China and the West

Dewey, John. New culture in China [ID D28486].
A Chinese friend, to whom I owe so much that he would be justified in arresting me for intellectual theft, has summarized for me the stages of foreign influence in China. At first, new military devices were thought to be the secret of western power. According to tradition, earlier divinities had come to China borne by the waves or riding a white horse. Some divinity must be associated with all organized power; and now 'Christ was riding on a cannon-ball' to China. This is not a literary phrase; it was the common man's literal belief. So an arsenal was built in Shanghai, and then gunboats. The guns wouldn't go off, or they exploded. The men-of-war were sunk by the Japanese navy in the Chino-Japanese War.
Then the weakness of China was attributed to her outworn form of government. Reform was to come by political means. A republic was to be constructed instead of a navy, as easily and in as short a time. But the republic hardly came off either. At this period, some foreigners made up their minds about Chinese ideas of reform and they have never changed their notion since. They labeled this political movement 'Young China' and have stuck right there. Meanwhile the thought of China has moved on; the representatives of this movement and their successors are now almost like fossil reminders of an olden time. The period is hardly ten years distant, but thoughts, if not things, change with such rapidity in China that one is hard pressed to keep up—and unfortunately many foreigners make little effort to keep pace.
The third period is that of reliance upon technical improvements. After all, the artillery and the naval equipment of the West are due to applied science, to engineering. So the distinguishing feature of western civilization, the one to be imitated, was thought to be neither military nor political but economic. Civil and mechanical engineers were to be the saviors of the country. Railways, factories, steam and electricity were to enable the old country to compete with new nations on even terms. But somehow this movement ran up against all sorts of obstacles; progress was slow; it brought new dangers and evils.
Soon there was a wave of moral reform. Thousands of societies were organized for the cure of this, that and the other evil. This was the time of the anti-footbinding societies, of anti-opium movements, of anti-gambling associations, of remodeling of the old system of education and so on through the list. Though Christian influence counted for much in the initiation of these reforms, they were mostly carried on in a Confucian revival.
Then came a conviction that underlying ideas must be changed, that democracy was a matter of beliefs, of outlook upon life, of habits of mind, and not merely a matter of forms of government. Democracy clearly demanded universal education, the extension of schools to all the people and a change from literary learning to something connected with civic and social action. It was the tradition that what was written must be written in the vocabulary, forms and cherished expressions of hundreds of years ago, in a language that bears little relationship to the spoken language of today. But the people could never be reached until the written language was simplified and made more accessible. And the language of speech must also be used in writing in order that modem ideas might get adequate expression. A scholar of the old school remarked to me in Hangchow, a centre of the older culture, that no one knew how many valuable ideas had been lost to China in the past few hundred years because those who thought them could not make them known, for lack of command of the cumbrous and artificial medium of writing. So there grew up, about two years ago, the so-called literary revolution—an attempt to write and publish in the vernacular and also to familiarize Chinese readers with what is distinctive in the trend of modem western literature, from free verse to Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Ibsen and Maeterlinck. I know of one school that criticized its foreign teacher of literature as not up-to-date, because he used Shakespeare and Dickens while they wanted H.G. Wells and Strindberg! They even suggested that he take a vacation, go home and catch up! He had become, they said, too 'Chinafied' and conservative.
The matter of content, of ideas, soon became more important than that of language and style. The new ideas were turned full against ancient institutions. The family system came in for full measure of criticism, and this not only from the point of view of the traditional western idea of family life, but from that of A Doll's House and the most advanced western radical thought. Socialistic literature, anarchism, Marx and Kropotkin ran like wild-fire through reading circles. Tolstoi became perhaps the most read of foreign writers. Thus was evolved a new formula: China could not be changed without a social transformation based upon a transformation of ideas. The political revolution was a failure, because it was external, formal, touching the mechanism of social action but not affecting conceptions of life, which really control society.
And now there are signs that the next stage will be an interest in scientific method. It is recognized that technology and other branches of applied science are dependent upon science as a method of thought, observation, registration, criticism, experiment, judgment and reasoning. The idea is gaining ground that the real supremacy of the West is based, not on anything specifically western, to be borrowed and imitated, but on something universal, a method of investigation and of the testing of knowledge, which the West hit upon and used a few centuries in advance of the Orient.
These latter ideas underlie what may be literally translated from the Chinese as 'the new culture movement'. Concretely and practically it is associated with the student revolt that began on May 4, 1919. Some foreigners think of the latter as simply a new form of political movement. They have been encouraged in this belief by Chinese politicians and by conservatives, most of whom doubtless believed it was a purely political movement. Anything of a cultural and social nature is too far removed from their own lives and thought to be conceivable. But though it directed its outward manifestations against a group of corrupt politicians, and though it was stimulated by the failure of Chinese claims at Versailles, on account of commitments made by these politicians, for value received, to the Japanese, it was in its deeper aspect a protest against all politicians and against all further reliance upon politics as a direct means of social reform. The teachers and writers who are guiding the movement lose no opportunity to teach that the regeneration of China must come by other means, that no fundamental political reform is now possible in China, and that, when it comes, it will come as natural fruit of intellectual changes worked out in social, non-political ways. And the great mass of the student body in the higher schools of China is now virtually pledged to abstinence from official life. Doubtless many will fall by the way in the future. They will not be able to resist the lure of an easy living and of power. But the anti-political bias is pretty firmly established.
This sketch, hurried and superficial as it is, suggests a number of comments. In the first place, the movement, though instigated by foreign contacts, which is only to say, after all, by contacts with the distinctively modem world, has become more and more characteristically Chinese. The movement of May 4 was directly undertaken by Chinese students, not only without the instigation of returned students, but against their advice. It was spontaneous and native. The movement for a reform of language would hardly have been started without foreign influence, but it is naturally a movement conducted by Chinese, for specifically Chinese ends, and it has precedents in Chinese history. The subsidiary movement toward phonetic script has been encouraged largely by missionaries, and so one hears more about it in western newspapers. Even the anti-political movement, the belief that reform is conditional upon scientific and social changes, is in a way a return to Chinese modes of thinking, a recovery of an old Chinese idea, plus an assertion that the power of that idea was not exhausted and terminated by Confucianism. It has now to be worked out in adaptation to new conditions, even if it involves the overthrow of Confucian forms of belief and conduct. Another obvious feature of the evolution is that it shows steady progress from the superficial to the fundamental.
The comments just made take the movement at its best, in its spirit. From the point of view of results concretely attained by it, they involve an undoubted idealization of its development. Each old stage has left behind it a deposit, a stratification. 'Young China' is at best an ambiguous term. It lumps into a single mass representatives of each of the phases described—military, political, economic, technological, ethical, literary, social, etc. By selecting certain individuals from each of these strata, one may, with some degree of truth, bring almost any charge against 'Young China'. Naturally, in other words, there is confusion, un-certainty, mutual criticism and hostility among the various tendencies. Most of the returned students of some years ago are opposed to the present anti-political movement and to the literary revolution. Many are still in a nationalistic stage where they rely upon some change to be wrought miraculously in the army and the government. More are distinctly in the technical stage, believing that if they could get the engineering jobs for which they have trained themselves, China would begin to move—as it doubtless would, to some degree.
One more discrimination has to be made. Although cultivated Japanese as well as politicians like Marquis Okuma have long proclaimed the right and duty of Japan to lead China, to be the mediator in introducing western culture into Asia (including India, where they look upon the English as alien interlopers), few Americans have taken seriously the dependence of China upon Japan in just these ways. I have seen books on the development of modem Chinese education which do not mention Japan, which attribute the renovation of the Chinese system to American influence, and which leave the impression that it is modeled upon the American common school system. As a matter of fact, it is modeled administratively wholly after the Japanese system, which, so far as western influence enters in, is based on the German system, with factors borrowed from French centralization. I have visited nine provinces and seen the educational leaders in the capitals where the higher schools are concentrated. There are but two cities, Peking and Nanking, where, in the government schools, direct western influence begins to approach the Japanese, either in methods or in personnel. To talk about returned students and fail to discriminate between those from Japan and those from Europe and America is to confuse everything touched by the discussion.
This is not said by way of criticism of Japanese-trained returned students. I believe that, in spite of the too bitter rivalry between them and other Chinese students educated abroad (partly a matter of the ever present 'rice-bowl' question), the great mass of Japanese-trained students are doing the best they can, according to their light, for China. The exceptions are enormous, for they include some of the politicians and military men who have been doing their worst during the past few years for China, and who have provoked a large measure of the present universal condemnation of Japan and things Japanese.
The point is that western ideas from the West itself and via Japan are two such different things that only confusion ensues when representatives of both schools are massed, as Mr. Bland constantly combines them, under the name of 'Young China'. The defeat of Russia by Japan created a vogue for Japan that no western country has ever begun to touch. Here was another oriental nation, using Chinese characters and deriving its civilization from China, which had conquered the dreaded foe, the West, in the person of mighty Russia. No wonder thousands flocked to Japan to study and most reformers took their models from Japan. By far the greater number of the revolutionary leaders who formed the Republic were Japanese or had lived in Japan as refugees and imbibed its culture as they never assimilated that of the West. The Manchu dynasty was doomed in any case. Full fifty years before the Revolution, the Taiping rebellion would probably have put an end to it, if foreign aid had not come to the support of the throne. The direct cause of its final downfall was the defeat of Russia by Japan. The historic parallel is the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan and the imperial restoration. By an accident, historically speaking, the change in China eventuated in a republic. Its main object, aside from getting rid of a foreign dynasty, was to modernize China as Japan had been modernized. 'Young China' at this period meant Japanized Chinese.
What the new leaders brought to the situation was western ideas via Japanese utilization of them. And this meant in effect not a new culture, but a utilization of western technique in military, technological and administrative affairs in the interest of old culture. The Japanese have persistently taught, doubtless sincerely, that western civilization is essentially materialistic, while oriental culture is idealistic and spiritual in basis and aims. They have held that the West obtained its temporary supremacy merely by artillery and machines. Hence it must be fought by adoption of its own devices, while old oriental ideas and ideals are retained intact. Most of the Chinese who studied in Japan returned to China with this idea of the materialistic, technological nature of western civilization firmly fixed in their heads. It fell in with the conceit of their own superiority, which was so common and amusing a feature of all the earlier intercourse of the West with the Orient. All that China needed to learn from America and Europe was technical science and its applications.
'Young China' is thus a diversified and fluent term. Among those popularly labeled with that name by western writers there are all kinds of contradictory aspirations. But the two things that stand out today as active and dominant features of the situation are the need of reform in culture as an antecedent of other reforms, and a tendency for leadership to revert to those who are distinctively Chinese in their attitude, as over against those who would introduce and copy foreign methods, whether from the West or from Japan.
The two traits seem to contradict each other. How can reversion to Chinese leadership coincide with attack upon Chinese customs and habits of mind? How can it coincide with a realization that the real source of western superiority is found, not in external technique, but in intellectual and moral matters? Well, history is never logical, and many movements are practically effectual in proportion to their logical inconsistency. But so far as an answer exists it is found in the fact, already alluded to, that the idea of the supremacy of intellectual and moral factors over all others is itself a native Chinese idea. It is much more Chinese than the idea that salvation can be found by introducing guns and factories and technical administrative improvements. It implies also that the real breakdown in Chinese national life is moral and intellectual. It implies a demand for new ways of thinking. Some of the new leaders might assert that they are truer to Confucianism in attacking it—as they mostly do—than others are in clinging to it. For the real idea, the vital idea in Confucius, they may say, is belief in the primacy of ideas, of knowledge, and in the influence of education to spread these ideas. But the ideas that are now petrified into Confucianism are not fitted to modem conditions. The breakdown in Chinese national life is proof of their inefficacy according to the standard of Confucianism itself. And Confucian education had become aristocratic, for the few only. Hence the need for a new culture, in which what is best in western thought is to be freely adopted—but adapted to Chinese conditions, employed as an instrumentality in building up a rejuvenated Chinese culture.
The program is an ambitious one. It may seem to many much more pretentious, much less hopeful, than an attempt to borrow specific devices from the West. To many foreigners on the ground, it certainly seems a deviation from the real path of Chinese reform, which they hold to be the adoption of Christianity. But its relation to Christianity bears out the account here given of it. Some of its leaders are as non-Christian as they are anti-Confucian. They do not attack Christianity. They are merely indifferent to it. Others, especially in active educational work, are Christians. But I have generally found that these men are profoundly indifferent not only to denominational and dogmatic Christianity, but to everything except the social aspect of Christianity. They do not even take the trouble to call themselves liberals in religious belief. They approach Christianity from such an angle that they are indifferent to the distinction between conservative and liberal in belief. In effect they assert their claim to develop a distinctively Chinese Christianity. And though the movement toward an independent Chinese Church has not as yet gone far, it is likely to be a large feature of the future.
It would be foolish to say that any great number of the students and teachers influenced by the new culture movement are wholly conscious of the underlying philosophy that has just been expounded. This is confined as yet to a small group of leaders. The movement is for the most part still a feeling rather than an idea. It is also accompanied by the extravagances and confusion, the undigested medley of wisdom and nonsense that inevitably mark so ambitious a movement in its early stages. By making a clever selection of extracts from the writings put forth in its name one could easily hold up the whole movement to ridicule, as less than half-baked, as an uncritical and more or less hysterical mixture of unrelated ideas and miscellaneous pieces of western science and thought. Or a selection of writings could be made which would show it to be dangerous to society, to the peace of the world. Japanese writers who have paid attention to it have mostly held it up as a subversive radicalism and have attributed it to Bolshevist propaganda. But in the nine provinces I have visited, I have yet to find a single trace of direct Russian influence. Indirectly the Russian upheaval has of course had a tremendous influence as a ferment, but far subordinate to that of the World War, and even to President Wilson’s ideas of democracy and self-determination. For the new culture movement, though it cares nothing for what is politely called a republic in present China, is enthusiastically stirred by democratic ideals, and is starting out with the premise that democracy must be realized in education and in industry before it can be realized politically. For Bolshevism in the technical sense there is no preparation and no aptitude in China. But it is conceivable that military misrule, oppression and corruption will, if they continue till they directly touch the peasants, produce a chaos of rebellion that adherents of the existing order will certainly label Bolshevism.
After the upheaval of May 4, the student unions started periodicals all over China. It is significant that at this moment of the height of the revolt against corrupt and traitorous officials and also of the Japanese boycott, these topics were secondary in the students’ journals. They were written in Pei-wha, the vernacular already referred to, and were ardent in advocacy of its use. Their burden was the need of educational change; attacks upon the family system; discussion of socialism; of democratic ideas; of all kinds of utopias, such as taking away children from their parents and giving them to public authorities to be reared, the abolition of all national and even provincial government and the reduction of China to a state of self-governing communes. Naturally there was much effervescence along with the fermentation. Lacking definite background of experience, the students thought all ideas and proposals much alike, provided only they were new and involved getting away from old customs and traditions.
In one prominent provincial city, some teachers in a normal school joined with a youth of seventeen in advocating free love as a remedy and substitute for the family system, communal rearing of children, abolition of all private property, the election of teachers by students as a form of democracy, the abolition of examinations as a relic of autocracy. Since the articles were written in the vernacular, an alarmed provincial governor, scared by the noise made by this blowing off of steam, closed the school and wrote to Peking, demanding that future use of the vernacular be prohibited by law. But some official had enough of the saving grace of common sense to remark that these dangerous thoughts would then be written in the old literary language, and then it would be necessary in consistency to forbid its use, too. Practically speaking, these ideas were about as dangerous as those set forth in schoolboys’ debating clubs would be in any country. Yet they are important symptoms and potentially they involve a menace, not to the peace of society, but to those who profit by the evils of the established order. It is significant that in my whole experience I have not found one of these extremists who had been trained in America or England. They are almost without exception persons who have been educated in China and who speak and read only Chinese. They can easily quote sanction for their extreme ideas from old Chinese writings and legends. The few exceptions were students trained in France, who had adopted as congenial to the anarchistic vein in Chinese thought certain ideas coming from the French Revolution.
In Nanking last spring some students were kind enough to make out for me a list of journals, mostly founded within the previous year and a half, to advocate the principles of the new culture. A cursory reading of the titles and professed objects of these periodicals confirms what has been said. The organ of this particular group of students gives the key-note of the whole undertaking. The journal is called Youth and Society. Its motto, with true Chinese balance of phrasing, is, 'To make society youthful and youth social'. The Dawn, New Voice of Society, The New Individual, The Citizen, The Warm Tide, Young China, The Young World, The New Group, The New Life, Upward, Construction, Learning and Labor and Truth are other typical names. And among the objects professed occur almost with monotony such phrases as 'to reform the nation and society, physically and socially'; 'to investigate society'; 'to study social and economic problems and introduce new ideas'; 'to introduce new thoughts to the citizen and uplift his personality while promoting home industries'—the last phrase of course an echo of the boycott; 'to arouse the workingman and reform society'; 'to promote popular education and save society'—this by a journal called Save the Country, 'to promote the new culture and develop thinking and pure science'; 'to bring about a development of learning so as to apply the idea of research and criticism to the reform of society'; 'to study society and introduce western ideas’; 'to reform society in the light of scientific ideas'; 'to introduce new thoughts to the world, and to apply an optimistic but critical attitude to the reconstruction of society'. Many of these papers were of course as ephemeral as all of them are ambitious. But they illustrate the spirit of the movement as hardly anything else could. The list would not be complete without the mention of journals like The New Woman, the object of which is 'to arouse women as a means to reforming society', and The Woman's Bell, the aim of which is 'to educate women and enable them to take part in the progress of society'. In fact, in the journals as a whole, the three most discussed topics are reform of the family system, the emancipation of women and the labor question, all of them in connection with educational reform. The three parent journals, which continue to exercise the greatest influence, and so are peculiarly the organs of the new culture movement, are called 'Youth', 'The Renaissance' and 'Emancipation and Reconstruction'. It must not be gathered that the whole activity has been literary and theoretical. For the first time in Chinese history, the educated youth have given themselves to what at home we term social service.
I suppose most foreigners approach China with an antecedent belief in its essential conservatism, its aversion to change. The conservatism is unquestionably there. But so also is a predilection for change. And the scene shifts so often as to be dizzying to observe. Teachers complain of the 'bumptious' insubordination of students—not a new complaint in China, where students have prerogatives in respect to their own discipline most disconcerting to visitors from free America. They complain also of instability of mind, which leads students to rush enthusiastically into a new cause only in a few months to lose interest and turn to some newer thing. The symptom is characteristic of conditions outside of schools. It is to be regretted. But it is genuine evidence of a general state of transition, with the hesitation, uncertainty and openness to novel stimuli that such periods are bound to exhibit. On the other hand, there is a maturity of interest far beyond that which marks American students of the same years. High-school boys and girls listen soberly and intelligently to lectures on subjects that would create nothing but bored restlessness in an American school. There is an eager thirst for ideas—beyond anything existing, I am convinced, in the youth of any other country on earth. At present the zeal for ideas outruns persistence in getting knowledge with which to back up the ideas. But it supplies an extraordinary vitality to the growing desire for knowledge and scientific method. It means that knowledge is being acquired, not as a technical device nor as a conventional badge of culture, but for social application. If the students in any higher school in China are asked why they are taking a particular course, the greater number will answer, 'To help our country' or 'To promote the reform of society'. Discount the superficiality with which many make this reply and there still remains a substantial basis for hope for the future.
After a few months in China, a visitor will take an oath, if he is wise, never to indulge in prediction. For prophecy is sure to be dictated by hope or fear rather than adequate facts. Flesh is weak, however, and loves to pass upon the present in terms of the future. The observer will consequently fall into the vice he abjures—as I have occasionally done—to his own prompt undoing. Yet, moving between the thin, but exciting, ice of prediction and the safe, dull ground of sure fact, one may assert that, with all its crudities and vacillations, the new culture movement provides one of the firmest bases for hope for the future of China. It cannot take the place of better means of communication—railways and highways—without which the country will not be unified and hence will not be strong. But in China there is need, too, for a unified mind, and that is impossible without the new intellectual movement. It also makes a great deal of difference whether the mind when unified looks to the past or is in sympathy with modem thought in the rest of the world. A China unified according to the scheme that Japan successfully adopted would be no less isolated than Japan has turned out to be, and more menacing to the world. China needs schools; it needs, and needs badly, universal elementary education. But it makes a great deal of difference what these schools teach and what their spirit and aim is—as German and Japanese universal education both prove.
Chinese educated youth cannot permanently forswear their interest in direct political action. Their attention needs to be devoted more than it has been to detailed, practical economic questions, to currency reform, public finance and problems of taxation, to foreign loans and the Consortium. One finds schools where foreign-educated students are teaching theoretical political economy from books based on the assumption of competition, machine production and capitalistic accumulation, which have no more to do with the surrounding industry—strictly local as it is, and carried on by handwork according to custom and for a static market—than has lunar astronomy. Or one finds the interest centering in socialism even when there is next to no problem of distribution of wealth (except checking the rapacity of officialdom) and when the problem of increased productivity for labor is acute. But China is after all in the early stage of the industrial revolution, and, if it is not to repeat the experience of the rest of the world, with all the evils and dangers of the warfare of capital and labor, with sweated industries, child and woman labor, oppression by capital and sabotage by the worker, if it is going to profit by the nineteenth-century experience of the rest of the world, it has to come to the problem prepared. And not even the most extravagant speculations of the present will, when brought to earth by the demands made by actual conditions, prove wholly useless as preparatory equipment.
China has the alternatives of perishing, to the disturbance of the world, as well as itself, or of condensing into a century or so the intellectual, scientific, industrial, political and religious progress for which the rest of the world has taken several centuries. It cannot, like the United States, make the change with plenty of elbow-room, but must accomplish it in a civilization crowded with traditions and superstitions as well as with people. Young China, especially Youngest China, shows an appreciation of this fact. There are hours when, stimulated by contact with what is best in the movement, I am willing to predict that it will succeed and, in succeeding with its own problems, will also give to the world things of new and permanent value. There are other times, when, after contact with the darker features of the situation, I wonder that the supporters of the cause do not all lose hope and pessimistically surrender. It is easy to see why some give up effort and devote themselves to making the best of a bad situation by feathering their own nests. At the end, one comes back to the sobriety, the industry, the fundamental solidity of the average common man. These qualities have weathered many previous storms. They will pull China through this one if they are redirected according to the demands and conditions of that modern world that has thrust itself so irresistibly and so disturbingly upon China. The new culture movement is a significant phase of the attempt to supply the direction so profoundly needed.

