錢鍾書英文文集（OCR）.txt

錢鍾書英文文集

A Collection Of Lian Zhongshu's English Essays


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钱锺书英文文集／钱锺书著．一北京：外语教学与研究出版社，2005.8ISBN 7-5600-5081-6
I.钱···II.钱···III.①古典文学-文学研究一中国-文集一英文②古典文学一文学研究一西方国家一文集一英文	IV. ① I206.2-53②I106.2-53
中国版本图书馆CIP数据核字（2005）第099277号
出版人：李朋义
责任编辑：周懿行 罗来鸥
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钱锺书，字默存（1910-1998），
江苏无锡人，国学大师钱基博之子。1933年毕业于清华大学外文系，1935年留学英国牛津大学Exeter学院，1937年获得B．Litt．学位，论文题为China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries。随后赴法国巴黎大学研究。1938年9月回国，先后任西南联大、震旦女子文理学院、暨南大学外文系教授，中央图书馆英文总纂，主编《书林季刊》。1949年后，任清华大学外文系教授，1953年任中国社会科学院文学研究所外文组研究员，但多年被借调外单位，未得在外文组研究。1982年任中国社会科学院副院长，1993年改任顾问。




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为保持作品当年的风貌，本文集部分英文单词的旧式拼写、大小写及斜体等均未按现行标准及规范予以更改，特此说明。

出版者 


Preface

By Yang Jiang

Qian Zhongshu* had fondly wished to write in English a book on European literature, because he was equally adept at writing in English or in Chinese through early training, and foreign literature was his proper field of study. He was a student of foreign languages and literature at the National University of Tsing-hua, and later,at the University of Oxford, where he got the degree of B. Litt. (Oxon). He held professorships in various Chinese universities lecturing on foreign literature and was concurrently the editor-in-chief of Philobiblon, a literary quarterly in English. After 1952, he was a senior fellow in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, working in the group for the research of foreign literature.But he was temporarily transferred to another post for about ten years. After his return to the Academy, he was again “temporarily” transferred to another group for the research of Classical Literature. In fact,he was transferred without any hope to return. What he intended to achieve was never accomplished, or rather was forever obstructed from achieving. Alas,the vanity of human wishes!
Nevertheless,he left behind some miscellaneous articles written in English,nowcompiled in this Collection, for the sheer purpose of preserving some specimens of Qian's writings in English so that readers may have a taste of his unique flavour straight from his own pen.
Chronologically arranged, the essays in this anthology are mostly culled from various journals in the collection of the National Library (formerly Beijing Library). Several other pieces have found their way here from Qian's unpublished papers. Future discoveries, should there be any, and after proper authentication, will be incorporated into the Collection. 


*Qian Zhongshu used the Wade-Giles romanization for Chinese Characters in their translation when these essays were first published. According to this romanization scheme, Qian Zhongshu is spelled Ch'ien Chungshu in this collection. 




Contents

Preface
Pragmatism and Potterism
Book Note I
Book Note II
On “Old Chinese Poetry"
Great European Novels and Novelists
Myth, Nature and Individual
A Critical Study of Modem Aesthetics
Apropos of the“Shanghai Man”
A Chapter in the History of Chinese Translation
Foreword to the Prose-poetry of Su Tung-P'o
Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama
Correspondence: To the Editor-in-Chief of T'ien Hsia
A Note on Mr. Wu Mi and His Poetry·
China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Chinese Literature
Critical Notice I
Critical Notice II
Critical Notice III
The Return of the Native
Correspondence:To the Editor of Philobiblon
An Early Chinese Version of Longfellow's "Psalm of Life"
The Mutual Illumination of Italian and Chinese Literature

Appendix I:A Letter to Donald Stuart
Appendix II: Information Provided by G. Dudbridge
Appendix III:A Speech by Qian Zhongshu
Appendix IV: Opening Address to the First Sino-American
Symposium on Comparative Literature




Pragmatism and Potterism

From Tsinghua Weekly（《清华周刊》），XXXV1931），pp．93-99．

Pragmatism has met with much hostile criticism. James himself has replied to some of the critics like Russell, Pratt and Bradley in “The Meaning of Truth".The rest like Taylor, Lovejoy,Gardiner, Bakewell,Creighton,Hibben,Parodi,Salter,Carus,Laland, Mentre,McTaggart,G. E. Moore, Schintz, etc., he does not “pretend to consider.” Since not only James, but almost all Pragmatists don't“pretend to consider” their critics, no doubt Pragmatism has profited little by criticism,1e.g.,as late as 1929, Professor Dewey, the most profound and logical of Pragmatists,in his Gifford Lectures “The Quest for Certainty”,still uses the word “practice” as ambiguously as of yore to denote at one time activity in general and at other times blind in contradistinction to intelligent action. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to pass any serious criticism upon Pragmatism, which indeed is superfluous, but to point out the resemblance which has struck upon me between this popular philosophy and a sort of mentality satirised in a popular novel.
As a philosophy, Pragmatism bears the stamp of American nationality throughout. It is a philosophy par excellence of capitalism and democracy,two formative agencies of modern age in general and modern America in particular.2 There is as much “egotism” in Pragmatism as Santayana finds in German philosophy. But the relation between this “American philosophy”and “American politics” is not my concern here. What is noteworthy is the Pragmatist's emphasis on activity and utility.This is quite in the line of the Baconian tradition. Ever since Cowley, critics have regarded Bacon as the prophet of the coming of themodern age. But Bacon is no mere seerof “the promised Land”, nay, he discovers it. The problem of philosophy in the classical antiquity and the middle ages is whether man with his natural faculties can have a true (in the Non-pragmatic sense) knowledge of the reality (whatever it may mean ). Any attempt on those old philosophers' part to solve this problem is confronted with the same difficulties as the modern theory of correspondence.Thus Plato, with his NOUS to save knowledge from the Heraclitean flux, sees no way out as to the problem of error in “Thaetetus”. Then Bacon comes with his dictum“Scientia est potentia”. The old knot is not untied, but simply cut. Hereafter we need not ask whether our natural faculties can truly grasp the reality, but whether we can make use of such knowledge as acquired through our natural faculties, no matter it is true (in the Non-pragmatic sense) or not. Knowledge is instrumental, it is simply a means to an end. There is perhaps more insight in Macaulay's estimate of Bacon than has been generally admitted. No doubt Professor Dewey would trace pragmatism to Bacon in “Reconstruction in philosophy” rather than to Protagoras. The ethics of such a philosophy is of course naturalistic. Since every idea is a means to an end, there can be no autonomy of values. Dr.G.E.Moore,in a fashion of giving a dog bad name and then hanging him, has called this heteronomy a naturalistic fallacy in “Principia Ethica".3
Anxious to do justice to the “alogical"4 element in consciousness, Pragmatists have a rooted antipathy towards logic; and by beautiful ironies of logic, they are often committed to self-contradiction. But then, what do Pragmatists care? They can “reform” logic to suit their book. James, Dr. Schiller tells us, “avowedly entertained too low an opinion of (intellectualist) logic5 to trouble to corret it”6. It is therefore left to Professor Dewey and Dr. Schiller to carry out the “reformation". Of these two philosophers' works on logic, Dr. Schiller's “Formal Logic”seems to me the most convincing and amusing. In that book, he has tried to beat,so to speak, formal logic with its own staff, and to show that formal logic is, if a little play on words after Dr. Schiller's fashion be allowed,formally logical without being logically formal. Dr.Schiller tells us that he is showing up the Aristotelian logic, “the most profitable of Greek Speculations only next to Euclid”. Curiously enough, those doctrines stated as Aristotelian and then furiously taken to task by Dr. Schiller can be found not in the Stagirite's “Organon”, but in the works of Dr. Schiller's fellow countrymen who,like Dr. Schiller, are critics of Aristotle;e.g. Sir W. Hamilton's “Lectures”. How far this confusion arises from Dr. Schiller's patriotic fallacy, I do not know. As we are not to “follow reason wherever it leads us",we are told to follow volition and interest wherever they lead us. Here the Pragmatist plays himself into his enemy's hands; for I think the will-to-believe theory does best to bring to light the latent ambiguity in the Pragmatist's use of the word “wrk”.A belief is true because it “works”;but the “working” of a belief which is the outcome of our will-to-believe,does not mean its verification or verifiability,but means the satisfaction or the encouragement derived from that belief. Dr. Schiller in his “Humanism” illustrates the working of the will-to-believe in our choosing between the two following arguments:
1.The world is so bad that there must be a better.
2.The world is so bad that there can not be a better.
According to Dr. Schiller, the second argument alone is strictly logical, yet we prefer the frst because it is more desirable. Whether we actually choose like this, I doubt; some people would surely think with Bradley that “when all is bad it must be good to know the worst".But, you see, Pragmatists can not look brute facts fairly in the face!
Pragmatism is a philosophy soi-disant scientific. Like Science it lays stress upon experiment and utility. This affinity is but skin-deep.Science,though not strictly logical,7 is ethically neutral:it can be used as well as abused. Besides its necessary assumptions, science (as well as the law of Parcimony in logic) forbids us will to believe anything on trust.8 Even Professor Dewey admits that the “Character” or personal equation is negligible in scientific judgments. Thus to believe an idea scientifically is not necessarily to believe it pragmatically; nor is scientific utility always equivalent to pragmatic desirability. For a truly scientific philosophy one must go to such “philosophical Puritanism”9 as advocated by Russell and not to the tender-hearted philosophy of James, Dewey, and Schiller.10 Perhaps Jamesis aware of this fact; and Professor Schintz's discovery of the substitution of Bergson for Poincare in “The Pluralistic Universe" is as interesting as Butler's discovery of
“the excised 'my's'” in “The Origin of Species”.
Now Pragmatism with its American stamp, its instrumentalism, its tender-heartedness and its unscientific character, bears a striking resemblance to what Miss Rose Macaulay descries as “Potterism”. A few quotations from that brilliant satire will suffice to prove my point: “Potterism was mainly an Anglo-Saxon disease. Worst of all in America, the great home of commerce, success, and the booming of the second-rate.... No good scientist can conceivably be a Potterite, because he is concernd with truth. Potterism is all for short and easy cuts and showy results....The very essence of Potterism is going for things for what they'll bring you,what they lead to, instead of for the thing in itself....Their attitude towards truth was typical:Clare wouldn't see it; Jane saw it perfectly clearly and would reject it without hesitation if it suited her book”, etc., etc. All these can be said with equal appropriateness of Pragmatism: and Pragmatism smellsstrongly of Potterism. Is the Pragmatic theory of knowledge au fond a philosophical expression and justification of the Potterite Mentality? Answer the question who list, I'Il not venture to do it.
Far be it from me to disparage either Pragmatism or Potterism. After all,to call Pragmatism Potterite or Potterism Pragmatic is not criticism-it is mere description.

