“Yes, I am a student,” said the Chinaman, “And I came here to study the
English manners and customs.”
We were seated on the top of the electric tram which goes to Hampton
Court. It was a bitterly cold spring day. The suburbs of London were not
looking their best.
“I spent three days at Oxford last week,” he said.
“It’s a beautiful place, is it not?” I remarked.
The Chinaman smiled. “The country which you see from the windows of the
railway carriages,” he said, “on the way from Oxford to London strikes
me as being beautiful. It reminded me of the Chinese Plain, only it is
prettier. But the houses at Oxford are hideous: there is no symmetry
about them. The houses in this country are like blots on the landscape.
In China the houses are made to harmonise with the landscape just as
trees do.”
“What did you see at Oxford?” I asked.
“I saw boat races,” he said, “and a great many ignorant old men.”
“What did you think of that?”
“I think,” he said, “the young people seemed to enjoy it, and if they
enjoy it they are quite right to do it. But the way the older men talk
about these things struck me as being foolish. They talk as if these
games and these sports were a solemn affair, a moral or religious
question; they said the virtues and the prowess of the English race were
founded on these things. They said that competition was the mainspring
of life; they seemed to think exercise was the goal of existence. A man
whom I saw there and who, I learnt, had been chosen to teach the young
on account of his wisdom, told me that competition trained the man to
sharpen his faculties; and that the tension which it provoked is
in itself a useful training. I do not believe this. A cat or a boa
constrictor will lie absolutely idle until it perceives an object worthy
of its appetite; it will then catch it and swallow it, and once more
relapse into repose without thinking of keeping itself ‘in training.’
But it will lie dormant and rise to the occasion when it occurs. These
people who talked of games seem to me to undervalue repose. They forget
that repose is the mother of action, and exercise only a frittering away
of the same.”
“What did you think,” I asked, “of the education that the students at
Oxford receive?”
“I think,” said the Chinaman, “that inasmuch as the young men waste
their time in idleness they do well; for the wise men who are chosen to
instruct the young at your places of learning, are not always wise. I
visited a professor of Oriental languages. His servant asked me to wait,
and after I had waited three quarters of an hour, he sent word to say
that he had tried everywhere to find the professor in the University who
spoke French, but that he had not been able to find him. And so he asked
me to call another day. I had dinner in a college hall. I found that the
professors talked of many things in such a way as would be impossible to
children of five and six in our country. They are quite ignorant of
the manners and customs of the people of other European countries. They
pronounce Greek and Latin and even French in the same way as English. I
mentioned to one of them that I had been employed for some time in the
Chinese Legation; he asked me if I had had much work to do. I said yes,
the work had been heavy. ‘But,’ he observed, ‘I suppose a great deal of
the work is carried on directly between the Governments and not through
the Ambassadors.’ I cannot conceive what he meant or how such a thing
could be possible, or what he considered the use and function of
Embassies and Legations to be. They most of them seemed to take for
granted that I could not speak English: some of them addressed me in a
kind of baby language; one of them spoke French. The professor who spoke
to me in this language told me that the French possessed no poetical
literature, and he said the reason of this was that the French language
was a bastard language; that it was, in fact, a kind of pidgin Latin.
He said when a Frenchman says a girl is ‘beaucoup belle,’ he is using
pidgin Latin. The courtesy due to a host prevented me from suggesting
that if a Frenchman said ‘beaucoup belle’ he would be talking pidgin
French.
“Another professor said to me that China would soon develop if she
adopted a large Imperial ideal, and that in time the Chinese might
attain to a great position in the world, such as the English now held.
He said the best means of bringing this about would be to introduce
cricket and football into China. I told him that I thought this was
improbable, because if the Chinese play games, they do not care who
is the winner; the fun of the game is to us the improvisation of it as
opposed to the organisation which appeals to the people here. Upon which
he said that cricket was like a symphony of music. In a symphony every
instrument plays its part in obedience to one central will, not for its
individual advantage, but in order to make a beautiful whole. ‘So it is
with our games,’ he said, ‘every man plays his part not for the sake of
personal advantage, but so that his side may win; and thus the citizen
is taught to sink his own interests in those of the community.’ I
told him the Chinese did not like symphonies, and Western music was
intolerable to them for this very reason. Western musicians seem to
us to take a musical idea which is only worthy of a penny whistle (and
would be very good indeed if played on a penny whistle!); and they
sit down and make a score of it twenty yards broad, and set a hundred
highly-trained and highly-paid musicians to play it. It is the contrast
between the tremendous apparatus and waste of energy on one side, and
the light and playful character of the business itself on the
other which makes me, a Chinaman, as incapable of appreciating your
complicated games as I am of appreciating the complicated symphonies of
the Germans or the elaborate rules which their students make with
regard to the drinking of beer. We like a man for taking his fun and
not missing a joke when he finds it by chance on his way, but we cannot
understand his going out of his way to prepare a joke and to make
arrangements for having some fun at a certain fixed date. This is why
we consider a wayside song, a tune that is heard wandering in the summer
darkness, to be better than twenty concerts.”
