CHINA
I
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA
Some recent travellers have expressed disappointment or even disgust
with what they saw or learned or guessed of China. My own first
impression is quite contrary. The climate, it is true, for the moment,
inclines one to gloomy views. An icy wind, a black sky, a cold drizzle.
March in England could hardly do worse. But in Canton one almost forgets
all that. Imagine a maze of narrow streets, more confused and confusing
than Venice; high houses (except in the old city); and hanging parallel
to these, in long, vertical lines, flags and wooden signs inscribed with
huge Chinese characters, gold on black, gold on red, red or blue on
white, a blaze of colour; and under it, pouring in a ceaseless stream,
yellow faces, black heads, blue jackets and trousers, all on foot or
borne on chairs, not a cart or carriage, rarely a pony, nobody crowding,
nobody hustling or jostling, an even flow of cheerful humanity,
inexhaustible, imperturbable, convincing one at first sight of the truth
of all one has heard of the order, independence, and vigour of this
extraordinary people. The shops are high and spacious, level with the
street, not, as in India, raised on little platforms; and commonly,
within, they are cut across by a kind of arch elaborately carved and
blazing with gold. Every trade may be seen plying--jade-cutters,
cloth-rollers, weavers, ring-makers, rice-pounders, a thousand others.
Whole animals, roasted, hang before the butchers' shops, ducks,
pigs--even we saw a skinned tiger! The interest is inexhaustible; and
one is lucky if one does not return with a light purse and a heavy
burden of forged curios. Even the American tourist, so painfully in
evidence at the hotel, is lost, drowned in this native sea. He passes in
his chair; but, like oneself, he is only a drop in the ocean. Canton is
China, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set me
thinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Often
in India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony,
austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a
lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing
penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but
phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly--that is the kind of impression
India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of
course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry,
intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man,
working, marrying, begetting and rearing children, growing middle-aged,
growing old, dying--and that is all. Here it is broad daylight; but in
India, moon or stars, or a subtler gleam from some higher heaven.
Recall, for example, Benares--the fantastic buildings rising and falling
like a sea, the stairs running up to infinity, the sacred river, the
sages meditating on its banks, the sacrificial ablutions, the squealing
temple-pipes, and, in the midst of this, columns of smoke, as the body
returns to the elements and the soul to God. This way of disposing of
the dead, when the first shock is over, lingers in the mind as something
eminently religious. Death and dissolution take place in the midst of
life, for death is no more a mystery than life. In the open air, in the
press of men, the soul takes flight. She is no stranger, for everything
is soul--houses, trees, men, the elements into which the body is
resolved. Death is not annihilation, it is change of form; and through
all changes of form the essence persists.
But now turn back to Canton. We pass the shops of the coffin-makers. We
linger. But "No stop," says our guide; "better coffins soon." "Soon" is
what the guide-books call the "City of the Dead." A number of little
chapels; and laid in each a great lacquered coffin in which the dead man
lives. I say "lives" advisedly, for there is set for his use a table and
a chair, and every morning he is provided with a cup of tea. A bunch of
paper, yellow and white, symbolises his money; and perhaps a couple of
figures represent attendants. There he lives, quite simply and
naturally as he had always lived, until the proper time and place is
discovered in which he may be buried. It may be months, it may be, or
rather, might have been, years; for I am told that a reforming
Government has limited the time to six months. And after burial? Why,
presumably he lives still. But not with the life of the universal soul.
Oh no! There have been mystics in China, but the Chinese are not
mystical. What he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and,
one might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family chapel
of the Changs--another of the sights of Canton--one sees ranged round
the walls hundreds of little tablets, painted green and inscribed in
gold. These are the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged in
three classes, those who pay most being in the first and those who pay
least in the third. One can even reserve one's place--first, second, or
third--while one is still alive, by a white tablet. You die, and the
green is substituted. And so, while you yet live, you may secure your
social status after death. How--how British! Yes, the word is out; and I
venture to record a suspicion that has long been maturing in my mind.
The Chinese are not only Western; among the Western they are English.
Their minds move as ours do; they are practical, sensible, reasonable.
And that is why--as it would seem--they have more sympathy with
Englishmen, if not with the English Government, than with any other
Westerners. East may be East and West West, though I very much doubt it.
But if there be any truth in the aphorism, we must define our terms. The
East must be confined to India, and China included in the West. That as
a preliminary correction. I say nothing yet about Japan. But I shall
have more to say, I hope, about China.
II
NANKING
The Chinese, one is still told, cannot and will not change. On the other
hand, Professor Ross writes a book entitled _The Changing Chinese_. And
anyone may see that the Chinese educated abroad are transformed, at any
rate externally, out of all recognition. In Canton I met some of the
officials of the new Government; and found them, to the outward sense,
pure Americans. The dress, the manners, the accent, the intellectual
outfit--all complete! Whether, in some mysterious sense, they remain
Chinese at the core I do not presume to affirm or deny. But an external
transformation so complete must imply _some_ inward change. Foreign
residents in China deplore the foreign-educated product. I have met some
who almost gnash their teeth at "young China." But this seems rather
hard on China. For nearly a century foreigners have been exhorting her,
at the point of the bayonet, to adopt Western ways and Western ideas.
And when she begins to do so, the same people turn round and accuse her
of unpardonable levity, and treachery to her own traditions. What _do_
foreigners want? the Chinese may well ask. I am afraid the true answer
is, that they want nothing but concessions, interest on loans, and trade
profits, at all and every cost to China.