Dewey, John. As the Chinese think [ID D28499].
There is an oft-quoted saying of Chesterton's that a man’s philosophy is the most important thing about him. He illustrates the point by saying that it is more important for a landlady to know the philosophy of life of a would-be lodger than to know his financial status. The latter may decide his ability to pay, but the former decides his willingness to make false or true representations and to carry out his agreements. The late Mr. Morgan aroused much interest when he said at Washington that he attached more importance in banking to the character of the applicants for credit than to the material securities they proffered. The remarks of Chesterton and Morgan testify to the practical importance of what in war-time we learned to call the imponderables— grit, stamina, loyalty, faith—in comparison with things so tangible that they can be counted and measured.
What is true, in this regard, of individuals is true of peoples. The spirit that countries bring to the negotiations going on in Washington, the spirit in which they will proceed to execute the decisions of the Conference, is more important than the letter of the decisions. Those who are cynical about the Conference are so because they do not believe in the underlying good faith of the governments concerned. They assume that negotiations are simply a hypocritical cover for a series of dickerings and maneuvers for special advantage, and that professions of regard for peace, justice and humanity are merely part of the traditional paraphernalia of a secret jockeying to get the better of some one else. They distrust, in short, the underlying philosophy of existing governments.
If we go deeper, we realize that many sources of discord and friction have their root in the fact that different peoples have different philosophies ingrained in their habits. They cannot understand one another and they misunderstand one another. It is fashionable today to assume that the causes of all difficulties between nations are economic. It is useful to fix attention upon these economic causes and to see what can be done in the way of adjustment. But the friction generated by economic competition and conflict would not break out into the flames of war if atmospheric conditions were not favorable. The atmosphere that makes international troubles inflammable is the product of deep-seated misunderstandings that have their origin in different philosophies of life.
If we are to take steps to dampen the atmosphere, to charge it with elements that will fire-proof international relations, we must begin with an attempt at an honest understanding of one another's philosophy of life. The difficulty is greatest between oriental and occidental peoples. There are great differences in the mental dispositions of European and American peoples; the philosophies of life of even the English and the Americans are much more unlike than they are usually assumed to be. But all such differences pale into insignificance as compared with the differences between the civilizations of the West and of Asia—between the philosophies to which these civilizations have given birth. It is proportionately hard to secure mutual understanding and respect and proportionately easy on both sides to create suspicion and fear, which slide over into hatred when the time is ripe.
The common belief at the present time that the Pacific is to be the scene of the next great world catastrophe, the fatalistic belief that conflict between the white and the yellow race is predestined, are really expressions of a sense of a deep, underlying cleft that makes mutual understanding impossible. But instead of trying to lessen the cleft by effort to understand each other, we talk about an irrepressible conflict of forces beyond human control, or else about the competition for control of the natural resources of China and the tropics. I would not minimize the danger in this competition, but it is ridiculous to suppose that it is so great as to make the Pacific the scene of an inevitable war. If we succeed in really understanding each other, some way of cooperation for common ends can be found. If we neglect the part played by fundamental misunderstandings in developing an atmosphere of combustion, any devices that are hit upon for lessening economic friction are likely to turn out so superficial that sooner or later they will break down.
One reason why misunderstanding is so dangerous is that peoples like persons tend to judge one another on the basis of their own habits of thought and feeling. Mr. Wells recently pointed out a specific instance. He said that the Japanese, because of their docility and obedience, tend to overestimate the power of the British government to regulate the sentiments and acts of the English people, while the English, because of contrary habits, tend to exaggerate the control that Japanese popular sentiment has upon the ruling class in Japan. The practical application he made bears upon the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Japanese tend to overlook the fact that the Alliance might break down under strain because of pressure of popular sentiment, which would make the government unable to carry it into effect in case of Japanese trouble with the United States. The English, on the other hand, overlook the danger of the Alliance, because they imagine that in a crisis the Japanese governing class would be amenable to an alert and intelligent public opinion.
It would be easy to fill pages with instances of just such misunderstandings due to imputing to another people the motives and aims that we should have if we performed the act that the other people has performed. Japanese diplomacy, for example, is centralized, almost dictated, from Tokyo. Ours is comparatively loose. If, accordingly, an American consul in the Orient does an act—if only making a speech—more or less on his own, it is natural for Japanese to assume that he is deliberately acting upon orders from Washington in pursuance of some national policy. Americans, on the other hand, are likely to overlook the compactness and continuity of Japanese diplomacy. Or, when they become aware of some objectionable result of diplomacy, they regard it as a sudden and treacherous coup instead of the culmination of a series of steps, which from the Japanese point of view have been already accepted and sanctioned, if only tacitly. Then the Japanese are perplexed in their turn.
Such incidents and others that might be mentioned seem trivial, taken one by one. But the total effect is by no means a trivial detail. The net result is mutual distrust, suspicion, dread.
Episodes of this kind illustrate the importance of a better understanding by each nation of the psychology of other nations. The physical means of intercourse between nations by means of trade, mails and cables have got far ahead of the agencies of psychological and moral intercourse. After thousands of years of isolation, the East and the West have been thrown into intimate political and commercial contact. During the period of separation each side of the globe has developed its own peculiar ways of thinking and feeling. It is no wonder that under such circumstances the contact of East and West is so largely materialistic, economic. It is an accident, a by-product of the invention of steam and electric machinery, and, like any accident, it may turn out a catastrophe.
There are many questions of a directly practical nature that cannot be understood or properly handled unless the larger background be taken into account. Why are the Chinese so unperturbed by circumstances that appear to a foreigner to menace their country with national extinction? How can they remain so calm when their country is divided within and threatened from without? Is their attitude one of callous indifference, of stupid ignorance? Or is it a sign of faith in deep-seated realities that western peoples neglect in their hurry to get results? So far as diplomatic negotiations, including those of the Washington Conference, are concerned, does the Chinese policy of watchful waiting—with more waiting than watchfulness from a western point of view—imply indifference to their fate or weakness that makes them unable to cope with it? Or is it evidence that they are banking upon the operation of slow-moving forces that in the end will bring things their way? Surely the right answer to such questions is at least of equal importance with the particular decisions of the Conference. In the long run it is more important; for it will control the way in which the decisions work out.
Again there is the question of China's long and obstinate resistance to modem methods of industry, to machinery, railways and large scale production and her disinclination to open up her country except because of pressure from a foreign power. This refusal, taken in connection with the desire of foreign nationals to utilize the natural resources of China and to find markets among her teeming millions, is the source of many of China's most acute difficulties. A natural question arises: Why hasn't China taken the lead in developing her own resources? Why hasn't she gone ahead much as the United States did, borrowing foreign capital, but keeping political and, in the main, economic control in her own hands? Is her course stupid inertia, a dull, obstinate clinging to the old just because it is old? Or does it show something more profound, a wise, even if largely unconscious, aversion to admitting forces that are hostile to the whole spirit of her civilization?
The right answer to these questions makes a great difference in the treatment of many concrete practical problems. If the course of China is blind and inert, there is much to be said for a combination of nations, a kind of economic-political consortium, which will force modern industrialism upon China, overcoming her obstinacy for her own good, not allowing sentimental considerations to stand too much in the way. But if there is something deeply worth while in Chinese culture, and if industrialism as it exists in the western world is a menace to what is deepest and best in Chinese culture, then the practical answer is quite different. Perhaps there will come a time when historians will say that the course of China gave evidence of a profound instinct. Perhaps they will say it was better for the world and for China that she resisted the introduction of western, machine-made industrialism until the world and she herself were able to control its workings. If so, the entanglements and perplexities into which China has temporarily got will not be too great a price to pay for the result finally attained. Only those who are completely satisfied with the workings of the present capitalistic system can dogmatically deny this possibility.
It is much easier to raise these questions than to answer them. But a knowledge of Chinese civilization and of the philosophy of life expressed in it at least makes the questions more real and more pertinent. Two great philosophies of life are intimately connected with the Chinese attitude toward political and social issues—those of Laotze and Confucius. Perhaps a third should be added—that of Buddha. But the latter was not indigenous, and the first two were. Though no one can deny the immense stimulus to Chinese art and thought that came with the introduction of Buddhism from India, yet in the end its influence seems to have een transformed by Taoism and Confucianism.
The teaching of Laotze did not become classic and official in the way in which that of the Confucian school did. Yet one obtains a strong impression that fundamentally its influence upon the people is greater than that of Confucianism, since it colored the way in which Confucianism was received. This is no place for a technical exposition of the teaching of Laotze, the Old Master. Nor is it important for our purpose. The important thing is the doctrine of the superiority of nature to man, and the conclusion drawn, namely, the doctrine of non-doing. For active doing and striving are likely to be only an interference with nature. The idea of non-doing can hardly be stated and explained; it can only be felt. It is something more than mere inactivity; it is a kind of rule of moral doing, a doctrine of active patience, endurance, persistence while nature has time to do her work. Conquering by yielding is its motto. The workings of nature will in time bring to naught the artificial fussings and fumings of man. Give enough rope to the haughty and ambitious, and in the end they will surely be hung in the artificial entanglements they have themselves evolved.
There is nothing exclusively Chinese in this point of view. But no other people has become so saturated with its consequences. It is at the root of their laissez-faire, contented, tolerant, pacific, humorous and good-humored attitude toward life. It is also at the root of their fatalism. The teachings of Laotze have been influential because they expressed something congenial to Chinese temperament and habits of life. China is agrarian, agricultural; everybody knows that fact. But while we know it, we forget how long and how stable is their agriculture. The title of a book by an American agriculturist, Farmers of Forty Centuries, is infinitely significant when we reflect upon it. Other peoples have been farmers. But by their methods they have exhausted the soil and gone down, or they have turned to other occupations, which have supplanted farming in importance. But the Chinese have gone on tilling, tilling, tilling, even, as in north China, against great odds; and their soil is still productive, as productive, probably, as ever it was.
This is an unparalleled human achievement. It helps explain the conservatism of the Chinese, their laissez-faire reverence for nature and their contempt for hurried and artificial devices of man’s contriving. Their minds are as steeped in contact with natural processes as their bodies are apt for agricultural work. They are conservative because for thousands of years they have been conserving the resources of nature, nursing, preserving, patiently, obstinately. While western peoples have attacked, exploited and in the end wasted the soil, they have conserved it. The results are engraved upon both Chinese and western psychologies. The Chinese have learned to wait for the fruition of slow natural processes. They cannot be hustled because in their mode of life nature cannot be hustled. Why be in a hurry when hurry only means vexation for yourself and either accomplishes nothing in nature or else interferes with its processes and so hinders the natural harvest?
It is not meant that there is nothing but good in this attitude. Virtues and defects, excellencies and weaknesses go together. Western fatalism takes the form of believing that, since what is going to happen will happen, we might in the meantime as well » go our own way. It is like the fatalism of soldiers in the trenches. Oriental fatalism is directed upon the present rather than upon the future. Why do anything, why try, why put forth energy to change conditions? Non-doing runs easily into passive submission, conservation into stubborn attachment to habitudes so fixed as to be 'natural', into dread and dislike of change.
But it is meant that the Chinese philosophy of life embodies a profoundly valuable contribution to human culture and one of which a hurried, impatient, over-busied and anxious West is infinitely in need. It is also meant—and this will appear to be the more 'practical' point—that this philosophy of life is so ingrained in the Chinese people that we cannot understand their way of dealing with political and social problems unless we take it into account. And if we do not understand it, we shall not be able to deal with them, in either politics or business, intelligently and successfully. To attain success, to achieve anything worth while in our relations with the Chinese we have to adopt enough of their own point of view to recognize the importance of time. We must give them time and then more time; we must take time ourselves while we give them time.
The teachings of Laotze spring from the depths of Chinese life and in turn they have influenced that life. Much of the actual effect, as it comes home to the individual farmer, has no connection with the general theory. As a philosophy in the abstract, the farmer would not recognize or understand it. It is associated for him with a mass of superstitions and geomantic practices. Yet even the superstitions are bound up with a general attitude toward nature. The most widely influential custom is that called Feng-shui, literally translated, 'wind-water'. The belief in Feng-shui is a belief in certain mystical influences connected with the land. Upon the propitious working of these forces depends the prosperity of the dead, the ancestral spirits, and of the living family. These forces are easily disturbed and their equilibrium and benign operation interfered with. This belief was an earlier obstacle to the introduction of railways and it is still a mighty obstacle in the way of opening new mines, and, in general, of introducing new industrial forces.
It is easy to dismiss the whole belief as a gross superstition, which is degrading intellectually as well as inimical to progress. But it is also easy to rationalize the doctrine. Then one would see in it a belief that the land and its energies belong to the whole succession of human beings, past generations and future. The present generation is a trustee of the family and race, of ancestry and posterity. The exploitation of the land must therefore be regulated in the interest of the whole succession. This rationalization is as extreme in one direction as the view that the Chinese system of geomancy is a degrading superstition is in the other. But the doctrine of Feng-shui is at least a remarkable exhibition of piety toward nature and it has been a power for conservation as well as for conservatism.
The general point of view of Confucianism is the opposite of that of Taoism. It magnifies the importance of art, of culture, of humanity, of learning and moral effort. Naturally, therefore, this doctrine influenced the scholars and upper classes much as Taoism spread among the people. Yet in many respects the actual effect of Confucianism has been like that of Taoism. In inculcating reverence for the classic literature of the past as the well- spring of wisdom, it supplied intellectual reasons for conservatism. In exalting moral and intellectual, as superior to physical, power, it taught patient disregard for display of military and political force, which is sure, in the end, to be brought to naught by reason.
It created that extraordinary reverence for the teacher, that conviction of his abiding influence upon the life as well as the learning of pupils, which is so remarkable a trait of Chinese life, and which helps to explain the tendency of the Chinese to rely upon pacific reason rather than upon brawling force for settlement of troubles. Is there any other people that has persistently believed that the influence of the teacher is in the end the most powerful of all social forces? What other nations are there whose heroes are moral teachers rather than revealers of supernatural affairs, priests, generals, statesmen?
Though Confucianism has had its especial career among the upper and official classes, yet its net effect has merged with the influence of Laotze to create a definite contempt for politics and an aversion to government as the West understands the term. To the Taoist, government is unnatural, an interference by men with the orderly operations of nature. The emperors, even the alien Tartars and Manchus, had to bow to this conviction. They got around the people by adopting their belief, by giving the emperor a mystic significance. He was the agent of the people in reverencing Heaven.
The emperor did not govern. He ruled by not governing, by not interfering with the real government, the customs of the people, which were so immemorial and so interwoven in agriculture with the operations of nature that they themselves were like the workings of nature. Tribute paid him was not so much political taxation as an expression of loyalty to the natural and moral forces that he embodied. If nature failed to function, if famines and floods recurred, if his demands became extortionate and his officers ceased to be fathers and mothers of the people, these were signs that he no longer represented Heaven. Then the people became, pending the restoration of righteous and benevolent order, the representatives of Heaven. According to Mencius (who emphasized this more democratic side of Confucianism) the people under such circumstances had not only the right but the duty of deposing the ruling house.
In putting down, largely in western terms, these suggestions about the philosophy of the Chinese, one is painfully conscious of their inadequacy. But even so, they show why the Chinese maintain such confidence in the outcome of events, in spite of so much that is discouraging. China has survived many such periods. But after a while the civil power, that is, the moral and intellectual, has reasserted itself, and the stable industry of the people has again become dominant. Even now, in spite of conditions that would throw any western state into chaos, there is steady progress among the people.
In her external relations, China undoubtedly faces a new situation. It is not safe to argue that, because she has always conquered her conquerors before, she is certain to do so this time. Her conquerors before were her inferiors in everything but military power and skill. Now she deals with peoples who are her superiors in natural science and in its applications to industry and commerce. Conquest of China by economic penetration that will reduce her population to a proletariat working for foreign capitalists backed by superior military resources, is a very different thing from direct military subjugation. Yet the reasons for China's historic confidence are still not wholly shaken.
It is a common saying that China manages her international relations on the basis of an old maxim about playing the barbarians off against one another. This fact sometimes inspires a frantic appeal for all foreign nations to get together and impose their unified will upon China. Propagandists for a foreign nation often bid Americans beware of expressions of Chinese regard for the United States. They say these are only another instance of a policy based on the old maxim; and that, if it succeeds, China with a bland smile will retire again into herself and forget her affection for the United States. This argument, taken at its worst, suggests the difficulty in the way of forming a stable combination among the Powers on the basis of material interests. It indicates that the only lasting union of Powers with respect to China must be formed upon a moral basis. A cut-throat union against China will in time bring about a cut-throat policy of the nations in the union toward one another. If the policy is tried, and, as a result of struggle among the nations, China regains her own, she will be entitled to smile at one more proof of the superiority of moral to material forces.
Finally, an understanding of the Chinese philosophy of life is not only essential to an intelligent treatment of Chinese problems, but it is of immense value to other nations. Not China alone but the world is in transition and liquidation. Psychologists talk about 'projection'. Persons who are irritated in themselves are always irritated about others. The principle applies in social psychology. Nations are now 'projecting' their own troubles and uncertainty upon China. The result may easily be rash and inconsiderate action. An adoption of Chinese calm and patience, a willingness to take only the steps, like disarmament and abolition of special privileges, which are immediately necessary, and to wait till time has adjusted the present troubled condition, would have a wonderfully healing effect. For it is not true that Chinese difficulties have suddenly become a menace to the world's peace and prosperity. It is only true that western nations are in danger of condensing their own troubles and unloading them upon China. The philosophy of the East was never more needed by the West than in the present crisis.