NOTES

1.with the exception of A. W.Moore, but Moore himself does not make any positive contribution to Pragmatism.
2.Cf. especially G. P. Adams'“Idealism and the Modem Age”,and A.Schintz's“Anti-pragmatism”,Vol II.
3.It must not be supposed that the naturalistic ethics deserves this “bad name". For a luminous criticism of the “hypostatic ethics” of Moore and Russel,see Santayana's “The Winds of Doctrine”,IV. For recent discussions,see D. C. Williams'“The Definition of Yellow and of Good”(Joumnal of Philosophy, Vol. XXVII, pp. 515-527) and A. Edel's “Further on Good and Its Structure" (Ibid. pp. 701-708).
4.See E. B. Bax's "The real, the rational, and the alogical" Chap. VII. But the attempt to reduce logic of “Psychologic” can be found as early as in Mill's“Logic”.
5. What Dr. Schiller means exactly by "intellectualist logic" is not quite clear. Dr.Schiller has “troubled" himself to “correct" the Aristotelian logic. And nowhere is the criticism of Aristotelian logic so sagacious as in the “intellectualist logic" of Bosanquet. Indeed Dr.Schiller owes a good deal of his criticism to Bosanquet, though he does not care to acknowledge it.
6. "Joumal of Philosophical Studies", Vol. VI, No.21,p.21.
7.See especially Earl Balfour's “The defense of philosophic doubt" Chap. XII,and the first part of his essay on Bergson's Creative Evolution in “Essays Speculative and Political”.
8.Cf.Laplace's famous retort to Napoleon in the formal presentation of his “Méchanique Céleste”.
9.The term is Muirhead's. See “what is philosophy,anyway?”in “The Use of Philosophy”.
10.For the shar antithesis between the scientific philosophy of Russell and the scientific philosophy of Dewey,see R. F.A. Hoernle's“The idol of Scientific Method in Philosophy" in “Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics”. 




BOOK NOTE I

From Tsinghua Weekly（《清华周刊》），XXXV（1931），pp．761-762．

Selections of English Prose from Chaucer to Hardy with Introduction and Notes by A. L. Pollard. Commercial Press. 1930. PP. xiii+ 503.$3.00 Mex.
Professor Pollard-Urquhart's editions of some of the best-known novels of Scott and Dickens have long been found helpful by Chinese students of English, and this new anthology of his will be equally serviceable. The selections extend chronologically,as the title shows,“From Chaucer to Hardy”.Contemporary authors have no place in this compilation for the very good reason, I suppose, that what is contemporary may be merely temporary. American authors are not represented, and so are a few English masters of style,e.g.Leigh Hunt and Stevenson. But the book is fairly comprehensive and representative,covers pretty much the whole field of prose writing not excluding the Novel, a genre of literature which lends itself least to selection,and can meet a great variety of tastes and moods. In making extracts from authors like Mandeville, Caxton, Greene, Lodge, Ascham,Hakluyt etc., Professor Pollard-Urquhart has made these old English masters accessible to those of us who have hitherto known them merely as names in Wardour Street, if they have known them at all.The book is also very painstakingly furnished with footnotes,biographical notes,and an introductory survey of the development of English prose; and students are equipped with everything which makes for facility of reading and intelligent appreciation. Indeed a more catholic and inexpensive campanion volume to histories of English literature can not be found in China. 




Book Note II

From Tsinghua Weekly（《清华周刊》），XXXVI（1932），pp．747-748．

Selections from the Works of Su Tung-P'o. Translated into English with Introduction,Notes, and Commentaries by Cyril Drummond Le Gros Clark and Wood-engravings by Averil Salmond Le Gros Clark.London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd.1931.P.180.1£.1s.
This book contains nineteen “prose-poems” selected and translated from the works of Su Tung-P'o, the great poet of the Sung Dynasty. In the original, they belong to different literary genres, some of them being“赋”，and others being“记”；this distinction， however,is lost through translation. Most of Su's popular pieces such as“The Red Cliff",“The Pavilion to Glad Rain”,“The Wily Rat",etc. are translated together with some of his sorriest stuffs like“Medlar and Chrysanthemum”（《服胡麻赋》）which，in my opinion, should be “left severely alone”.Chinese readers (who are presumably acquainted with these pieces in the orignal) will not, perhaps,“experience such feeling of glad surprise that came to Keats on first opening Chapman's'Homer'” as Mr. E. C. Werner enthusiastically assures them in the Foreword-but how much I for one should like to unlearn my Chinese in order to “experience”it!
It is idle to contend with Mr. Werner with his theory of the translatability of Chinese poetry into English prose(!) that this translation fails to give the reader any idea of Su's style-a contention so self-evident as to be hardly worth the making. Su's playfulness becomes almost elephantine in the translation, and his philosophisings read so pontifical in English. I mention these not to question Mr.Le Gros Clark's ability as a translator, but simply to put a spoke upn the wheel of Mr. Werner's enthusiasm. The translation is exceedingly readable. It is neither cumbersome with baggage as the latest English translation of Chu Yuan nor turgid with finesse as some of the rhymed versions of the Tang poets. It is very close to the original but not free from errors. For example,the phrase “bright moon” in “Raising my wine-cup, I asked my friend to recite a poem to the bright moon, singing the verses of the Chaste Maiden”(p. 47) refers also to a poem and should be italicized.Mr. Le Gros Clark has also missed the full import of the sentence“秋冬雪月千里一色”in The Pavilion of Flying Cranes（cf p．65）．Again，the translation of“苏子”and“东坡居士”au pied de la lettre into “the son of Su” and “Tung-P'o, the retired scholar” is inaccurate. Lapses like these need not be enumerated because they are negligible. The Commenteries and Notes at the end of the book are neve meddlesome, but the Introduction is highly inadequate: for instance, in the section on the“Cultural Background”,much space is taken up by an account of historians and chroniclers who had nothing to do with Su,and the literati who founded the “Sung shih”（宋诗）traditon might have never existed for all the mention accorded to them. Both Mr. Le Gros Clark and Mr. Werner seem to consider Su a tippler,whereas we have on record his personal statement to the contrary（cf：“书东皋子传后”）， Su is rather a gourmet.“Wine-cup” is a mere Chinese poetic diction, and like all poetic dictions, should not be taken too literally.
The charm of this book is much enhanced by the beautiful woodengravings and tail-pieces of Mrs. Le Gros Clark. They so ingeniously reproduce the spirit of Su's “prose-poems” in a different medium that to praise them is better than to criticize them, and to look at them is better than otherwise.




On“Old Chinese Poetry”

