came at last to a solitary place, and, sitting down, watched the evening light on the mountains; and they seemed to be saying something. What ? "Rocks that are bones, earth that is flesh, what, what do you mean Eyeing me silently ? Streams that are voices, what, what do you say? You are pouring an ocean into a cup. Yet pour, that all it can hold May at least be water of yours." At dusk I got back to the river, and found that a wind had sprung up and the junks were trying to pass the rapid. There must have been fifty of them crowded together. They could only pass one by one; and the scene was pandemonium. The Chinese are even noisier than the Italians, and present the same appearance of confusion. But in some mysterious way an order is always getting evolved. On this occasion it seemed to be perfectly understood which boat should go first. And presently there she was, in mid-rapid, apparently not advancing an inch, the ropes held taut from a causeway a quarter of a mile off. At last the strain suddenly ceased, and she moved quickly upstream. Another followed. Then it was dark. And we had to pass the night, after all, tossing uneasily in the rough water. Soon after dawn we started again. I went across to the causeway, and watched the trackers at work twenty each on two ropes, hardly advancing a step in five minutes. Then the boat's head swung into shore, the tension ceased; something had happened. I waited half an hour or so. "Nothing doing," in the expressive American phrase. Then I went back. We had sprung a leak, and my cabin was converted into a swimming-bath. Another hour or so repairing this. Then the rope had to be brought back and attached again. At last we started for the second time, and in half an hour got safely through the hundred yards of racing waters into the bank above. At ten I got my breakfast, and we started to sail with a fair wind. It dropped. Rain came on. My crew (as always in that conjuncture) put up their awning and struck work. So here we are at i P.M., in a heavy thunder-shower, a mile from the place we tried to leave at six o'clock this morning. This is the ancient method of travelling 4000 years old, I suppose. It is very inconvenient! Oh, yes BUT!

IV
Pekin
Professor Giles tells us, no doubt truly, that the Chinese are not a religious nation. No nation, I think, ever was, unless it be the Indians. But religious impulses sweep over nations and pass away, leaving deposits rituals, priesthoods, and temples. Such an impulse once swept over China, in the form of Buddhism; and I am now visiting its deposit in the neighbourhood of Pekin. Scattered over the hills to the west of the city are a number of monastery temples. Some are deserted; some are let as villas to Europeans; some, like the one where I am staying, have still their complement of monks in this temple, I am told, some three to four hundred. But neither here nor anywhere have I seen anything that suggests vitality in the religion. I entered one of the temples yesterday at dusk and watched the monks chanting and processing round a shrine from which loomed in the shadow a gigantic bronze-gold Buddha. They began to giggle like children at the entrance of the foreigner and never took their eyes off us. Later, individual monks came running round the shrines, beating a gong as though to call the attention of the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctory praise or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen even in Italy, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the latter end of the gospel of Buddha in China. It seems better that he should sit deserted in his Indian caves than be dishonoured by such mummeries. But once it must have been otherwise. Once this religion was alive. And then it was that men chose these exquisite sites for contemplation. The Chinese Buddhist had clearly the same sense for the beauty of nature that the Italian Franciscans had. In secluded woods and copses their temples nestle, courts and terraces commanding superb views over the great plain to Pekin. The architecture is delicate and lovely; tiled roofs, green or gold or grey, cornices elaborately carved and painted in lovely harmonies of blue and green; fine trees religiously preserved; the whole building so planned and set as to enhance, not destroy, the lines and colour of the landscape. To wander from one of these temples to another, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in them at night, is to taste a form of travel impossible in Europe now, though familiar enough there in the Middle Ages. Specially delightful is it to come at dusk upon a temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkle as the wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a dark recess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces and swords that seem to threaten the impious intruder. This morning there was a festival, and the people from the country crowded into the temple. Very bright and gay they looked in their gala clothes. The women especially were charming; painted, it is true, but painted quite frankly, to better nature, not to imitate her. Their cheeks were like peaches or apples, and their dresses correspondingly gay. Why they had come did not appear; not, apparently, to worship, for their mood was anything but religious. Some, perhaps, came to carry away a little porcelain boy or girl as guarantee of a baby to come. For the Chinese, by appropriate rites, can determine the sex of a child a secret unknown as yet to the doctors of Europe! Some, perhaps, came to cure their eyes, and will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of the organs affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the sights and the country. We saw a group on their way home, climbing a steep hill for no apparent purpose except to look at the view. What English agricultural labourer would do as much? But the Chinese are not "agricultural labourers"; they are independent peasants; and a people so gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have found nowhere else in the world. The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate with Italy. First the plain, with its fresh, spring green, its dusty paths, its grey and orange villages, its cypress groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs. Then the hills, swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine and clean in colour and form. For this beauty I was unprepared. I have even read that there is no natural beauty in China. And I was unprepared for Pekin too. How can I describe it? At this time of year, seen from above, it is like an immense green park. You mount the tremendous wall, 40 feet high, 14 miles round, as broad at the top as a London street, and you look over a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge the orange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, and find the great roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running north and south, east and west, and thick, as the case may be, with dust or mud; and opening out of them a maze of streets and lanes, one-storyed houses, grey walls and roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, all goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarming pedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in this gigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley of greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only is commonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with its cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists, concession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, occupying and guarding the great north gate, and playing baseball in its precincts. There are the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, the Russians, the Japanese; and there, in a magnificent Chinese palace, are the British, girt by that famous wall of the siege on which they have characteristically written "Lest we forget!" Forget what? The one or two children who died in the Legation, and the one or two men who were killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devastation which followed when the siege was relieved? This latter, I fear, the Chinese are not likely to forget soon. Yet it would be better if they could. And better if the Europeans could remember much that they forget could remember that they forced their presence and the trade on China against her will; that their treaties were extorted by force, and their loans imposed by force, since they exacted from China what are ironically called "indemnities" which she could not pay except by borrowing from those who were robbing her. If Europeans could remember and realise these facts they would perhaps cease to complain that China continues to evade their demands by the only weapon of the weak cunning. When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, and picked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to enter into social relations with you merely because you pick him up and, retaining his property, propose that you should now be friends and begin to do business. The obliquity of vision of the European residents on all these .points is extraordinary. They cannot see that wrong has been done, and that wrong engenders wrong. They repeat comfortable formulae about the duplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge them with dishonesty at the very moment that they are dismembering their country; they attach intolerable conditions to their loans, and then complain if their victims attempt to find accommodation elsewhere. Of all the Powers the United States alone have shown some generosity and fairness, and they are reaping their reward in the confidence of Young China. The Americans had the intelligence to devote some part of the excessive indemnity they exacted after the Boxer riots to educating Chinese students in America. Hundreds of these young men are now returned to China, with the friendliest feeling to America, and, naturally, anxious to develop political and commercial relations with her rather than with other Powers. British trade may suffer because British policy has been less generous. But British trade, I suppose, would suffer in any case. For the British continue to maintain their ignorance and contempt of China and all things Chinese, while Germans and Japanese are travelling and studying indefatigably all over the country. "We see too much of things Chinese !" was the amazing remark made to me by a business man in Shanghai. Too much! They see nothing at all, and want to see nothing. They live in the treaty ports, dine, dance, play tennis, race. China is in birth-throes, and they know and care nothing. A future in China is hardly for them.