But I must not deviate into politics. What suggested this train of
thought was the student-guide supplied me at Nanking by the American
missionary college. There he was, complete American; and, I fear I must
add, boring as only Americans can bore. Still, he showed me Nanking, and
Nanking is worth seeing, though the interest of it is somewhat tragic. A
wall 20 to 40 feet thick, 40 to 90 feet high, and 22 miles in circuit (I
take these figures on trust) encloses an area larger than that of any
other Chinese city. But the greater part of this area is fields and
ruins. You pass through the city gate in the train, and find yourself in
the country. You alight, and you are still in the country. A carriage
takes you, in time, to the squalid village, or series of villages, where
are housed the 350,000 inhabitants of modern Nanking. Among them are
quartered the khaki-clad soldiers of new China, the new national flag
draped at the gate of their barracks. Meantime old China swarms,
unregenerate, in the narrow little streets, chaffering, chattering,
laughing in its rags as though there had never been a siege, a
surrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps and their
sores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. Ragged children run for
miles beside the carriage, singing for alms; and stop at last,
laughing, as though it had been a good joke to run so far and get
nothing for it. One monument in all this scene of squalor arrests
attention--the now disused examination hall. It is a kind of
rabbit-warren of tiny cells, six feet deep, four feet broad, and six
feet high; row upon row of them, opening on narrow unroofed corridors;
no doors now, nor, I should suppose, at any time, for it would be
impossible to breathe in these boxes if they had lids. Here, for a week
or a fortnight, the candidates sat and excogitated, unable to lie down
at night, sleeping, if they could, in their chairs. And no wonder if,
every now and again, one of them incontinently died and was hauled out,
a corpse, through a hole in the wall; or went mad and ran amuck among
examiners and examinees. For centuries, as is well known, this system
selected the rulers of China; and whole lives, from boyhood to extreme
old age, were spent in preparing for the examinations. Now all this is
abolished; and some people appear to regret it. Once more, what _do_ the
foreigners want?
The old imperial city, where once the Ming dynasty reigned, was
destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion. The Tartar city, where before the
revolution 3000 mandarins lived on their pensions, was burnt in the
siege of 1911. Of these cities nothing remains but their huge walls and
gates and the ruins of their houses. The principal interest of Nanking,
the so-called "Ming tombs," lies outside the walls. And the interest is
not the tombs, but the road to them. It is lined by huge figures carved
out of monoliths. Brutes first--lions, camels, elephants, horses, a pair
of each lying down and a pair standing; then human figures, military and
civil officers. What they symbolise I cannot tell. They are said to
guard the road. And very impressive they are in the solitude. Not so
what they lead to, which is merely a hill, artificial, I suppose, piled
on a foundation of stone. Once, my guide informed me, there was a door
giving admission; and within, a complete house, with all its furniture,
in stone. But the door is sealed, and for centuries no one has explored
the interior. I suggested excavation, but was told the superstition of
the inhabitants forbade it. "Besides," said my guide, "the Chinese are
not curious." I wonder? Whether or no they are curious, they are
certainly superstitious. Apropos, a gunboat ran aground on the Yangtse.
The river was falling, and there seemed no chance of getting off for
months. The officers made up their minds to it, and fraternised with the
priest of a temple on the bank. The priest one day asked for a
photograph of the boat. They gave him one, and he asked them to dinner.
After dinner he solemnly burnt the photograph to his god. And--"would
you believe it?"--next day a freshet came down and set the vessel
afloat. Which shows how superstitions are generated and maintained in a
world so little subject to law, on the surface of it, as ours.
My anecdote has brought me to the Yangtse, and it is on a river-boat
that I write. Hour after hour there passes by the panorama of hills and
plain, of green wheat and yellow rape, of the great flood with its
flocks of wild duck, of fishers' cabins on the shore and mud-built
thatched huts, of junks with bamboo-threaded sails skimming on flat
bottoms, of high cliffs with monasteries perched on perilous ledges, of
changing light and shade, of burning sunset and the stars. Travelling by
river is the best of all travelling--smooth, slow, quiet, and soothingly
contemplative. All China, I am informed by some pessimists, is in a
state of anarchy, actual or latent. It may be. But it is difficult to
believe it among these primitive industrious people living and working
as they have lived and worked for 4000 years. Any other country, I
suppose, in such a crisis as the present would be seething with civil
war. But China? When one puts the point to the foreigner who has been
talking of anarchy he says, "Ah! but the Chinese are so peaceable! They
don't mind whether there's a Government or no. They just go on without
it!" Exactly! That is the wonderful thing. But even that seems to annoy
the foreigner. Once more, what _does_ he want? I give it up.
III
IN THE YANGTSE GORGES
At the upper end of the gorge poetically named "Ox Liver and Horse
Lungs" I watched the steamboat smoking and splashing up stream. She had
traversed in a few hours the distance I, in my houseboat, had taken
three days to cover; and certainly she is much more convenient and much
more comfortable. That, however, is not necessarily an advantage. What
may be urged with some force is that travelling by steamboat is more
humane. It dispenses with human labour of a peculiarly dangerous and
strenuous kind. Twenty-eight boatmen are attached to my single person. A
big junk may have a crew of two hundred. When the wind is not fair they
must row or tow; and towing is not like towing along the Thames!
Suddenly you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Presently
they appear high above, creeping with the line along a ledge of rock.