Fei, Juetian. Duwei di she hui yu zheng zhi zhe xue [ID D28517]. [A critique of John Dewey's social and political philosophy].
Fei Juetian wrote a scathing critique of Dewey's lectures on social and political philosophy. Disagreeing with Dewey's comment about the cause of international conflicts, Fei claimed that conflicts exist not between nations, but between classes. It was unrealistic for Dewey to hope that through the development of industry and education, China could endow individuals with rights while also providing the opportunities to exercise those rights. This could be realized only by carrying out a revolution as the Russians did. Fei further asserted that Dewey's experimental approach to politics based on collective inquiry and continuous reform simply did not make sense. "If I tell the world that we should experiment with socialism and see if it works, people would think that I am crazy and would oppose this experiment. If I proclaim that socialism holds the ultimate truth to solving problems in today's society, that there is no better theory than socialism, people will become interested in its practice and help transform the theory into a reality". Fei rejected Dewey's particularistic approach to solving social problems, claiming that social problems were all interrelated and could not be dissected into this or that particular problem. An educational problem may have been tied to a political or economic problem. Fei also disagreed with Dewey that social theories should be grounded in concrete facts, not on abstract speculations. Fei condemned Dewey for overly replying on contingent social knowledge at the expense of eternal truths, without which, he believed, human civilizations would not advance. He completely denounced Dewey's claim that science could be applied to solving social problems. Fei believed that social problems were not difficult to resolve if only the proletariat were made aware of their oppression by the capitalists and thus united to fight for their right. He concluded that Dewey's experimental approach would not work ; only a social revolution, a class war, could provide the antidote to all of China's ills.

John Dewey : Lecture 'Essentials of democratic politics' : delivered at the Private Fujian College of Law and Administration. = Min ben zheng zhi zhi ji ben. In : Jiao yu bu gong bao (1921).

Babbitt, Irving. Humanistic education in China and the West [ID D28793].
Most of the Chinese I meet tell me what China needs is a Renaissance with all that a Renaissance implies in the way of a break with the past. Now the present Renaissance movement owes its inception to the pressure upon China from the Occident, and has developed thus far, so far as it has developed at all, on occidental rather than on Oriental lines. It is perhaps well that I should explain at the outset that it has been my business for many years past, in connection with the teaching I have been doing at Harvard, to study the nature of the European Renaissance or break with the mediaeval past that took place in the sixteenth century and to trace the main currents of European thought and literature from that day to this. I have been giving special attention to what one may term the second great forward push of individualism, or emancipation from traditional standards, that took place in the eighteenth century. The characteristic of this occidental movement, as I see it, has been, from the sixteenth century down, its tremendous expansiveness. It has been, first, an expansion of men's knowledge and control of natural forces in the interests of comfort and utility. This first or utilitarian side of the modern movement already has its prophet in Francis Bacon; you may know its votaries by their pleas for organization and efficiency, and in general by their confidence in machinery. The second side of the great expansive movement puts its main emphasis on emotional expansion and stresses at one time the fraternity that is to be achieved by this emotional expansion, at another time, the self-expression that it encourages. This emotional side of the movement had its prophet in the eighteenth century in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
To bring together the two sides of the movement, mankind as a whole is to advance constantly in the control of nature to the ends of utility and comfort, and at the same time is to be united increasingly by the spirit of brotherhood conceived as a process of expansive emotion. This movement may be defined in its totality as humanitarianism. At the centre of humanitarianism as a philosophy of life is the idea of progress, which in some form or other is the true religion of our occidental expansionists. The typical man of the nineteenth century conceived that as a result of the combination of scientific discovery and expansive sympathy, he was, in Tennyson's phrase, moving towards a "far-off divine event."
Instead, it has turned out that he was moving towards Armageddon. A revulsion of feeling has ensued and the most interesting development of occidental thought of to-day is the increasing tendency to doubt the idea of progress in the form it has assumed during the past two centuries. (See, for example. Dean Inge's Idea of Progress (Romanes Lecture for 1920.) Certain persons are inclined to inquire whether some essential element was not omitted in our occidental break with the past, whether in the expressive phrase of the Germans, we have not poured out the baby with the bath water. As a result of this omission, the real issue is seen to be not the struggle between the forces of progress and those of reaction, but between civilization and barbarism. More than fifty thousand copies have recently been sold in Germany of a book by Oswald Spengler with the significant title The Downfall of the Occident. Everyone recognizes that the Occident has been amazingly successful in its pursuit of power, but the question may be asked whether it has not got its power as the expense of wisdom. Now the struggle between new and old that is beginning in China is along lines very familiar to students of occidental tendencies. On the one hand, is what seems to be an effete tradition, on the other are those who are working for a progressive and organized and efficient China. Another type of Chinese progressive is, I am told, for throwing over the Chinese classics, and going in for occidental writers of the extreme Rousseauistic type like Ibsen, and Strindberg, and Bernard Shaw. Now up to a certain point I sympathize with the aims of the Chinese progressives. China needs to become organized and efficient; she needs to acquire to some extent the machinery that has grown up in the Occident if she is to protect herself against the imperialistic aggression of Japan or the powers of Europe. China is likely to see something resembling the European industrial revolution. China also needs to escape from the rut of pseudo-classic formalism into which she had fallen as the result of a too inert traditionalism. At the same time China should not in its eagerness to become progressive imitate the Occident and pour out the baby with the bath water. It should be careful, in short, however much it repudiates the mere formalism, to retain the soul of truth that is contained in its great traditions. When one examines these great traditions one finds certain striking analogies with our Western traditions that the representatives of the utilitarian-sentimental movement have been so busy discarding.
The Western traditions have been partly religious, partly humanistic. The names that sum up these two aspects of tradition most completely are those of Aristotle and Christ, corresponding in a general way to those of Confucius and Buddha in the Far East. A writer in the Revue Philosophique points out that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas combined along scholastic lines Aristotle and Christ in his Sum of Theology, so Chu Hsi was making about the same time in China a scholastic combination of Buddhist and Confucian elements in his great commentary.
Let us ask ourselves what is the element of wisdom in these great traditions, losing which the East as well as the West will fall from genuine civilization into a sort of mechanical barbarism.
This problem of civilization was never so urgent as to-day. For something without analogy in the past has taken place as the result of the discoveries of physical science: all parts of the world are being brought into physical and economic contact with one another. For instance, as a result of the European war, cotton went to forty cents a pound, the increase in wages that resulted for the colored people of our American South enabled them to buy silk shirts and underwear and this caused in turn a commotion in the market for raw silks at Tokio. The fiery chariots in which the ancient Chinese Taoists dreamt of flying through the heavens are becoming a reality. The trip from New York to Peking, or from New York to Buenos Aires may in no distant future be taken as quickly and with more comfort than the trip from New York to Boston as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. In view of such inventions as that of the wireless telephone one may say that the whole world is, in a very literal sense, becoming a whispering gallery. Think of the danger if the words that are whispered are to be words of hatred and suspicion, if men are to be bound together in a huge mass of interlocking machinery and at the same time remain spiritually centrifugal!
Let us then discuss in a very and critical fashion the question which, as I have just said, is most urgent at the present hour—the question of civilization versus barbarism, considering first the question of civilization in general and then that of Chinese civilization in particular. What strikes one in surveying the past is the tendency of men to look on their own country and its ways of viewing life as civilized and on the men of other countries and their ways of viewing life as barbaric. The Greeks showed a considerable degree of assurance when they deemed themselves alone civilized and dismissed the vast outside world as barbaric. Dr. Johnson showed perhaps a still greater degree of assurance when he said of the Greeks themselves : "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes, a barbarous people;" and also when he remarked : "For anything I see, foreigners are fools."
No country, however, is a more extreme example of the tendency in question than the China of the past. China was the civilized world; it was in the Chinese phrase All-under-Heaven (Poo-tien-shia) ; the rest of the world, if recognized at all, was dismissed as a vague fringe of outer barbarism. Buddhism, to be sure, penetrated into China from without. But a memorial to the throne that was composed by a statesman of the Tang period begins as follows: "This Buddha was a barbarian." Now in a way I sympathize with this confidence of old China in its own civilization if not with the arrogance that led it to dismiss as of slight value the achievements of every other type of civilization, and I am going to state why in my judgement traditional Chinese civilization deserves a high rating, when compared with the civilization of other countries; this reason is first and foremost that, in spite of all its corrupt mandarins and officials of the past and present, China has perhaps more than any other country, planted itself on moral ideas. Joubert, one of the most sagacious of French critics, writes of the Chinese: "Are they in as imperfect a state as is commonly supposed? They have been frequently conquered, we are told. But are we to make the institutions of a country responsible for the chances and incidents of war? And is not long duration a sign of excellence in laws, as utility and clearness are characteristics of truth in philosophical systems? Now what people ever had laws more ancient, which have varied less and which have been more constantly honored, loved, studied?" One may add to what Joubert says about the traditional preoccupation of the Chinese with moral ideas that this interest has been displayed predominantly on the humanistic level. It has not been primarily naturalistic, like that of the Occident at the present time, nor again mainly religious, like that of ancient, and to some extent, modern India ; the chief concern of the Chinese has been rather with the ethical aspects of men's relations to one another in this world. For example, the so-called Sacred Edict of Kang Hsi (early eighteenth century) which is admirable from a purely humanistic point of view, is positively disparaging in its mention of both Buddhism and Christianity.
But the utilitarian-sentimental movement that is now being introduced into China also professes to be civilized and ethical, and in the name of its own conception of civilization and ethics, it will show itself ready, as it has with us, to discard traditional ethical conceptions whether humanistic or religious. I can only express the conviction at the risk of seeming unduly dogmatic because of my failure through lack of time to give all my grounds for this conviction, that the present movement in the Occident is at its very heart not ethical but pseudo-ethical. Let me return for a moment to its notion of progress. There is a sense in which everybody should believe in progress. Confucius showed that he believed in progress when he said of his disciple Yen Yuan: "Ah, what a loss! I used to see him ever progressing and never coming to a standstill." But the utilitarians have fallen into a palpable confusion between moral and material progress.
I am going to quote on this latter point a passage from a young English critic, Mr. John Middleton Murry. In his "Evolution of an Intellectual" (1919), he writes as follows: "There would not be the faintest trouble in reading modern history in such a fashion that the disaster of the war would appear, not a terrible aberration of mankind, but the logical culmination of all that process of complicating and multiplying material satisfactions which began with the Industrial Revolution in England and has usurped the name of civilization. This so-called civilization, it could be clearly shown, has acted merely as a multiplying instrument. It has increased the desires of man, and increased the horror of the method he has always chosen to attain them if unimpeded satisfaction were not permitted. * * Modern civilization is only a complex of material discoveries and it is nothing more. In other words it is not a civilization at all. It is a material condition which has usurped a spiritual title. The excitement of the process of its creation was so great that the peoples involved in it had no time to look about them. The fervor of activity was upon them, and they made, with an ease that now seems to us almost, miraculous , the assumption that their fervor was a moral fervor. * * Words of real moral and spiritual import were, we will not say debased, but transferred from one scheme of values to another. * * The language of morality became the language of materiality. *** There were no adequate spiritual controls. The problem is how to create them."
Disraeli says that the English-speaking peoples have been unable to distinguish between comfort and civilization. The word comfort itself is an interesting example of that tendency of which Mr. Murry speaks to transfer words from one scheme of values to another. "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted". The American of the present day wishes to get his comfort without any preliminary mourning; and this is a main aspect of what has been termed our criminal optimism. Moreover the utilitarian debasement of general terms is only half the story ; the sentimentalist has also tampered with the right meaning of words in his endeavor to prove that it is possible to satisfy the requirements of the moral law by some process of emotional expansion. All other modern revolutions were preceded about the middle of the eighteenth century by a revolution in the dictionary. It was about that time, for example, that the word conscience began to take on its present meaning; instead of being a still small voice, as it had been traditionally, it became a social conscience that operates rather through a megaphone.
Now the way to deal with such confusions and sophistries is not simply by an appeal to the past or to some form of traditional authority. Since the persons who utter these sophistries profess above all to be modern, one should meet them on their own ground and deal with them in a thoroughly modern, that is, in a thoroughly critical spirit. According to Mr, Murry, material progress has been able to pass for spiritual progress only by a twisting and perversion of general terms. This reminds us that Socrates, the first great exponent of the critical spirit in the Occident opposed to the sophists of his time and their uncritical break with the past a rigorous definition of general terms. We are reminded also of a saying of Confucius. When asked what he would do first of all if the reins of government were put in his hands, he replied that the first thing he would do would be to define his terms and make words correspond to things. The man who wishes to practice the Socratic and Confucian art of making words correspond to things and to discover how far our current theories are in accord with the actual facts of human nature must use the past as his laboratory. One should remind the modernist, who piques himself above all on being experimental, to how great an extent tradition itself is only a convenient summing up of actual experience. Confucian doctrine, for example, can be judged not only by its fruits since the age of Confucius, but reflects a great body of moral experience in the ages that preceded him. I cannot forbear quoting at this point a passage from the late M. Chavannes, Professor at the College de France, and at the time of his death the most accomplished of occidental sinologues: "Confucius was, as it were, five hundred years before our era, the national conscience which gave precision and corroboration to the profound ideas of which the classic books of remote antiquity reveal to us the first outlines. He went about proclaiming the necessity of conforming to the moral ideal that China had slowly conceived in the course of centuries; the men of his time refused to obey him because they found it too difficult to give up their comforts or their interests; they felt nevertheless that his voice had a more than human authority; they were moved and stirred to the depths of their being when they were touched by the potent spirit coming from the distant past which summoned up in them the truths glimpsed by their fathers."
Let us turn then to this Confucian tradition, resting as it does on an enormous mass of concrete experience, for light on the question that I declared to be so urgent at the present moment — the question as to what is the centripetal element in human nature, the element that really brings men together on the spiritual level, and not merely, like our mechanical devices, establishes a material contact between them while leaving them spiritual, by centrifugal. Confucius defines the specifically human element in man, not in terms of expansive emotion like the sentimental humanitarians of to-day, but as a "law of inner control; " (I borrowed this rendering of li from "The Sayings of Confucius" translated by Mr. Lionel Giles of the British Museum) and herein he agrees with the best humanists of the Occident from Aristotle and the Greeks down. If a man is to be truly human, he cannot expand freely along the lines of his ordinary self, but must discipline this ordinary self to a sense of measure and proportion. But most people, says Aristotle, do not wish to do anything of the kind; "they would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." So that humanists in both the East and the West oppose to the democratic doctrine of the divine average the doctrine of the saving remnant. A man who accepts a truly humanistic discipline tends to become what Confucius calls a superior man ("True aristocrat" would perhaps be a better rendering. "Superior man" has about it a slight suggestion). (Chun tzu) or what Aristotle calls a highly serious man. Personally I am struck by the central soundness of this Confucian conception. It does not proscribe sympathy; it would merely have sympathy tempered by selection. (The element of sympathy is of course abundantly present in Confucian jen). You no doubt recall that apostles of an indiscriminate fraternity were abroad in ancient China as they are in the Occident to-day. The attacks of Mencius on Mei-ti and his followers who were for suppressing discrimination in favor of brotherhood still hold good against our western sentimentalists, for instance, against Tolstoy and his followers.
If the superior man is a great blessing to the world it is less because he engages in what is now known as social service than because he is setting the world a good example. Plato defines justice as minding one's own business. As a result of our current "uplift" activities the point is rapidly being reached where everybody is minding everybody else's business. The meddler and the busybody has perhaps for the first time in the history of the world got himself taken at his own estimate of himself. We are in fact living in what some one has termed the "meddle ages." It might be well to reflect on what Confucius says of his ideal ruler, Shun. Religiously self-observant, he says, Shun simply sat gravely on his throne and everything was well. Shun was minding his own business in the Platonic sense and the force of his example was such that other people were led to do likewise.
Humanistic ideas of the kind I have been describing were maintained in old China by a system of education. That this education had fallen into a rut of pseudo-classic formalism and that it had from the start grave deficiencies must, I think, be freely granted. But even here you must be careful not to pour out the baby with the bath water. There was, for example, a great idea at the bottom of the old civil service examinations, however imperfectly it was carried out. There was to be selection and severe selection on humanistic lines among those who aspired to serve the state, but the basis of the selection was to be democratic. This combination of the democratic with the aristocratic and selective principle is one that we can scarcely be said to have solved in the Occident. Our democratic development has been won largely at the expense of standards; and yet without leaders who are disciplined to the best humanistic standards the whole democratic experiment is going, in my judgement, to prove impossible. Let me take up almost at random another point in the old Chinese education that has been very severely and to a large extent rightly critized — namely, the undue emphasis on memory. Since Rousseau and his attack on memory in his "Emile" we have been tending to fall into the opposite extreme in the Occident. We have forgotten the uses of what I would term the selective memory. This type of memory must always play a large role in any genuinely humanistic training. You memorize great poems or the sayings of the sages even though they do not mean much to you at the time. This meaning is illumined by later experience. As it is, when children should be storing up in their memories the winnowed wisdom of the past, they are likely, as a result of our current sentimental prejudice in favor of child's "literature," to be reading some such books as "The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies" or "Peter Pumpkin in Wonderland."
My own general conviction, then, so far as I may venture to express a conviction on the basis of my imperfect knowledge of China, is that you can get rid of many things on the periphery of your traditional education, you can get rid of much that is scholastic in the Confucian basis of this education, you can modify much that is in the old books themselves ; many of the rules of good form for example that are laid down in the "Li Ki" seem to me to be no more of the essence of that decorum or law of inner control which must be at the heart of every true humanism than the fact, which has also been piously handed down, that Confucius ate ginger at every meal. You may, again, enrich your education greatly with elements drawn from the Occident, especially on the scientific and naturalistic side, and so acquire the material efficiency that China lacks. I believe, however, that with all the peripheral changes you need to retain a certain central rightness in the traditional conception. This rightness seems to me to derive from the perception that the maintenance of civilization is due, not primarily to the multitude and to some "general will" in Rousseau's sense that emanates spontaneously from a supposedly divine average, but to a saving remnant or comparatively small number of leaders. The ultimate basis of sound leadership is the type of character that is achieved through self-discipline, and this self-discipline itself has its root in humility or "submission to the will of Heaven." I am inclined to think that Confucius is superior to many of our occidental humanists in his clear recognition of the fact that the law of measure is itself subject to the law of humility. The mention of humility raises the question to what extent distinctively religious elements should enter into your new education ; for Confucianism, admirable in its own way, is not, in any complete sense of the word, a religion. This question is too large to be adequately treated in a talk of this kind and I am not planning to discuss it in any detail. I may say, however, in passing, that I have been struck by one thing in my study of Buddhism — and when I was a youth I was at pains to learn both Sanskrit and Pali in order that I might gain some knowledge of Buddhist doctrine at the source, — and that is, that in its original form Buddhism is much nearer to the modern spirit, which I have defined as the positive and critical spirit, than the Mahayana, which is practically the only form of Buddhism you have had in China. A certain number of Chinese should study Pali — some indeed are now doing this in America — not only to understand various aspects of the past in China but to discover how far this ancient faith may still be a living force upon the present. (It Is not easy to get an adequate notion of Buddhism through translations. The difficulty is in the rendering of the general terms. Fausboll, for example, has rendered fifteen different Pall words by the one word "desire" in his translation of the Sutta-Nipata ; Vol. X. Sacred Books of the East. In his translation of the Dhammapada (ibid.). Max Muller has (ch. XVI) rendered by "love" two different terms, neither of which properly has that meaning). Judged by its fruits in life and conduct Buddhism at its best is a striking confirmation of Christianity.
The conclusion of the whole matter is this: You cannot afford to neglect the ethical side of your Renaissance, nor again can you afford to be pseudoethical, as you may be, if you adopt too uncritically certain notions that are current in the West today. Specifically you will run the danger of losing what is best in your own great and civilized past without acquiring what is really civilized in the Occident. You will merely acquire, if you are too utilitarian, our machinery — our typewriters and telephones and automobiles — and, because the latest machinery is likely to be the best, you are likely to assume the same of our literature, and to run after our Rousseauistic eccentrics. The remedy, it seems to me, is not to lose touch with your own background in the name of a superficial progress, and at the same time to get into closer touch with our background beginning with the Greeks. You will find that the two backgrounds confirm one another especially on the humanistic side, and constitute together what one may term the wisdom of the ages. It seems to me regrettable that there are less than a dozen Chinese students in America today who are making a serious study of our occidental background in art and literature and philosophy. There should be at least a hundred. You should have scholars at all your more important seats of learning who could teach the Confucian Analects in connection with the Ethics of Aristotle. On the other hand, we should have at our important seats of learning scholars, preferably Chinese, who could give courses in Chinese history and moral philosophy. This might prove an important way of promoting a real understanding between the intellectual leaders of Orient and Occident. The tragic failure of the past century has been the failure to work out a sound type of internationalism. Science is in a sense international, but it has been turned to the ends of national aggrandizement. The type of brotherly love that has been preached in connection with the humanitarian movement has proved even more fallacious. Why not work for a humanistic international? An international, one may say, of gentlemen who, without rising necessarily to the sublimities of religion, feel that they can at least unite on a platform of moderation and common sense and common decency. My hope is that, if such a humanistic movement gets started in the West, it will have a response in a neo-Confucian movement in China — a Confucianism that will be disengaged from all the scholastic and formalistic accretions with which it has been overlaid in the course of centuries. In any case the decisive battle between humanists on the one hand, and utilitarians and sentimentalists on the other will be fought in both China and the West in the field of education.