V
The Englishman abroad
To write from China about the Englishman may seem an odd choice. But to see him abroad is to see him afresh. At home he is the air one breathes; one is unaware of his qualities. Against a background of other races you suddenly perceive him, and can estimate him fallaciously or no as you estimate foreigners. So seen, the Englishman appears as the eternal schoolboy. I mean no insult; I mean to express his qualities as well as his defects. He has the pluck, the zest, the sense of fair play, the public spirit of our great schools. He has also their narrowness and their levity. Enter his office, and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming, skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with an air of playing at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of an hour he will have asked you round to the club, and offered you a whisky and soda. Dine with him, and the talk will turn on golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, and the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definite questions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise and intelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will founder resent-fully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissing you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customs of the country in which he lives, he will know and care nothing, except so far as they may touch his affairs. He will never, if he can help it, leave the limits of the foreign settlement. Physically he oscillates between his home, his office, the club, and the racecourse; mentally, between his business and sport. On all general topics his opinions are second or third hand. They are the ghosts of old prejudices imported years ago from England, or taken up unexamined from the English community abroad. And these opinions pass from hand to hand till they are as similar as pebbles on the shore. In an hour or so you will have acquired the whole stock of ideas current in the foreign community throughout a continent. Your only hope of new light is in particular instances and illustrations. And these, of course, may be had for the asking. But the Englishman abroad in some points is the Englishman at his best. For he is or has been a pioneer, at any rate in China. And pioneering brings out his most characteristic qualities. He loves to decide everything on his own judgment, on the spur of the moment, directly on the immediate fact, and in disregard of remoter contingencies and possibilities. He needs adventure to bring out his powers, and only really takes to business when business is something of a "lark." To combine the functions of a trader with those of an explorer, a soldier, and a diplomat is what he really enjoys. So, all over the world, he opens the ways, and others come in to reap the fruit of his labours. This is true in things intellectual as in things practical. In science, too, he is a pioneer. Modern archaeology was founded by English travellers. Darwin and Wallace and Galton in their youth pursued adventure as much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, when laboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is apt to retire and leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, " larks" into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is freeliving, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact, routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them. The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to be lived before he will consent to live it. The Englishman just lives ahead, not aware that there is a problem; or convinced that, if there is one, it will only be solved "by walking." The philosopher proceeds from the abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with the concrete, and may or, more probably, may not arrive at the abstract. No general rules are of any use to him except such as he may have elaborated for himself out of his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education. For education teaches how to think in general, and that isn't what he wants or believes in. So, when he gets into affairs, he discards all his training and starts again at the beginning, learning to think, if he ever does learn it, over his own particular job. And his own way, he opines, must be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt and even indignation for individuals or nations who are moved by "ideas." At this moment his annoyance with the leaders of "Young China" is provoked largely by the fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how a nation should be governed and organised, instead of starting with the particularities of their own society, and trying to mend it piece by piece and from hand to mouth. Before they make a constitution, he thinks, they ought to make roads; and before they draw up codes, to extirpate consumption. The conclusion lies near at hand, and I have heard it drawn "What they want is a few centuries of British rule." And, indeed, it is curious how constantly the Englishman abroad is opposed, in the case of other nations, to all the institutions and principles he is supposed to be proud of at home. Partly, no doubt, this is due to his secret or avowed belief that the whole world ought to be governed despotically by the English. But partly it is because he does not believe that the results the English have achieved can be achieved in any other way than theirs. They arrived at them without intention or foresight, by a series of detached steps, each taken without prescience of the one that would follow. So, and so only? can other nations arrive at them. He does not believe in short cuts, nor in learning by the experience of others. And so the watchwords "Liberty," "Justice," "Constitution," so dear to him at home, leave him cold abroad. Or, rather, they make him very warm, but warm not with zeal, but with irritation. Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's enthusiasms. He cannot endure the profession that a man is moved by high motives. His annoyance, for example, with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to the fact that he supports the importation into China of Indian opium. Very commonly he does not. But the movement is an "agitation" (dreadful word!). It is "got up" by missionaries. It purports to be based on moral grounds, and he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is not himself moved by moral considerations. Almost invariably he is. But he will never admit it for himself, and he deeply suspects it in others. The words "hypocrite," "humbug," "sentimentalist" spring readily to his lips. But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you will find, often enough, that he has arrived at the same conclusion as the "sentimentalist" only, of course, for quite different reasons ! For intellect he has little use, except so far as it issues in practical results. He will forgive a man for being intelligent if he makes a fortune, but hardly otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuous admiration for a definite, intellectual accomplishment which he knows it is hard to acquire and is not sure he could acquire himself. That, for instance, is his attitude to those who know Chinese. A "sinologue," he will tell you, must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give so much time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he is proud of the sinologue as the public school is proud of a boy so clever as to verge upon insanity, or a village is proud of the village idiot. Something of the same feeling, I sometimes think, underlies his respect for Shakspere. "If you want that kind of thing," he seems to say to the foreigner, "and it's the kind of thing you would want, we can do it, you see, better than you can! ' So with art. He is never a connoisseur, but he is often a collector. Partly, no doubt, because there is money in it, but that is a secondary consideration. Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all about it, except its aesthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the flair of the dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any distinction between them. But these, from his point of view, are trifles. What matters it that he has pre-eminently the virtues of active life. He is fair-minded, and this, oddly, in spite of his difficulty in seeing another man's point of view. When he does see it he respects it. Whereas nimbler-witted nations see it only to circumvent and cheat it. He is honest; as honest, at least, as the conditions of modern business permit. He hates bad work, even when, for the moment, bad work pays. He hates skimping and sparing. And these qualities of his make it hard for him to compete with rivals less scrupulous and less generous. He is kind-hearted much more so than he cares to admit. And at the bottom of all his qualities he has the sense of duty. He will shoulder loyally all the obligations he has undertaken to his country, to his family, to his employer, to his employees. The sense of duty, indeed, one might say with truth, is his religion. For on the rare occasions on which he can be persuaded to broach such themes you will find, I think, at the bottom of his mind that what he believes in is Something, somehow, somewhere, in the universe, which helps him, and which he is helping, when he does right. There must, he feels, be some sense in life. And what sense would there be if duty were nonsense? Poets, artists, philosophers can never be at home with the Englishman. His qualities and his defects alike are alien to them. In his company they live as in prison, for it is not an air in which wings can soar. But for solid walking on the ground he has not his equal. The phrase "Solvitur ambulando" must surely have been coined for him. And no doubt on his road he has passed, and will pass again, the wrecks of many a flying-machine.