And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, "Plenty coolie fall here. Too high
place." Or they are clambering over boulders, one or two told off to
disentangle the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling along
a greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly able to advance
a step or even to hold their own. As a labour-saving machine one must
welcome the advent of the steamboat, as one is constrained to welcome
even that of the motor-omnibus. But from the traveller's point of view
it is different. Railways and steamboats enable more of us to travel,
and to travel farther, in space. But in experience he travels the
farthest who travels the slowest. A mediæval student or apprentice
walking through Europe on foot really did see the world. A modern
tourist sees nothing but the inside of hotels. Unless, that is, he
chooses to walk, or ride, or even cycle. Then it is different. Then he
begins to see. As now I, from my houseboat, begin to see China. Not
profoundly, of course, but somehow intimately. For instance, while my
crew eat their midday rice, I stroll up to the neighbouring village.
Contrary to all I have been taught to expect, I find it charming,
picturesque, not so dirty after all, not so squalid, not so poor. The
people, too, who, one thought, would insult or mob the foreigner, either
take no notice, or, if you greet them, respond in the friendliest way.
They may, of course, be explaining to one another that you are a foreign
devil, but nothing in their countenance or manner suggests it. The
children are far better-mannered than in most European countries. They
may follow you, and chatter and laugh; but at least they have not learnt
to beg. Curiosity they have, and gaiety, but I detect no sign of
hostility. I walk down the long street, with its shops and roomy
houses--far roomier and more prosperous-looking than in most Indian
villages--and come to the temple. Smilingly I am invited to enter. There
are no mysteries in Chinese religion. I begin to wonder, indeed, whether
there is any religion left. For everywhere I find the temples and
monasteries either deserted or turned into schools or barracks. This one
is deserted. It is like a series of lumber-rooms, full of dusty idols.
The idols were once gaudy, brightly painted "to look like life," with
beards and whiskers of real hair. But now their splendour is dimmed. The
demons scowl to no purpose. To no purpose the dragons coil. No
trespasser threatens the god behind his dingy curtains. In one chamber
only a priest kneels before the shrine and chants out of a book while he
taps a bronze vessel with a little hammer. Else, solitude, vacuity, and
silence. Is he Buddhist or Taoist? I have no language in which to ask. I
can only accept with mute gestures the dusty seat he offers and the cup
of lukewarm tea. What has happened to religion? So far as I can make
out, something like the "disestablishment of the Church." The Republic
has been at work; and in the next village I see what it has been doing.
For there the temple is converted into a school. Delightedly the
scholars show me round. On the outside wall, for him who runs to read,
are scored up long addition sums in our Western figures. Inside, the
walls are hung with drawings of birds and beasts, of the human skeleton
and organs, even of bacteria! There are maps of China and of the world.
The children even produce in triumph an English reading-book, though I
must confess they do not seem to have profited by it much. Still, they
can say "cat" when you show them a picture of the creature; which is
more than I could do in Chinese. And China does not change? Wait a
generation! This, remember, is a tiny village in the heart of the
country, more than 1000 miles from the coast. And this is happening all
over the Celestial Empire, I suppose. I start to return to my boat, but
have not gone a quarter of a mile before I hear a shout, and looking
back find half the school following me and escorting their teacher, who
speaks English. He regrets to have missed my visit; will I not return
and let him show me the school? I excuse myself, and he walks with me to
the boat, making what conversation he can. One remark I remember--"China
a good place now; China a republic." And I thought, as we exchanged
cards, that he represented the Republic more essentially than the
politicians whom foreigners so severely criticise. Anyhow, Republic or
no, China is being transformed. And there is something other than
steamboats to attest it.
Which brings me back to my starting-point. On the steamboat you have no
adventures. But on the houseboat you do. For instance, the other day
the rope broke as we were towing up a rapid, and down we dashed, turning
round and round, and annihilating in five minutes the labour of an hour.
I was afraid, I confess; but the boatmen took it as a matter of course.
In some way, incomprehensible to me, they got us into the bank, and,
looking up, the first thing I saw was an embankment in construction--the
railway from Ichang to Chungking. When it is finished we shall go by
train--not even by steamboat,--and so see nothing except tunnels.
Certainly, we shall not be compelled to pass the night in a small
village; nor permitted to see the sunset behind these lovely hills and
the moon rising over the river between the cliffs of the gorge. Nor
shall we then be delayed, as I was yesterday, till the water should run
down, and so tempted to walk into the country. I made for a side valley,
forded a red torrent, and found myself among fields and orchards; green
of mulberries, green of fruit trees, green of young corn; and above, the
purple hills, with all their bony structure showing under the skin of
soil. I followed a high path, greeted by the peasants I met with a
charming smile and that delightful gesture whereby, instead of shaking
your hand, they clasp theirs and shake them _at_ you. I came at last to
a solitary place, and, sitting down there, watched the evening light on
the mountains. I watched, and they seemed to be saying something. What?
"Rocks that are bones, earth that is flesh, what, what do you
mean
Eyeing me silently?
Streams that are voices, what, what do you say?
You are pouring an ocean into a cup. Yet pour, that all it
can hold
May at least be water of yours."
At dusk I got back to the river, and found that a wind had sprung up and
the junks were trying to pass the rapid. There must have been fifty of
them crowded together. They could only pass one by one; and the scene
was pandemonium. The Chinese are even noisier than the Italians, and
present the same appearance of confusion. But in some mysterious way an
order is always getting evolved. On this occasion it seemed to be
perfectly understood which boat should go first. And presently there she
was, in mid-rapid, apparently not advancing an inch, the ropes held taut
from a causeway a quarter of a mile off. At last the strain suddenly
ceased, and she moved quickly up stream. Another followed. Then it was
dark. And we had to pass the night, after all, tossing uneasily in the
rough water. Soon after dawn we started again. I went across to the
causeway, and watched the trackers at work--twenty each on two ropes,
hardly advancing a step in five minutes. Then the boat's head swung into
shore, the tension ceased; something had happened. I waited half an hour
or so. "Nothing doing," in the expressive American phrase. Then I went
back. We had sprung a leak, and my cabin was converted into a
swimming-bath. Another hour or so repairing this. Then the rope had to
be brought back and attached again. At last we started for the second
time, and in half an hour got safely through the hundred yards of racing
waters into the bank above. At ten I got my breakfast, and we started to
sail with a fair wind. It dropped. Rain came on. My crew (as always in
that conjuncture) put up their awning and struck work. So here we are at
1 P.M., in a heavy thunder-shower, a mile from the place we tried to
leave at six o'clock this morning. This is the ancient method of
travelling--four thousand years old, I suppose. It is very inconvenient!