Wu, Xuezhao. The birth of a Chinese cultural movement : letters between Babbitt and Wu Mi [ID D28817].
Letters to Wu Mi by Babbitt
(1)
Jaffrey, New Hampshire, 30 June, 1921.
My dear Mr. Wu,—I gather from the letter you wrote my wife on June 24th that it is doubtful whether I am to have the pleasure of seeing you again before your return to China. I left Cambridge to come up here on June 22. I am planning to be in Cambridge again about July 10 and supposed that I should see you at that time. I regret greatly that this is not possible but have at least the satisfaction of knowing that you have received your A.M. in regular course after all. I am sure that you deserved the degree on your total record.
It has been a great pleasure for me to have you as a student. I feel confident that you are one of those who will work most effectively to save what is admirable and wise in the traditions of your country from unintelligent innovation. Do not fail to write me, not only about your personal fortunes, but about the Chinese situation in general. I am especially interested, as you know, in the problem of Chinese Education. If I can be of help to you in any way do not hesitate to call on me. Please convey my very warm regards to Mr. May. With best wishes for a pleasant journey, in which my wife joins, I am,
Very sincerely yours,
Irving Babbitt
(2)
Dublin, N.H., 17 Sep., 1922
Dear Mr. Wu,—I am one of the poorest and most irregular of correspondents or I should have written you long ago to tell you how much I appreciated your letters of last winter. These, with the letter I have just received, give me a very vivid picture of your personal circumstances as well as of the situation with which you are contending in China. You seem to me to be making a plucky fight personally and have, I am sure, no reason for self-reproach. I hope that the outlook for China is not quite so dark as you seem to think. I do not feel qualified to have an opinion. My impression, such as it is, is that the Chinese are a cheerful, industrious and intelligent folk who have coped with many a serious emergency in the past and may succeed in coping with this one. My special interest, as you know, is in the great Confucian tradition
and the elements of admirable humanism that it contains. This tradition needs to be revitalized and adjusted to new conditions but anything approaching a complete break with it would in my judgment be a grave disaster for China itself and ultimately perhaps for the rest of us.
I hear favorable comment from Chinese at Harvard on your new Critical Review [Xue heng]. It seems to me just the kind of thing that is needed. I wonder whether you are going to have difficulty in recruiting a sufficiently large staff of contributors. It would seem dsirable under the circumstances to coöperate with every one who shares the general point of view in spite of the difficulties and discouragements that you mentioned in your letters of last winter. Is not Mr. Tang likely to prove a useful auxiliary? I had a talk with him on Chinese philosophy just before he left Cambridge for home. He seemed to me better informed in this field than perhaps any other Chinese I have ever met. Would not his article on Schopenhauer and Buddhism in the Chinese Students Monthly (or the equivalent) be good material for your Critical Review? The article by Mr. K. L. Lou on theories of Laughter struck me as a very distinguished piece of writing and might also be presented profitably
to Chinese readers. Mr. Tang and Mr. Lou have not perhaps the kind of aggressiveness that seems needed in China just now, but, when all is said, they are very valuable men. Mr. H. H. Chang is just handing in an extremely able doctoral thesis on the Humanism of Matthew Arnold. The last chapter of this thesis—Matthew Arnold and Confucian humanism—contains material that might, in my opinion, be used to advantage in your review. Mr. Chang strikes me as distinctly aggressive. You may have noticed the articles he has been publishing in the Yale Review, Edinburgh Review, North American Review and (N.Y.) Nation. And he is only twenty-four years-old!—I wish, by the way, you could publish notices of John Dewey's last two volumes of a kind that will expose his superficiality. He has been exercising a bad influence in this
country, and I suspect also in China. Might not Mr. Tang be of aid to you here?
I have been having a very strenuous year. During the first half year I gave a graduate seminar at Yale in addition to full work at Harvard and Radcliffe. During the second half of April, I took a Western trip, travelling about seven thousand miles and giving four lectures at Leland Stanford Un., one lecture at the Un. of California, one at the Northwestern Un. and one at the Un. of Chicago. This summer I have been getting visited and working on Democracy and Imperialism [Democracy and leadership]. It goes forward slowly, but I hope to have it finished in three or four months. It is the hardest job I have ever undertaken. I have accepted an invitation to go during the second half of this coming academic year as exchange professor from Harvard to the Sorbonne. I have not yet decided what courses it is advisable for me to give at Paris or whether I had better give them in French or English,—I am sending you an article in La Revue hebdomadaire on my writing that I thought might interest you. Professor Mercier seems to me to have made a very intelligent summary.
Tell Mr. May that I sent the photograph and two volumes of Mr. More I promised him and hope that they reached him safely.— Remember that it is always a pleasure for me to hear from you and that I stand ready to help you in any way in my power.
Sincerely yours,
Irving Babbitt
(3)
6 Kirkland Road, Cambridge, 24 July, 1924
Dear Mr. Wu,—Some time ago I sent you a copy of my new book "Democracy and Leadership" and trust that it has reached you safely. If not, let me know and I will send you another copy. I was much interested in your last letter and also greatly appreciated your kindness in sending me a copy of the Critical Review containing the translation of M. Mercier's article. The value of this kind of translation is that it may open the way for coöperation between those who are working for a humanistic movement in China and those who are interested in starting a similar movement in the Occident. In the meanwhile the West needs a more adequate interpretation than it has yet received of the Confucian humanism and this is, as you know, a task that I am fond of urging upon you and other Chinese who know their own cultural background and have at the same time a good knowledge of English.
I have admired at a distance the pluck and persistency you have displayed in editing the "Critical Review" in the face of what must have been great difficulties. I fear that the whole situation has been still further complicated by the upheaval at Nanking of which Mr. H. H. Hu tells me. I am in no position to form an opinion as to the academic politics involved but I cannot help feeling much regret at the breaking up of your particular group. I understand that you are going to the Northeastern University. I hope that this change will not involve too great a sacrifice. Mr. May, I am told, is to come to Harvard as a teacher of Chinese. I did not know anything about this appointment until it was actually announced. He will of course be able to give me very full information about the situation at Nanking.
I recently made a trip to Princeton to visit Mr. P. E. More. He sailed for Europe on July 12. He is planning to be abroad about a year, spending the latter part of the trip in Greece. He has been extremely active in a literary way of late. He has published two books this year—"Hellenistic Philosophies" and "The Christ of the New Testament." I do not like the trend that appears at the end of this latter book towards dogmatic and revealed religion. Personally I am more in sympathy with the purely psychological method of dealing with the religious problem that appears in Buddha and his early disciples.
Have you any recent word of Mr. Chang? When he last wrote to me some months ago, he spoke appreciatively of the salutary influence that "The Critical Review" has been exercising. I wonder whether you take a more favorable view of the present situation in China and whether the young people seem to you to be growing a little less superficial. Give my kind regards to Mr. Tang and Mr. Lou and also inform them that I have sent them complimentary copies of "Democracy and Leadership."
Sincerely yours,
Irving Babbitt

Letters to Babbitt from Wu Mi
(1)
Southeastern University, Nanking, China. July 6, 1923.
Dear Professor Babbitt:
Your kind letter of September 17 last year has remained unanswered, and I am very sorry for it. Mr. H. H. Chang has just returned to China from Europe; he was here yesterday and, to our great delight, told us about his meeting with you in Paris and about your lectures at the Sorbonne. Mrs. Babbitt, he told us, was accompanying you in your lecture trip to Europe. I hope both you and Mrs. Babbitt are very well, and Mr. Drew too.
Thank you very much for sending me the copy of La Revue hebdomadaire, which I received in last April. Upon receiving it, I had allowed myself the liberty of translating M. Mercier's article (L'Humanism positiviste de Irving Babbitt) into Chinese, and of having the translation published in the 19th issue of our Critical Review, with your photograph (taken from the original you sent to Mr May) and the picture of Sever Hall (your lecture room) as frontpieces. The volume containing the translation and the pictures will be out in a few days; and I will send you a copy respectfully as soon as it is issued. You may not approve the idea of having your picture as frontpiece; my excuse is that the same liberty had already been taken by the French review, and that our frontpiece is bigger and more distinct than the one in that review.
In the later part of May, Mr G. N. Orme, British Magistrate in Hongkong, paid us a special visit (having been introduced by Mr. R. F. Johnston and having seen our Review) here. Mr. Orme's ideas in many respects coincided with yours, and his views (having lived for 20 years and more in this part of the world) on Chinese affairs and especially on Chinese education agreed with our own. We had a very good talk with him and asked him [to] lecture to our students. Then I wrote a letter of introduction for him (he was returning to England by way of America), and he said, if circumstances allowing, he would certainly go to pay you a visit at Cambridge. I hope he could have fulfilled his promise.
Mr. H. H. Hu is one of our best friends and one of the few men working most earnestly and persistently for the Critical Review, and has written as much as any one since its publication. He was also the man who translated your article in The Chinese Students' Monthly (Humanstic Education in China and the West) into Chinese for an earlier number of the Review (which I remember I sent you). Mr. Hu is a student of Botany and had studied in the University of California for some years. Since then he has been professor of Botany in this University; and now he is coming to Harvard to make special studies in Arnold’s Arboratum. He is to sail in two weeks, and will stay for two years at Harvard. Although he has never seen you, he is, I may say, as good as one of your personal pupils. He has read all the books written by you, and Mr More, and Mr Sherman. He has a very competent knowledge of Chinese literature and a superficial acquaintance with
Western literature. What I am trying to say is that he is coming to pay his respects to you, and wishes to receive frequent advices
and inspiration from you. I did not give him a formal letter of introduction, but I beg to state the case in detail here. Moreover, he
will be better able to tell you about the conditions in China and about ourselves than I could inform you in a short letter.
The conditions in China went from bad to worse in the last two years since my return. The country is just now facing an extremely serious political crisis, both internal and foreign. I cannot but be grieved to think that the Chinese people has decidedly degenerated, so that the observations on our national character drawn from history and our past excellencies do not at all fit with the Chinese of today. And I believe, unless the mind and moral character of the Chinese people be completely reformed (by a miracle or a Herculean effort), there is no hope even for a political and financial regeneration in the future. Of course we must work to make a better China; but if no success, then the history of China since 1890 will remain one of the most instructive and interesting pages in the history of the world, with reference to national decadence.
In the midst of such circumstances, our private lives have been very happy. Messrs May & Tang and I have been teaching here peacefully. My salary has been increased from $160 to $200 this year, and will be $220 next year, counting monthly. (The purchasing power of money is much greater in China than in America). Apart from my teaching work, all my time is devoted to the work of the Critical Review which has been coming out steadily every month. The effect of the Review is faint but encouraging; for if we could get many able hands to write, the consequence will be decidedly felt and will be for good. At present I am still trying to seek for contributors. Mr May wrote only one article in the last twelve months. Mr. Tschen in Berlin did not respond to our call. But Mr. Tang has been doing good service; and Mr. K. L. Lou is to arrive from Europe in a week or so, and we hope to retain him in this school and make use of his cooperation. Mr. H. H. Chang is
going to teach at the National University of Peking, which has been the headquarters of that movement the effect of which we
are trying to oppose and remedy. Thank you for your kind intentions. You can help us in one way which means most to us. That is, if any new book is published by you (like "Democracy and Imperialism") or by Mr More (like "Greek Tradition" Vol. II) or by Mr S. P. Sherman, or if you happen to see any new book (in English or French or German) that you think is expressing ideas similar to yours and therefore very
useful for our cause, please drop a note to Mr H. H. Hu at Arnold's Arboratum or to me, only suggesting the name and the publisher of the book, then Mr Hu or I will be able to get the book ourselves. That book will serve as material for translation or digested account in our Review.
Although we are no longer in your classes, we are still deriving constant inspiration and precept from you. With humble personal
regards to you and Mrs. Babbitt,
Yours pupil
Mi Wu
P. S. M. Sylvain Levi had been in China, & was lecturing in the University of Peking in last April; we tried but failed to get him to come down to Nanking & lecture in our school.
(2)
Southeastern University, Nanking, China. July 4, 1924
My dear Master:
We are exceedingly grateful to you for having sent to each of us a copy of your long expected book "Democracy and Leadership." Please be assured that, though we are now in another hemisphere, we have constantly been reviewing your ideas in our minds and reading your books (both old and new) with much more seriousness and attention than when we were sitting in your classroom in Sever Hall. Whatever we do and wherever we go, you will always be our guide and teacher in more than ordinary sense of the word. I especially will strive to make more and more Chinese students in their home land benefited by your ideas and indirect inspiration.
On receiving your book "Democracy and Leadership", I immediately set to reading it, and then at once translated its "Introduction", with a summary of the whole book, and had these published in the 32nd Number of The Critical Review. That Number will appear in August, and I will send you a copy upon its publication. I trust that the 19th Number of The Critical Review, which contains your picture and Mr. Mercier's French article in Chinese translation, had safely reached you in last August.
Lately there have been many changes in the life and work of your pupils in China. Mr. K. T. May is coming to Harvard as Instructor
in Chinese Language; he is sailing on August 22; and upon his arrival, he will tell you of our experience in detail. Briefly, Mr. K. L. Low was appointed Head of English Department in this university last September. The bad teachers of the Department organized a mean and petty opposition against him (for the only reason that he is the acquaintance of Mr. May). In November, the Vice-President (who is the only important man here who can appreciate literature and like us) died. Since then things changed fast. In April of this year, Mr. Low was obliged to declare his resignation, and to accept the offer of Nankai College, Tientsin, (where Mr. May taught in 1919-1920) as head of English Department. In May, Mr. May, apprehensive of coming disaster, resigned and accepted the offer from Harvard. Three days later, the University illegally incorporated the Department of Western Literature (of which Mr. May was Head and I a member) into the English
Department—and thus practically killed the latter. The leader of the above-mentioned opposition to Mr. Low, a rascal, was to be the Head of the incorporated Department. I was therefore forced to go. I am going to be teacher of English at Northeastern University, Mukden, Manchuria; and will be there by the 10th of August. The Southeastern University is rather glad that Low, May and I are all gone. Of the teachers (old and new) for the incorporated Department, Mr. C. S. Hwang, I think, is the only one fitted to be a teacher. Mr. Hwang had been in your "English Literary Criticism" class at the Sorbonne in 1923, and he wishes me to convey to you his respectful remembrances.
Please pardon me for repeating to you that we are living at a crisis of a great decadence in the history of China. Everything in China is corrupt to the last degree. Personal disappointment and misfortune are nothing compare[ed] to the national disaster and
universal darkness.
Of the group of your Chinese pupils, Mr. H. H. Chang (at the University of Peking) seems to be the only one who is successful, bright, and happy. Mr. K. L. Low is serene and aloof; people all respect him; and he is not unduly enthusiastic about anything. Mr. K. T. May is generally recognized as an Epicurean with a refined taste, and a genius full of whims and temperamental indulgences. (My dissatisfaction with him is that he did not at all work hard— for example, he has not written a single article for The Critical Review for the last 22 months). Mr. Y. T. Tang (Head of the Department of Philosophy here) is similar to Mr. Low, but much more tactful and popular, and comparatively successful. My own life is inglorious and painful. I have been working, with very little cooperation and assistance, to maintain the Critical Review (which appeared in every month); the work is very labourious, though the result is far from satisfactory. For this and other work, I have sacrificed my rest, contentment, and the kind of social intercourse which is necessary in China in order to keep a man in his position.
So I am going to Mukden, from which place I shall write to you my next letter.
I have already ordered from the booksellers Mr. More's "Greek Tradition II: Hellenistic Philosophy". I had bought last year Mr. Sherman's "The Americans". Kindly send me a brief list of the most excellent books that have appeared recently which you think I must do well to read.
With best wishes to you and Mrs. Babbitt and Mr. Drew,
Your humble pupil
Mi Wu
(3)
TSING HUA COLLEGE
PEKING August, 2, 1925.
Dear Professor Babbitt:
I remember to have written you a letter on the 4th of July, 1924, when the group of friends in Nanking was breaking up & just before I started for Mukden. Arriving in Mukden in early August, I read with great pleasure and gratitude your letter that was forwarded to me. Sometime in November, I sent you two volumes of the Critical Review (being Nos. 32 & 34), containing the Chinese translation of your writings (the Introduction of "Democracy and Imperialism", and Chapter I of "Literature & the American College"). Aside from those, though I was trying always to write you, I have not done it. I hope you and Mrs. Babbitt, & old Mr. Drew, also Mr. More and Sherman, are in good health and spirit, and you will readily pardon my negligence.
As I always try to look up to you for inspiration and example in all my work and conduct, I feel I must render you the account, at least once in a year, of what I have been doing & what has been happening to me. Of course, you know well our experience in Nanking from your frequent conversation with Messrs. K. T. May & H. H. Hu; & of the conditions in China in general. So I need not dwell upon those aspects. For my own part, I went to Mukden, to Northeastern University, to teach English (very elementary) in August 1924. My feeling was very much like Esther Waters (Excuse the vulgar comparison) who, being a woman servant, went about from one family to another and worked hard, in order to feed and to bring up her beloved child. To be sure I have no right to claim the "Critical Review" as my own child; but I mean that the circumstances under which I worked to maintain the Critical Review, were made much more difficult and unfavorable by my reluctant transfer from Nanking to Mukden. With our old friends & associates dispersing in the four winds, and with contributions always
lacking & insufficient, I had to turn out a volume of 67000 words each month, amidst the journey, the household preparations and disposals, the family demands and problems in the hot month of July (and again in the bleak January). And the Chung Hua Book Co. several times threatened to discontinue and end the publication of the Review; and it was only after much wrangle of words and even with the promise of financial compensation to them in the future, that they consented to carry on the publication for another year.
Mukden however turned out to be much better than I had expected. Though the atmosphere in Mukden is unduly conservative and somewhat provincial, it was the only place in China, where educational work was taken up seriously and honestly; where the students attended classes regularly and studied their lessons faithfully; where the influence of the so-called "New Culture Movement" was not allowed to creep in, and where those (like myself) who dare to oppose to Dr. Hu Shih etc. might find a refuge and haven. The Dean of the Northeastern University was in sympathy with our movement; and through our friendship, I have recommended more than one of the members of the Critical Review (notably Mr. Lew the old man) to teach there; and I can say, our thought and ideas do actually prevail in that part of China, more than in any other place. In October 1924, I was invited by the Japanese to go to the port of Dairen and Port Arthur for a lecture. I chose to speak (in English) on the "Humanism of Prof. Babbitt" to the groups of Japanese & Chinese educators & teachers, giving them a digest and summary of the ideas in your books. One brilliant young Japanese gentleman, Mr. Shimonoski, served as my interpreter; he was very much taken up with your ideas, he became my friend and thereupon I presented him two volumes of your works.
In early January 1925, I went down to Shanghai, to see my parents, and to manage my younger sister’s wedding. In early February,
I came to Peking, and since then I have been serving in Tsing Hua College (my alma mater) as the Organizing Secretary of the Research Institute, also teaching one course on Translation. Beginning with September 1, when the organizing part will come to an end and when the work of Research Institute will actually be started, I shall be Dean of the Research Institute. My work is entirely administrative in nature, and I am not expected to teach anything but the Translation course for the College students. And there is a great deal of social intercourse and obligations, both inside and outside of the College, which I must attend and fulfill in my present capacity—which is an unpleasant necessity, rather than a useful pastime. Compared with my past life in Nanking & Mukden, I am now having more physical comfort and material indulgence; and, as I have to run about a great deal and see people, I am now having much less time for reading and writing. This is what grieves me: the quiet and simple and studious life I had had in Nanking and Mukden has already seemed to me a golden age to which I desire but never can return!
What had made me forsake Mukden and come to Peking and to Tsing Hua College, was neither the usual attractions of the Capital (opportunities for a political career; beautiful girls of elevated station; first class restaurants and book-shops; etc.) nor the material compensation and physical comfort which Tsing Hua College could better afford, but those points of convenience and advantage which can help me to work better and more efficiently for the Critical Review. I mean, for example, a very good Library; an able assistant paid by the College, but willing to work for the Critical Review in spare time out of mere zeal and friendship; the chances for meeting like-minded people, especially men of letters, and thereby to secure contributions and articles for the Critical Review. Upon the work of the Review, my thoughts and my energy are concentrated; and [for] those things I really care.
The research work to be done in the Institute will entirely be confined to the Chinese field—the various branches of Chinese studies. Perhaps it will be devoted, more to searching after facts, than to the discussion of living ideas. And as there is much school politics and as my chief concern is for the Critical Review, I have to take a rather conciliatory and wise course in regard to affairs and direction of the Research Institute. The 4 Professors appointed for the Research Institute are as follows: (1) Mr. Wang Kuo-Wei (excellent scholar, whose name you perhaps have seen in the "Tong Pao"); (2) Mr. Liang Chi-Chao, famous politically; (3) Mr. Yinkoh Tschen, whom I did my best to recommend and who, after much reluctance, had consented to come in next February (the rest are all here ); (4) Dr. Yuen-Ren Chao, who taught Chinese at Harvard before Mr. K. T. May. Besides, we have as Special Lecturer Dr. Chi Li, also a Harvard man. The actual progress of the work I will report to you later on.
I humbly beg to have your constant instruction and advice, both in regard to the work of the Research Institute and to that of the Critical Review. Your words are always to me a great source of encouragement and good influence. I have carefully read your books to the last page of "Democracy & Leadership", and Mr. More's books to the end of "Christ of the New Testament." Please suggest to me, from time to time, the books (either old or new) which you think I should read or I should translate for the pages of the Critical Review. (For the Review has been founded but to propagate your ideas and the ideas of Confucius).
Allow me to make an apology for having translated your books by extracts. I have considered it the sacred duty of mine (as well as of Mr. K. T. May etc.) to translate your works as much as possible for the Chinese people whom I am sure you must love as much as your own countrymen. I lay in bed with pain for not having administered enough (since 1921) the cup of wisdom from your angelic fountain to the Chinese people who, besides neglecting their own national tradition, are now being ruined by the allied evils of the so-called "New Culture Movement" and Bolshevism. I do these things with almost religious zeal. Even if you should blame me and beat me for making such translations, I am willing to receive your chastisement; but I must do it, so that I can in future die with clear conscience. O, my dear Master, will you understand and pardon me? However, let me give you full assurance of these 3 facts: (1) Whenever I have made any translation
from your books, I never fail in sending you the translation in print. (No translation is made without you being informed). (2) All such translations are made by myself, and with greatest mount of care and prudence possible. (See, for, example, "Europe & Asia" in No. 38, or "Introduction" to Democracy and Leadership, in No. 32, of "Critical Review"). Even [if] it should go under the name of another translator, the work was in fact made under my direction and with my own revision so complete that it may be actually regarded as my work. (See, for example, Chapt. I of Literature and American College", in No. 34 of C. R.). (3) In China, besides Messrs K. T. May, H. H. Hu, & myself, no one will think of translating your books. No one will do it, even if they are paid. Few will even accept your ideas. Only some faithful adherents to the direct teaching of Confucius are willing to be taught and guided by you. O, my dear Master, this is a sad revelation. If there are others in China interested in translating your books (how poor the translation may be), China would never have fallen into the present abyss of material and spiritual decadence! I have never seen any discussion of your ideas, the appearance of your name,
outside of the columns of the Critical Review. No, absolutely none. Please be not afraid of people mis-translating you. (Even [if] such
a thing should happen, you can count on at least one of your disciples in China to take up the pen for your defense and correction before you know of it). The rumor you had heard must be from some Chinese student who perhaps had caught a glimpse of my translation in the Review and had gone to speak to you without uch indicating the source of his discovery. But because of such rumor, I beg to state the case very fully for giving you assurance; and once more I ask for your pardon in this & other affairs.
The greatest pain I always have felt in all my work and attempt, comes from the lack of co-operation among our friends, and the lack of the trait of aggressiveness among good & intelligent people. I cannot describe the case in full. But we expect first of all good writing from Mr. K. T. May. Will you kindly help us by constantly urging Mr. May to send me his writings or translations for the Critical Review?
Of our friends, (1) Mr. K. L. Low has just gone to America, to serve as Secretary in Chinese Legation at Washington, (2) Dr. H. H. Chang is teaching at National University, Peking. He admires John Morley, and is a close associate and friend of Dr. Hu Shih. We saw each other rarely. (3) Mr. Y. T. Tang is to teach in Nankai University, Tientsin.
With best regards, & humblest assurances, I am, as always,
Yours respectfully, Mi Wu