VI
China in transition
The Chinese Revolution has proceeded, so far, with less disturbance and bloodshed than any great revolution known to history. There has been little serious fighting and little serious disorder; nothing comparable to that which accompanied, for instance, the French Revolution of 1789. And this, no doubt, is due to the fact that the Chinese are alone among nations of the earth in detesting violence and cultivating reason. Their instinct is always to compromise and save everybody's face. And this is the main reason why Westerners despise them. The Chinese, they aver, have "no guts." And when hard pressed as to the policy of the Western Powers in China, they will sometimes quite frankly confess that they consider the West has benefited China by teaching her the use of force. That this should be the main contribution of Christian to Pagan civilisation is one of the ironies of history. But it is part of the greater irony which gave the Christian faith to precisely those nations whose fundamental instincts and convictions were and are in radical antagonism to its teaching. Though, however, it is broadly true that the Chinese have relied on reason and justice in a way and to a degree which is inconceivable in the West, they have not been without their share of original sin. Violence, anarchy, and corruption have played a part in their history, though a less part than in the history of most countries. And these forces have been specially evident in that department to which Westerners are apt to pay the greatest attention in the department of government. Government has always been less important hi China than in the Western world; it has always been rudimentary in its organisation; and for centuries it has been incompetent and corrupt. Of this corruption Westerners, it is true, make more than they fairly should. China is no more corrupt (to say the least) than the United States, or Italy, or France, or than England was in the eighteenth century. And much that is called corruption is recognised and established "squeeze," necessary, and understood to be necessary, to supplement the inadequate salaries of officials. A Chinese official is corrupt much as Lord Chancellor Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought properly to be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. Moreover, the people have always had their remedy. When the recognised "squeeze" is exceeded, they protest by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the most unfavourable view, may be described as corruption tempered by anarchy. And this system, it is admitted, still prevails after the Revolution. Clearly, indeed, it cannot be extirpated until officials are properly paid; and China is not in a position to pay for any reform while the Powers are
drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources by that particular form of robbery called by diplomatists "indemnity." The new officials, then, are "corrupt" as the old ones were; and they are something more. They are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full of ideas as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even more divorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign education seems to make a cut right across a Chinaman's life. He returns with a new head; and his head never gets into normal relations with his heart. That, I believe, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with enormous rapidity and freedom unchecked by the flywheel of traditional feelings. And it is Jacobinism that accounts for the extraordinary vigour of the campaign against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to maintain that this campaign is not serious. But that is because Europeans simply cannot conceive that any body of men should be in as deadly earnest about a moral issue as are the representatives of Young China. The anti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. Smokers are flogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; and farmers who resist are shot down. The other day in Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventy farmers who had protested against the destruction of their crops were locked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of seventy-six, falsely accused of growing poppy, was fined 500 dollars, and when he refused to pay was flogged to death by the orders of a young official of twenty-two. Stories of this kind come in from every part of the country; and though this or that story may be untrue or exaggerated, there can be no doubt about the general state of affairs. The officials are putting down opium with a vigour and a determination which it is inconceivable should ever be applied in the West to the traffic in alcohol. But in doing so they are showing a ruthlessness which does not seem to be native to the Chinese, and which perhaps is to be accounted for by what I have called Jacobinism, resulting from the effects of a Western education that has been unable to penetrate harmoniously the complicated structure of Chinese character. The anti-opium campaign is one example of the way in which the Revolution has elicited and intensified violence in this peace-loving people. Another example is the use of assassination. This has been an accompaniment of all great revolutions. It took the form of "proscriptions" in Rome, of the revolutionary tribunals in France. In China it is by comparison a negligible factor; but it exists. Two months ago a prominent leader of the southern party was assassinated; and popular suspicion traces the murder to high Government officials, and even to the President himself. The other day a southern general was killed by a bomb. For the manufacture of bombs is one of the things China has learned from the Christian West; and the President lives in constant terror of this form of murder. China, it will be seen, does not altogether escape the violence that accompanies all revolutions. Nor does she altogether escape the anarchy. Anarchy, indeed, that is a simple strike against authority, may be said to be part of the Chinese system. It is the way they have always enforced their notions of justice. A curious example has been recently offered by the students of the Pekin University. For various reasons good or bad they have objected to the conduct of their Chancellor. After ineffectual protests, they called upon him in large numbers with his resignation written out, and requested him to sign it. He refused, whereupon they remarked that they would call again the next day with revolvers; and in the interval he saw wisdom and signed. Last week there was a similar episode. The new Chancellor proved as unpalatable as his predecessor. The students once more presented themselves with his resignation written out. He refused to resign, and, as the students aver, scurrilously abused them. They proceeded to the Minister of Education, who refused to see them. Thereupon they camped out in his courtyard, and stayed all day and all night, sending a message to the professors dated "from under the trees of the Education Office," to explain that they were unfortunately unable to attend lectures. This Chancellor, too, it would seem, has seen wisdom and resigned. How strange it all seems to Western eyes! A country, we should suppose, where such things occur, is incapable of organisation. But it is certain that we are wrong. Our notion is that everything must be done by authority, and that unless authority is maintained there will be anarchy. The Chinese notion is that authority is there to carry out what the people recognise to be common sense and justice; if it does otherwise, it must be resisted; and if it disappears life will still go on as it is going on now in the greater part of China on the basis of the traditional and essentially reasonable routine. Almost certainly the students of the University had justice on their side; otherwise such action would not be taken; and when they get justice they will be more docile and orderly than our own undergraduates at home. Another thing surprising to European observers is the apparent belief of the Chinese in verbal remonstrance. Under the present regime officials and public men are allowed the free use of the telegraph. The consequence is that telegrams of advice, admonition, approval, blame, fear, hope, doubt pour in daily to the Government from civil and military governors, from members of Parliament and party leaders. In the paper to-day, for example, is a telegram from the Governors of seventeen provinces addressed to the National Assembly. It begins as follows: "To the President, the Cabinet, the Tsan Yi Yuan, the Chung Yi Yuan, and the Press Association, When the revolution took place at Wuchang, the various societies and groups responded, and when the Republic was inaugurated the troops raised among these bodies were gradually disbanded. For fear that, being driven by hunger, these disbanded soldiers would become a menace