Oh, yes--BUT!----
IV
PEKIN
Professor Giles tells us, no doubt truly, that the Chinese are not a
religious nation. No nation, I think, ever was, unless it be the
Indians. But religious impulses sweep over nations and pass away,
leaving deposits--rituals, priesthoods, and temples. Such an impulse
once swept over China, in the form of Buddhism; and I am now visiting
its deposit in the neighbourhood of Pekin. Scattered over the hills to
the west of the city are a number of monastery temples. Some are
deserted; some are let as villas to Europeans; some, like the one where
I am staying, have still their complement of monks--in this temple, I am
told, some three to four hundred. But neither here nor anywhere have I
seen anything that suggests vitality in the religion. I entered one of
the temples yesterday at dusk and watched the monks chanting and
processing round a shrine from which loomed in the shadow a gigantic
bronze-gold Buddha. They began to giggle like children at the entrance
of the foreigner and never took their eyes off us. Later, individual
monks came running round the shrines, beating a gong as though to call
the attention of the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctory
praise or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen even in
Italy, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the latter end of the gospel
of Buddha in China. It seems better that he should sit deserted in his
Indian caves than be dishonoured by such mummeries.
But once it must have been otherwise. Once this religion was alive. And
then it was that men chose these exquisite sites for contemplation. The
Chinese Buddhists had clearly the same sense for the beauty of nature
that the Italian Franciscans had. In secluded woods and copses their
temples nestle, courts and terraces commanding superb views over the
great plain to Pekin. The architecture is delicate and lovely; tiled
roofs, green or gold or grey, cornices elaborately carved and painted in
lovely harmonies of blue and green; fine trees religiously preserved;
the whole building so planned and set as to enhance, not destroy, the
lines and colour of the landscape. To wander from one of these temples
to another, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in them at
night, is to taste a form of travel impossible in Europe now, though
familiar enough there in the Middle Ages. Specially delightful is it to
come at dusk upon a temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkle
as the wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a dark
recess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces and swords that seem
to threaten the impious intruder.
This morning there was a festival, and the people from the country
crowded into the temple. Very bright and gay they looked in their gala
clothes. The women especially were charming; painted, it is true, but
painted quite frankly, to better nature, not to imitate her. Their
cheeks were like peaches or apples, and their dresses correspondingly
gay. Why they had come did not appear; not, apparently, to worship, for
their mood was anything but religious. Some perhaps came to carry away a
little porcelain boy or girl as guarantee of a baby to come. For the
Chinese, by appropriate rites, can determine the sex of a child--a
secret unknown as yet to the doctors of Europe! Some, perhaps, came to
cure their eyes, and will leave at the shrine a picture on linen of the
organs affected. Some are merely there for a jaunt, to see the sights
and the country. We saw a group on their way home, climbing a steep hill
for no apparent purpose except to look at the view. What English
agricultural labourer would do as much? But the Chinese are not
"agricultural labourers"; they are independent peasants; and a people so
gay, so friendly, so well-mannered and self-respecting I have found
nowhere else in the world.
The country round Pekin has the beauty we associate with Italy. First
the plain, with its fresh spring green, its dusty paths, its grey and
orange villages, its cypress groves, its pagodas, its memorial slabs.
Then the hills, swimming in amethyst, bare as those of Umbria, fine and
clean in colour and form. For this beauty I was unprepared. I have even
read that there is no natural beauty in China. And I was unprepared for
Pekin too. How can I describe it? At this time of year, seen from above,
it is like an immense green park. You mount the tremendous wall, 40 feet
high, 14 miles round, as broad at the top as a London street, and you
look over a sea of spring-green tree-tops, from which emerge the
orange-gold roofs of palaces and temples. You descend, and find the
great roads laid out by Kubla Khan, running north and south, east and
west, and thick, as the case may be, with dust or mud; and opening out
of them a maze of streets and lanes, one-storeyed houses, grey walls and
roofs, shop fronts all ablaze with gilt carving, all trades plying, all
goods selling, rickshaws, mule-carts canopied with blue, swarming
pedestrians, eight hundred thousand people scurrying like ants in this
gigantic framework of Cyclopean walls and gates. Never was a medley of
greatness and squalor more strange and impressive. One quarter only is
commonplace, that of the Legations. There is the Wagon-lits Hotel, with
its cosmopolitan stream of Chinese politicians, European tourists,
concession-hunters, and the like. There are the Americans, occupying
and guarding the great north gate, and playing baseball in its
precincts. There are the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Italians,
the Russians, the Japanese; and there, in a magnificent Chinese palace,
are the British, girt by that famous wall of the siege on which they
have characteristically written "Lest we forget!" Forget what? The one
or two children who died in the Legation, and the one or two men who
were killed? Or the wholesale massacre, robbery, and devastation which
followed when the siege was relieved? This latter, I fear, the Chinese
are not likely to forget soon. Yet it would be better if they could. And
better if the Europeans could remember much that they forget--could
remember that they forced their presence and their trade on China
against her will; that their treaties were extorted by force, and their
loans imposed by force, since they exacted from China what are
ironically called "indemnities" which she could not pay except by
borrowing from those who were robbing her. If Europeans could remember
and realise these facts they would perhaps cease to complain that China
continues to evade their demands by the only weapon of the
weak--cunning. When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, and
picked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to enter into social
relations with you merely because you pick him up and, retaining his
property, propose that you should now be friends and begin to do
business. The obliquity of vision of the European residents on all these
points is extraordinary. They cannot see that wrong has been done, and
that wrong engenders wrong. They repeat comfortable formulæ about the
duplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge them with
dishonesty at the very moment that they are dismembering their country;
they attach intolerable conditions to their loans, and then complain if
their victims attempt to find accommodation elsewhere. Of all the Powers
the United States alone have shown some generosity and fairness, and
they are reaping their reward in the confidence of Young China. The
Americans had the intelligence to devote some part of the excessive
indemnity they exacted after the Boxer riots to educating Chinese
students in America. Hundreds of these young men are now returned to
China, with the friendliest feeling to America, and, naturally, anxious
to develop political and commercial relations with her rather than with
other Powers. British trade may suffer because British policy has been
less generous. But British trade, I suppose, would suffer in any case.