From The Chinese Critic（《中国评论家》），VI，1933． 

One of the consequences of "The New Chinese Literature Movement" is the rupture between present-day literature and that which precedes it. Chinese literature is, as it were, chopped up into two-the old and the new. This rupture naturally brings about a complete transvaluation of old literary values. Here and there in contemprary criticisms of the old poetry, we are met with some vague cacklings about the Pacifism of Tu Fu(A.D. 712-770),the Socialism of Pei Chu-i (A.D. 772-846), the Radicalism of Yuen Mei (A.D. 1715-1797),etc., as if bythe modernity of their “-isms”(all of which are duly honored with capital letters) were those old poets to be judged.
We witness also a reversal in the literary fortunes of many men: Han Yu(A.D. 768-824),e.g., has to abide our question who has hitherto been above criticism, and a large host of old poets of varying shades of renown are now touched by the chill of neglect. These are but instancesof the way the wind is blowing. Indeed, even the claim of “Old” Chinese poetry as poetry has been seriously disputed in certain quarters.
But the oft-made charges of formalism and artificiality against the “Old” poetry are, to say the least,superficial.The“defects”of “Old” Chinese poetry do not lie in the rigidity of the Form(which, forsooth,is elastic enough), but in a peculiar sort of poverty in the Content. And I shall attempt to point out in this paper what we do not find in “Old” Chinese poetry.
The first thing that strikes a reader of “Old” Chinese poetry is the comparative paucity of what Santayana happily describes in his "Interpretations of Poetry and Religionas the Poetry of Barbarism. The most outstanding example is,of course,love-poetry.Amatory verses and songs on conjugal love we have, and in plenty. But for the poems that describe without any reserve that dynamic vital force which draws a man and a woman close together and that impact of hot feeling upon hot feeling, search where we will,we shall search in vain. Love is often treated as a domestic sentiment,something which suggests Mendelssohn's“Wedding March,”but rarely if ever as a primeval passion with untamed ferocity, that partakes more of the nature of a duel than that of a duet- witness the first poem in “Book of Odes.” The erotic “Odes” describe lovers' clandestine meetings and flirtations rather than their raptures and deliriums. They are too soufflé in sentiment to become love-poetry worthy of the name.
Great as Tu Fu is, love-poems are conspicuous by their absence in his works. Indeed, he seems to have written in blissful ignorance of the Heart. More gallant than Tu Fu, Li Po (A. D. 705-762) pays compliments to ladies some of whom are even technically “undesirable,” in many beautiful ditties. But, being of a mercurial temper,he regards woman but as a part of his joie de vivre; in fact,woman figures in his poetry mostly as his boon companion.
Li Shang-yin(A.D. 813-858)1 the acknowledged master of Chinese amatory verse,sings of love-making rather than of love. The scenic setting of love-making furnishes a canvas for his consummate skill in poetical embroidery, and he accumulates on it learned imageries to achieve spectacular effects.All later writers of amatory verse follow suit. Suburban, domesticated scenes are invariably preferred to wild romantic ones;“love in a valley” seems uncongenial to Li Shang-yin as well as to all later poets,and love in a boudoir would be infinitely more to their taste. The following description is very bald unadorned for one from the pen of Li Shang-yin,but it gives the reader an idea of the typical rendezvous in Chinese poetry:
“Oh,ay! the stars of yesternight!
Oh,yesternight the wind!
Upon the left a painted hall,
And sweet abodes behind.”2
Li Shang-yin will tell the reader how the beloved shielded her face behind a moon-shaped fan to conceal her confusions at the sight of him, how she passed by him in a lumbering coach without so much as exchanging a word with him, how he was nervously startled out of his sweet dreams, how he hurried in writing his love-letters,3 and thousand and one other little incidents which make love-making a pleasant idleness to the busy and a pleasant business to the idle; but about his own feelings he is nebulously vague, and the imaginative reader has to dot the i's for himself. Of course, it is “bad form” to blow one's cheeks out with hysterical declarations of one's love, and Li Shang-yin's vagueness may testify to a perfect mastery of that art of “suggestion” which Professor Herbert A. Giles gives so many Chinese poets credit for, but surely passion can not have our poet tightly in its grip, if he shows such self-restraint and insouciance. Even when he does touch upon love, pure and simple, he still employs what Aristotle calls “indirect expressions":
“The silkworm ceases to spin only when it is exhausted,
And the taper drips tears of wax until it is burnt to ashes."4
So the reader is given to understand that he (the poet) will love on to the end of his life. Li Shang-yin's way of dilating upon the “adventitious” and leaving out the essential becomes the tradition in Chinese amatory verse. And later poets also use indirect expressions to a very great extent in order to conceal their emotions-sometimes their lack of them.
One notices also that most of Chinese amatory verse is reminiscent in tone-“Emotion recolected in tranquillity.”The poets al seem in their distant youth to have loved and lost,
“To have beheld the bird,
And let it fly;
To have seen the star
For a moment nigh,
And lost it
Through a slothful eye;
To have plucked the flower
And cast it by.”
This fact explains a good deal: When the poet gains tranquillity and resignation, his passion necessarily loses ripple and edge. “Affective memory” is psychologically an impossible feat:distant youth can not be whistled back, and old glamours can not be recaptured.Moreover, there is in most of these verses a note of condescension on the part of the poet. The loved one seems to have won his love at the expense of her respectability and the poet seems to be aware of the fact and tries to make capital of it. This is perhaps due to the inequality of sexes in ancient China. And I venture to think that while the inequality of sexes cannot account for the absence of high comedy in the East- pace Meredith, it does partly explain the lack of genuine love-poetry in Chinese literature. The Chinese convention against callinga spade a spade has also a lot to answer for the metaphorical treatment of the theme of love.
The time-honored definition of poetry (Sh'ih) as restraint or discipline(Ch'ih) clinches the matter. This definition is no mere verbal jingling; it somehow reminds us of Arnold's dictum that poetry is the criticism of life. As the ideal life of Chinese is one of decorum and ceremonious urbanity, discipline or restraint is an indispensable means to the end. Poetry thus acquires a pedagogic function, and becomes more or less a kind of“responsible propaganda,” to alter Mr. Montgomery Belgian's useful terminology.5 Accordingly, emotions raw, tempestuous,and of a good“body”(as we say of wine) must be subjected to a rigorous discipline-broken in, toned down, lulled to a windless calm and diluted to a milky mildness before they are thought fit for expression.6
The second thing a reader fails to find in “Old” Chinese literature is meditative or philosophical poetry.Our didactic poetry is largely of the order of “kitchen maxims,” unredeemed by any ethical aspirations. Our old poets do not attempt to scale speculative heights or grapple with Life's problems-at least not in their capacity as poets. No sooner a poet philosophises than he becomes sceptical and nihilistic-witness the fussillade of questions shot at the T'ien (Heaven) in the third book of Chu Yuan's“Li Sao." This lack of meditative or philosophical poetry becomes most conspicuous in poetry dealing with Nature. Western poets are interested in Nature because she speaks to the spirit of man.They wonder at her beauty as well as exult inher significance. Whether they receive from Nature but what they give, or, as Professor Whitehead says in a highly suggestive passage in his “Science and the Modern World,”they express only the concrete facts of our apprehension which are distorted in scientific analysis,they are at least not merely “sightseeing.”Chinese poets,however,all regard natural“views” as simply so many landscapes with an appeal to the sense of the picturesque. They are too unsophisticated or “extravertic” to “turn away from actuality,” to borrow Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie's phrase in his lecture on “Romanticism.”They will occasionally indulge in little “pathetic fallacies” and invest Nature with their own passing moods;but their sorrows and joys are too volatile to crystallise into spiritual outlooks. Chinese Nature poetry is more remarkable for its sight than for its insight, for the finesse and minutiae in the description than for anything transcending passive observation. Hence the absurdity of drawing a Plutarchian parallel between Tao Yuan-ming (A.D. 365-427)and Wordsworth. Tao Yuan-ming's easy-going disposition totally unfits him for quasimystic broodings. To him (as indeed to all Chinese poets) Nature is but abackground for hobnobbings and strollings. The solitary pine-tree and the chrysanthemums do not give him moments of spiritual consecration as the daffodils and the primroses do Wordsworth. If Nature inspires in him any desire to preach,he preaches what he practises-contentment and enjoyment:“Ah, how short a time it is that we are here! Why then not set our hearts at rest, ceasing to trouble whether we remain or go? What boots it to wear out the soul with anxious thoughts? Thus will I work out my allotted span,content with the appointments of Fate,my spirit free from care”.7Or, as he says more boisteriously elsewhere:“Enjoy today to the utmost; let tomorrow go hang”.8 We come across the same sentiment everywhere in Chinese Nature poetry. Two quotations from Tu Fu will suffice. After a detailed description of Nature's various manifestations in Spring-time, he winds up thus:
“If carefully one reasons,one must own
Now is the time to grasp enjoyment'shair.”
Again:
“Time so short let us enjoy,
Standing not aloof and coy.”9
These quotations give the keynote to the whole Chinese temperament, a temperament not of contemplation but of enjoyment. This temperament, never surrendering itself to any contemplation for its own sake, makes it manifest not only in the lack of meditative poetry in Chinese literature, but also in the backwardness of pure science and “puristic” philosophy in Chinese civilization. Both scienceand philosophy in China have been closely bound up and shot through with human interests, and neither gets to the stage when it becomes ethically neutral and able to study things not sub specie humanitatis but sub specie aeternitatis.10 In “Letters from John Chinaman” there is a beautiful passage on Chinese literature:“A rose in a moonlit garden,the shadows of treeson the turf, the pathos of life and death, the long embrace,the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides forever away with its freight of music and light into the shadow and mist of the haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes,the bird on the wing, a perfume escapes on the gale-to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what is called Literature.” But the question is: how do we respond? To us-to our old poets, at least-a rose in a moonlit garden is there simply to feast the eye-not to be “understood,root and all” like“the flower in the crannied wall." The brevity of life makes the enjoyment of pleasures more imperative; the evanescence of pleasures renders the enjoyment of them more poignant. Whether the poet be hilarious like Li Po or quietistic like Tao Yuan-ming in his enjoyment,he is not perverse in his pleasures or relentless in his pursuit of them.He will have nothing of that painful cult called Hedonism. He may be dissipated,if you please,but decadent he is not: there is a large healthiness even in his abandonments.Of course life is not a perpetual May-day with him; time and again the note of sadness is heard in his poetry. But this sadness is delimited to particular untoward events,and never diffused or universalised into an all-embracing Weltschmerz." His attitude towards personal immortality is particularly illustrative. His is the biological in contradistinction to te spiritual standpoint; he concerns himself not with those abstruse problems of the imperishable soul, “the faith that looks thru death,”“the deserts of eternity” which may lie beyond,etc., but with the prolongation of his own life to infinity. Endlessness of te present life rather than timelessness of the future one,persistence through time rather than transcendence of it,is his cherished aim-see,e.g.the series of poems entitled “Sentiments and Moods" by Yuan Chi (A.D. 210-263), especially X,XXII, XXIII,XXIV,XXXV,XL,and LXXVIII.
It follows that our old poets are incapable of that mysticism which modern critics attribute to them.Their temper revolts against any such dogged straining after the ineffable union of subject and object.Li Po,e.g. on whom epithets like “mystic”,“romantic”have been laid on thick, is a myth-maker, not a mystic poet. He records his happy wanderings in the realm of free fancy, and the good time he has had with the fairies, but from any taint of damp, miasmic mysticism he is seraphically free. Indeed, Francis Thompson's remarks about “the child's faculty of make-believe raised to the Nth power” in his essay on Shelley might be one and all applied to Li Po with appropriateness. His poetry shows no syntactic torture, no tangled symbolism, no hard struggle with words such as characterise all mystic utterances. And his fairies must not be taken as symbols of inner experience;they are so “human,all too human.”
“You Sien”(Fairyland Visited) has been the favorite theme of Chinese poets. But the fairies in the “You Sien” poems usually have their prototypes in real human beings. The poet records an actual event either public or personal in term of fairies. It is mystification not mysticism that the poet aims at. One may note in this connection an amusing mistake in Professor Giles's very readable book on Chinese literature. At the end of Chapter I in Book V of “A History of Chinese Literature,”Professor Giles gives a complete version of Ssu-K'ung Tu's “philosophical poem, consisting of twenty-four apparently unconnected stanzas.”This poem, according to Professor Giles, “is admirably adapted to exhibit the forms under which pure Taoism commends itself to the mind of a cultivated scholar.” This is what Professor Giles thinks Ssu-K'ung Tu to have done,but what Ssu-K'ung Tu really does is to convey in imageries of surpassing beauty the impressions made upon a sensitive mind by twenty-four different kinds of poetry-“pure, ornate, grotesque” etc. The “twenty-four apparently unconnected stanzas” are grouped under the tite“Shih P'ing”(Characterisations of Poetry). Professor Giles has, at his own peril,ignored the title and then, with an ingenuity quite admirable in itself, translated a piece of impressionistic criticism into mystical poetry par excellence.Traduttori traditori!
We have made a rapid review of “Old” Chinese poetry and noted its defects,or rather deficiencies in love-poetry and philosophical poetry. But “Old” Chinese poetry has the qualities of its very defects with other redeeming features in the bargain. If not impassioned,it is airy and graceful. If not profound, it is at least free from obscurity or fuliginousness. After all,the most beautiful girl can give only what she has, and it would be sheer wilfulness to reprove apple-trees for not producing peaches. Anatole France said:“Assuredly we love poetry in France, but we love it in our own way; we insist that it should be eloquent and we willingly excuse it from being poetic.” We need but substitute the word “France” by the word “China”, and the whole saying would apply pat to “Old”Chinese poetry.