to the place, the various societies and groups have established a society at Shanghai called the Citizens' Progressive Society, to promote the means of livelihood for the people, and the advancement of society, and the establishment has been registered in the offices of the Tutuhs of the provinces." Then follows a statement of the "six dangers" to which the country is exposed, an appeal to the Assembly to act more reasonably and competently, and then the following peroration: "The declarations of us, Yuan-hung and others, are still there, our wounds have not yet been fully recovered, and should the sea and ocean be dried up, our original hearts will not be changed. We will protect the Republic with our sinews and blood of brass and iron, we will take the lead of the province, and be their backbone, and we will not allow the revival of the monarchy and the suppression of the powers of the people. Let Heaven and earth be witness to our words. You gentlemen are pillars of the political parties, or the representatives of the people, and you should unite together and not become inconsistent. You first determined that the Loan is necessary, but such opinion is now changed, and you now reject the Loan. Can the ice be changed into red coal in your hearts? Thus even those who love and admire you will not be able to defend your position. However, if you have any extraordinary plan or suggestion to save the present situation, you can show it to us." Some of the strange effect produced by this document is due, no doubt, to translation. But it, like the many others of the kind I have read, seems to indicate what is at the root of the Chinese attitude to life a belief in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said enough to show that this attitude does not exclude the use of violence; but I feel sure that it limits it far more than it has ever been limited in Europe. Even in time of revolution the Chinese are peaceable and orderly to an extent unknown and almost unbelievable in the West. And the one thing the West is teaching them and priding itself on teaching them is the absurdity of this attitude. Well, one day it is the West that will repent because China has learnt the lesson too well.

VII
A sacred mountain
It was midnight when the train set us down at Taian-fu. The moon was full. We passed across fields, through deserted alleys where sleepers lay naked on the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by halls and pavilions, by shimmering, tree-shadowed spaces, up and down steps, and into a court where cypresses grew. We set up our beds in a veranda, and woke to see leaves against the morning sky. We explored the vast temple and its monuments iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tablet of the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stones inscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after hall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling walls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent of Tai Shan, the most sacred mountain in China, the most frequented, perhaps, in the world. There, according to tradition, legendary emperors worshipped God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, and sighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. The great Chin-Shih-Huang was there in the third century B.C. Chien Lung in the eighteenth century covered it with inscriptions. And millions of humble pilgrims for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep and narrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no detours, but follows straight up the bed of a stream, and the greater part of the five thousand feet is ascended by stone steps. A great ladder of eighteen flights climbs the last ravine, and to see it from below, sinuously mounting the precipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, is enough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least were glad to be chaired some part of the way. A wonderful way! On the lower slopes it passes from portal to portal, from temple to temple. Meadows shaded with aspen and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool to green pool. Higher up are scattered pines. Else the rocks are bare bare, but very beautiful, with that significance of form which I have found everywhere in the mountains in China. To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. All the way up the rocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctity of the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially, by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. They are models, one is told, of caligraphy as well as of literary composition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not be the one without the other. The very names of favourite spots are poems in themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phoenixes"; another "the fountain of the white cranes." A rock is called " the tower of the quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of the clouds." More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a rock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles," because there some mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarly Chinese! It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple that crowns it, dedicated to Yti Huang, the "Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; and his image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But we did not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disc, straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the river, five thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim grey levels. Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after range of lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, with half a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full in view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the great Tang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to drink and make verses. They are still known to tradition as the "six idlers of the bamboo grove"; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upon their symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours passed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There are temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself ; to the Lady of the mountain, Pi-hsia-yuen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius " goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the sky," one inscription calls her and the kindly mother who gives children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to the Cloud-compeller: to many others. And in all this, is there no room for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or the spirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that some men adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor is he a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions set up by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run as follows: "Without labour, oh Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest things." "Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world." "In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord to achieve great works." These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are as religious as anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of the worshippers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of worshippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and what lies behind it for the religion of a Wordsworth they seem to be pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is loveliest all go to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in all the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature? "Great God, I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have been wrung from him had he been born in China. And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of China "pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the East assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true and is far from being true in any unqualified sense would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western civilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen, all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent aesthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of disease of the Soul. It implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the Chinese have written poems in exquisite calligraphy, they will cover the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of temples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in the landscape, they will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they will because they have done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, our medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of civilising China. Would that China could civilise the West!