For the British continue to maintain their ignorance and contempt of
China and all things Chinese, while Germans and Japanese are travelling
and studying indefatigably all over the country. "We see too much of
things Chinese!" was the amazing remark made to me by a business man in
Shanghai. Too much! They see nothing at all, and want to see nothing.
They live in the treaty ports, dine, dance, play tennis, race. China is
in birth-throes, and they know and care nothing. A future in China is
hardly for them.
V
THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD
To write from China about the Englishman may seem an odd choice. But to
see him abroad is to see him afresh. At home he is the air one breathes;
one is unaware of his qualities. Against a background of other races you
suddenly perceive him, and can estimate him--fallaciously or no--as you
estimate foreigners.
So seen the Englishman appears as the eternal school-boy. I mean no
insult; I mean to express his qualities as well as his defects. He has
the pluck, the zest, the sense of fair play, the public spirit of our
great schools. He has also their narrowness and their levity. Enter his
office, and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming,
skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with an air of
playing at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of an hour he will have
asked you round to the club and offered you a whisky and soda. Dine with
him, and the talk will turn on golf or racing, on shooting, fishing, and
the gymkhana. Or, if you wish to divert it, you must ask him definite
questions about matters of fact. Probably you will get precise and
intelligent replies. But if you put a general question he will flounder
resentfully; and if you generalise yourself you will see him dismissing
you as a windbag. Of the religion, the politics, the manners and customs
of the country in which he lives he will know and care nothing, except
so far as they may touch his affairs. He will never, if he can help it,
leave the limits of the foreign settlement. Physically he oscillates
between his home, his office, the club, and the racecourse; mentally,
between his business and sport. On all general topics his opinions are
second or third hand. They are the ghosts of old prejudices imported
years ago from England, or taken up unexamined from the English
community abroad. And these opinions pass from hand to hand till they
are as similar as pebbles on the shore. In an hour or so you will have
acquired the whole stock of ideas current in the foreign community
throughout a continent. Your only hope of new light is in particular
instances and illustrations. And these, of course, may be had for the
asking.
But the Englishman abroad in some points is the Englishman at his best.
For he is or has been a pioneer, at any rate in China. And pioneering
brings out his most characteristic qualities. He loves to decide
everything on his own judgment, on the spur of the moment, directly on
the immediate fact, and in disregard of remoter contingencies and
possibilities. He needs adventure to bring out his powers, and only
really takes to business when business is something of a "lark." To
combine the functions of a trader with those of an explorer, a soldier,
and a diplomat is what he really enjoys. So, all over the world, he
opens the ways, and others come in to reap the fruit of his labours.
This is true in things intellectual as in things practical. In science,
too, he is a pioneer. Modern archæology was founded by English
travellers. Darwin and Wallace and Galton in their youth pursued
adventure as much as knowledge. When the era of routine arrives, when
laboratory work succeeds to field work, the Englishman is apt to retire
and leave the job to the German. The Englishman, one might say, "larks"
into achievement, the German "grinds" into it. The one, accordingly, is
free-living, genial, generous, careless; the other laborious, exact,
routine-ridden. It is hard for an Englishman to be a pedant; it is not
easy for a German to be anything else. For philosophy no man has less
capacity than the Englishman. He does not understand even how such
questions can be put, still less how anyone can pretend to answer them.
The philosopher wants to know whether, how, and why life ought to be
lived before he will consent to live it. The Englishman just lives
ahead, not aware that there is a problem; or convinced that, if there is
one, it will only be solved "by walking." The philosopher proceeds from
the abstract to the concrete. The Englishman starts with the concrete,
and may or, more probably, may not arrive at the abstract. No general
rules are of any use to him except such as he may have elaborated for
himself out of his own experience. That is why he mistrusts education.
For education teaches how to think in general, and that isn't what he
wants or believes in. So, when he gets into affairs, he discards all his
training and starts again at the beginning, learning to think, if he
ever does learn it, over his own particular job. And his own way, he
opines, must be the right way for every one. Hence his contempt and even
indignation for individuals or nations who are moved by "ideas." At this
moment his annoyance with the leaders of "Young China" is provoked
largely by the fact that they are proceeding on general notions of how a
nation should be governed and organised, instead of starting with the
particularities of their own society, and trying to mend it piece by
piece and from hand to mouth. Before they make a Constitution, he
thinks, they ought to make roads; and before they draw up codes, to
extirpate consumption. The conclusion lies near at hand, and I have
heard it drawn--"What they want is a few centuries of British rule."
