_CHINESE SENTIMENT._
In Memory of a Dead Wife.--Of a Dear Friend.--Farewell
Verses.--Æsthetic Feeling.--Drinking
Song.--Music.--Justice to Rats.
It is so much our habit in China to think the Chinese have no
sentiment, that I have thought it might be interesting to gather
together what indications I have observed during eleven years'
residence among them, leaving the reader, if of a judicial frame of
mind, to sum up and formulate his own conclusions.
One of the most poetic events in history used to seem to me in
childhood that crowning of his dead Queen by King Pedro, to which Mrs.
Hemans consecrated some of her most pathetic verses. To this day I
cannot think of the beautiful dead Inez de Castro in all the grandeur
of her coronation robes, seated upon her throne, without feeling
something of the faint, cold shuddering which the poetess imagines.
Yet when I went for the first time to a grand Chinese house in the
Arsenal at Shanghai, and found it all dressed out with signs of
mourning, white cloths, and balls of twisted white cotton, people all
in their best dresses, and preparations complete for three days of
theatrical performance, though I was startled to find that all this
was to commemorate the birthday of the wife of the master of the
house, lying quiet in her grave already these twenty years, the
twenty-years-in-China-and-not-know-a-word-of-the-language men all said
it was quite usual, and seemed surprised and annoyed that I should
find it affecting. Alas! to this day I have never learned whether he
loved her very much, nor quite satisfied myself whether it was really
her birthday or the day of her death they were thus celebrating. But,
interpret it all after whatever fashion, there was surely in this
some indication of sentiment.
[Illustration: GUARD-HOUSE NEAR THE ARSENAL.]
Again, there are many suicides in China, and habit seems to make both
Europeans and Chinese callous. Yet when a German who had returned to
China happy in the belief a girl he knew would follow and marry him,
and on hearing she had changed her mind, or for some other reason
would not come, thought it better to leave a life that for him held no
promise, the following poem appeared in a Shanghai paper:
"AVE ATQUE VALE!
In memory of the late ----.
'Es lebe,
wer sich tapfer halt!'
--_Goethe's 'Faust.'_
The wild prunes blossom, red and white,
In wintry air.[1]
Heavy with orange, in sunlight,
The groves are fair.
The pearl-like river, silent, sure,
Glides to the sea:
A spirit, mutinous but pure,
Sets itself free.
Love, flowers, and music erst were thine;
But love, to thee
A blight, was bitter as the brine
Of the salt sea.
From these thy noble spirit yearned
Towards nobler schemes;
Dreams of a nobler age returned,
Alas! but dreams.
Last on the river-girdled spot--
Thy spacious home,
Spacious but lone, for one was not
That should have come--
We sat and talked of modern creed
And ancient lore;
Of modern gospel--gush and greed,
Now to the fore.
Thy fervent hope it was to join
The best with best;
To break down the dividing-line
Of East and West.
O friend! albeit of alien race,
For evermore
Shall be with me thy noble face,
Too sicklied o'er
With a world-sorrow e'en too great
For thy great heart,
Since from us, who still serve and wait,
Thou wouldst depart.
Farewell! The swift-wheeled ship will bring
To thy far West
The tidings, while I, grieving, sing
Thee to thy rest.
KU HUNG MING.
VICEROY'S YAMEN,
WUCHANG, _December 4th, 1893_."
The Englishman who could write as good a poem in Chinese has not yet
been born; but I quote it because of the sentiment it expresses.
The young Chinese to whom I tried to teach English took leave of me,
when I left for England, in very elegant Chinese verse, to which I
wish I could do justice by translation. The sentiment of it was very
appropriate. He regretted my departure, wondering what he should do
without me; for to him I had been like the snow, which, by covering up
and protecting the plants, makes the young shoots grow, as I had made
his intelligence burgeon. This struck me as a very happy expression of
sentiment, and, as I was assured by Chinese scholars, equally
felicitously expressed.
[Illustration: ROOF AND ROOF-END AT CHUNGKING.
_By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
The Chinese love of beautiful curves, spending time and money on the
roof-cornices and outside ornaments of even quite a poor cottage,
indicates a deep-seated sentiment for the beautiful, as do also the
trees in their towns, some of which have almost as many trees as
houses, as also their love of flowers. In the flowering season a bough
of blossom may be seen in a vase on the counter of even the darkest
little shop; whilst no literary man would think his writing-table
complete without a vase for one lovely blossom, and no woman would
think herself dressed until she had stuck a flower on one side of her
glossy hair. But every one probably would acknowledge that the Chinese
have a very strong æsthetic sentiment. Here, however, is an adieu to
the Old Year much resembling one of Burns' songs in its sentiment, or
want of it:
"ADIEU TO THE OLD YEAR.
The voice of the cricket is heard in the hall;
The leaves of the forest are withered and sere;
My spirits they droop at those chirruping notes
So thoughtlessly sounding the knell of the year.
Yet why should we sigh at the change of a date,
When life's flowing on in a full steady tide?
Come, let us be merry with those that we love;
For pleasure in measure there's no one to chide."
_Translated by W. A. P. M._
[Illustration: BRIDGE AT HANGCHOW.]
But this Chinese drinking-song, which could without exciting any
special comment appear upon a New Year's card of to-day, was published
in the Chinese Book of Odes 500 B.C. Twelve centuries later we find a
decidedly prettier sentiment and finer touch in Li-tao-po, one of
China's favourite poets A.D. 720. It is interesting to notice that
four of China's poets, Tze-ma-hsiang-yu, Yang-hsiung, Li-tao-po, and
_Su-tung-po_, were all born and spent their earliest years in
Szechuan, on the borderland of Tibet, and the yet unconquered Lolo
country, like our own English Border country, China's cradle of legend
and song.