Dickinson, G. Lowes. An essay on the civilisations of India, China & Japan [ID D27979].
Pt. II
China
When I landed in China, indeed, when I first saw the Mongolian type at Darjeeling, I was aware of a feeling as though an oppressive cloud had lifted. I realised then how strange and how tragic India had been to me, how utterly alien I had felt there. The brooding over the whole country of a spirit not merely religious, but religious in a sense so remote from anything religion has meant in the West; the tremendous forces antagonistic to man marching over the land, famine, plague, malaria, drought, flood; the handful of English camped there, fighting these things with so little help and so little hope; the gulf between rulers and ruled; the spirit of revolt, which yet seemed to have in it no real capacity or promise; all these things, felt sub-consciously even more than consciously, had lain like a nightmare upon me, clouding all the interest and all the pleasure of my travels. India was sublime, but it was terrible. China, on the other hand, was human. At the first sight of these ugly, cheery, vigorous people I loved them. Their gaiety, as of children, their friendliness, their profound humanity, struck me from the first and remained with me to the last. I can imagine no greater contrast than that between their character, their institutions, their habits, and those of the Indians. The Chinese are, and always have been, profoundly secular, as the Indians are, and always have been, profoundly religious. It is true, of course, that the Chinese have had religion, as the Europeans have had it; Buddhism came to them from India as Christianity came to us from Judaea, and Taoism was an indigenous growth. They have had also saints and mystics, as Europe has had them. But Buddhism and Taoism have never suited the Chinese character any more than Christianity has suited the European. Both Buddhism and Taoism quickly degenerated to mere superstition, systems of magic, imaginary means to obtain material ends. It was, and is, Confucianism with its rationalism, its scepticism, its stress on conduct, that expresses the Chinese spirit. Over India gleam the stars; over China the sun shines. Mankind is the centre of the Chinese universe, as the Absolute is the centre of the Indian. Confucianism may easily be translated into terms of Western positivism ; it could never be translated into terms of Hinduism. The religion of the mass of the Chinese has always been mere superstition, whereas in India, as I have said, it appears to be true that the superstition symbolises a real spiritualism. Ancestor worship is the centre of the Chinese system; but that, perhaps, ought not to be called worship at all. It is rather commemoration, and as such all educated Chinamen regard it. It is thus rather a social than a religious institution, and serves to bind the family together rather than to foster a spiritual life. Its bearing on life is a bearing on conduct, and it is but an intensified form of the feeling which, even in the West, leads a man of distinguished family to feel that he must try to be worthy of his ancestors. What distinguishes the Chinese attitude in this matter from that of the modern West is its backward rather than its forward look. Probably only the educated. To the mass, I expect, it is really "worship," in the sense that they expect to receive benefits from the spirits to whom they offer. We look to our descendants, they to their forebears. And the discrediting of Confucianism under the new regime is due to its supposed conservatism rather than to any idea that it is irrational and superstitious. In this matter of religion the Chinese have only to throw over their superstition and over the educated superstition never had any hold and they will be immediately in line with the West. In India, as we saw, things are far otherwise. For what is most characteristic and profound in the Indian spirit is antagonistic to and irreconcilable with rationalism and science. This, which I call the secularism of the Chinese attitude to life, is also expressed in their art. The art of India, in my judgment, has, as art, little or no value (this, of course, is a highly controversial opinion), but it is tremendously significant of the spiritual life of India. It is all symbolic, and it is symbolic of those grandiose abstractions in which the Indian mind delights. It expresses an over-world of spiritual forces of which the world of sense is a shadowy and illusory manifestation. It does not interpret, it negates the ordinary life and the ordinary consciousness. That is why it is so disquieting, so terrible, so monstrous to the western spirit. But the art of China is through and through human. It is the kind of art that Romans, too, or Englishmen might have produced, if they had been gifted with aesthetic genius ; the art of reasonable concrete-minded men, with a keen sensitiveness to the pathos and gaiety of human life, and the beauty and grandeur of nature. It is characteristic of Chinese landscape-painting that it should include representation of the human observer. Their artists do not, it is true, treat nature as a mere background to human life, as, for example, the great Venetian artists do; but neither do they treat it as the vehicle of tremendous supernatural forces, which is the spirit of Indian art. They treat it as a beautiful object, itself real, contemplated by a sane and sensitive human spirit. So with their poetry. It is of all poetry I know the most human and the least symbolic or romantic. It contemplates life just as it presents itself, without any veil of ideas, any rhetoric or sentiment; it simply clears away the obstruction which habit has built up between us and the beauty of things, and leaves that, showing in its own nature, revealed but not recreated. Chinese art and Chinese poetry have the spirit of Wordsworth and of the most modern literary movement in France. Their art is a realism, though not an actualism; a vision of what this life is as seen by those who can see it, not of some other world behind or above or outside it. The fundamental attitude of the Chinese towards life is thus, in my judgment, and always has been, that of the most modern West, nearer to us now than to our mediaeval ancestors, infinitely nearer to us than India. And the same is true, at bottom, of social institutions. China, so far as I know, is the only country whose civilisation has been for centuries, if not always, democratic. There has never been caste in China, there has been, I think, less even of class than in most countries. That equality of opportunity which is the essence of democracy, and which has been denied by every other civilisation, has been affirmed by China in theory, and to a great extent in practice, from the date at which her written annals begin. There has never been a priestly caste, there has never been a governing caste. The rich, of course, have necessarily had advantages in the race as they have with us, but the barrier between rich and poor has never been as great as it is in the modern West, and it has been at least as easy, probably easier, to rise from bottom to top. And this social fact is reflected in the bearing and manners of the Chinese. I have never been in a country where the common people are at once so selfrespecting, so independent, and so courteous. In America, for example, everybody appears to think it necessary to assure you that they are as good as you are by behaving rudely to you. Nothing of the kind obtains in China, for it would never occur to them that they are not as good. There is none of this selfconscious assertion of their rights; still less is there anything of that obsequiousness which one meets everywhere in India. The Chinese man is the democratic man. He is already, so far as his attitude to himself and to his fellows is concerned, what democrats hope the western man may become. His attitude is democratic, just as it is positive and secular. And this underlying and fundamental likeness to the man of the modern West is, in my judgment, far more important and significant than the superficial differences which are usually dwelt upon by western travellers and residents. There is one other important point in which China contrasts with India. China has been and remains politically independent and united. This statement needs some qualification, but it is essentially true. The Tartars and the Manchus have conquered China, but they have imposed