And, indeed, it is curious how constantly the Englishman abroad is
opposed, in the case of other nations, to all the institutions and
principles he is supposed to be proud of at home. Partly, no doubt, this
is due to his secret or avowed belief that the whole world ought to be
governed despotically by the English. But partly it is because he does
not believe that the results the English have achieved can be achieved
in any other way than theirs. They arrived at them without intention or
foresight, by a series of detached steps, each taken without prescience
of the one that would follow. So, and so only, can other nations arrive
at them. He does not believe in short cuts, nor in learning by the
experience of others. And so the watchwords "Liberty," "Justice,"
"Constitution," so dear to him at home, leave him cold abroad. Or,
rather, they make him very warm, but warm not with zeal but with
irritation.
Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's enthusiasms. He
cannot endure the profession that a man is moved by high motives. His
annoyance, for example, with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to the
fact that he supports the importation into China of Indian opium. Very
commonly he does not. But the movement is an "agitation" (dreadful
word!). It is "got up" by missionaries. It purports to be based on moral
grounds, and he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is not
himself moved by moral considerations. Almost invariably he is. But he
will never admit it for himself, and he deeply suspects it in others.
The words "hypocrite," "humbug," "sentimentalist" spring readily to his
lips. But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you will
find, often enough, that he has arrived at the same conclusion as the
"sentimentalist"--only, of course, for quite different reasons! For
intellect he has little use, except so far as it issues in practical
results. He will forgive a man for being intelligent if he makes a
fortune, but hardly otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuous
admiration for a definite intellectual accomplishment which he knows it
is hard to acquire and is not sure he could acquire himself. That, for
instance, is his attitude to those who know Chinese. A "sinologue," he
will tell you, must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give so
much time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he is proud of
the sinologue--as a public school is proud of a boy so clever as to
verge upon insanity, or a village is proud of the village idiot.
Something of the same feeling, I sometimes think, underlies his respect
for Shakspere. "If you want that kind of thing," he seems to say to the
foreigner, "and it's the kind of thing you _would_ want, _we_ can do it,
you see, better than you can!"
So with art. He is never a connoisseur, but he is often a collector.
Partly, no doubt, because there is money in it, but that is a secondary
consideration. Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his
sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise
and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all
about it, except its æsthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot
see it. He has the _flair_ of the dealer, not the perception of the
amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any distinction
between them.
But these, from his point of view, are trifles. What matters is that he
has pre-eminently the virtues of active life. He is fair-minded, and
this, oddly, in spite of his difficulty in seeing another man's point of
view. When he _does_ see it he respects it. Whereas nimbler-witted
nations see it only to circumvent and cheat it. He is honest; as honest,
at least, as the conditions of modern business permit. He hates bad
work, even when, for the moment, bad work pays. He hates skimping and
paring. And these qualities of his make it hard for him to compete with
rivals less scrupulous and less generous. He is kind-hearted--much more
so than he cares to admit. And at the bottom of all his qualities he has
the sense of duty. He will shoulder loyally all the obligations he has
undertaken to his country, to his family, to his employer, to his
employees. The sense of duty, indeed, one might say with truth, is his
religion. For on the rare occasions on which he can be persuaded to
broach such themes you will find, I think, at the bottom of his mind
that what he believes in is Something, somehow, somewhere, in the
universe, which helps him, and which he is helping, when he does right.
There must, he feels, be some sense in life. And what sense would there
be if duty were nonsense?
Poets, artists, philosophers can never be at home with the Englishman.
His qualities and his defects alike are alien to them. In his company
they live as in prison, for it is not an air in which wings can soar.
But for solid walking on the ground he has not his equal. The phrase
"Solvitur ambulando" must surely have been coined for him. And no doubt
on his road he has passed, and will pass again, the wrecks of many a
flying-machine.
VI
CHINA IN TRANSITION
The Chinese Revolution has proceeded, so far, with less disturbance and
bloodshed than any great revolution known to history. There has been
little serious fighting and little serious disorder; nothing comparable
to that which accompanied, for instance, the French Revolution of 1789.
And this, no doubt, is due to the fact that the Chinese are alone among
nations of the earth in detesting violence and cultivating reason. Their
instinct is always to compromise and save everybody's face. And this is
the main reason why Westerners despise them. The Chinese, they aver,
have "no guts." And when hard pressed as to the policy of the Western
Powers in China, they will sometimes quite frankly confess that they
consider the West has benefited China by teaching her the use of force.
That this should be the main contribution of Christian to Pagan
civilisation is one of the ironies of history. But it is part of the
greater irony which gave the Christian faith to precisely those nations
whose fundamental instincts and convictions were and are in radical
antagonism to its teaching.
Though, however, it is broadly true that the Chinese have relied on
reason and justice in a way and to a degree which is inconceivable in
the West, they have not been without their share of original sin.
Violence, anarchy, and corruption have played a part in their history,
though a less part than in the history of most countries. And these
forces have been specially evident in that department to which
Westerners are apt to pay the greatest attention--in the department of
government. Government has always been less important in China than in
the Western world; it has always been rudimentary in its organisation;
and for centuries it has been incompetent and corrupt. Of this
corruption Westerners, it is true, make more than they fairly should.