NOTES

1.A great poet omitted in H. A. Giles:“A History of Chinese Literature.”
2.See W. J.B.Fletcher:“More Gems of Chinese Poetry,”p.145.
3.See Li Shang-yin's “Poems Without Subjects,”Mr. Fletcher has translated one of them,and that wrongly.
4.Ibid.
5.See Belgion:"Our Present Philosophy of Life,”pp.30 ff.
6.Cf. Mr. Arthur Waley's interesting essay on “The Limitations of Chinese Literature” in “170 Chinese Poems,”particularly pp. 18-19.
7.Concluding lines of “Homeward Again”;from Giles:“A History of Chinese Literature” p. 130. Cf.“Returning to the Fields" translated by Mr. Waley in “170 Chinese Poems,”p.113.
8. Concluding lines of the poem on a trip to Sieh Chuan.
9.Concluding lines of “The River Chu”;from Fletcher:“More Gems of Chinese Poetry,”p. 72,p.74.
10. Cf. Nietzsche's animadversions on German thought in “Beyond Good and Evil,”§23.
11.Cf. the Section on “Temper of East and West" in Watts-Dunton's excellent article on poetry in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica." 




Great European Novels and Novelists

By A.L.POLLARD,M.A.(OXON)
Henri Vetch,Publisher,at the French Bookstore,Peiping.
pp. 438.$ 4.JJ Mex. 1933.

From The China Critic（《中国评论家》），VI，1933．

The Chinese title of this book《西洋小说史略》（literally，“A Brief History of the Development of Western Novel”)which is written by Prof. Wu Mi in austere, four-square characters, is slightly misleading.The book covers a much narrower field than its Chinese title implies. American novelists, for example,fall beyond its scope.There is Henry James, of course; but then, James,though born an American, died an Englishman. German novels receive no treatment, with the outstanding exception of “Sorrows of Young Werther” a book which, with its water-mellonish sentiments,has been the formative influence in the character of many a Chinese young man. Indeed, Prof. Pollard lays the whole emphasis upon French, English and Russian writers; because, to quote the Preface,“the novels of these countries seem to be more universally read." Thus I think the English title describes more adequately the lop-sided character of this book. It must also be mentioned that this book stops short at the pre-war novelists like Wells and Bennett, Loti and Bourget. The omission of contemporary writers, about whom even the most hardboiled literary historian feels sometimes nervous,is a proof of Prof. Pollard's tactfulness.
This book is primarily a text for student' use,and as such,it is admirable. It is almost unique in China and will liely remain so for a long while yet. The style is very smooth and limpid, unperturbed by irrelevant flashes of wt or flourishes of rhetoric, and moves without haste and without rest. To be sure, Prof. Pollard does not pretend to lead us voyaging through uncharted oceans of literature, and contents himself with merely giving an account of well-known novels and short descriptions of their plots-but how competently this is done! With an infalllible sense of hitting the nail on its head, Prof. Pollard always emphasises the right persons and says the right things about them in the right words. Indeed, he is annoyingly orthodox and sound in his judgments: one almost wishes that he would be a little more idiosyncratic and wayward for the reviewer's benefit. Perhaps Prof. Pollard thinks that Chinese students who come across a book of this kind,presumably fr the first time, would not be able to appreciate his critical heresies and would blandly accept his startling paradoxes as if they were only platitudes, and thus give him little encouragement to be original and eccentric. If so, then Prof. Pollard ought to refer back to their loci the quotations he has aptly made from an imposing array of authorities like Miss Rebecca West,Prof.Saintsbury,Sir Leslie Stephen,Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr.Jusserand, Mr.Murry, Mr. Forster, Mr. le Breton and Mr. Orlo Williams,(the last named, by the way, is missing in the Index).A bibliography should also be supplied.
Considering the amateurish efforts that have been made to father the“Conscious Stream” method in fiction on some philosophical theory,it might be well to take what Prof. Pollard says about Marcel Proust as a jumping-off place for a little digression. Prof. Pollard says the usual thing about the influence of Bergson and Freud on the technique of Proust. But the method of Proust seems to me to have more affinity with Hume's philosophy than with Bergsonism or Freudian psychology in its stress on association and its atomistic or cinematographic view of personality. Psychological atomism and associationism are really the working hypotheses of Proust,and the Freudian wish and Bergsonian durée furnish but materials for him to work upon. Bearing in mind Humian philosophy,and what Otto Weininger says about woman, and what English traits are, I venture to think it is not mere chance that an English woman (Mrs. Virginia Woolf) should be the consummate mistress of this method. Mr. W. B. Yeats in his Foreword to a book on Berkeley by Hone and Rossi observes that the “Conscious Stream" method in fiction is at bottom the inverse of Zola's naturalism and to some extent the counter part of new realism in philosophy. Had Mr. Yeats taken pains to probe more deeply into new realism, he would see his indebtedness to Hume: Does not Russell hold all experience to be analyzable into sensations? Have not American neo-realists made handsome acknowledgments to Hume(see,e.g. Perry:"Present Philosophical Tendencies,”p.307)?
Revenons à mos moutons. The most puzzling thing in this excellent book is the list of the titles of the novels that have been translated into Chinese. The list is almost-well,illiterate. Of course,there are more versions and perversions of European novels than one cares to recall, but to mention only thirty-six translations- and that not on any selective policy-is really curious. The list is not even exhaustive with regard to the translations of those novels mentioned. It gives only one translation of“Madame Bovary,” while there are at least two. And the excellent translation of “Candide” published serially in the“Critical Review”（学术）certainly deserves mention beside Hsu Tsu-mo＇s.
I detect only three typographical errors.For the first word “the”of the first sentence of the Preface,read “this.”For the word “has” in the last line of the third paragraph on p. 207, read “have.”For the word“lead” in the second sentence of the second paragraph on p. 359,read either“leads”or“led.” 
 



Myth, Nature and Individual
By FRANK BAKER
George Allen and Unwin. 1931. Five Shillings

From The China Critic（《中国评论家》），1934．

The style of Mr. Frank Baker's book on the status and significance of mythology is at once so allusive and elusive that one can hardly pack up the matter or pin down the meaning any more than bind Leviathan with a chord or pin Proteus to his proper self. To those of us who like to see a book not only well-informed but also well formed, it might appear a sin against proportion to give twenty mortal pages of "References to Literature" and twelve of“Analysis of Contents" in a book whose main text occupies less than eighty pages. Mr. Baker speaks from a very full mind and runs the risk of making his study almost-how can one put it inoffensively?-well, a book padded out of books.
It is gratuitous to take Mr. Baker's statements very literally; some of them look rather groundless in spite of the copious references to literature and authorities, and almost all of them are provokingly dogmatic nonetheless for being expressed in a vague and drowsy language that seems always to mean more than it actually says. It is also impossible to enumerate those minor points on which we beg to differ from Mr. Baker, and incidentaly from Nietszche,Vaihinger and Gaultier too. We shall single out one point for discussion, and that point seems to form the basic concept
of Mr. Baker's book.
Mr.Baker draws a sharp contrast between Myth and Science. “Science strives towards an absolute objectivity.... Conversely,in Myth, the Subject absorbs the Object” (p. 13).“Of the possibilities of apprehension, Myth and Science are the anti-podes”(p.79). We are then told that Science is as subjective and “fictitious” as Myth and “engendered” by mytho-poetic faculty.So in the end, the antithesis is blurred, the distinction turns out to be one without difference, and one thing becomes another. And we find that “just as Sleep is, as complement, imperative to the sustained tenue of Wakefulness, even so is Myth essential to the maintenance and preservation of Science" (p.73). The analogy is as questionable as the simile is apt, and Mr. Baker goes on to talk about the “protracted and systematized insomnia” of Science left “in isolation.”
Even if ther are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in Science, Myth,we fancy, can never“complement”it to “apprehend” them. To stretch the term “Myth”to include the “transcendental knowledge” of poets and artists is to make a portmanteau word of it; to talk of Myth as “the complementary possibiliy of apprehension” is to take advantage of this equivocation. Poets may invent myths and fill silence with faint sighs and illuminate darness with lurking eyes, but it does not follow that poetic imagination or apprehension consists in myth-making.The attitude of a poet towards myths of his own making is entirely different from that of the primitive man towards what are myths to us though “facts” to him: the poet willingly suspends his disbelief,as Coleridge says; but the primitive man actually believe bona fide and nolens volens. The fact is that Myth, properly so called,is not the antipode of Science. Its relation to Science is not diametric,but linear. It is crude or unscientific Science, if we may use an oxymoron. When a hypothesis is tried by the Scientific method and found wanting, it is pronounced antiquated and relegated to the limbo of Myths. Mythology is then the childhood of Science, and Science on reachingits second childhood will once more become Mythology. Just as“Child is the father of Man,”even so Mythology may be said to have “engendered” Science. Like Science, Myth is cognitive and aetiological in function. It is an anthropomorphised account of natural phenomena. What experiment or application is to Science, magic is to Myth. We need not cite numerous authorities in support of this view to match Mr. Baker's cloud of witnesses. Suffice it to say, Andrew Lang is a doughty exponent of the aetiological theory of Myth. But the gist of the whole matter has been incomparably put by Froude in his much neglected essay on “The Book of Job” in“Short Studies of Great Subjects.”
The real antipode of Myth is, strange to say,Mysticism.Myth represents the perigee of man's effort to understand the universe, urged by curiosity, yet credulous and uncritical; Mysticism is its apogee, the vertigo, so to speak, that results from the aspiring flight of thought. Myths are communal in nature and shared by the whole society in which they have sprung up, whilst Mysticism is intensely individual and remains a sealed book even to the mystic himself in his non-“numinous” moments. Mythology is notthe product of religious feeling, whereas Mysticism is supremely interested in the happy union with the Divine. The contrast becomes more striking when we come to literary matters. Myth is often an element in poetry and is itself a teeming warren of figures of speech;Mysticism, however, being one of those things which Prof. Lancelot Hogben and Mr. Arthur Sewell call“private,”is “unspeakable and undescribable,” as says Ploinus(“Enneades,”VI. BK. IV. 4.) who surely has a right to be heard on this subject. 




A Critical Study of Modern Aesthetics
BY THE EARL OF LISTOWEL, PH.D.
George Allen & Unwin, London. 1933. 10s. 6d.