“What did that professor say?” I asked.
“He said that if I were to stay long enough in England and go to a
course of concerts at the Chelsea Town Hall, I would soon learn to
think differently. And that if cricket and football were introduced
into China, the Chinese would soon emerge out of their backwardness and
barbarism and take a high place among the enlightened nations of the
world. I thought to myself as he said this that your games are no
doubt an excellent substitute for drill, but if we were to submit to so
complicated an organisation it would be with a purpose: in order to turn
the Europeans out of China, for instance; but that organisation without
a purpose would always seem to us to be stupid, and we should no more
dream of organising our play than of organising a stroll in the twilight
to see the Evening Star, or the chase of a butterfly in the spring. If
we were to decide on drill it would be drill with a vengeance and with a
definite aim; but we should not therefore and thereby destroy our play.
Play cannot exist for us without fun, and for us the open air, the
fields, and the meadows are like wine: if we feel inclined, we roam and
jump about in them, but we should never submit to standing to attention
for hours lest a ball should escape us. Besides which, we invented the
foundations of all our games many thousand of years ago. We invented and
played at ‘Diabolo’ when the Britons were painted blue and lived in
the woods. The English knew how to play once, in the days of Queen
Elizabeth; then they had masques and madrigals and Morris dances
and music. A gentleman was ashamed if he did not speak six or seven
languages, handle the sword with a deadly dexterity, play chess, and
write good sonnets. Men were broken on the wheel for an idea: they were
brave, cultivated, and gay; they fought, they played, and they wrote
excellent verse. Now they organise games and lay claim to a special
morality and to a special mission; they send out missionaries to
civilise us savages; and if our people resent having an alien creed
stuffed down their throats, they take our hand and burn our homes in
the name of Charity, Progress, and Civilisation. They seek for one
thing--gold; they preach competition, but competition for what? For
this: who shall possess the most, who shall most successfully ‘do’ his
neighbour. These ideals and aims do not tempt us. The quality of the
life is to us more important than the quantity of what is done and
achieved. We live, as we play, for the sake of living. I did not say
this to the professors because we have a proverb that when you are in a
man’s country you should not speak ill of it. I say it to you because I
see you have an inquiring mind, and you will feel it more insulting to
be served with meaningless phrases and empty civilities than with the
truth, however bitter. For those who have once looked the truth in the
face cannot afterwards be put off with false semblances.”
“You speak true words,” I said, “but what do you like best in England?”
“The gardens,” he answered, “and the little yellow flowers that are
sprinkled like stars on your green grass.”
“And what do you like least in England?”
“The horrible smells,” he said.
“Have you no smells in China?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “we have natural smells, but not the smell of gas and
smoke and coal which sickens me here. It is strange to me that people
can find the smell of human beings disgusting and be able to stand the
foul stenches of a London street. This very road along which we are now
travelling (we were passing through one of the less beautiful portions
of the tramway line) makes me homesick for my country. I long to see a
Chinese village once more built of mud and fenced with mud, muddy-roaded
and muddy-baked, with a muddy little stream to be waded across or
passed by stepping on stones; with a delicate one-storeyed temple on the
water-eaten bank, and green poppy fields round it; and the women in dark
blue standing at the doorways, smoking their pipes; and the children,
with three small budding pigtails on the head of each, clinging to them;
and the river fringed with a thousand masts: the boats, the houseboats,
the barges and the ships in the calm, wide estuaries, each with a pair
of huge eyes painted on the front bow. And the people: the men working
at their looms and whistling a happy tune out of the gladness of their
hearts. And everywhere the sense of leisure, the absence of hurry and
bustle and confusion; the dignity of manners and the grace of expression
and of address. And, above all, the smell of life everywhere.”
“I admit,” I said, “that our streets smell horribly of smoke and coal,
but surely our people are clean?”
“Yes,” he said, “no doubt; but you forget that to us there is nothing so
intolerably nasty as the smell of a clean white man!”