China is no more corrupt (to say the least) than the United States or
Italy or France, or than England was in the eighteenth century. And much
that is called corruption is recognised and established "squeeze,"
necessary, and understood to be necessary, to supplement the inadequate
salaries of officials. A Chinese official is corrupt much as Lord
Chancellor Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought properly
to be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. Moreover, the
people have always had their remedy. When the recognised "squeeze" is
exceeded, they protest by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the most
unfavourable view, may be described as corruption tempered by anarchy.
And this system, it is admitted, still prevails after the Revolution.
Clearly, indeed, it cannot be extirpated until officials are properly
paid; and China is not in a position to pay for any reform while the
Powers are drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources by that
particular form of robbery called by diplomatists "indemnity." The new
officials, then, are "corrupt" as the old ones were; and they are
something more. They are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full of
ideas as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even more
divorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign education seems to make
a cut right across a Chinaman's life. He returns with a new head; and
this head never gets into normal relations with his heart. That, I
believe, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with enormous
rapidity and freedom unchecked by the fly-wheel of traditional feelings.
And it is Jacobinism that accounts for the extraordinary vigour of the
campaign against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to maintain that
this campaign is not serious. But that is because Europeans simply
cannot conceive that any body of men should be in as deadly earnest
about a moral issue as are the representatives of Young China. The
anti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. Smokers are
flogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; and farmers who resist are
shot down. The other day in Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventy
farmers who had protested against the destruction of their crops were
locked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of seventy-six, falsely
accused of growing poppy, was fined 500 dollars, and when he refused to
pay was flogged to death by the orders of a young official of
twenty-two. Stories of this kind come in from every part of the country;
and though this or that story may be untrue or exaggerated, there can be
no doubt about the general state of affairs. The officials are putting
down opium with a vigour and a determination which it is inconceivable
should ever be applied in the West to the traffic in alcohol. But in
doing so they are showing a ruthlessness which does not seem to be
native to the Chinese, and which perhaps is to be accounted for by what
I have called Jacobinism, resulting from the effects of a Western
education that has been unable to penetrate harmoniously the complicated
structure of Chinese character.
The anti-opium campaign is one example of the way in which the
Revolution has elicited and intensified violence in this peace-loving
people. Another example is the use of assassination. This has been an
accompaniment of all great revolutions. It took the form of
"proscriptions" in Rome, of the revolutionary tribunals in France. In
China it is by comparison a negligible factor; but it exists. Two months
ago a prominent leader of the southern party was assassinated; and
popular suspicion traces the murder to high Government officials, and
even to the President himself. The other day a southern general was
killed by a bomb. For the manufacture of bombs is one of the things
China has learned from the Christian West; and the President lives in
constant terror of this form of murder. China, it will be seen, does not
altogether escape the violence that accompanies all revolutions. Nor
does she altogether escape the anarchy. Anarchy, indeed, that is a
simple strike against authority, may be said to be part of the Chinese
system. It is the way they have always enforced their notions of
justice. A curious example has been recently offered by the students of
the Pekin University. For various reasons--good or bad--they have
objected to the conduct of their Chancellor. After ineffectual protests,
they called upon him in large numbers with his resignation written out,
and requested him to sign it. He refused; whereupon they remarked that
they would call again the next day with revolvers; and in the interval
he saw wisdom and signed. Last week there was a similar episode. The new
Chancellor proved as unpalatable as his predecessor. The students once
more presented themselves with his resignation written out. He refused
to resign, and, as the students aver, scurrilously abused them. They
proceeded to the Minister of Education, who refused to see them.
Thereupon they camped out in his courtyard, and stayed all day and all
night, sending a message to the professors dated "from under the trees
of the Education Office" to explain that they were unfortunately unable
to attend lectures. This Chancellor, too, it would seem, has seen wisdom
and resigned.
How strange it all seems to Western eyes! A country, we should suppose,
where such things occur, is incapable of organisation. But it is certain
that we are wrong. Our notion is that everything must be done by
authority, and that unless authority is maintained there will be
anarchy. The Chinese notion is that authority is there to carry out what
the people recognise to be common sense and justice; if it does
otherwise, it must be resisted; and if it disappears life will still go
on--as it is going on now in the greater part of China--on the basis of
the traditional and essentially reasonable routine. Almost certainly the
students of the University had justice on their side; otherwise such
action would not be taken; and when they get justice they will be more
docile and orderly than our own undergraduates at home.
Another thing surprising to European observers is the apparent belief of
the Chinese in verbal remonstrance. Under the present régime officials
and public men are allowed the free use of the telegraph. The
consequence is that telegrams of advice, admonition, approval, blame,
fear, hope, doubt pour in daily to the Government from civil and
military governors, from members of Parliament and party leaders. In the
paper to-day, for example, is a telegram from the Governors of
seventeen provinces addressed to the National Assembly. It begins as
follows:
"To the President, the Cabinet, the Tsan Yi Yuan, the Chung Yi
Yuan, and the Press Association,--When the revolution took place
at Wuchang, the various societies and groups responded, and when
the Republic was inaugurated the troops raised among these
bodies were gradually disbanded. For fear that, being driven by
hunger, these disbanded soldiers would become a menace to the
place, the various societies and groups have established a
society at Shanghai called the Citizens' Progressive Society, to
promote the means of livelihood for the people, and the
advancement of society, and the establishment has been
registered in the offices of the Tutuhs of the provinces."
Then follows a statement of the "six dangers" to which the country is
exposed, an appeal to the Assembly to act more reasonably and
competently, and then the following peroration:
"The declarations of us, Yuan-hung and others, are still there,
our wounds have not yet been fully recovered, and should the sea
and ocean be dried up, our original hearts will not be changed.