From The China Critic（《中国评论家》），VII，1934． 

This book is one of those doctorate theses which their authors think worthy of publication. It is divided into two parts: Part I Historical; and Part II Critical and Constructive. The historical part is intended to bring up to date Bernard Bosanquet's elaborate work “The History of Aesthetics” and begins where Bosanquet's book ènds. Certain philosophers like Fechner and Guyau already mentioned by Bosanquet are also included on the ground that they have not received adequate treatment from him.
As a continuation of Bosanquet's “History,” this book naturally challenges comparison with its predecessor. It must be admitted that Bosanquet's turgid style and faulty arrangement do compare unfavourably with the Earl of Listowel's clarity of language and orderly marshaling of facts. But Bosanquet, in spite of his occasionally secondhand knowledge (as he frankly admits with regard to the Medieval and Hellenistic period), is a weighty historian, quite prodigal of details and laborious in analysis. The Earl of Listowel, on the contrary, is brief to the point of perfunctoriness. His book gives us, as it were,only small puffs and short draughts of contemporary winds of aesthetic doctrine. He neither traces historical influences nor works out logical implications but contents himself with merely giving the broad conclusions modern aestheticians have arrived at. Even in the longest chapter on what the author calls “the profoundest interpretation” of the aesthetic experience, the theory of Einfuhlung, we are nowhere told that the theory in question is but an offshoot of the theory of “Eject”. Croce and his followers have co them only a meager chapter of four and half pages. Santayana ought to be grateful for the three paragraphs devoted to him in view of the fact that Richards is dismissed in one only. Ruskin has been accorded eight closely printed pages in Bosanquet's work, whereas the presumably more "adequate portrayal" of his ideas in this book runs to a page and a half. The two most revolutionary studies of aesthetics,Louis Grudin's“Primer of Aesthetics”(1933) and Arthur Sewell's “Psychology of Beauty”(1931), are not mentioned at all. The twofold division of theories into Subjective and Objective is also qustionable,considering that there are borderland or neutal cases. And the Earl of Listowel is obliged to add eclecticism to the list of Subjective theories and to pigeon-hole middle-of-the-roaders like Alexander and Bosanquet.
The Earl of Listowel is himself an eclectic. In his criticisms he seems to think that every theory contains some truth,but none the whole truth. This eclectism is precisely what one would expect from a good historian with no preconceived theory up his sleeves. One who can impartially give the devil his due will also act on Molière's precept to take the good where he can find it. The pity is that in his criticisms, too, the Earl of Listowel indulges in generalities and commonplaces. He never picks a single hole that has not been pierced through and through by the shafts of other men's criticism. He is even capable of irrelevancies like the jibe at Carrit's “stylistic brilliance". Like all eclectic theories, his own views are by no means novel. There is certainly nothing original in the conclusion that aesthetic experience is “a disinterested and harmonious contemplation of the form and content of individual objects.”But then, an historian's business is not to show originality, but rather to trace origins. 




Apropos of the “Shanghai Man”

From The China Critic（《中国评论家》），VII，1934． 

Walking along Nanking Road in a sunless Sunday afternoon,I recalled in a flash the concluding lines of Baudelaire's Le Couvercle:
“Le ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite Où bout l'imperceptible et vaste Humanité.”(The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot Where the vast human generations boil!)
The lines seemed suddenly to embody themselves before my eyes.The gloomy overcast sky and the seething throng of human animals conspired to jerk, so to speak, these terrible lines into concrete visualisation. And especially the vast throng of Sunday-making people, so stupendous and overwhelming! The very thing to move Xerxes to tears over the sentimental reflection that not one of these multitudes would be alive when a hundred years had gone by.
Just as the“Peking Man"(that paleontological reconstruction) is the Chinaman of the past,so the “Shanghai Man” is the Chinaman of the present,and-who knows?-might be that of the future too. In current Chinese literature, the term “Shanghai Man”has long been used as the synonym for a Babbitian sort of person, smart, efficient,self-complacent,with ever so slight a touch of vulgarity. He has the best of everything and is healthily innocent of all spiritual fermentations.Mammon is in Heaven and all's right with the world! Like the poet, the “Shanghai Man” is born, not made. Not everybody living or buried alive in Shanghai can be the blessed “Shanghai Man.”We poor journalists,for example,have certainly no claim to that honorific title. And of that huge Sunday-making crowd at least twenty per cent have been merely compelled to seek their living hre, unadapted and unadaptable to Shanghai. I know many persons who have spent twenty or thirty years in Shanghai and yet remained to the end strangers in a strange land.
Now this failure to adapt oneself to one's milieu may be a case of what Bergson calls“raideur” and therefore fit for ridicule. But we might be mistaken; for this apparent raideur is perhaps the sign of strong character and superior intelligence. Have not men of powerful intellect and fine sensibility often complained within our hearing that they felt out of their element in Shanghai,or that they at once despised and envied the contentment of the “Shanghai Man” with his environment? It is no sheer accident that the campaign for humor inaugurated by the Analects Semi-monthly should have started among the Shanghai Intellectuals. In an article published in the China Critic several years ago,Dr. Y.T.Lin made a superfine analysis of the varieties of Chinese Humor. But this New Humor (of which Dr.Lin is himself the sponsor) is the Old Humor writ small: there is no Rabelaisian heartiness or Shakespearean broadness in it. It is full of subtle arrièrepensées, refined petulance,and above all a kind of nostalgia as evinced in the loving memory of the academic life in Europe,the rehabilitation of the culture of the Ming dynasty, etc. This shows that our New Humorists are really out of humor with their surroundings and laugh probably because they are too civilised to weep.
A publicist lately spoke on the lack of “Culture” in Shanghai. He talked of founding libraries and other "cultural” institutions with a view to bringing sweetness and light to Shanghai.Sweetness and light indeed! Can there be anything other than sourness and goom under“this black lid of the mighty pot”? 




A Chapter in the History of Chinese Translation

From The China Critic（《中国评论家》），VII，1934．

As a liberator of Chinese thought，Yen Fu（严复）is now where the snows of yesteryear are. Not only he, but his masters too,Spencer and Huxley in their capacity as philosophers, have been consigned to the limbo of oblivion. The western ideas for which he fought to win proper recognition in China have long lost their dynamic power and novelty. He was so self-conscious in his modernity, so keenly anxious to be on the crest of any incoming wave that to read nowadays some of his commentaries freely interpolated in his versions of Montesquieu, Huxley, etc. gives one the feeling of looking at a dandy of some bygone fashion:his dandyism remains, though the fashion has passed him by. He would be old enough to be venerable, if he is not old-fashioned enough to be ridiculous. This fate Yen Fu shares with all merchants of ideas past as well as future. Even that handsome edition of his translations issued by our biggest publishing concern cannot rehabilitate him. As a thinker, he is rapidly becoming the shadow of a shade. But to a connoisseur of style, his translations remain a source of delight and interest. I for one have never ceased to marvel at the skil with which Yen Fu “transmutes” the original author. One would never suppose Huxley,for example, to be the virtuoso of plain style as Mr. Mencken happily calls him, if one reads him in Yen Fu's translation. Here is no master of effective assertion, no gladiator of pen,and above all no Darwin's bulldog, but a sweetly reasonable gentleman persuading in mellifluous and jewelled phrases. Of Huxley's unmistakable hard ring there is not a trace; we find only subtle overtones to make for the “other harmony” of prose.
Assuredly,this is not our idea of good translation. But we must judge Yen Fu only by the standards he himself aimed at reaching. In the introductory remarks to hisfamous translation of Evolution and Ethics, he stated three things to be requisite in a good translation:fidelity,intelligibility, and polished style. His theory is that a translation to be good must (1) render faithfully the ideas of the original, (2) observe the usage of the native tongue so as to be readily understood by readerswho cannot read the original,and (3) in itself possess high literary merits. He quoted Confucius to lend weight to the last point that “messages conveyed in plain and unadorned languagehave no lasting value.” Judged in the light or darkness of his own theory,Yen Fu's translations are beyond all doubt very good-indeed, too good to be good translations a we ordinarily understand them. The rub lies of course in the tird point. If we apply the hackneyed antithesis of Form and Matter in art to this theory, we can see readily that the first point is concerned entirely with the matter of the original work-
“First Matter,all alone,
Before a rag of Form was on,” 
the second with the form of the translation as fused with the matter of the original, and the third with the form of translation pure and simple,irrespective of the matter. What Yen Fu calls good style is something ornamental and adventitious, something superadded and not organic to the matter of the original work. Its relation to the original matter is, to borrow the old simile,one of clothes to the body (and unfit clothes at that), not of the skin to the flesh.This is not only a dangerous theory of translation but also a crude and vulgar conception of style. It should be taken to account for the world without end of perversions and travesties which we call translations only by courtesy. Thus, as a translator,Yen Fu is not altogether beneficial in his influence.
Yen Fu's theory is historically important nonetheless for being critically unjustifiable. There were great Chinese translators before Yen Fu even as there were heroes before Agamemnon.But the great Buddhist translators of the third to the seventh century to a man neglected style in Yen Fu's sense of the word. They took care of the sense of the original and to a great extent let the style of the translation take care of itself. They coined new phrases and expressions where the old might be ambiguous, and escaped ambiguity only at times to falI into obscurity and neologism.They all tried to be faithful to the original at any cost, and even the most literary among them did not take delight in style for its own sake. In their rigidity of attitude, they may be compared, with certain important reservations, to the Tudor translators of the sixteenth century England. There is a rawness and hardness about their translations, and their style has the delectable tartness and tang of a fresh apple.The first and second of Yen Fu's three standards were not unknown to our old translators; Yen Fu, being a more self-conscious artist, added the third to the list. The bareness and ruggedness of the Buddhists' style grated on a taste accustomed to richness and mellowness. He therefore labored at the style of his translation until it became “pretty” enough to give point to Bentley's mot on Pope's Homer.
Yen Fu's view on translation naturally reminds us of Fitzgerald's set forth in his letters regarding the version of Calderon; and Fitzgerald's theory, as Mr.H.M. Paull points out, is itself an expansion of Dryden's view in his Prelaces (see Literary Ethics, p.308). Yen Fu, however, was not influenced by Dryden or the translator of Omar Khayyam, but by his older contemporary Wu Ju-lun（吴汝纶），the foremost educationist of his day and the Nestor of letters. Yen Fu looked upon him very much as a “philosopher, guide and friend,” and sought his advice in matters of translation. Wu Ju-lun's advice can be read in a letter to Yen Fu now included in his prose works and curiously neglected by students. The most noteworthy passage in that letter is as follows:“You(Yen Fu) said:'The style should be refined of course. But in the original, there are expressions which are not of good taste and ought to be left untranslated to keep the style pure. Hence the dilemma: if I alter those expressions, I am not faithful to the original; if, on the other hand,I let them stand, I spoil the style of my translation.'This is a difficulty indeed! My humble opinion is that you should rather be unfaithful to the original than unrefined in your style. Vulgarity in style is ungentlemanly.” So we see that Yen Fu had his doubts about the third point. It is Wu Ju-lun who gave him the courage of opinion. Being ignorant of foreign languages, Wu Ju-lun did not feel qualms in departing from the original; being a sedulous ape to prose masters, he naturally conceived of style as a kind of window-dressing or floor-polishing. Yen Fu carried out this advice to the letter in his version of Evolution and Ethics. From Wu Ju-lun's enthusiastic foreword to that version we may quote another significant passage: “One can translate books only with such a style as Mr. Yen's.... As a man of letters, Huxley is not a patch on our Tang and Sung prose masters, let alone Ssuma Ch'ien and Yang Yung. But once dressed up by Mr.Yen,Huxley's book would not suffer much in comparison with our Pre-Chin philosophers. How important style is!”
It is therefore a mistake to say that Yen Fu derived his theory of translation from Alexander Fraser Tytler's Essay on the Principles of Translation.Most likely Yen Fu had not even so much as heard of Tytler's Essay. Like Yen Fu, Tytler divided his theory in partes tres:“I. That the translation should give a cmplete transcript of the ideas of the original work. II. That the style and manner of writing should be of the same character with that of the original. III. That the translation should have all the ease of original composition.” Tytler's third rule corresponds to Yen Fu's second standard,while Tytler's second rule is much less open to objection and more difficult to carry out than Yen Fu's third. According to Tytler,the style of the translation should be imitative of that of the original and is not an independent growth like a fungus on a tree (See:Chapters V and VII of Tytler's Essay). This conception is almost the polar opposite of Yen Fu's. The nearest approach to Tytler'z theory in Chinese is perhaps the one advocated by Ma Chien-tsung（马建忠），author of the famous Chinese Grammar. 
The Chinese Grammar has eclipsed Ma Chien-tsung's other writings and we have all along ignored or been ignorant of his important contribution to the study of translation. In his collected prose writings（entitled“适可齐记言记行”）there is an essay on translation whose general contention can be seen from the following quotation: “The translator must catch the spirit as well imitate the letter of the original with the result that the style of the translation is precisely that of the original without even a hair's breadth of difference between them."This theory believes in “holding the mirror up” to the original and may be called the photographic theory of translation. It certainly marks a great advance upon Yen Fu's view which insists on interposing a mist, as Arnold says of the translator of Homer,between his version and the original, although the mist may be a golden one through which even the most insignificant odds and ends loom up vague, formidable and clothed in lurid beauty. 