Wu Mi returned to China, kept in touch with Irving Babbitt through correspondence and by regularly sending him copies of Xue heng.
Wu Mi was fascinated by Babbitt's ideas, which were known as the New Humanism, and by Babbitt's respect for ancient Eastern philosophy, including Buddhism and Confucianism. According to Wu Mi, the New Cultural Movement's one-sided promotion of naturalism was introducing into China a system of thought that Babbitt and other distinguished scholars had already shown to have been the source of calamities in the West. Babbitt adhered to the old tradition of dualism with respect to human nature. Inspired by Babbitt, Wu Mi also assumed a dualistic standpoint on this subject. He refused those who regarded human nature as solely evil or solely good. Wu Mi shared Babbitt's view that 'in the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision'.

Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140]. (1)
Preface by Amy Lowell
Let me state at the outset that I know no Chinese. My duty in Mrs. Ayscough's and my joint collaboration has been to turn her literal translations into poems as near to the spirit of the originals as it was in my power to do. It has been a long and arduous task, but one which has amply repaid every hour spent upon it. To be suddenly introduced to a new and magnificent literature, not through the medium of the usual more or less accurate translation, but directly, as one might burrow it out for one's self with the aid of a dictionary, is an exciting and inspiriting thing. The method we adopted made this possible, as I shall attempt to show. The study of Chinese is so difficult that it is a life-work in itself, so is the study of poetry. A sinologue has not time to learn how to write poetry; a poet has no time to learn how to read Chinese. Since neither of us pretended to any knowledge of the other's craft, our association has been a continually augmenting pleasure.
I was lucky indeed to approach Chinese poetry through such a medium. The translations I had previously read had given me nothing. Mrs. Ayscough has been to me the pathway to a new world. No one could be a more sympa- [Page vi] thetic go-between for a poet and his translator, and Mrs. Ayscough was well-fitted for her task. She was born in Shanghai. Her father, who was engaged in business there, was a Canadian and her mother an American. She lived in China until she was eleven, when her parents returned to America in order that their children might finish their education in this country. It was then that I met her, so that our friendship is no new thing, but has persisted, in spite of distance, for more than thirty years, to ripen in the end into a partnership which is its culmination. Returning to China in her early twenties, she became engaged to an Englishman connected with a large British importing house in Shanghai, and on her marriage, which took place almost immediately, went back to China, where she has lived ever since. A diligent student of Chinese life and manners, she soon took up the difficult study of literary Chinese, and also accepted the position of honorary librarian of the library of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Of late years, she has delivered a number of lectures on Chinese subjects in China, Japan, America, and Canada, and has also found time to write various pamphlets on Chinese literature and customs.
In the Autumn of 1917, Mrs. Ayscough arrived in America on one of her periodic visits to this country. She brought with her a large collection of Chinese paintings for exhibition, and among these paintings were a number of [Page vii] examples of the "Written Pictures." Of these, she had made some rough translations which she intended to use to illustrate her lectures. She brought them to me with a request that I put them into poetic shape. I was fascinated by the poems, and, as we talked them over, we realized that here was a field in which we should like to work. When she returned to China, it was agreed that we should make a volume of translations from the classic Chinese writers. Such translations were in the line of her usual work, and I was anxious to read the Chinese poets as nearly in the original as it was possible for me to do. At first, we hardly considered publication. Mrs. Ayscough lives in Shanghai and I in Boston, and the war-time mails were anything but expeditious, but an enthusiastic publisher kept constantly before us our ultimate, if remote, goal. Four years have passed, and after many unavoidable delays the book is finished. We have not done it all by correspondence. Mrs. Ayscough has come back to America several times during its preparation; but, whether together or apart, the plan on which we have worked has always been the same.
Very early in our studies, we realized that the component parts of the Chinese written character counted for more in the composition of poetry than has generally been recognized; that the poet chose one character rather than another which meant practically the same thing, because [Page viii] of the descriptive allusion in the make-up of that particular character; that the poem was enriched precisely through this undercurrent of meaning in the structure of its characters. But not always – and here was the difficulty. Usually the character must be taken merely as the word it had been created to mean. It was a nice distinction, when to allow one's self the use of these character undercurrents, and when to leave them out of count entirely. But I would not have my readers suppose that I have changed or exaggerated the Chinese text. Such has not been the case. The analysis of characters has been employed very rarely, and only when the text seemed to lean on the allusion for an added vividness or zest. In only one case in the book have I permitted myself to use an adjective not inherent in the character with which I was dealing – and, in that case, the connotation was in the word itself, being descriptive of an architectural structure for which we have no equivalent – except in the "Written Pictures," where, as Mrs. Ayscough has stated in her Introduction, we allowed ourselves a somewhat freer treatment.
It has been necessary, of course, to acquire some knowledge of the laws of Chinese versification. But, equally of course, these rules could only serve to bring me into closer relations with the poems and the technical limits of the various forms. It was totally impossible to follow either the rhythms or the rhyme-schemes of the originals. All [Page ix] that could be done was to let the English words fall into their natural rhythm and not attempt to handicap the exact word by introducing rhyme at all. This is the method I followed in my translations of French poems in my book, "Six French Poets." I hold that it is more important to reproduce the perfume of a poem than its metrical form, and no translation can possibly reproduce both.
Our plan of procedure was as follows: Mrs. Ayscough would first write out the poem in Chinese. Not in the Chinese characters, of course, but in transliteration. Opposite every word she put the various meanings of it which accorded with its place in the text, since I could not use a Chinese dictionary. She also gave the analyses of whatever characters seemed to her to require it. The lines were carefully indicated, and to these lines I have, as a rule, strictly adhered; the lines of the translations usually corresponding, therefore, with the lines of the originals. In the few poems in which the ordering of the lines has been changed, this has been done solely in the interest of cadence.
I had, in fact, four different means of approach to a poem. The Chinese text, for rhyme-scheme and rhythm; the dictionary meanings of the words; the analyses of the characters; and, for the fourth, a careful paraphrase by Mrs. Ayscough, to which she added copious notes to acquaint me with all the allusions, historical, mythological, geographical, and technical, that she deemed it necessary for me to know. [Page x] Having done what I could with these materials, I sent the result to her, when she and her Chinese teacher carefully compared it with the original, and it was returned to me, either passed or commented upon, as the case might be. Some poems crossed continent and ocean many times in their course toward completion; others, more fortunate, satisfied at once. On Mrs. Ayscough's return to America this year, all the poems were submitted to a farther meticulous scrutiny, and I can only say that they are as near the originals as we could make them, and I hope they may give one quarter of the pleasure to our readers that they have to us in preparing them.

Williams, William Carlos. Portrait of the author. In : Contact ; spring (1921).
[betr. Yang Guifei, letzte Strophe ; englische Version von Bo Juyi's Chang hen ge]
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/56467/.
The birches are mad with green points
the wood's edge is burning with their green,
burning, seething--No, no, no.
The birches are opening their leaves one
by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold
and separate, one by one. Slender tassels
hang swaying from the delicate branch tips--
Oh, I cannot say it. There is no word.
Black is split at once into flowers. In
every bog and ditch, flares of
small fire, white flowers!--Agh,
the birches are mad, mad with their green.
The world is gone, torn into shreds
with this blessing. What have I left undone
that I should have undertaken
O my brother, you redfaced, living man
ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon
this same dirt that I touch--and eat.
We are alone in this terror, alone,
face to face on this road, you and I,
wrapped by this flame!
Let the polished plows stay idle,
their gloss already on the black soil.
But that face of yours--!
Answer me. I will clutch you. I
will hug you, grip you. I will poke my face
into your face and force you to see me.
Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest
thing that is in your mind to say,
say anything. I will understand you--!
It is the madness of the birch leaves opening
cold, one by one.
My rooms will receive me. But my rooms
are no longer sweet spaces where comfort
is ready to wait on me with its crumbs.
A darkness has brushed them. The mass
of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken.
Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed.
I am shaken, broken against a might
that splits comfort, blows apart
my careful partitions, crushes my house
and leaves me--with shrinking heart
and startled, empty eyes--peering out
into a cold world.
In the spring I would drink! In the spring
I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things.
Your face! Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei!
your hands, your lips to drink!
Give me your wrists to drink--
I drag you, I am drowned in you, you
overwhelm me! Drink!
Save me! The shad bush is in the edge
of the clearing. The yards in a fury
of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror.
Drink and lie forgetting the world.
And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one.
Coldly I observe them and wait for the end.
And it ends.
Qian Zhaoming : At the time when Williams wrote Prologue to 'Kora in hell' and Portrait of the author, English version of Bo Juyi : Quelle : Giles, Herbert A. A history Williams owned a copy of Giles' book (14th print.). A note in his hand on the front endpaper shows that he gave the book to his mother in 1916.
Williams : "Bob McAlmon, my co-editor on Contact rescued it from the wastebasket. I threw it away because I thought it was sentimental and I was afraid I was imitating Pound. I hated to imitate. But Bob said it was good so I let it survive."
Henry W. Wells : Williams casually refers to one of the chief figures in Chinese history : Xuanzong.

Williams, Carlos Williams. Sour grapes : a book of poems. (Boston : Four Seas Co., 1921).
Qian Zhaoming : Bo Juyi gave Williams the technique of achieving wholeness by means of uniting opposing elements. The immediate effect of using the strategy is a tangible harmony in Sour grapes poems : the dark is balanced with the light, the cold with the warm, the death with the living, and the sour with the sweet. Bo Juyi not only employs the same metaphor, but employs it to illustrate precisely the same truth about the world. It is certainly possible that Williams took both the image and the idea from the Chinese poet.
Williams' effort to see life as whole, as Bo Juyi did.
Williams make the following statement in 1956 :"Everyone knows the meaning of sour grapes, but it had a special meaning for me. I've always thought of a poet as not a successful man except in his own mind, which is devoted to something entirely different than what the world whinks of as success. The poet puts his soul in his work and if he writes a good poem he is successful. When I decided on the title I was playing a game, sticking my fingers up to my nose at the world. All the poems are poems of disappointment, sorrow. I felt rejected by the world. But secretly I had my own idea. Sour grapes are just as beautiful as any other grapes. The shape, round, perfect, beautiful. I knew it – my sour grape – to be just as typical of beauty as any grape, sweet or sour. But the world undoubtedly read a sour meaning into my title."

[Twain, Mark]. Sheng si zhi mi. Yi Qiao yi. [ID D29442].
Mao, Dun : "Mark Twain has become very popular lately because of his humor, but critics have also changed their opinions of him, realizing that to regard his fiction as mere humor is to do him an injustice. In all of Twain's works, be they long or short, is deeply engraved the ideology of democracy ; this very important feature of his works has been realized only in recent years. This is what makes 'The ordeal of Mark Twain', published last year, well worth reading."

Guo Moruo. Nü shen = The goddesses [ID D11264].
Guo Moruo : "It was Whitman who made me crazy about writing poems. It was in the year when the May 4th Movement broke out that I first touched his Leaves of grass. Reading his poems, I came to see what to write and how to voice my personal troubles and the nation's sufferings. His poems almost made me mad. Thus, it was possible for me to have the first poetry collection The goddesses published."
[Enthält] : Guo, Moruo. Chen an. [Good morning].
I greet you with a Good Morning, Atlantic Ocean
Flanked to the new World,
Graves of Washington, of Lincoln and of Whitman.
Whitman, Whitman ! Whitman who was similar to Pacific !
Pacific Ocean !...

Sekundärliteratur
1929 Caochuan, Weiyu [Zhang, Xiuzhong]. Zhongguo xin shi tan di zuo ri jin ri he ming ri. (Beijing : Hai yin shu ju, 1929). [China's new poetry]. 中國新詩壇的昨日今日和明日
Caochuan denigrates Guo Moruo's Whitmanesque poems, claiming the The goddesses [ID D11264] is a failure for two main reasons : abstractness and verbosity.
2002
Liu Rongqiang : To Guo Moruo, Whitman believed that all things that exist are equally divine, and all are God's self-expressions. Such ideas became significant for Guo when his concerns turned to China's movement toward becoming a nation building up a democratic system. Reading Leaves of grass, he was inspired by Whitman's embrace of democracy, individualism, and science. He found that what Whitman exalted was identical to the ideals in China in his day, and he came to believe that Whitman's poetic techniques were the best way to express those ideals. Under Whitman's influence, Guo became a pioneer in writing Chinese vernacular poems. He exalted democracy, individual emancipation, and science in many of his poems, and he also made creative use of Whitman's dynamic techniques, including repetition, parallelism, enumeration, and even foreign words.
2006
Yang Liping : Guo Moruo was intoxicated for a time by Walt Whitman's stormy poems in Leaves of grass. These poems offered him an ideal form for expressing his strong sentiments about himself and China, and directly inspired him to pen such 'masculine and violent poems'. Guo was fascinated with Whitman's poetry : Whitman's style, which has broken with all conventional rules, is by and large in tune with the spirit of 'Sturm und Drang' sweeping across China during the May fourth and New Culture movements. Under the influence of Whitman, Guo paid little attention to rhyming and broke away from the metrical stricture of traditional Chinese poetics. Both Whitman and Guo attached great importance to spontaneity in emotional expression in their poetry and believed that the spirit of a poem always takes precedence over the letter.

Yeats, W.B. When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound. In : Yeats, W.B. Thoughts upon the present state of the world. In : Dial ; vol. 71, no 3 (Sept. 1921). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31959/31959-h/31959-h.htm
When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic year
Whirls out new right and wrong
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of gong.
Madison Morrison : Yeats's figure of the dragon combines its destructive western with its restorative Chinese powers.