We will protect the Republic with our sinews and blood of brass
and iron, we will take the lead of the province, and be their
backbone, and we will not allow the revival of the monarchy and
the suppression of the powers of the people. Let Heaven and
earth be witness to our words. You gentlemen are pillars of the
political parties, or the representatives of the people, and you
should unite together and not become inconsistent. You first
determined that the Loan is necessary, but such opinion is now
changed, and you now reject the Loan. Can the ice be changed
into red coal in your hearts? Thus even those who love and
admire you will not be able to defend your position. However, if
you have any extraordinary plan or suggestion to save the
present situation, you can show it to us."
Some of the strange effect produced by this document is due, no doubt,
to translation. But it, like the many others of the kind I have read,
seems to indicate what is at the root of the Chinese attitude to life--a
belief in the power of reason and persuasion. I have said enough to show
that this attitude does not exclude the use of violence; but I feel sure
that it limits it far more than it has ever been limited in Europe. Even
in time of revolution the Chinese are peaceable and orderly to an extent
unknown and almost unbelievable in the West. And the one thing the West
is teaching them and priding itself on teaching them is the absurdity of
this attitude. Well, one day it is the West that will repent because
China has learnt the lesson too well.
VII
A SACRED MOUNTAIN
It was midnight when the train set us down at Tai-an-fu. The moon was
full. We passed across fields, through deserted alleys where sleepers
lay naked on the ground, under a great gate in a great wall, by halls
and pavilions, by shimmering tree-shadowed spaces, up and down steps,
and into a court where cypresses grew. We set up our beds in a verandah,
and woke to see leaves against the morning sky. We explored the vast
temple and its monuments--iron vessels of the Tang age, a great tablet
of the Sungs, trees said to date from before the Christian era, stones
inscribed with drawings of these by the Emperor Chien Lung, hall after
hall, court after court, ruinous, overgrown, and the great crumbling
walls and gates and towers. Then in the afternoon we began the ascent of
Tai Shan, the most sacred mountain in China, the most frequented,
perhaps, in the world. There, according to tradition, legendary emperors
worshipped God. Confucius climbed it six centuries before Christ, and
sighed, we are told, to find his native State so small. The great
Chin-Shih-Huang was there in the third century B.C. Chien Lung in the
eighteenth century covered it with inscriptions. And millions of humble
pilgrims for thirty centuries at least have toiled up the steep and
narrow way. Steep it is, for it makes no détours, but follows straight
up the bed of a stream, and the greater part of the five thousand feet
is ascended by stone steps. A great ladder of eighteen flights climbs
the last ravine, and to see it from below, sinuously mounting the
precipitous face to the great arch that leads on to the summit, is
enough to daunt the most ardent walker. We at least were glad to be
chaired some part of the way. A wonderful way! On the lower slopes it
passes from portal to portal, from temple to temple. Meadows shaded with
aspen and willow border the stream as it falls from green pool to green
pool. Higher up are scattered pines Else the rocks are bare--bare, but
very beautiful, with that significance of form which I have found
everywhere in the mountains in China.
To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitive. All the way up the
rocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctity
of the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially,
by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. They
are models, one is told, of caligraphy as well as of literary
composition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not be
the one without the other. The very names of favourite spots are poems
in themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phoenixes"; another "the
fountain of the white cranes." A rock is called "the tower of the
quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of the
clouds." More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a
rock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles," because there some
mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny
stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarly
Chinese!
It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple that
crowns it, dedicated to Yü Huang, the "Jade Emperor" of the Taoists; and
his image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But
we did not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disc,
straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the river, five
thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim grey levels.
Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after range
of lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, with
half a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full
in view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the great
Tang poet Li-tai-po retired with five companions to drink and make
verses. They are still known to tradition as the "six idlers of the
bamboo grove"; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upon
their symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours
passed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred
to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for
there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshippers. There are
temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself; to the Lady of
the mountain, Pi-hsia-yüen, who is at once the Venus of
Lucretius--"goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the
sky," one inscription calls her--and the kindly mother who gives
children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the
Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to
the Cloud-compeller; to many others. And in all this, is there no room
for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship
the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or the
spirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that some
men adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor--is
he a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions set
up by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run as follows:--
"Without labour, oh Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest things."
"Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world."
"In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord to
achieve great works."
These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are as religious as
anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of the
worshippers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been,
the mass of worshippers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any
country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not
know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of
religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and
what lies behind it--for the religion of a Wordsworth--they seem to be
pre-eminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others
like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the
inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is
loveliest--all goes to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills,
perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in
all the country, that charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy,
as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature?
"Great God, I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn."
That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have
been wrung from him had he been born in China.
And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of
China--"pro-Chinese," as they are contemptuously called in the
East--assert that China is more civilised than the modern West, even
the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is
apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan
may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a
place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential
values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganised, corrupt,
incompetent, even if it were true--and it is far from being true in any
unqualified sense--would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of
inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the
superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its
foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western
civilisation, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers,
and police; but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity
never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It
is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood
flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous
foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless
architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen,
all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West
everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that
this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent
æsthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of
sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken.
The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. It
implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the
opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate.
Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will
shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly.
Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone,
beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a
funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the
Chinese have written poems in exquisite caligraphy, _they_ will cover
the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of
temples, each so designed and placed as to be a new beauty in the
landscape, _they_ will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs
on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they _will_, because
they _have_ done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment.
Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organisation, our
medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a
price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages
they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive
culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of
civilising China. Would that China could civilise the West!