Foreword To the Prose-poetry of Su Tung-P'o

From The Prose-poetry of Su Tung-l	,1935,xiii-xxii.

Of the Sung dynasty, it may be said, as Hazlitt said of himself in the words of lago, that it is nothing if not critical. The Chinese people dropped something of their usual wise passiveness during the Sung dynasty, and “pondered, searched, probed, vexed, and criticised." This intellectual activity, however, is not to be compared with that of the Pre-Chin period, the heyday of Chinese philosophy. The men of the Sung dynasty were inquisitive rather than speculative,filled more with a sense of curiosity than with a sense of mystery. Hence, there is no sweep, no daring, no roominess or margin in their intellectualism. A prosaic and stuffy thing theirs is,on the whole. This critical spirit revealed itself in many directions, particularly in the full flourish of literary criticism and the rise of the lao-hsüeh（道学），that mélange adultère of metaphysic,psychology, ethics and casuistry.
Literary criticism in China is an unduly belated art. Apart from a handful of obiter dicta scattered here and there, Liu Hsieh's Literar Mind（刘勰《文心雕龙》）and Ln Chi＇s A Prose-poem on Literature（陆机《文赋》）are all the critical writings that count up to the Sung dynasty.There is Chung Yung's Classification of Poets （钟嵘《诗品》）of course.But Chung Yung is a literary genealogist rather than a critic, and his method of simply dividing poets into sheep and goats and dispensing praise or dispraise where he thought due,is the reverse of critical, let alone his fanciful attempts to trace literary parentages.＇ Ssu-kung Tu＇s Characterisations of Poetry （司空图《诗品》）is a different matter．2 Ssu-kung Tu seeks to convey purely with imagery the impressions registered by a sensitive mind of twenty-four different kinds of poetry-“pure, ornate, grotesque,” etc. His is perhaps the earliest piece of “impressionistic” or “creative criticism” ever written in any language,so quietly ecstatic and so autonomous and self-sufficient, as it were, in its being; but it fails on that very account to become sober and proper criticism. It is not until the Sung dynasty that criticism begins to be practised in earnest. Numerous “causeries on poetry”（诗话）are written and principles of literature are canvassed by way of commentaries on individual poets.Henceforth,causeries on poetry become established as the vehicle for Chinese criticism. One must note in passing that there do not appear professional critics with the rise of criticism. In those good old days of China, criticism is always the prerogative of artists themselves. The division of labour between critics and artists in the West is something that the old Chinese literati would scoff at.The criticism of the Sung dynasty,like all Chinese criticisms before the “New Literature Movement” with the possible exception of Liu Hsieh's Literary Mind, is apt to fasten upon particulars and be given too much to the study of best words in best places. But it is symptomatic of the critical spirit, and there is an end of it.
The Chinese common reader often regards the men of the Sung dynasty as prigs. Their high seriousness and intellectual and moral squeamishness are at once irritating and amusing to the ordinary easy-going Chinese temperament. There is something paralysing and devitalising in their wire-drawn casuistry which induces hostile critics to attribute the collapse of the Sung dynasty to its philosophers. There is also a disingenuousness in their atempts at what may be called, for want of a better name, philosophical masquerade: to dress up Taoism or Buddhism as orthodox Confucianism. One need but look into Sketches in a Villa（《阅微草堂笔记》）and Causeres on Poetry in a Garden（《随园诗话》）to see what a good laugh those two coxcombs of letters，Chi Yuan（纪昀） and Yuan Mei（袁枚）have had at the expense of the Sung philosophers and critics respectively. Nevertheless one is compelled to admit that the Sung philosophers are unequalled in the study of mental chemistry.Never has human nature been subject to a more rigorous scrutiny before or since in the history of Chinese thought. For what strikes one most in the tao-hsüieh is the emphasis on self-knowlede. This constant preying upon itself of the mind is quite in the spirit of the age. The Sung philosophers are morbidly introspective, always feeling their moral pulses and floundering in their own streams of consciousness. To them,their mind verily “a kingdom is.” They analyse and pulverise human nature. But for that moral bias, which Nietzsche thinks to be also the bane of German philosophy, their vivisection of the human soul would have contributed a good deal to what Santayana calls literary psychology.
The poetry of the Sung dynasty is also a case in point. It is a critical commonplace that the Sung poetry furnishes a striking contrast to the T"ang poetry. Chinese poetry, hitherto ethereal and delicate, seems in the Sung dynasty to take on flesh and becomes a solid,full-blooded thing. It is moreweighted with the burden of thought. Of course, it still looks light and slight enough by the side of Western poetry. But the lightness of the Sung poetry is that of an aeroplane describing graceful curves, and no longer that of a moth fluttering in the melow twilight. In the Sung poetry one finds very little of that suggestiveness, that charm of a beautiful thing imperfectly beheld,which foreigners think characteristic of Chinese poetry in general. Instead, one meets with agreat deal of naked thinking and outright speaking. It may be called “Sentimental”in contradistinction to the T'ang poetry which is on the whole “Naïve,”to adopt Schiller's useful antithesis. The Sung poets, however,make up for their loss in lisping naïveté and lyric glow by a finesse in feeling and observation. In their descriptive poetry, they have the knack of taking the thing to be described sur le vif-witness Lu Yu（陆游）and Yang Wan-li（杨万里）.They have also a better perception of the nuances of emotion than the T'ang poets,as can be seen particularly in their tz＇u（词），a species of song for which the Sung dynasty is justly famous.3 Small wonder that they are deliberate artists, considering the fact that they all have been critics in the off-hours of their inspiration. The most annoying thing about them is perhaps their erudition and allusiveness which make the enjoyment of them to a large extent the luxury of the initiated even among the Chinese.
The interest of Su Tung-p'o for us lies in the fact that he does not share the spirt of his age. He seems to be born out of his due time and is nonetheless an anachronism for being himself unaware of it. To begin with, he is not critical in the sense that his contemporaries are critical. In the excellent account of Su's philosophy of art,Mr. C.D.Le Gros Clark has shown that Su goes to the root of the matter;he turns from the work of art to the mind of the artist. A poet, according to Su, should “merge himself" with reality,and not content himself with the mere polishing of literary surfaces.4 Compared to this conception of the ontological affinity between the artist and Nature, the most meticùlous studies of Su's contemporaries in diction and technique dwindle into mere fussiness of the near-sighted over details.Again,Su has a rooted antipathy against the spiritual pedantry of tao-hsüieh, that “unseasonable ostentation" of conscience and moral sense. He speaks disparagingly of the high talk about human nature and reason, and the inefficiency of those who model themselves upon Confucius and Mencius．5 He is also opposed to Ch＇êng I（程颐），the leader of the tao-hsüeh party in politics, with a virulence almost incompatible with his otherwise genial and tolerant character.He is probably still in purgatory for these offences. Chu Hsi（朱熹） has condemned him several times in his writings'-and, in a way, to be dispraised of Chu Hsi is no small praise! Finally, as a poet, he is comparatively the most “naïve” among his “sentimental”contemporaries. Though no “native woodnotes wild,” his poetry smells more of the perfume of books, as the Chinese phrase goes, than of the lamp oil.His stylistic feats seem rather lucky accidents than the results of sweating toil. He is much more spontaneous and simple in the mode of feeling than（say）Huang T＇ing-chien（黄庭坚）who，with Su，is the twin giant in the Sung poetry. Ling Ai-hsuan（林艾轩）has put the contrast between Su and Huang in a nutshell, comparable to Johnson's epigram on the difference between Dryden and Pope:“Su's poetry is manly and walks in big strides, while Huang's is womanlike and walks in a mincing gait.”8 Has not Su himself also said that simplicity and primitiveness should be the criteria of good art?°
Su's strains are as profuse as his art is unpremeditated. He throws out his good things to the winds with the prodigality and careless opulence of Nature.Here's God's plenty indeed! As he says of his own style:“My style is like a spring of inexhaustible water which bubbles and overflows where it lists, no matter where. Running its course through the plains, it may glide along at the speed of a thousand li a day. When it threads its way through cliffs and mountains,one never knows beforehand what shape it may assume to conform with these obstacles.... It flows where it must flow and stops where it must stop."10 Elsewhere he repeats almost verbatim what he says here with the additional metaphor that style should be like the floating cloud."' It is significant that this simile of water with its association of fluidity and spontaneity recurs with slight variations in all criticisms of Su. To quote a few examples from his contemporaries will suffice：his brother Tzu-yu（子由）likens his style to a mountain stream young after rain;12 Huang T"ing-chien, to the sea, tractless and boundless, into which all rivers empty; 13 Li Chi-ch＇ing（李耆卿），to an impetuous flood；14 Hsu Kai（许凯）， to a big river. 1 Thus the abiding impression of Su's art is one of “spontaneous overflow.”Ch＇ien Ch＇ien-i（钱谦益）varies the metaphor by comparing Su's style to quicksilver and draws the conclusion that the Taoist and Buddhist Naturalism must have been the formative influence in Su's life and	art 16 — conclusion Mr.Le Gros Clark arrives at independently four centuries later. 
It is strange that this Naturalism, which exercises a liberating influence upon Su, should also form an important element in the harrowing, cut-and-dry Sung philosophy or tao-hsüieh. One is tempted to think that, whereas the Sung philosophers are only naturalistic in creed, Su is naturalistic in character. Su is a spirit apart indeed!
Famed in all great arts, Su is supreme in prose poetry or fu （赋）．17 In other species of writing， he only develops along the lines laid down by his immediate predecessors; but his prose poetry is one of those surprises in the history of literature. Here is an art rediscovered that has been lost for several centuries. The whole T'ang dynasty is a blank as far as prose poetry is concerned. 18 The famous prose poems by Han Yü（韩愈）and Liu Tsung-yuan（柳宗元）are all stiff-jointed， imitative and second-rate. Ou-yang Hsiu （欧阳修）first shows the way by his magnificent Autumn Dirge，19 and Su does the rest. In Su's hands, the fu becomes a new thing: he brings ease ito what has hitherto been stately;he changes the measured,even-paced tread suggestive of the military drill into a swinging gait, and he dispenses altogether with that elaborate pageantry which old writers of fu are so fond of unrolling before the reader．20He is by far the greatest fu-writer since Yü Sin（庾信）． While Yü Sin shows how supple he can be in spite of the cramping antithetical style of the fu, Su succeeds in softening and thawing this rigid style,smoothing over its angularity and making the sharp points of the rhyming antitheses melt into one another. T'ang Tzu-hsi（唐子西）does not exaggerate when he says that in fu Su“beats all the ancients."21 The fag-end of a foreword is not the place for a detailed discussion of the literary qualities of Su's fu. Su's usual freakishness, buoyancy, humour, abundance of metaphor are all there.But critics, while noting these, have overlooked that which distinguishes his fu from his other writings ... the difference in tempo.Su's normal style is “eminently rapid,”as Arnold says of Homer; in his prose poems, however, he often slackens down almost to the point of languidness as if he were caressing every word he speaks. Take for instance the section in Red Cliff, Part I, beginning with Su's question “Why is it so?” It moves with the deliberate slowness and ease of a slow-motion picture. What is said above does not apply, of course,to such sorry stuff as Modern Music in the Yen Ho Palace,On the Restoration of the Examination System,etc., which Mr.Le Gros Clark has also translated for the sake of having Su's prose poems complete in English. They are written in the style empesé,being rhetorical exercises borrowed from “ambulant political experts,”as Mr.Waley points out.
There is,therefore,no better proof of Mr.Le Gros Clark's deep knowledge of Chinese literature than his choiceof Su's fu for translation. Throughout the whole translation he shows the scruples of a true scholar and the imaginative sympathy possible only to a genuine lover of Su. His notes and commentaries are particularly valuable, and so much more copious and learned than Lang Yeh's （郎晔）that even Chinese students will profit by them in reading Su's prose poems in the original. If the English reader still cannot exchange smiles and salutes with Su across the great gulf of time so familiarly as the Chinese does, it is perhaps due to a difficulty inherent in the very nature of translation. It is certainly no fault of Su's accomplished translator. 