Alfred Sao-ke Sze leitet die chinesische Gesandtschaft für Amerika.

Stevens, Wallace. The snow man. In : Poetry ; vol. 19 (Oct. 1921).
Qian Zhaoming : Stevens makes a start at perceiving the thing itself in 'Thirteen ways'. It is in The snow man that he first succeeds in uniting the thing itself and the norhing.

Wells, H.G. China and world peace [31341].
PREFACE
The article on "China" by H. G. Wells, the copyright of which is owned by the Chicago Tribune and the New York World, is herewith reproduced through the courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.
That H. G. Wells is a great writer at the present time is an undisputed fact. His words mean definite things. His views on China as exposed in this article deserve wide circulation, especially at this moment when China needs to be better understood.
As an appendage, we print herewith also the China’s program as was laid before the committee on Far East¬ern and Pacific problems in the Washington Conference by the Chinese minister, H. E. Sao Ke Alfred Sze.
C.P.C.

The Chinese propaganda in America and western Europe seems on the whole to be conducted more efficiently than the Japanese. And the Chinese student, it seems to me, gets into closer touch with the educated American and European because his is a democratic and not an aristocratic habit of mind. He has an intensely western sense of public opinion.
The masses of China may be destitute, ignorant, and disordered, but in their mental habits they are modern and not medieval, in the sense that the Japanese seem to "get on" with their western social equivalents better than any of the Asiatic people. And increasing multitudes of Chinese are learning English today; it is the second language in China.
Now if Japan is the figure in the limelight at Washington today, China is the giant in the background, or, if you will, China is the background and scene of the present Pacific drama.
We have had so much in the papers lately about these two countries, we have been treated to such a feast of particulars about them that most of us have long since forgotten thoroughly the broad facts of the case and it will be refreshing to recall them here and now.
Let us remind ourselves that China is a country with a population amounting at the lowest estimate to between two and three times the population of the United States, or of France and England put together. This population has the longest unbroken tradition of peaceful industry in the world. It is essentially civilized; it respects learning and civility profoundly. A common literature and ancient traditions keep its people one. In the past, China has been divided again and again— always to reunite. But it has become "old fashioned", dangerously old fashioned, perhaps by reason of its very stability; it has lagged behind most of the world in the development of its. transport and economic possibilities.
In mineral deposits and other natural resources and in the industrial capability it has more undeveloped wealth than any other single people in the world. It is only ih the last century or so that China has lagged behind. Only a few centuries ago China was as civilized as Europe and politically more stable. In a century or so she may be again the most civilized and intelligent power in the world, flourishing in fellowship and perfect understanding with the great states of America and Europe.
She may be—if she is hot torn to pieces and kept iq a state of enfeeblement and disorder by the hostile action of external powers.
But at present China is in a state of political impatence. Her Manchu imperialism has proved itself to be hopelessly inefficient and China is now struggling to reconstruct upon modern republican lines, obviously suggested by the American example.
A few decades ago Japan astonished the world by Europeanizing herself upon Prussian lines. China now, under far less favorable conditions and with a vaster country and a less disciplined people, is struggling to Americanize herself. But it is no easy task to make over a people at one stride from a medieval autocracy to a modern democracy. It is far easier to Prussianize than to Americanize, for in the one case you have only to train an official class and in the other you must educate a whole people.
China is torn by dissensions; the south jars with the north; she has two or more governments, each claiming to be THE Chinese government, and whole provinces have fallen under the sway of military adventurers. It is a distressing spectacle, but it was probably an inevitable phase in the development of New China. Before we fall a prey to anti-Chinese propaganda it is well to recall how long it has always taken to build up the necessary understandings and habits of association upon; which a new political system rests.
France, for example, was a land of revolutions and political instability for nearly a century after the great revolution. America wrangled feebly anddangerously for several years after the war of independence before she establishing her federal government; she only cemented her union after a colossal struggle; she was not really and securely one unit until a century had elapsed.
During these long decades of probation foreign observers preached endlessly about the fickleness of the French and the political efficiency of the Americans and foretold the certainty of a break up of the United States, just as today they sneer at young China and foretell the political disintegration of the Chinese.
And we have to bear in mind that the forces of organization and renewal in China struggle against peculiar difficulties and interferences quite outside the happier experiences of France and America. In particular, they struggle against an intolerable and paralyzing amount of foreign interference.
The brilliant series of adventures and accidents by which a London trading company added the empire of Great Mogul as a picturesque, but incongruously big jewel to the British crown set an extraordinarily bad precedent in Asiatic affairs. It obsessed European political thought with the impossible dream of carving up all Asia into similar domains. The mogul's empire was itself an empire of conquest in a land saturated by ideas of caste and this gave all the European adventurers the attitude of high caste men benevolently consuming inferior races.
In that spirit, Europe—with Japan coming in presently as a hopeful student of European methods—had been trying to cook, carve up and fight for the portions of China for nearly a century, treating these wonderful people as an inferior race. The very worst that can be said about Japan with regard to China is that she has been too vigorously European.
Consider how it would have been with the United States in the years of discord that led up to the civil war if these difficulties had been complicated by three such embarrassments as there: First, that most foreigners, except now the Germans and Austrians, are outside the reach of the native courts; and their disputes with Chinese go before special foreign courts; that they are specially favored in regard to property and shipping secondly, that the Chinese government is restricted from raising revenue by any tariff above a flat rate of 5 per cent, and that they are also strictly restricted to 2 1/2 per cent in their interior dues upon foreign (but not Chinese) trade, so that they are in fact unable to raise enough revenue to maintain an efficient government; and, thirdly, that nearly all the Chinese railways—and as every American knows, transport is the very life of a modern state—are in the grip of this foreign country or that.
These are the open and manifest inconveniences of the situation, but behind these more open aspects there is a vast tangle of intervention between Chinese and Chinese affairs, schemes for further exploitation, financial entanglements, vast concession plans and projects for "spheres of influence" for this aggressive foreign nation or that. And this foreign influence is not the influence of one foreign power pursuing a single and consistent policy, but a number of competing powers, all pursuing different ends and pulling things this way and that. How could any country reconstruct itself while it was entangled in such a net of interference? No people on earth could do such a thing.
The plain fact is that, if China is to reconstruct herself that net has to be cut away. It is not enough to warn Japan out of China, or to say "open door" for China. The open door is good for the ventilation of that great apartment, but what is also needed is a clearing out of the incumbrances inside. These incumbrances are not primarily Japanese.
The five great powers sit at a green table in the fotm of a horseshoe in the conference, and the four lesser powers at a straight table like the armature of a horseshoe magnet. At the deft hand comer, next the Japanese, are the three Chinese representatives. I gather that will be allowed to say "Shantung" at the conference in moderation, but not Tibet, nor Tonquin, nor the east China—or indeed any—railway.
I doubt if either Mr. Balfour or M. Briand will nerve himself to say these forbidden words. But an irresponsible journalist may write them.
If there is to be a real end to war and disarmament, there has to be a release of China to free-Chinese control, and that means a self-denying ordinance from ALL the great powers. It will be an easy one for America and Italy to accept, but it will be a difficult sacrifice, indeed, for the two hoary leaders in the breakup of China, Great Britain and Fratice. Neither country has a bad heart, but long ago in the east they acquired some very bad habits lead very quickly to disaster.
The real test of the quality of the conference will appear when some issue arises which involves an as¬sertion or denial of the principle of "unhand and keep your hands off China". If the Chinese are worth while the conference has to establish that principle. It cannot be gracefully advanced by America because America has so little to relinquish. It CAN be established at the initiative of either Britain or France. It seems plain to me that official America is waiting for some move in that direction from either or both of these powers. If that principle of a free China is established at the Washington conference the way will have been opened in the not very remote future to a healthy and vigorous United States of China, a great modern, pacific, and progressive power.
And when I write "China", I mean what any sensible man means when he writes "China". I mean all, those parts of Asia in which the Chinese people and the Chinese culture prevail. I include at least south Manchuria, which is as surely Chinese as Texas is American, and which can no more be given to any other power without the consent of China than my overcoat can be given by one passerby to another.
The plan alternative to a released and renascent China is the cutting up of China among the aggressive powers to the tune of theirpopular American air "The Open Door", the demoralization and disintegration of the Chinese, international elbowing, competition, quarrels among the powers who have "shared" China and at last, the next great war—which it will be just as aesy for America to keep out of as the great war of 1914-18.

CHINA'S PROGRAM BEFORE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE
China's statement of principles, as outlined on Nov. 16, 1921, before the committee on Pacific and Far Eastern problems, by the Chinese minister, Dr. Sze, follows:
"In view of the fact that China must necessarily play an important part in the deliberations of this conference with reference to the political situation in tht Far East, the Chinese delegation has thought it proper that they should take the first possible opportunity to state certain general principles whidh in their opinion should guide the conference in the determinations which it is to make.
"Certain of the specific applications of the principles which it is expected that the conference will make, it is our intention later to bring forward, but at the present time it is deemed sufficient simply to propose the principles which I shall presently read.
"In formulating these principles, the purpose has been kept steadily in view of obtaining rules in accordance with which existing and possible future political "and economic problems in the Far East and the Pacific may be most justly settled, and with due regard to the rights and legitimate interests of all the powers concerned.
"Thus it has been sought to harmonize the particular interests of China with these general interests of all the world. China is anxious to play her part, not only in maintaining peace, but in promoting the material advancement and the cultural development of all the nations. She wishes to make her vast natural resources available to all peoples who need them, and in return to receive the benefits of free and equal intercourse with them.
"In order that she may do this it is necessary that she should have every possible opportunity to develop her political institutions in accordance with the genius and needs of her own people. China is now contending with certain difficult problems which necessarily arise, when any country makes a radical change in her form of government.
"These problems she will be able to solve if given the opportunity to do so. This means not only that she should be freed from the danger or threat of foreign aggression, but that, so far as circumstances will possibly permit, she be relieved from limitations which now deprive her of autonomous administrative action and prevent her from securing adequate public revenues.
"In conformity with the agenda of the conference, the Chinese government proposes for the consideration of and adoption by the conference the following general principles to be applied in the determining of the questions relating to China:
"1. (a) The powers engage to respect and observe the territorial integrity and political and administrative independence of the Chinese republic.
" (b) China, upon her part, is prepared to give an undertaking not to alienate or lease any portion of her territory or littoral to any power.
"2. China, being in full accord with the principle of the so-called open door, or equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations having treaty relations with China, is prepared to accept and apply it in all parts of the Chinese republic without exception.
"3. With a view to strengthening mutual confidence and maintaining peace in the Pacific and the Far East, the powers agree not to conclude between themselves any treaty or agreement directly affecting China or the general peace in these regions without previously notifying China and giving to her an opportunity to participate.
"4. All special rights, privileges, immunities, or commitments, whatever their character or contractural basis, claimed by any of the powers in or relating to China, are to be declared, and all such or future claims not so made known are to be deemed null and void. The rights, privilleges, immunities and commitments, now known or to be declared, are to be examined with a view to determining their scope and validity, and, if valid, to harmonize them with one another and with the principles declared by this conference.
"5. Immediately or as soon as circumstances will permit, existing limitations upon China's political juris dictianal and administrative freedom of action are to be removed.
"6. Reasonable, definite terms of duration are to be attached to China's present commitments which are without time limits.
"7. In the interpretation of instruments granting special rights or privileges, the well established principle of construction that such grants shall be strictly construed in favor of the grantors is to be observed.
"8. China's rights as a neutral are to be fully respected in future wars to which she is not a party.
"9. Provision is to be made for the peaceful settlement of international disputes in the Pacific and the Far East.
"10. Provision is to be made for future conferences to be held from time to times for the discussion of international questions relative to the Pacific and the Far East, as a basis for the determination of common policies of the signatory powers in relation thereto."

Huxley, Aldous. Works.
1921
Huxley, Aldous. Crome yellow. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1921).
Chap. 2
There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one couldn't publicly admit it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless furniture…
Chap. 3
She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness…
Chap. 5
Mary's china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever, were fixed on Mr. Scogan…
Chap. 9
The Chinese boycott of Japan, and the rivalries of that country and America in the Pacific, might be breeding a great new war in the East…
Chap. 10
"I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly," said Mary, fixing him with her china eyes…
Chap. 17
Murmurs of applause and gratitude were heard, and Mary, her large china eyes fixed on the performer…
Chap. 20
Mary's large blue china eyes were fixed upon him, seriously, penetratingly…

1922
Huxley, Aldous. Mortal coils : five stories. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1922).
Permutations among the nightingales
DOLPHIN. Precisely. But ... oh, those china-blue eyes, that ingenuousness, that pathetic and enchanting silliness! She touches lost chords in one's heart…
The Tillotson banquet
Spode tiptoed round the room, peering with astonishment at all the objects in glass, in gilded bronze, in china, in leathers, in embroidered and painted silk, in beads, in wax, objects of the most fantastic shapes and colours, all the queer products of a decadent tradition, with which the room was crowded… "Get someone to put all these things back in their places," Lord Badgery commanded, indicating with a wave of the hand the ravaged cases, the confusion of glass and china with which he had littered the floor, the pictures unhooked…
Nuns at luncheon
"I know. I shall suddenly bring a swarm of moving candles and Chinese lanterns under the mulberry trees. You imagine the rich lights and shadows, the jewel-bright leafage, the faces and moving limbs of men and women, seen for an instant and gone again…

1932
Huxley, Aldous. Brave new world. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1932).
Chap. 2
Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble…

1962
Huxley, Aldous. Island : a novel. (London : Chatto & Windus, 1962).
Sekundärliteratur
Velma Lush : His fascination with eastern religion was one of the reasons he departed on a world tour in 1925. The island of Pala is probably one of the islands of the Indonesian Archipelago. In Island, Huxley's portrayal of the Palanese beliefs demonstrate principles of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Confucianism. The beliefs, values and struggles of a lifetime are combined to form this culmination of his life's work. The Palanese are described as Mahayanists Buddhists "shot through and through with Tantra." The first principle "Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there" shows an element of Taoist philosophy. The fictional version of Tantra can be interpreted as Taoism; since being a Tantrik means you don't denounce the world and try to escape into Nirvana - you accept the world and everything about it. The Mahayanists Buddha philosophy of the Palanese aims at the passage beyond suffering into the Clear Light of the Void of all living beings (Nirvana); while living according to the Tao, appreciating and working with whatever happens during a person's life on earth. The Taoist appreciates the value of scientific knowledge about the universe and believes it increases his understanding of the "Tao." However, the "Taoist" would not use science to change a person, nor as a means to change the intelligence of society, as the Palanese did - that would be interfering with the laws of nature. In the end, the Taoist "non-interference" philosophy is one of the reasons for the doom of their society.

Wei Chenzu ist Gesandter der chinesischen Gesandtschaft in Berlin.

Hu Shi wrote in his diary : "I went to visit Zhao Yuanren at noon. He's about to finish the translation of Alice's adventures in wonderland : a real masterpiece !"

Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140]. (2)
Introduction by Florence Ayscough
There has probably never been a people in whose life poetry has played such a large part as it has done, and does, among the Chinese. The unbroken continuity of their history, throughout the whole of which records have been carefully kept, has resulted in the accumulation of a vast amount of material; and this material, literary as well as historical, remains available to-day for any one who wishes to study that branch of art which is the most faithful index to the thoughts and feelings of the "black-haired race," and which, besides, constitutes one of the finest literatures produced by any race the world has known.
To the confusion of the foreigner, however, Chinese poetry is so made up of suggestion and allusion that, without a knowledge of the backgrounds (I use the plural advisedly) from which it sprang, much of its meaning and not a little of its beauty is necessarily lost. Mr. Arthur Waley, in the preface to his "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems," says: "Classical allusion, always the vice of Chinese poetry, finally destroyed it altogether." Granting the unhappy truth of this statement, the poetry of China is nevertheless so human and appealing as to speak with great force even [Page xx] to us who live under such totally different conditions; it seems worth while, therefore, to acquire a minimum of knowledge in regard to it and so increase the enjoyment to be derived from it. In the present collection, I have purposely included only those poems in which this national vice is less in evidence; and this was not a difficult task. There is such an enormous body of Chinese poetry that the difficulty has been, not what to take, but what to leave out. I have been guided somewhat by existing translations, not wishing to duplicate what has already been adequately done, when so much still remains untouched. Not that all these poems appear in English for the first time, but many of them do; and, except for Mr. Waley's admirable work, English renderings have usually failed to convey the flavour of the originals.
Chinese scholars rank their principal poets in the following order: Tu Fu, Li T'ai-po, and Po Chü-i. Realizing that, naturally, in any literature, it is the great poets which another nation wishes to read, I have purposely kept chiefly to them, and among them to Li T'ai-po, since his poems are of a universal lyricism. Also, Mr. Waley has devoted his energies largely to Po Chü-i. Tu Fu is very difficult to translate, and probably for that reason his work is seldom given in English collections of Chinese poems. Some of his simpler poems are included here, however. A small section of the book is devoted to what the Chinese [Page xxi] call "written-on-the-wall-pictures." I shall come back to these later.
The great stumbling-block which confronts the translator at the outset is that the words he would naturally use often bring before the mind of the Occidental reader an entirely different scene to that actually described by the Oriental poet. The topography, the architecture, the fauna and flora, to say nothing of the social customs, are all alien to such a reader's own surroundings and cannot easily be visualized by him. Let me illustrate with a modern poem, for it is a curious fact that there has lately sprung up in America and England a type of poetry which is so closely allied to the Chinese in method and intention as to be very striking. This is the more remarkable since, at the time of its first appearance, there were practically no translations of Chinese poems which gave, except in a remote degree, the feeling of the originals. So exact, in fact, is this attitude toward the art of poetry among the particular group of poets to whom I have reference and the Chinese masters, that I have an almost perfect illustration of the complications of rendering which a translator runs up against by imagining this little poem of Miss Lowell's being suddenly presented to a Chinese scholar in his grass hut among the Seven Peaks: [Page xxii]
NOSTALGIA
BY AMY LOWELL
"Through pleasure and palaces" –
Through hotels, and Pullman cars, and steamships . . .

Pink and white camellias
floating in a crystal bowl,
The sharp smell of firewood,
The scrape and rustle of a dog stretching himself
on a hardwood floor,
And your voice, reading – reading –
to the slow ticking of an old brass clock . . .