on her nothing but a dynasty. They have adopted completely the manners, customs, ideas of the conquered. Of China it is truer even than of Greece that Capta Jerum victorem cepit. Not so India. The Mahometans, in spite of conversions, remain Mahometans, different in religion, different in sentiment, different in social institutions, from the Hindus. Nothing yet has brought the two communities into harmony; and their antagonism is still, and perhaps increasingly, an important factor in the Indian situation. Again, India, until the British conquest, has never been welded into a political unity. The largest native empires, like that of Asoka, the largest alien ones, like that of the Moguls, never included the whole peninsula. And, in addition, there have been always the vertical divisions of caste. But China, except for short periods, has been for two thousand years at least under one head; and though the provinces have had a very large measure of autonomy, they have been administered by officials appointed by the Central Government, and have recognised its existence by the payment of taxes. The various dialects of China, though unintelligible one to another, are varieties of the same language; and the common script has always given to the educated a common medium of communication, much as Latin gave it to mediaeval Europe. China has been a political unity, even though a loose one; and though this unity has not given rise to a strong national feeling, there is in China a basis for such feeling more real and more powerful than anything that seems to exist in India. For this reason, among others, China would not be so easy to conquer as India was, nor so easy to govern by any race that did not assimilate itself to Chinese customs and standards. I see, then, in China, so far as the most fundamental conditions are concerned, a far greater similarity to the modern West than to India. But, of course, points of similarity to India and of difference from the West do strike the eye. Like India, but unlike western Europe, China is predominantly agricultural, and the bulk of her people are peasants. Like India, and unlike the West, indeed to a much greater degree than India, she is untouched by industrialism. The era of railways, of mines, of factories, is but just beginning, and the immense resources of the country have hardly been tapped. Like India, and unlike the modern West, the family is the cardinal point on which all her social life and a great part of her government turns. And this family solidarity, while it fulfils many of the functions which in the West have to be undertaken by Government, is a very serious obstacle to the introduction of western forms of business for example, the joint-stock company. Still, these differences, important as they are, are comparatively superficial; and it would, I believe, for good or for evil, be much easier to westernise China than it would be to westernise India. The Chinese would only have to apply their attitude to life in a new way; but the Indians would have to transform theirs. The Chinese are already secular, practical, matter of fact ; they require, to westernise them, only a new technique. But the Indians require a new spirit. Although, however, as I have suggested, it would be easier to westernise China than to westernise India, the process of westernisation has not as yet gone so far in the one country as in the other. Effective contact between Europe and China dates only from the opium war.1 From that date the activities of the western powers in China have been continuous, discreditable, and indefensible. But though the powers have robbed China, have bullied her, have interfered with her independence and sovereign rights, have imposed upon her teaching which she did not want and trade which she thought disastrous and immoral, they have so far made no serious attempt to conquer and annex her. The servitude of China is financial; but the history of Egypt shows how easily financial may pass into political control. It may be so with China; the next few months or years will decide. But meantime and up to now China is independent. The activities, commercial and other, of the foreigners have been. In spite of Mr. Morse's apologies, I consider this to be the proper description of that war, mostly confined to the treaty ports. And though these are now very numerous and include a number of cities far inland on the Yang-tze, they are of course but isolated points in the vast territory of China. And even in these ports the western spirit has hardly touched even the externals of Chinese life. The foreign communities build their own cities outside the native city ; there they administer themselves, lead their own life as in Europe, their life of business and of sport, and never, if they can help it, enter the native city or any part of the interior of China. The British firms, who were first in the field, did and still do their business through themedium of Chinese merchants, and have no direct relation with their customers in the country. They never stir from the treaty ports, and they know nothing and care nothing about Chinese conditions except so far as these may react upon their business. "We see too much of things Chinese here," the agent of a British firm said to me, when I made some comment on the Chinese city. And the sentiment, I believe, is pretty general among Europeans in China. While these conditions prevailed there was nothing in the presence of the foreign traders which need have led to any radical change in Chinese institutions or ideas. But the conditions are now rapidly changing. The new enterprise, especially of Germans and Japanese, is sending bagmen acquainted with the language all over the interior of China. Oil and cigarettes are the pioneers of this commercial invasion. The skin-disease of advertisement is beginning to disfigure the face of the country, and German art nouveau appears in the stations of the railway from Tsinan-fu to Pekin. The grip of the West has begun to close, and will more and more be felt in the general dissemination of ugliness, meanness, and insincerity throughout the empire. More important, however, I think, than commercial enterprise in disturbing the secular tradition of China has been missionary activity. I did not, indeed, gather, and I do not believe, that China is in process of Christianisation or will ever be Christianised, though I have met Chinese Christians and, I think, sincere ones. But the missionaries have been the pioneers of western education, and it is western education that has made the revolution. All the new leaders have been educated, first at missionary schools and colleges in China, then abroad, mainly in Japan and the United States. And this education has produced a new and surprising type of Chinese. Nothing in my travels has struck and perplexed me more than this. China has always been regarded as the type of the unchanging. If ever there was a stable national character, a stable national mentality, it might have been supposed that it would be there, in a homogeneous people of the same stock, never conquered, or at least never affected in race, in manners, in laws, in language, by conquest; never interrupted or disturbed for centuries in their traditional ideas and their traditional manner of life. Here, surely, if anywhere, sudden revolution was impossible. Here change, if it came at all, would come by slow degrees, fighting its way against an immense and profound psychological immobility. But what happens in fact ? A Chinese taken as a boy and brought up in a missionary school, then transferred during the impressionable period of life to a foreign country to complete his education, returns to China transformed through and through. There is no vestige of conservatism left in him. He has adopted not only the manners, the dress, the speech, the very intonation of a foreign country; he has adopted its whole mental and moral outfit. There is nothing in China he does not want to transform, nothing he does not believe he can transform. This is particularly true of the Chinese educated in America. I met in Canton some of the chief officials of the revolutionary government, the chief justice, the foreign secretary and others. I was astounded. They were exactly like American undergraduates. Their whole mentality, so far as I could see, was American. They had not only the manners, the dress, the speech; they had the confidence, the light-heartedness, the easy and