NOTES

1．See 叶梦得《石林诗话》，王士祯《渔洋诗话》and《古夫于亭杂录》，especially陈衍《诗品平议》.
2.For a version,or rather perversion, of Characterisations, see Giles:A History of Chinese Literature,Book IV, Chapter I(p.179 et seq.)
3．Cf．王国维《人间词话》．
Mr.Arthur Waley,however,thinks differenty.See 170 Chinese Poems, p.31.In the same breath Mr. Waley dismisses Su Tung-p'o's poetry as “patchwork” and declares that “Su hardly wrote a poem which does not contain a phrase borrowed from Po Chü-i.”Whether or not this charge can be substantiated， a cursory glance into 冯应榴（Variorum Edition of Su Tung-p'o's Poetical Works) will show. But we must bear in mind that commentators are apt to give poets the credit of a memory as tenacious as their own.For the best account of the difference between Su Tung-p'o and Po Chü-i，see 罗大经《鹤林玉露》.Mr.Waley says further that Su＇s Verse is valued by his countrymen chiefly for its musical qualities.On this point, Mr. Waley is misled perhapsby some of Su's“countrymen”who are not poetry-lovers.
4.To Mr.Le Gros Clark's quotations from Su's own writings,illustrative of his philosophy of art，we may supplement quotations from poems like《书晁补之所藏与可画竹》，《吴子野将出家赠以扇山枕屏》，《次韵吴传正枯木歌》，《筼筜谷绝句》，etc.
5．See《答刘巨济书》．
6．For a succinct account of this party strife，see《宋史纪事本末》卷四十五．
7．Cf．《朱子大全集·杂学辩》，《答程允夫书》，《答汪尚书书》，《答吕东莱书》。
8．Quoted in 王士祯《池北偶谈》and 袁枚《随园诗话》．Here is given only aloose translation.
9．《书鄢陵王主簿所画折枝》．Quoted also in Mr．Le Gros Clark＇s Introduction．
10．《东坡密语子瞻自论文》．Quoted in part by Mr． Le Gros Clark in his Introduction.
11．《答谢民师书》。
12．《栾城集·东坡先生墓志》。
13．《山谷诗集》：“子瞻诗句妙一世，乃云效庭坚体，故次韵道之。”
14．《文章精义》。
15．《彦周诗话》。
16．《初学集·读苏长公文》cf．《渔洋精华录·读唐宋金元明诗各题一绝》。
17.See the section on “The Nature of the fu” in Mr.Le Gros Clark's Introduction.
18．Cf．包世臣《艺舟双楫·答董晋卿书》和周星誉鸥堂日记·记李莼客语》。
19. See Giles: Gems of Chinese Literature, p. 164, and Waley:More Translations,p. 105.
20．Cf．艾南英：《天傭子集·王子巩观生草序》，章学诚《文史通义·文理篇》和《书坊刻诗话后》。
21．强幼安《唐子西文录》。 