"Tickets, please!"
And I watch the man in front of me
Fumbling in fourteen pockets,
While the conductor balances his ticket-punch
Between his fingers.
As we read this poem, instantly pictures of American travel start before our eyes: rushing trains with plush-covered seats, negro porters in dust-grey suits, weary ticket-collectors; or marble-floored hotel entrances, clanging elevator doors, and hurrying bell-boys, also the vivid suggestion of a beautiful American house. But our scholar would see none of this. To him, a journey is undertaken, according to the part of the country in which he must travel, either in a boat, the types of which are infinitely varied, from the large, slow-going travelling barge capable of carrying many passengers, to the swifter, smaller craft [Page xxiii] which hold only two or three people; in one of the several kinds of carriages; in a wheelbarrow, a sedan chair, a mule litter, or on the back of an animal – horse, mule, or donkey, as the case may be. Again, there is no English-speaking person to whom "Home, Sweet Home" is not familiar; in a mental flash, we conclude the stanza suggested by the first line, and know, even without the title, that the subject of the poem is homesickness. Our scholar, naturally, knows nothing of the kind; the reference is no reference to him. He is completely at sea, with no clue as to the emotion the poem is intended to convey, and no understanding of the conditions it portrays. Poem after poem in Chinese is as full of the intimate detail of daily life, as dependent upon common literary experience, as this. There is an old Chinese song called "The Snapped Willow." It, too, refers to homesickness and allusions to it are very frequent, but how can an Occidental guess at their meaning unless he has been told? In this Introduction, therefore, I have endeavoured to give as much of the background of this Chinese poetry as seems to me important, and, since introductions are made to be skipped, it need detain no one to whom the facts are already known.
The vast country of China, extending from the plains of Mongolia on the North to the Gulf of Tonquin on the South, a distance of somewhat over eighteen hundred miles, and from the mountains of Tibet on the West to the [Page xxiv] Yellow Sea on the East, another stretch of about thirteen hundred miles, comprises within its "Eighteen Provinces" practically every climate and condition under which human beings can exist with comfort. A glance at the map will show the approximate positions of the ancient States which form the poetic background of China, and it will be noticed that, with the exception of Yüeh, they all abut either on the Huang Ho, better known as the Yellow River, or on the Yangtze Kiang. These two great rivers form the main arteries of China, and to them is largely due the character of the people and the type of their mythology.
The Yellow River, which in the old mythology was said to have its source in the Milky Way (in the native idiom, "Cloudy" or "Silver River"), really rises in the K'un Lun Mountains of Central Asia; from thence its course lies through the country supposed to have been the cradle of the Chinese race. It is constantly referred to in poetry, as is also its one considerable tributary, the Wei River, or "Wei Water," its literal name. The Yellow River is not navigable for important craft, and running as it does through sandy loess constantly changes its course with the most disastrous consequences.
The Yangtze Kiang, "Son of the Sea," often referred to as the "Great River," is very different in character. Its source lies among the mountains of the Tibetan border, where it is known as the "River of Golden Sand." After [Page xxv] flowing due South for several hundred miles, it turns abruptly to the North and East, and, forcing its way through the immense wall of mountain which confronts it, "rushes with incredible speed" to the far-off Eastern Sea, forming in its course the Yangtze Gorges, of which the most famous are the San Hsia, or "Three Chasms." To these, the poets never tire of alluding, for, to quote Li T'ai-po, the cliffs rise to such a height that they seem to "press Green Heaven." The water is low during the Winter months, leaving many treacherous rocks and shoals uncovered, but rises to a seething flood during the Summer, when the Tibetan snows are melting. The river is then doubly dangerous, as even great pinnacles of rock are concealed by the whirling rapids. Near this point, the Serpent River, so-called from its tortuous configuration, winds its way through deep ravines and joins the main stream. As may be imagined, navigation on these stretches of the river is extremely perilous, and an ascent of the Upper Yangtze takes several months to perform since the boats must be hauled over the numerous rapids by men, called professionally "trackers," whose work is so strenuous that they are bent nearly double as they crawl along the tow-paths made against the cliffs. In spite of the precipitous nature of the banks, many towns and villages are built upon them and rise tier on tier up the mountain sides. Having run about two-thirds of its course and reached the [Page xxvi] modern city of Hankow, the Great River changes its mood and continues on its way, immense and placid, forming the chief means of communication between the sea and Central China. The remarkably fertile country on either side is intersected by water-ways, natural and artificial, used instead of roads, which latter do not exist in the Yangtze Valley, their place being taken by paths, some of which are paved with stone and wide enough to accommodate two or three people abreast.
As travel has always been very popular, every conceivable form of water-borne craft has sprung up, and these the poets constantly used as they went from the capital to take up their official posts, or from the house of one patron to another, the ancient custom being for the rich to entertain and support men of letters with whom they "drank wine and recited verses," the pastime most dear to their hearts. The innumerable poems of farewell found among the works of all Chinese poets were usually written as parting gifts from the authors to their hosts.
As it nears the sea, the river makes a great sweep round Nanking and flows through what was once the State of Wu, now Kiangsu. This and the neighbouring States of Yüeh and Ch'u (the modern Chêkang and parts of Hunan, Kweichow, and Kiangsi) is the country painted in such lovely, peaceful pictures by Li T'ai-po and his brother poets. The climate being mild, the willows which grow on the [Page xxvii] banks of the rivers and canals are seldom bare and begin to show the faint colour of Spring by the middle of January; and, before many days, the soft bud-sheaths, called by the Chinese "willow-snow," lie thick on the surface of the water. Plum-trees flower even while the rare snow-falls turn the ground white, and soon after the New Year, the moment when, according to the Chinese calendar, Spring "opens," the fields are pink with peach-blooms, and gold with rape-blossom, while the air is sweetly scented by the flowers of the beans sown the Autumn before. Walls and fences are unknown, only low ridges divide the various properties, and the little houses of the farmers are built closely together in groups, as a rule to the South of a bamboo copse which acts as a screen against the Northeast winds prevailing during the Winter; the aspect of the rich plain, which produces three crops a year, is therefore that of an immense garden, and the low, grey houses, with their heavy roofs, melt into the picture as do the blue-coated people who live in them. Life is very intimate and communistic, and the affairs of every one in the village are known to every one else. The silk industry being most important, mulberry-trees are grown in great numbers to provide the silk-worms with the leaves upon which they subsist, and are kept closely pollarded in order that they may produce as much foliage as possible.
This smiling country on the river-banks, and to the [Page xxviii] South, provides a striking contrast to those provinces lying farther North and West. Shantung, the birthplace of Confucius, is arid and filled with rocky, barren hills, and the provinces of Chili, Shansi, Shensi, and Kansu, which extend Westward, skirting the Great Wall, are also sandy and often parched for lack of water, while Szechwan, lying on the Tibetan border, although rich and well irrigated, is barred from the rest of China by tremendous mountain ranges difficult to pass. One range, called the "Mountains of the Two-Edged Sword," was, and is, especially famous. It formed an almost impassable barrier, and the great Chu Ko-liang, therefore, ordered that a roadway, of the kind generally known in China as chan tao (a road made of logs laid on piers driven into the face of a cliff and kept secure by mortar) be built, so that travellers from Shensi might be able to cross into Szechwan. This road is described by Li T'ai-po in a very beautiful poem, "The Terraced Road of the Two-Edged Sword Mountains."
These varied scenes among which the poets lived differed again from those which flashed before their mental eyes when their thoughts followed the soldiers to the far Northwest, to the country where the Hsiung Nu and other Mongol tribes lived, those Barbarians, as the Chinese called them, who perpetually menaced China with invasion, who, in the picturesque phraseology of the time, desired that their horses should "drink of the streams of the South." [Page xxix] These Mongol hordes harassed the Chinese State from its earliest days; it was as a defence against them that the "First Emperor" erected the Great Wall, with a length of "ten thousand li" as Chinese hyperbole unblushingly states – its real length is fifteen hundred miles. This defence could, however, merely mitigate, not avert, the evil; only constant effort, constant fighting, could prevent the Mongol hordes from overrunning the country.
Beyond the Jade Pass in Kansu, through which the soldiers marched, lay the desert and the steppes stretching to the very "Edge of Heaven," and on this "edge" stood the "Heaven-high Hills"; while, on the way, surrounded by miles of sand, lay the Ch'ing Hai Lake (Green, or Inland, Sea), a dreary region at best, and peopled by the ghosts of countless soldiers who had fallen in battle on the "Yellow Sand Fields."
In addition to these backgrounds of reality, that of the Fertile Empire and that of the Barren Waste, there was another – that of the "Western Paradise" inhabited by the Hsi Wang Mu (Western Empress Mother) and those countless beings who, after a life in this world, had attained Immortality and dwelt among the Hsien, supernatural creatures living in this region of perfect happiness supposed to lie among the K'un Lun Mountains in Central Asia. From the spontaneous manner in which they constantly refer to it, and from the vividness of the pictures [Page xxx] suggested by their references to it, one can almost question whether this Fairy World, the World of Imagination, with its inhabitants, were not as real to the writers of the early days as was the World of Actuality. Thus the topography of Chinese poetry may be said to fall into three main divisions, and allusions are made to
1. The beautiful scenes in the Eighteen Provinces.
2. The desolate region beyond the Jade Pass.
3. The glorious "Western Paradise."
Ideals determine government, and government determines social life, and social life, with all that the term connotes, is the essence of every literature.
The theory upon which the Chinese State was established is exceedingly interesting, and although the ideal was seldom reached, the system proved enduring and brought happiness to the people who lived under it.
The Emperor was regarded as the Son of the Celestial Ruler, as Father of his people, and was supposed to direct his Empire as a father should direct his children, never by the strong arm of force, but by loving precept and example. In theory, he held office only so long as peace and prosperity lasted, this beneficent state of things being considered a proof that the ruler's actions were in accordance with the decree of Heaven. Rebellion and disorder were an equal proof that the Son of Heaven had failed in his great [Page xxxi] mission; and, if wide-spread discontent continued, it was his duty to abdicate. The "divine right of kings" has never existed in China; its place has been taken by the people's right to rebellion.
This system created a very real democracy, which so struck the Dutchman, Van Braam, when he conducted a commercial embassy to the Court of Ch'ien Lung in 1794, that he dedicated his account of the embassy to "His Excellency George Washington, President of the United States," in the following remarkable manner:
Sir,
Travels among the most ancient people which now inhabits this globe, and which owes its long existence to the system which makes its chief the Father of the National Family, cannot appear under better auspices than those of the Great Man who was elected, by the universal suffrage of a new nation, to preside at the conquest of liberty, and in the establishment of a government in which everything bespeaks the love of the First Magistrate for the people. Permit me thus to address the homage of my veneration to the virtues, which in your Excellency, afford so striking a resemblance between Asia, and America. I cannot shew myself more worthy of the title of Citizen of the United States, which is become my adopted country, than by paying a just tribute to the Chief, whose principles and sentiments, are calculated to procure them a duration equal to that of the Chinese Empire.
The semi-divine person of the Emperor was also regarded as the "Sun" of the Empire, whose light should shine on high and low alike. His intelligence was compared to the penetrating rays of the sun, while that of the Empress found its counterpart in the soft, suffusing brilliance [Page xxxii] of the moon. In reading Chinese poetry, it is important to keep these similies in mind, as the poets constantly employ them; evil counsellors, for instance, are often referred to as "clouds which obscure the sun."
The Son of Heaven was assisted in the government of the country by a large body of officials, drawn from all classes of the people. How these officials were chosen, and what were their functions, will be stated presently. At the moment, we must take a cursory glance at Chinese history, since it is an ever-present subject of allusion in poetry.
Two favourite, and probably mythical, heroes, the Emperors Yao and Shun, who are supposed to have lived in the semi-legendary period two or three thousand years before the birth of Christ, have been held up ever since as shining examples of perfection. Shun chose as his successor a man who had shown such great engineering talent in draining the country, always in danger of floods from the swollen rivers, that the Chinese still say: "Without Yü, we should all have been fishes." Yü founded the first hereditary dynasty, called the Hsia Dynasty, and, since then, every time the family of the Emperor has changed, a new dynasty has been inaugurated, the name being chosen by its first Emperor. With Yü's accession to the throne in 2205 B.C., authentic Chinese history begins.
Several centuries later, when Yü's descendants had deteriorated and become effete, a virtuous noble named [Page xxxiii] T'ang organized the first of those rebellions against bad government so characteristic of Chinese history. He was successful, and in his "Announcement to the Ten Thousand Districts," set forth what we should call his platform in these words: "The way of Heaven is to bless the good and punish the wicked. It sent down calamities upon the house of Hsia to make manifest its crimes. Therefore I, the little child, charged with the decree of Heaven and its bright terrors, did not dare forgive the criminal... It is given to me, the one man, to ensure harmony and tranquillity to your State and families; and now I know not whether I may not offend the Powers above and below. I am fearful and trembling lest I should fall into a deep abyss." The doctrine that Heaven sends calamity as a punishment for man's sin is referred to again and again in the ancient "Book of History" and "Book of Odes." It is a belief common to all primitive peoples, but in China it persisted until the present republic demolished the last of the long line of dynastic empires.
T'ang made a great and wise ruler. The Dynasty of Shang, which he founded, lasted until 1122 B.C., and was succeeded by that of Chou, the longest in the annals of Chinese history – so long, indeed, that historians divide it into three distinct periods. The first of these, "The Rise," ran from 1122 B.C. to 770 B.C.; the second, "The Age of Feudalism," endured until 500 B.C.; the third, "The [Page xxxiv] Age of the Seven States," until 255 B.C. Starting under wise rulers, it gradually sank through others less competent until by 770 B.C. it was little more than a name. During the "Age of Feudalism," the numerous States were constantly at war, but eventually the strongest of them united in a group called the "Seven Masculine Powers" under the shadowy suzerainty of Chou. Although, from the political point of view, this period was full of unrest and gloom, from the intellectual it was exceedingly brilliant and is known as the "Age of Philosophers." The most famous names among the many teachers of the time are those of Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, and Confucius. To these men, China owes the two great schools of thought upon which her social system rests.
The "Age of the Seven States" (Masculine Powers) ended when Ch'in, one of their number, overcame and absorbed the rest. Its prince adopted the title of Shih Huang Ti, or "First Supreme Ruler," thus placing himself on an equality with Heaven. Is it to be wondered at that the scholars demurred? The literary class were in perpetual opposition to the Emperor, who finally lost patience with them altogether and decreed that all books relating to the past should be burnt, and that history should begin with him. This edict was executed with great severity, and many hundreds of the literati were buried alive. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the name of Shih Huang [Page xxxv] Ti is execrated, even to-day, by a nation whose love for the written word amounts to veneration.
Although he held learning of small account, this "First Emperor," to give him his bombastic title, was an enthusiastic promoter of public works, the most important of these being the Great Wall, which has served as an age-long bulwark against the nomadic tribes of Mongolia and Central Asia. These tribes were a terror to China for centuries. They were always raiding the border country, and threatening a descent on the fertile fields beyond the mountains. The history of China is one long struggle to keep from being overrun by these tribes. There is an exact analogy to this state of affairs in the case of Roman Britain, and the perpetual vigilance it was obliged to exercise to keep out the Picts.
Shih Huang Ti based his power on fear, and it is a curious commentary upon the fact that the Ch'in Dynasty came to an end in 206 B.C., shortly after his death, and only a scant half-century after he had founded it.
A few years of struggle, during which no Son of Heaven occupied the Dragon Throne, succeeded the fall of the Ch'in Dynasty; then a certain Liu Pang, an inconsiderable town officer, proved strong enough to seize what was no one's possession and made himself Emperor, thereby founding the Han Dynasty.
The Han is one of the most famous dynasties in Chinese [Page xxxvi] history. An extraordinary revival of learning took place under the successive Emperors of Han. The greatest of them, Wu Ti (140-87 B.C.), is frequently mentioned by the poets. Learning always follows trade, as has often been demonstrated. During the Han Dynasty, which lasted until A.D. 221, intercourse with all the countries of the Near East became more general than ever before, and innumerable caravans wended their slow way across the trade routes of Central Asia. Expeditions against the harassing barbarians were undertaken, and for a time their power was scotched. It was under the Han that Buddhism was introduced from India, but deeply as this has influenced the life and thought of the Middle Kingdom, I am inclined to think that the importance of this influence has been exaggerated.
This period, and those immediately preceding it, form the poetic background of China. The ancient States, constantly referred to in the poems, do not correspond to the modern provinces. In order, therefore, to make their geographical positions clear, a map has been appended to this volume in which the modern names of the provinces and cities are printed in black ink and the ancient names in red. As these States did not all exist at the same moment, it is impossible to define their exact boundaries, but how strongly they were impressed upon the popular mind can be seen by the fact that, although they were merged into [Page xxxvii] the Chinese Empire during the reign of Shih Huang Ti, literature continued to speak of them by their old names and, even to-day, writers often refer to them as though they were still separate entities. There were many States, but only those are given in the map which are alluded to in the poems published in this book. The names of a few of the old cities are also given, such as Chin Ling, the "Golden Mound" or "Sepulchre," and Ch'ang An, "Eternal Peace," for so many centuries the capital. Its present name is Hsi An-fu, and it was here that the Manchu Court took refuge during the Boxer madness of 1900.
Little more of Chinese history need be told. Following the Han, several dynasties held sway; there were divisions between the North and South and much shifting of power. At length, in A.D. 618, Li Shih-min established the T'ang Dynasty by placing his father on the throne, and the T'ang brought law and order to the suffering country.
This period is often called the Golden Age of Chinese Learning. The literary examinations introduced under the Han were perfected, poets and painters were encouraged, and strangers flocked to the Court at Ch'ang An. The reign of Ming Huang (A.D. 712-756), the "Brilliant Emperor," was the culmination of this remarkable era. China's three greatest poets, Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i, all lived during his long reign of forty-five years. Auspiciously as this reign had begun, however, it ended sadly. The Em- [Page xxxviii] peror, more amiable than perspicacious, fell into the toils of his favourite concubine, the lovely Yang Kuei-fei, to whom he was slavishly devoted. The account of their love story – a theme celebrated by poets, painters, and playwrights – will be found in the note to "Songs to the Peonies." A rebellion which broke out was crushed, but the soldiers refused to defend the cause of the Emperor until he had issued an order for the execution of Yang Kuei-fei, whom they believed to be responsible for the trouble. Broken-hearted, the Emperor complied, but from this date the glory of the dynasty was dimmed. Throughout its waning years, the shadow of the dreaded Tartars grew blacker and blacker, and finally, in A.D. 907, the T'ang Dynasty fell.
Later history need not concern us here, since most of the poems in this book were written during the T'ang period. Though these poems deal largely with what I have called the historical background, they deal still more largely with the social background and it is, above all, this social background which must be understood.
If the Emperor were the "Son of Heaven," he administered his Empire with the help of very human persons, the various officials, and these officials owed their positions, great and small, partly to the Emperor's attitude, it is true, but in far greater degree to their prowess in the literary examinations. An official of the first rank might owe his [Page xxxix] preferment to the Emperor's beneficence; but to reach an altitude where this beneficence could operate, he had to climb through all the lower grades, and this could only be done by successfully passing all the examinations, one after the other. The curious thing is that these examinations were purely literary. They consisted not only in knowing thoroughly the classics of the past, but in being able to recite long passages from them by heart, and with this was included the ability to write one's self, not merely in prose, but in poetry. Every one in office had to be, perforce, a poet. No one could hope to be the mayor of a town or the governor of a province unless he had attained a high proficiency in the art of poetry. This is brought strikingly home to us by the fact that one of the chief pastimes of educated men was to meet together for the purpose of playing various games all of which turned on the writing of verse.
The examinations which brought about this strange state of things were four. The first, which conferred the degree of Hsiu Ts'ai, "Flowering Talent," could be competed for only by those who had already passed two minor examinations, one in their district, and one in the department in which this district was situated. The Hsiu Ts'ai examinations were held twice every three years in the provincial capitals. There were various grades of the "Flowering Talent" degree, which is often translated as Bachelor of [Page xl] Arts, some of which could be bestowed through favour or acquired by purchase. The holders of it were entitled to wear a dress of blue silk, and in Chinese novels the hero is often spoken of as wearing this colour, by which readers are to understand that he is a clever young man already on the way to preferment.
The second degree, that of Ch'ü Jen, "Promoted Man," was obtained by passing the examinations which took place every third year in all the provincial capitals simultaneously. This degree enabled its recipients to hold office, but positions were not always to hand, and frequently "Promoted Men" had to wait long before being appointed to a post; also, the offices open to them were of the lesser grades, those who aspired to a higher rank had a farther road to travel. The dress which went with this degree was also of silk, but of a darker shade than that worn by "bachelors."
The third examination for the Chin Shih, or "Entered Scholar," degree was also held triennially, but at the national capital, and only those among the Ch'ü Jên who had not already taken office were eligible. The men so fortunate as to pass were allowed to place a tablet over the doors of their houses, and their particular dress was of violet silk.