disconcerting superficiality. On the other hand, those educated in England were comparatively critical, sober, and cautious. Those educated in Japan, I was informed, had the revolutionary elan of that country; and when the second revolution broke out, the students that were in Japan crowded over en masse to join the revolutionary troops. The one student I met from Germany looked and spoke like a German. This conversion may, of course, be superficial. There may be underlying it an unchanged basis of Chinese character. But if so, it is the superficial part that is active in China. It is these young men that have made the revolution and established the Republic ; that are doing all they can to sweep away the old China, root and branch, and build up there a reproduction of America. There is nothing, I think, which they would not alter if they could, from the streets of Canton to the family system, from the costume of a policeman to the national religion. This attitude of theirs exasperates the foreigners, who seem as much disgusted and alarmed at the actual appearance of a new China as they used to be critical and censorious of the old one. But it is, after all, very natural. These young men find their country a prey to foreign aggression. They see that the only way to meet the foreigners is to meet them on their own ground, and they have before them the triumphantly successful example of Japan. It must, however, be admitted that there has not appeared in China any group of men of the capacity and power of the statesmen who piloted Japan into the new era. The young men have ideas in plenty, but they have no experience, and, it would seem, no practical capacity. Too often they have not character. For it is, I fear, indisputable, as it is undisputed, that many of the new officials and of the new legislators are corrupt as well as incompetent. Certainly it is remarkable and, so far as my knowledge of history goes, unique that in a great revolution in a nation of four hundred millions one man only should emerge with the capacity for government; and Yuan Shih Kai, I believe, will not appear to history to be more than an astute and tenacious opportunist. The recent revolution has exposed the incapacity and the lack of character of the southern leaders. And, however sympathetic one may be with the revolutionists, the question forces itself upon one whether we have not here another demonstration that old bottles will not hold new wine; that ideas derived from an alien civilisation may transform the brain, but cannot penetrate the soul of a different race. I suspect, at any rate, that in young China there is some dislocation between their convictions and their character, which makes them ineffective for action towards ends in which they genuinely believe. On the other hand, the problem before the republican revolutionaries is a vast one, and one which no country has solved without years of confusion and bloodshed. European critics are apt to forget this. It took France a century of successive revolutions and reactions before the Republic was definitely established. Two revolutions and a series of civil wars were necessary to get rid of the Stuarts in England. The surprising thing in China is that the dynasty has disappeared with so little effort and so little regret. For among all the possibilities of the future, the one which is universally repudiated is a Manchu restoration. Still, to get rid of the Manchus is one thing, to set up a new government is another. The breach of continuity has been complete, as complete as in revolutionary France. Nothing in Chinese history or tradition has prepared them for a representative republic, and it is quite possible that it is not under a republic that the new era, which in any case is inevitable, will be best inaugurated and furthered. At present, however, it must be admitted that republican institutions have not been given a fair chance. That, I believe, has been the weakness of the President's policy. Instead of endeavouring to gain the confidence of all parties in the National Assembly, and to get all to work together for the common good, he seems to have set out from the beginning to discredit the Assembly. When I was in Pekin the two Houses were meeting day after day and doing no business because a quorum could not be obtained; and this was due to the deliberate abstension of the Chin-Pu-Tang party, which is admittedly the party of the President, and which, no doubt, was in his pay. True, serious differences of policy had developed between him and the southern party. He had contracted the quintuple loan over the head of the Assembly in defiance of their protest and in violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitution. But the fact that he did so is precisely an example of what I should call his bad statesmanship. What is worse, he was believed to be privy to the assassination of Sung, the southern leader; and as the facts have never been allowed to come out in Court, he must continue to lie under that suspicion. If the National Assembly hitherto has been impotent and futile, the fault, I believe, lies rather with the President than with them.1 But these, after all, are. Since this was written, the President has dissolved all elective bodies in China, and made himself an absolute dictator, transitory conditions. The fundamental fact is that the revolution was accomplished by a handful of men educated in foreign customs and foreign ideas, and working with a mercenary army (for it is clear that the troops who have taken part on either side are mercenaries who transfer their allegiance from one party to the other according as they are paid). There is no national movement in China, for there is no Chinese nation, in the sense that there is an English or a French or a German nation. The Chinese, as I have already pointed out, though they have never been divided as India has, have never been united by a common political consciousness. Their social organisation has rested not on the central government, but on the family and the village. Government has been a mechanism imposed from above to make roads and canals, to do justice, and to collect taxes. And the comparative isolation of China for many centuries, the absence of wars waged for very existence, such as have built up the European system, prevented the formation of national sentiment by outside pressure. The Chinese have been the most peaceable, and, in many respects, the most civilised people the world has seen. They have not had, because they have not needed, a national self-consciousness, and they cannot improvise one in a moment. There can be no doubt, I imagine, that the mass of the people do not know what the revolution is about; and that they welcomed it less because it got rid of the Manchus than because it relieved them for a time from the payment of taxes. It does not, however, follow, as European critics often imply, that China can never acquire a political sense or work a constitution. Given education, a press, better means of communication, and in a generation the change might be effected. The Chinese, as experience has now shown, are the most educable of people; and this, no doubt, applies to the masses no less than to the handful who have hitherto had the opportunity. And the education has begun. In elementary schools modern subjects are beginning to be taught; geography, history, elementary science, the existence, the character, and the power of other nations. I myself, visiting a school in a small village on the Upper Yangtze, far from all foreign influence, found an English-speaking teacher who had been educated by missionaries, an English spelling and reading book, maps of China and of the world, and drawings of bacteria. These things must be taking effect. And those who seem still to think that the revolution in China is a mere flash in the pan, implying no radical transformation, are likely before many years have passed to be very much astonished. What may happen politically, whether the government be republican or monarchical, on the American or the French or the German model, is comparatively unimportant. The important thing is that the educational process has begun, the education both of events and of schooling ; and that to education the Chinese are eminently responsive. For good and for evil the old China is a thing of the past. The penetration by western ideas has begun, and whether it go faster or slower it will go far and go to the end.