This is an attempt to render the best-known ode of China's favourite
bard, A.D. 720:
"ON DRINKING ALONE BY MOONLIGHT.
Here are flowers, and here is wine;
But where's a friend with me to join
Hand to hand and heart to heart
In one full cup before we part?
Rather than to drink alone,
I'll make bold to ask the moon
To condescend to lend her face
To grace the hour and the place.
Lo! she answers, and she brings
My shadow on her silver wings;
That makes three, and we shall be,
I ween, a merry company.
The modest moon declines the cup,
But shadow promptly takes it up;
And when I dance, my shadow fleet
Keeps measure with my flying feet.
Yet though the moon declines to tipple,
She dances in yon shining ripple;
And when I sing, my festive song
The echoes of the moon prolong.
Say, when shall we next meet together?
Surely not in cloudy weather;
For you, my boon companions dear,
Come only when the sky is clear."
_Translated by W. A. P. M._
The fancy if not the sentiment of this song is so pretty, that it is
hard to see how the nation that produced it can be rebuked for want
of sentiment by the nation that to this day sings, "Drink, puppies,
drink." Indeed, I think this Chinese drinking-song dating from the
eighth century A.D. the very prettiest I have ever met with in any
literature. It has three if not four of such graceful conceits as
would alone make the success of a modern bard. But they are old, very
old. And China, too, is old; and is said to produce nothing of the
kind now.
To turn to comparatively more modern days, _Lu-pe-Ya's Lute_,
Englished and reduced into poetry by Mrs. Augusta Webster, shows a
sentiment for friendship and for music deep in the Chinese breast. It
is, I suppose, because I am so very unmusical that I rather enjoy
Chinese music. It seems to me very merry, especially its funereal
chants.
People often wonder if the Chinese enjoy European music. Two
Englishmen were invited not long ago to a military mandarin's house to
hear one of his sons, a great musician, play. The latter could only
perform if perfect silence were observed by the audience and a vase of
flowers and lighted incense before him to help his inspiration.
Unfortunately, after all these preparations, it appeared his was a
stringed instrument, to be laid upon the table and played with the
nails--the most difficult instrument to play upon that the Chinese
possess; and the melody, if it were a melody, was so low, the
Englishmen came away quite unable to judge of its beauty. "Heard
melodies are sweet, but those unheard----" However, some other young
military mandarins had played a duet on flutes, and another performed
on a flageolet, both very agreeably.
It may interest those interested--and who of us in China are not?--in
the great opium question to hear that a young lad of sixteen went away
from the dinner-table to smoke opium. "How dreadful!" said one of the
Europeans. "A lad of sixteen to smoke opium! He will never live!"
"Why, look at my five sons, all born since I smoked," said the host;
"I began when I was twenty. But, indeed, his family are rather glad he
smokes. You see, my guest is a very rich young fellow from up the
river, who has no father; and if he did not smoke opium, he would be
sure to be getting into mischief with women or gambling. Now, smoking
opium, they think, will keep him at home." Is not this rather a novel
view of the question?
The old legend of the Fairy Foxes, which I Englished some years ago,
and brought out in Mr. Hasegawa's very pretty _crêpe_ paper series,
shows a sentiment of kindness for animals with which some people are
unwilling to credit a nation that emphatically does not say, "What a
beautiful day! Let us go out and kill something." Both that and _The
Rat's Plaint_, translated from the original Chinese and rendered into
verse by my husband, and very beautifully illustrated as well as
reproduced on _crêpe_ paper by Mr. Hasegawa, might be circulated by
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The latter's
quaintness--it is a very old Chinese legend--alone makes the reader
pass over the very nice sentiment for poor pussy, as well as the
homely Chinese sense of justice, stating the rat's case in the first
instance so very plainly as almost to make the reader incline to his
side.
There is an easy-going live-and-let-live character about the Chinese,
which makes them very pleasant employers, as all steamship captains
will testify, and which, perhaps, accounts for their not hurrying off
the face of the earth the rats that are such a great pest in a Chinese
city. An English Consul, on undoing a not yet used camera, found that
to get at the gum used they had eaten through each fold of its dark
chamber. One year in Chungking they made a hole through a strong
wooden case we thought safely closed down, opened the tins of milk
just as we should have done ourselves, and evidently dipped their
tails in, and fished out all the milk those tails could reach. We have
often thought this worthy to be a _Spectator_ story. But, however
incredible it may sound, it is true; and when we opened the case, we
found all the top layer out of two dozen tins of milk opened and half
emptied in this way. Worse still, that same year--there was famine in
the land, and human beings were dropping down dead of hunger every day
by the river-side--there was a hole one morning in our dear little
pony's back, said to be caused by the wicked rats.
The Chinese easy-going liberal disposition and sense of justice have
been immortalised in _The Rat's Plaint_, translated by my husband,
where the poor rat's case is made out as I never saw it till I read it
there; though in the end the rat is awarded punishment, and pussy-cat
installed in her high place as favoured friend in every homestead. And
so herewith an end of Chinese sentiment.
[Illustration: BRIDGE AND CAUSEWAY ON WEST LAKE.]
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The imagery is taken from a line in Chinese poetry--
"In November the wild prunes first blossom on the mountain-pass"--as
the death of Mr. ---- took place in that month.