The fourth, which really conferred an office rather than a degree, was bestowed on men who competed in a special examination held once in three years in the Emperor's Palace. Those who were successful in this last examination [Page xli] became automatically Han Lin, or members of the Imperial Academy, which, in the picturesque phraseology of China, was called the "Forest of Pencils." A member of the Academy held his position, a salaried one, for life, and the highest officials of the Empire were chosen from these Academicians.
This elaboration of degrees was only arrived at gradually. During the T'ang Dynasty, all the examinations were held at Ch'ang An. These four degrees of learning have often been translated as Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Doctor of Literature, and Academician. The analogy is so far from close, however, that most modern sinologues prefer to render them indiscriminately, according to context, as student, scholar, and official.
By means of this remarkable system, which threw open the road to advancement to every man in the country capable of availing himself of it, new blood was continually brought to the top, as all who passed the various degrees became officials, expectant or in being, and of higher or lower grade according to the Chinese measure of ability. Military degrees corresponding to the civil were given; but, as these called for merely physical display, they were not highly esteemed.
Since only a few of the candidates for office passed the examinations successfully, a small army of highly educated men was dispersed throughout the country every three [Page xlii] years. In towns and villages they were regarded with the reverence universally paid to learning by the Chinese, and many became teachers to the rising generation in whom they cultivated a great respect for literature in general and poetry in particular.
The holders of degrees, on the other hand, entered at once upon a career as administrators. Prevented by an inexorable law – a law designed to make nepotism impossible – from holding office in their own province, they were constantly shifted from one part of the country to another, and this is a chief reason for the many poems of farewell that were written. The great desire of all officials was to remain at, or near, the Court, where the most brilliant brains of the Empire were assembled. As may be easily imagined, the intrigues and machinations employed to attain this end were many, with the result that deserving men often found themselves banished to posts on the desolate outskirts of the country where, far from congenial intercourse, they suffered a mental exile of the most complete description. Innumerable poems dealing with this sad state are found in all Chinese anthologies.
There were nine ranks of nobility. The higher officials took the rank of their various and succeeding offices, others were ennobled for signal services performed. These titles were not hereditary in the ordinary sense, but backwards, if I can so express it. The dead ancestors of a nobleman [Page xliii] were accorded his rank, whatever had been theirs in life, but his sons and their descendants had only such titles as they themselves might earn.
The desire to bask in the rays of the Imperial Sun was shared by ambitious fathers who longed to have their daughters appear before the Emperor, and possibly make the fortune of the family by captivating the Imperial glance. This led to the most beautiful and talented young girls being sent to the Palace, where they often lived and died without ever being summoned before the Son of Heaven. Although numberless tragic poems have been written by these unfortunate ladies, many charming romances did actually take place, made possible by the custom of periodically dispersing the superfluous Palace women and marrying them to suitable husbands.
In striking contrast to the unfortunates who dragged out a purposeless life of idleness, was the lot of the beauty who had the good fortune to capture the Imperial fancy, and who, through her influence over the Dragon Throne, virtually ruled the Middle Kingdom. No extravagancies were too great for these exquisite creatures, and many dynasties have fallen through popular revolt against the excesses of Imperial concubines.
It would be quite erroneous to suppose, however, that the Emperor's life was entirely given up to pleasure and gaiety, or that it was chiefly passed in the beautiful seclusion [Page xliv] of the Imperial gardens. The poems, it is true, generally allude to these moments, but the cares of state were many, and every day, at sunrise, officials assembled in the Audience Hall to make their reports to the Emperor. Moreover, Court ceremonials were extremely solemn occasions, carried out with the utmost dignity.
As life at Court centred about the persons of the Emperor and Empress, so life in the homes of the people centered about the elders of the family. The men of wealthy families were usually of official rank, and led a life in touch with the outer world, a life of social intercourse with other men in which friendship played an all-engrossing part. This characteristic of Chinese life is one of the most striking features of the poetic background. Love poems from men to women are so rare as to be almost non-existent (striking exceptions do occur, however, several of which are translated here), but poems of grief written at parting from "the man one loves" are innumerable, and to sit with one's friends, drinking wine and reciting verses, making music or playing chess, were favourite amusements throughout the T'ang period.
Wine-drinking was general, no pleasure gathering being complete without it. The wine of China was usually made from fermented grains, but wines from grapes, plums, pears, and other fruits were also manufactured. It was carefully heated and served in tall flagons somewhat resembling our [Page xlv] coffee-pots, and was drunk out of tiny little cups no bigger than liqueur glasses. These cups, which were never of glass, were made of various metals, of lacquered or carved wood, of semi-precious stones such as jade, or agate, or carnelian; porcelain, the usual material for wine-cups to-day, not having yet been invented. Custom demanded that each thimbleful be tossed off at a gulp, and many were consumed before a feeling of exhilaration could be experienced. That there was a good deal of real drunkenness, we cannot doubt, but not to the extent that is generally supposed. From the character of the men and the lives they led, it is fairly clear that most of the drinking kept within reasonable bounds. Unfortunately, in translation, the quantity imbibed at these wine-parties becomes greatly exaggerated. That wine was drunk, not merely for its taste, but as a heightener of sensation, is evident; but the "three hundred cups" so often mentioned bear no such significance as might at first appear when the size of the cups is taken into account. Undoubtedly, also, we must regard this exact number as a genial hyperbole.
If husbands and sons could enjoy the excitement of travel, the spur of famous scenery, the gaieties of Court, and the pleasures of social intercourse, wives and daughters were obliged to find their occupations within the Kuei or "Women's Apartments," which included the gardens set apart for their use. The ruling spirit of the Kuei was the [Page xlvi] mother-in-law; and the wife of the master of the house, although she was the mother of his sons and the director of the daughters-in-law, did not reach the fulness of her power until her husband's mother had died.
The chief duty of a young wife was attendance upon her mother-in-law. With the first grey streak of daylight, she rose from her immense lacquer bed, so large as to be almost an anteroom, and, having dressed, took the old lady her tea. She then returned to her own apartment to breakfast with her husband and await the summons to attend her mother-in-law's toilet, a most solemn function, and the breakfast which followed. These duties accomplished, she was free to occupy herself as she pleased. Calligraphy, painting, writing poems and essays, were popular pursuits, and many hours were spent at the embroidery frame or in making music.
Chinese poetry is full of references to the toilet, to the intricate hair-dressing, the "moth-antennæ eyebrows," the painting of faces, and all this was done in front of a mirror standing on a little rack placed on the toilet-table. A lady, writing to her absent husband, mourns that she has no heart to "make the cloud head-dress," or writes, "looking down upon my mirror in order to apply the powder and paint, I desire to keep back the tears. I fear that the people in the house will know my grief. I am ashamed."
In spite of the fact that they had never laid eyes on [Page xlvii] the men they were to marry before the wedding-day, these young women seem to have depended upon the companionship of their husbands to a most touching extent. The occupations of the day were carried on in the Kuei; but, when evening came, the husband and wife often read and studied the classics together. A line from a well-known poem says, "The red sleeve replenishes the incense, at night, studying books," and the picture it calls up is that of a young man and woman in the typical surroundings of a Chinese home of the educated class. Red was the colour worn by very young women, whether married or not; as the years advanced, this was changed for soft blues and mauves, and later still for blacks, greys, or dull greens. A line such as "tears soak my dress of coarse, red silk" instantly suggests a young woman in deep grief.
Shih Huang Ti based his power on fear, and it is a curious commentary upon the fact that the Ch'in Dynasty came to an end in 206 B.C., shortly after his death, and only a scant half-century after he had founded it.
A few years of struggle, during which no Son of Heaven occupied the Dragon Throne, succeeded the fall of the Ch'in Dynasty; then a certain Liu Pang, an inconsiderable town officer, proved strong enough to seize what was no one's possession and made himself Emperor, thereby founding the Han Dynasty.
The Han is one of the most famous dynasties in Chinese [Page xxxvi] history. An extraordinary revival of learning took place under the successive Emperors of Han. The greatest of them, Wu Ti (140-87 B.C.), is frequently mentioned by the poets. Learning always follows trade, as has often been demonstrated. During the Han Dynasty, which lasted until A.D. 221, intercourse with all the countries of the Near East became more general than ever before, and innumerable caravans wended their slow way across the trade routes of Central Asia. Expeditions against the harassing barbarians were undertaken, and for a time their power was scotched. It was under the Han that Buddhism was introduced from India, but deeply as this has influenced the life and thought of the Middle Kingdom, I am inclined to think that the importance of this influence has been exaggerated.
This period, and those immediately preceding it, form the poetic background of China. The ancient States, constantly referred to in the poems, do not correspond to the modern provinces. In order, therefore, to make their geographical positions clear, a map has been appended to this volume in which the modern names of the provinces and cities are printed in black ink and the ancient names in red. As these States did not all exist at the same moment, it is impossible to define their exact boundaries, but how strongly they were impressed upon the popular mind can be seen by the fact that, although they were merged into [Page xxxvii] the Chinese Empire during the reign of Shih Huang Ti, literature continued to speak of them by their old names and, even to-day, writers often refer to them as though they were still separate entities. There were many States, but only those are given in the map which are alluded to in the poems published in this book. The names of a few of the old cities are also given, such as Chin Ling, the "Golden Mound" or "Sepulchre," and Ch'ang An, "Eternal Peace," for so many centuries the capital. Its present name is Hsi An-fu, and it was here that the Manchu Court took refuge during the Boxer madness of 1900.
Little more of Chinese history need be told. Following the Han, several dynasties held sway; there were divisions between the North and South and much shifting of power. At length, in A.D. 618, Li Shih-min established the T'ang Dynasty by placing his father on the throne, and the T'ang brought law and order to the suffering country.
This period is often called the Golden Age of Chinese Learning. The literary examinations introduced under the Han were perfected, poets and painters were encouraged, and strangers flocked to the Court at Ch'ang An. The reign of Ming Huang (A.D. 712-756), the "Brilliant Emperor," was the culmination of this remarkable era. China's three greatest poets, Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i, all lived during his long reign of forty-five years. Auspiciously as this reign had begun, however, it ended sadly. The Em- [Page xxxviii] peror, more amiable than perspicacious, fell into the toils of his favourite concubine, the lovely Yang Kuei-fei, to whom he was slavishly devoted. The account of their love story – a theme celebrated by poets, painters, and playwrights – will be found in the note to "Songs to the Peonies." A rebellion which broke out was crushed, but the soldiers refused to defend the cause of the Emperor until he had issued an order for the execution of Yang Kuei-fei, whom they believed to be responsible for the trouble. Broken-hearted, the Emperor complied, but from this date the glory of the dynasty was dimmed. Throughout its waning years, the shadow of the dreaded Tartars grew blacker and blacker, and finally, in A.D. 907, the T'ang Dynasty fell.
Later history need not concern us here, since most of the poems in this book were written during the T'ang period. Though these poems deal largely with what I have called the historical background, they deal still more largely with the social background and it is, above all, this social background which must be understood.
If the Emperor were the "Son of Heaven," he administered his Empire with the help of very human persons, the various officials, and these officials owed their positions, great and small, partly to the Emperor's attitude, it is true, but in far greater degree to their prowess in the literary examinations. An official of the first rank might owe his [Page xxxix] preferment to the Emperor's beneficence; but to reach an altitude where this beneficence could operate, he had to climb through all the lower grades, and this could only be done by successfully passing all the examinations, one after the other. The curious thing is that these examinations were purely literary. They consisted not only in knowing thoroughly the classics of the past, but in being able to recite long passages from them by heart, and with this was included the ability to write one's self, not merely in prose, but in poetry. Every one in office had to be, perforce, a poet. No one could hope to be the mayor of a town or the governor of a province unless he had attained a high proficiency in the art of poetry. This is brought strikingly home to us by the fact that one of the chief pastimes of educated men was to meet together for the purpose of playing various games all of which turned on the writing of verse.
The examinations which brought about this strange state of things were four. The first, which conferred the degree of Hsiu Ts'ai, "Flowering Talent," could be competed for only by those who had already passed two minor examinations, one in their district, and one in the department in which this district was situated. The Hsiu Ts'ai examinations were held twice every three years in the provincial capitals. There were various grades of the "Flowering Talent" degree, which is often translated as Bachelor of [Page xl] Arts, some of which could be bestowed through favour or acquired by purchase. The holders of it were entitled to wear a dress of blue silk, and in Chinese novels the hero is often spoken of as wearing this colour, by which readers are to understand that he is a clever young man already on the way to preferment.
The second degree, that of Ch'ü Jen, "Promoted Man," was obtained by passing the examinations which took place every third year in all the provincial capitals simultaneously. This degree enabled its recipients to hold office, but positions were not always to hand, and frequently "Promoted Men" had to wait long before being appointed to a post; also, the offices open to them were of the lesser grades, those who aspired to a higher rank had a farther road to travel. The dress which went with this degree was also of silk, but of a darker shade than that worn by "bachelors."
The third examination for the Chin Shih, or "Entered Scholar," degree was also held triennially, but at the national capital, and only those among the Ch'ü Jen who had not already taken office were eligible. The men so fortunate as to pass were allowed to place a tablet over the doors of their houses, and their particular dress was of violet silk.
The fourth, which really conferred an office rather than a degree, was bestowed on men who competed in a special examination held once in three years in the Emperor's Palace. Those who were successful in this last examination [Page xli] became automatically Han Lin, or members of the Imperial Academy, which, in the picturesque phraseology of China, was called the "Forest of Pencils." A member of the Academy held his position, a salaried one, for life, and the highest officials of the Empire were chosen from these Academicians.
This elaboration of degrees was only arrived at gradually. During the T'ang Dynasty, all the examinations were held at Ch'ang An. These four degrees of learning have often been translated as Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Doctor of Literature, and Academician. The analogy is so far from close, however, that most modern sinologues prefer to render them indiscriminately, according to context, as student, scholar, and official.
By means of this remarkable system, which threw open the road to advancement to every man in the country capable of availing himself of it, new blood was continually brought to the top, as all who passed the various degrees became officials, expectant or in being, and of higher or lower grade according to the Chinese measure of ability. Military degrees corresponding to the civil were given; but, as these called for merely physical display, they were not highly esteemed.
Since only a few of the candidates for office passed the examinations successfully, a small army of highly educated men was dispersed throughout the country every three [Page xlii] years. In towns and villages they were regarded with the reverence universally paid to learning by the Chinese, and many became teachers to the rising generation in whom they cultivated a great respect for literature in general and poetry in particular.
The holders of degrees, on the other hand, entered at once upon a career as administrators. Prevented by an inexorable law – a law designed to make nepotism impossible – from holding office in their own province, they were constantly shifted from one part of the country to another, and this is a chief reason for the many poems of farewell that were written. The great desire of all officials was to remain at, or near, the Court, where the most brilliant brains of the Empire were assembled. As may be easily imagined, the intrigues and machinations employed to attain this end were many, with the result that deserving men often found themselves banished to posts on the desolate outskirts of the country where, far from congenial intercourse, they suffered a mental exile of the most complete description. Innumerable poems dealing with this sad state are found in all Chinese anthologies.
There were nine ranks of nobility. The higher officials took the rank of their various and succeeding offices, others were ennobled for signal services performed. These titles were not hereditary in the ordinary sense, but backwards, if I can so express it. The dead ancestors of a nobleman [Page xliii] were accorded his rank, whatever had been theirs in life, but his sons and their descendants had only such titles as they themselves might earn.
The desire to bask in the rays of the Imperial Sun was shared by ambitious fathers who longed to have their daughters appear before the Emperor, and possibly make the fortune of the family by captivating the Imperial glance. This led to the most beautiful and talented young girls being sent to the Palace, where they often lived and died without ever being summoned before the Son of Heaven. Although numberless tragic poems have been written by these unfortunate ladies, many charming romances did actually take place, made possible by the custom of periodically dispersing the superfluous Palace women and marrying them to suitable husbands.
In striking contrast to the unfortunates who dragged out a purposeless life of idleness, was the lot of the beauty who had the good fortune to capture the Imperial fancy, and who, through her influence over the Dragon Throne, virtually ruled the Middle Kingdom. No extravagancies were too great for these exquisite creatures, and many dynasties have fallen through popular revolt against the excesses of Imperial concubines.
It would be quite erroneous to suppose, however, that the Emperor's life was entirely given up to pleasure and gaiety, or that it was chiefly passed in the beautiful seclu- [Page xliv] sion of the Imperial gardens. The poems, it is true, generally allude to these moments, but the cares of state were many, and every day, at sunrise, officials assembled in the Audience Hall to make their reports to the Emperor. Moreover, Court ceremonials were extremely solemn occasions, carried out with the utmost dignity.
As life at Court centred about the persons of the Emperor and Empress, so life in the homes of the people centered about the elders of the family. The men of wealthy families were usually of official rank, and led a life in touch with the outer world, a life of social intercourse with other men in which friendship played an all-engrossing part. This characteristic of Chinese life is one of the most striking features of the poetic background. Love poems from men to women are so rare as to be almost non-existent (striking exceptions do occur, however, several of which are translated here), but poems of grief written at parting from "the man one loves" are innumerable, and to sit with one's friends, drinking wine and reciting verses, making music or playing chess, were favourite amusements throughout the T'ang period.
Wine-drinking was general, no pleasure gathering being complete without it. The wine of China was usually made from fermented grains, but wines from grapes, plums, pears, and other fruits were also manufactured. It was carefully heated and served in tall flagons somewhat resembling our [Page xlv] coffee-pots, and was drunk out of tiny little cups no bigger than liqueur glasses. These cups, which were never of glass, were made of various metals, of lacquered or carved wood, of semi-precious stones such as jade, or agate, or carnelian; porcelain, the usual material for wine-cups to-day, not having yet been invented. Custom demanded that each thimbleful be tossed off at a gulp, and many were consumed before a feeling of exhilaration could be experienced. That there was a good deal of real drunkenness, we cannot doubt, but not to the extent that is generally supposed. From the character of the men and the lives they led, it is fairly clear that most of the drinking kept within reasonable bounds. Unfortunately, in translation, the quantity imbibed at these wine-parties becomes greatly exaggerated. That wine was drunk, not merely for its taste, but as a heightener of sensation, is evident; but the "three hundred cups" so often mentioned bear no such significance as might at first appear when the size of the cups is taken into account. Undoubtedly, also, we must regard this exact number as a genial hyperbole.
If husbands and sons could enjoy the excitement of travel, the spur of famous scenery, the gaieties of Court, and the pleasures of social intercourse, wives and daughters were obliged to find their occupations within the Kuei or "Women's Apartments," which included the gardens set apart for their use. The ruling spirit of the Kuei was the [Page xlvi] mother-in-law; and the wife of the master of the house, although she was the mother of his sons and the director of the daughters-in-law, did not reach the fulness of her power until her husband's mother had died.
The chief duty of a young wife was attendance upon her mother-in-law. With the first grey streak of daylight, she rose from her immense lacquer bed, so large as to be almost an anteroom, and, having dressed, took the old lady her tea. She then returned to her own apartment to breakfast with her husband and await the summons to attend her mother-in-law's toilet, a most solemn function, and the breakfast which followed. These duties accomplished, she was free to occupy herself as she pleased. Calligraphy, painting, writing poems and essays, were popular pursuits, and many hours were spent at the embroidery frame or in making music.
Chinese poetry is full of references to the toilet, to the intricate hair-dressing, the "moth-antennæ eyebrows," the painting of faces, and all this was done in front of a mirror standing on a little rack placed on the toilet-table. A lady, writing to her absent husband, mourns that she has no heart to "make the cloud head-dress," or writes, "looking down upon my mirror in order to apply the powder and paint, I desire to keep back the tears. I fear that the people in the house will know my grief. I am ashamed."
In spite of the fact that they had never laid eyes on [Page xlvii] the men they were to marry before the wedding-day, these young women seem to have depended upon the companionship of their husbands to a most touching extent. The occupations of the day were carried on in the Kuei; but, when evening came, the husband and wife often read and studied the classics together. A line from a well-known poem says, "The red sleeve replenishes the incense, at night, studying books," and the picture it calls up is that of a young man and woman in the typical surroundings of a Chinese home of the educated class. Red was the colour worn by very young women, whether married or not; as the years advanced, this was changed for soft blues and mauves, and later still for blacks, greys, or dull greens. A line such as "tears soak my dress of coarse, red silk" instantly suggests a young woman in deep grief.