Tao Xingzhi studiert Politische Wissenschaften an der University of Illinois, dann am Teachers College, Columbia University unter John Dewey, Paul Monroe und William Kilpatrick.

M.M. [Pound, Ezra]. The words of Ming Mao [ID D29089].
Mr. Loftus Hare's article on Yang-Chu, in the last issue of The Egoist, is most interesting, but let me add here Ming-Mao's reply to Yang Chu, especially to the remarks on Confuciuas, as follows :
Yang-Chu says that Kung-fu-tse had never a day's joy in all his life, yet we read that the Master Kung was once rapt into three days' revery, or as the Taoists say, ecstasy by the mere sound of certain beautiful music. To say that a man so capable of aesthetic pleasure has never a day's joy, is manifest folly.
As for Yang and his relation to Egoism, it was Kung who gave true instruction, seeing that he taught that a man's joy should rest in the dignity of his own mind and not in the shilly-shally of circumstance. Thus he died serene though it were among fishermen.
As for Ch'ieh and Chow, their pleasures depended on their having been born to imperial position, their luxury was bestowed upon them, how shall hereditary emperors who are born with such opportunity for revels be set up as examples for men of common fortune, who, even if they had the capacity for debauch, would, if they desired to exercise it, spend all their lives in a vain desire for trappings and for numerous women in brocade, and for pavilions and caparisoned horses ?
The counsels of Yang-Chu are in no sense Egoism, since they teach a man to depend on all things save himself. This dependence on self is the core of Confucian philosophy.

Song Faxiang reist von New York nach London.

Pound, Ezra. Des Imagistes [ID D29162].
[Enthält] :
Pound, Ezra. After Ch'u Yuan.
I will get me to the wood
Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria,
By the silver-blue flood move others with ivory cars
There come forth many maidens
To gather grapes for the leopards, my friend
For there are leopards drawing the cars.
I will walk in the glade,
I will come out of the new thicket
And accost the procession of maidens.
Pound, Ezra. Liu Ch'e
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoice of the heart is beneath them :
A wet leaf that clings to the thereshold.
Pound, Ezra. Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord
O fan of white silk,
Clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You are also laid aside.
Ban, Jieyu. Song of regret, a rewrite of a Chinese translation of Herbert A. Giles.
Commenting on the first Imagist anthology, Charles Norman observes that "Two things strike a reader at once – the many poems, including four of Pound's six, which are adapted from the Chinese or formed on Chinese models, and many, including Pound's other two, which are influenced by Greek art, thought and poetry". The Greek-Chinese combination reflects what Pound was thinking at the moment when he edited Des Imagists. While reading Giles' translation of classical Chinese poetry he was struck by an affinity between the two ancient traditions.

Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Song Faxiang.
Homer Pound encountered Song Faxiang in Philadelphia and then directed him to Ezra Pound in London. Song was so impressed with the father and son's passion for Chinese culture that he offered to find jobs in China for both of them. Ezra Pound responded : "China is interesting, VERY".
Letters from Song Faxiang to Ezra Pound.
8 Febr. 1914
"I have already sent two inquiries for a position for you in China and have seen a few men and see if I can make them give you a good position. They ask me to get your academic records, etc. So if you will be kind enough to send to me, it will be a great advantage. I think I can get a fairly good position for you. We will see what can be done."
1 April 1914
"Now in regard to your coming out to Peking, I have been trying very hard to get a suitable position for you but so far I have not been able. I have found a position about $200.00 = £20 per month as a translator. If you feel like it, please let me know. It might be all right for you for the beginning, but I am rather afraid that you do not like it. I am looking for a good position for you."
3 July 1914
"Accept my congratulations for you happy union and newly married life. I wish you great success. I am sorry that you have changed your plan that you are coming to Peking to join me. I hope sometime in the near future you can come to pay me a visit."
Qian Zhaoming : Pound's encounter with Song coincided with his initial attraction to Confucianism. Song as Pound's first Chinese contact turned out to be a caustic critic of Confucius and Mencius. Interacting with him proves to have informed Pound of the anti-Confucian polemics in early Republican China. Song's attack on Confucianism appears in Song's article The causes and remedy of the poverty of China.
[Song, Faxiang]. F.T.S. The causes and remedy of the poverty of China [ID D29080].
Note by Ezra Pound. "The following MSS, was left with me by a Chinese official. I might have treated it in various ways. He suggested that I should rewrite it. I might excerpt the passages whereof I disapprove but I prefer to let it alone. At a time when China has replaced Greece in the intellectual life of so many occidentals, it is interesting to see in what the occidental ideas are percolating into the orient. We have here the notes of a practical and technical Chinaman. There are also some corrections, I do not know by whom, but I leave them as they are. "
Song turned out to be a caustic critic of Confucius. He compared China negatively with America, admiring American economists' adherence to the principle of production and consumption and denouncing the Confucian admonition against material 'desires' and 'appetites'. The Chinese had been taught to be 'satisfied' in poverty', he contended, 'hence the present poverty'. Pound did not agree with Song. Song's anti-Confucian article led Pound back to a scrutiny of Pauthier's Confucian Four Books. After reading William Loftus Hare's Chinese egoism, he got a chance to respond implicitly to Song. Without any knowledge of the degree to which Confucianism had been corrupted, Pound wondered how China could remedy its problems – What Song described as 'the corruption of the internal administration, the weakness of our army, the deplorable condition of our finance, and the misery of the people' – by abandoning its Confucian tradition. To Pound nothing seemed wrong with Confucian teachings. Song and his fellow Chinese modernists just had to distinguish Confucianism from the political system of old China. When the Chinese modernists were breaking from Confucianism in their search for a modern nation, Pound was moving in a contrary direction, reclaiming the humanist values of the Confucian tradition. He looked to China for an alternative to modernity. Song and his contemporaries in their attempt to replace Confucianism with a Western model.