Tragedy in Old Chinese Drama

From Tien Hsia Monthly（《天下月刊》），I（1935），pp．37-46．

The critical pendulum has once more swung back and there are signs that our old literature is coming into favour again.Knowing persons have also told us that there is just at present even a craze for our old literature among foreigners and that our old drama especially has all the cry in the West.We are quite proud to hear of these things. That our old drama should lead the way ofthe craze need not surprise us; for, though the real power of drama, as Aristotle says in his Poetics, shold be felt apart from representation and action, drama can for that very reason appeal to the majority of persons whose interest does not rise above mere representation and spectacle. Moreover, our old drama richly deserves the epithet “artificial” which Lamb applies to the comedy of manners. To Western readers surfeited with drab realism and tiresome problem plays our old drama comes as “that breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning” which must be as refreshing as (say) Barrie's pleasant fancy and pathos after an overdose of Pinero and Jones. But whatevervalue our old dramas may have as stage performances or as poetry, they cannot as dramas hold their own with great Westem dramas. In spite of the highest respect for the old dramatists, one cannot sometimes help echoing Coleridge's wish as regards Beaumont and Fletcher that instead of dramas, they should have written poetry,i.e.poetry in the broad sense inclusive of tz＇u（词）and ch＇u（曲）as well.I say this without the least prejudice, because I yield to none in my enthusiasm for our old literature and would definitely range myself on the side of the angels and the ancients, should a quarrel between the Ancients and the Moders break out in China.
The highest dramatic art is of course tragedy and it is precisely in tragedy that our old playwrights have to a man failed. Apart from comedies and farces,the rank and file of our serious drama belong to what is properly called the romantic drama. The play does not present a single master-passion, but a series of passions loosely strung together. Poetic justice is always rendered, and pathetic and humorous scenes alternate as regularly as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon, to borrow a homely smile from Oliver Twist. Of the tragic sense, the sense of pathos touched by the sublime,the sense of“Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach!, in meiner Brust,”the knowledge of universal evil as the result of partial good,there is very little trace.True, thereare numerous old plays which end on the note of sadness. But a sensitive reader can very easily feel their difference from real tragedies: he goes away from them not with the calm born of spent passions or what Spinoza calls acquiescentia with the workings of an immanent destiny, but, on the contrary, haunted by the pang of a personal loss, acute, disconsolate, to be hidden away even from oneself.One has only to compare Shakespeare's Antony and Clepatra and Dryden's All for Love with Pei Jen-fu＇s Rain in the Oil Trees（白仁甫《梧桐雨》）and Hung Shen＇s The Palace of Evelasting Life（洪昇《长生殿》）in order to perceive the difference.The story of Emperor Hsuan Tsung of the T'ang dynasty and his lady-love Yang Kuei-fei is presented in both Chinese plays just as that of Antony and Cleopatra is presented in both English plays.And both are stories of “the world well lost" for love. The parallel between the two Chinese plays and Antony and Cleopatra is particularly close, because they all throw the unities of time and place by the board; and in the first half of all of them, tragic scenes and events are entirely absent. They all begin idyllically, but how differently they end! In reading the two Chinese plays,we are not lifted beyond personal sympathy to a higher plane of experience. The piercing lyricism of Rain in the Oil Trees and the sensuous and emotional luxury of The Palace of Everlasting Life are fine things in themselves, but they are not to be confused with tragic power. Instead of a sense of reconciliation and fruition,they leave us at the end weakened by vicarious suffering, with a tiny ache in the heart,crying for some solace or support and a scheme of things nearer to the heart's desire. This is surely worlds away from the full tragic experience which, as Mr.I. A.Richards describes so finely in Principles of Literary Criticism,“stands uncomforted, unintimidated, alone and self-reliant."Now,one kind of experience may be as precious as another, but one kind of experience cannot possess the same feeling-tang as another.
These Chinese plays leave the reader yearning for a better scheme of things instead of that feeling of havingcome to the bitter end of everything. This impression is heightened by the structure of the plays. The curtain does not fall on the main tragic event, but on the aftermath of that event.The tragic moment with passion at its highest and pain at its deepest seems to ebb out in a long falling close. This gives the peculiar effect of lengthening-out as of a trill or a sigh. It is significant that in Rain in the Oil Trees Yang Kuei-fei dies in the third act, leaving a whole act to the Emperor to whine and pine and eat away in impotent grief the remains of his broken heart, and that in The Palace of Everlasting Life,the bereavement occurs in the twenty-fifth scene only to prepare us for the happy reunion (more or less after the fashion of Protesilaus and Laodamia in Wordsworth's poem) in the fiftieth scene. What is more important still, oneis unable to rise beyond a merely personal sympathy with the tragic characters because they are not great enough to keep us at a sufficient psychical distance from them. The tragic flaw (αμapτtα) is there, but it is not thrown into sharp relief with any weight of personality or strength of character. The Emperor,for example, appears in the plays a essentially a weak, ineffectual and almost selfish sensualist who drifts along the line of least resistance. He has no sense of inward conflict. He loses the world by loving Yang Kuei-fei and then gives her up in the attempt to win back the world. He has not character enough to be torn taut between two worlds; he has not even sense enough to make the best of both worlds. I Pei Jen-fu's play he seems a coward and a cad. Pressed by rebels for Yang Kuei-fei's life,he says to her:“I cannot help it. Even my own life is at stake."When Yang Kuei-fei implores him, he replies:“What can I do!”When finally Yang Kuei-fei is led away by the rebels,he says to her:“Don't blame me,my dear.”We have no love for rant and fustian, but these speeches are understatements with a vengeance. They stand self-convicted;any comment on them is superfluous. In Hung Shen's play,the Emperor indeed puts on a bolder front. Yang Kuei-fei meets her death bravely,but the Emperor will not let her, and talks of the world well lost for love. Afte a little hedging, however,he delivers her over to the rebels with these parting words:“Since you have made up your mind to die, how can I prevent you?” To do justice to the Emperor, these words are spoken very feelingly with tears and much stamping of foot. But compare them with Antony's speech in Shakespeare's play:
“Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Her is my space.”
or ever with Antony's more plain words in Dryden's play:
“Take all,the world is not worth my care!”
Indeed,it is almost a critical gaffe to compare things so radically different. To cling bloodthirstily to life in face of calamity and then to luxuriate in grief is anything but tragic.I know very well that as a matter of historical fact, the Emperor did not die as Antony did. But my point is that while there is tragic quintessence enough and to spare in this situation even without the Emperor's death, our old dramatists in handling the situation have not produced plays which give us the full tragic experience.
Hence I beg to differ with great diffidence, to be sure-from such an authority on old Chinese drama as the late Wang Kuo-wei （王国维）.In A History of the Dramas of the Sung and Yuan Dynasties（《宋元戏曲史》），Wang Kuo-wei says：“Dramas written since the Ming dynasty are all comedies. But some of the Yuan dramas are tragic. In plays like The Han Palace in Autumn《汉宫秋》，Rain in the Oil Trees，etc.， there is neither recognition nor happy reversal of fortune. The most tragic of all are Kuan Han-ch＇ing＇s The Gross Injustice to Maid Tou （关汉卿《窦娥冤》）and Chi Chün-hsiang＇s Chao＇s Orphan（纪君祥《赵氏孤儿》）.In these two plays, although the calamity comes through the machinations of the villains,yet the tragic heroes assert their will-power to the full in precipitating the calamity and facing it without wince.Thus,they are quite worthy of the company of the greatest tragedies of the world.”These bold words are quoted from the twelfth chapter on “The Yuan Drama considered as Literature”（元曲之文章）.We have already discussed Rain in the Oil Trees . As Augustine Birrell wittily puts it:"The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part, but poets are to be judged in their happiest hours”; so we shall examine the two plays which Wang Kuo-wei has singled out as “the most tragic.” I we may multiply distinctions, we can see no less than three claims made by Wang Kuo-wei for the two plays in question. First, they are great literary masterpieces,to which we may heartily agree. Second,they are great tragedies because the hero's assertion of will issues in calamity, about which we have some reserves to make. Third, they are great tragedies in the sense that, let us say, Oedipus and Othello and Berenice are great tragedies, with which we beg leave to differ.Indeed,Wang Kuo-wei's whole conception of the tragic as springing from the assertion of will seems definitely Corneillian;and the tragic conflict as conceived by him is even less inward than that as conceived by Corneille who, however perfunctorily,does sometimes touch upon the rudes combats between propre honneur and amour as in the case of Rodrigue in Le Cid.The poof of the pudding lies in the eating: let us examine the two plays briefly in turn.
We shall take The Gross Injustice to Maid Tou first. Tou Tien-chang, a poverty-stricken scholar, leaves for the capital to participate in the competitive examination and hands over his daughter Tou Tuan-yün to a widow to pay for some old debt. After eight years Tou Tuan-yün marries the widow's son who dies of consumption two years later. The villain Chang Lü-er takes a fancy to her, but she adheres to the traditional moral code of constancy to one man and will have nothing to do with him. Finally Chang poisons his own father and accuses her of the murder. Then comes the blood-curdling law-court scene in which she claims the whole guilt to herself in order to avert the suspicion from her mother-in-law. She is sentenced to death. On the scaffold, she invokes Heaven to have pity on her and visit a drought of three years upon the people. This takes place in Act III. In Act IV, Tou Tien-chang who has been away for a long time, and who now becomes the Lord Chief Justice,ferrets out the case and revenges for his daughter's death.This is a rough summary of the main incidents of the play. The characteristic poetic justice in the last act is very soothing to our outraged feelings, but the pertinent question is: does it heighten the tragic event? Even if we waive the question for a moment and leave the fourth act out of account, can we say of the three preceding acts that they give us a total impression of tragedy “unintimidated, uncomforted, self-reliant and alone”? One looks into one's own heart and answers no. One feels that Tou Tuan-yün's character is so noble and flawless, her death so pathetic,and the wrong done to her so outrageous that the fourth act is imperatively called for to adjust the balance. In other words,the playwright has so presented the situation that the play is bound to end in poetic justice and not in tragedy. Why? Tou Tuan-yün perishes neither for any fault of her own nor by any decree of Fate. If there is any tragic flaw in her character,the playwright has turned the blind spot to it and evidently wishes us to do the same. The playwright's own sympathy is certainly with her, our moral judgment is with her,and even Divinity or Fate,is with her teste the drought and the fall of snow. Why then-in the name of all gods and wanton boys who kill for sport-not a little poetic justice? Again, the tragic conflict as presented in the play is a purely outward one.Her mind is all of a piece:there is a pre-established harmony between her constancy to the dead husband and her repugnance to the new suitor. She opposes the villain and meets the challenge with an undivided soul. The assertion of one's will in such a case is comparatively an easy matter.The conflict, however, may be made internal by showing Tou Tuan-yün's love of her own life warring with the wish to save her mother-in-law's life. Significantly enough, the dramatist fails to grasp this.
Our criticismsof The Gross Injustice to Maid Tou apply more or less to Chao's Orphan too. The hero of this play is Ch'eng Ying, the family physician of Chao, who sacrifices his ow child to save the life of the orphan and finally instigates the orphan to take vengeance on the villain. The play closes with ample poetic justice and universal jubilee: the villain is cruelly done to death,the orphan recovers his lost property, and Ch'eng Ying receives rewards for his sacrifice. Here the tragic conflict is more intense and more internal.Ch'eng Ying's self-division between love for his own boy and the painful duty of sacrifice is powerfully presented.2 But unfortunately,the competing forces,love and duty, are not of equal strength and there is apparently no difficulty for the one to conquer the other. Ch'eng Ying obviously thinks (and the dramatist invites us to think with him) that it is more righteous to fulfil the duty of sacrifice than to indulge in paternal love-“a little more and how much it is!”The combats here are not rudes at all. The taut tragic opposition is snapped and the scale tips towards one side. This is shown most clearly in the case of Kun-sun Ch'u-chiu who in sacrificing his own life to protect the orphan,shows not the slightest hesitation in choosing between love and duty. This play which gives high promise to be a tragedy “worthy of the company of the greatest tragedies in the world” ends in material fruition rather than spiritual waste.I hasten to add that I make these criticisms without in the least denying that Chao's Orphan is a very moving play and shows even greater promise of tragic power than The Gross Injustice to Maid Tou.
There are, according to Dr. L. A. Reid (to whose lucid discussion of tragedy in A Study of Aesthetics I am much indebted), two main types of tragedy. In the first, the interest tends to be centered on character. In the second, Fate itself draws the attention. Shakespearean tragedies belong to the first type,while Greek tragedies to the second. Our old dramas which can be called tragedies only by courtesy tend towards the Shakespearean type. Like Shakespearean tragedies,they dispense with the unities and emphasise characters and their responses to evil circumstances. But they are not tragedies because, as we have seen,the playwrights have but an inadequate conception of the tragic flaw and conflict. In a note on “Chinese Primitivism" in Rousseau and Romanticism, the late Irving Babbitt ascribe our lack of tragedy to the absence of “ethical seriousness”among our people. The phrase is ambiguous and a little explanation would be welcome. Perhaps Babbitt means by it that “artificiality” which we refer to in the beginning of this article. If our own analysis above is true at all, then the defect seems to arise from our peculiar arrangement of virtues in a hierarchy.Every moral value is assigned its proper place on the scale, and all substances and claims are arranged according to a strict“order of merit.” Hence the conflict between two incompatible ethical substances loses much of its sharpness, because as one of them is of higher moral value than the other,the one of lower value fights all along a losing battle. Thus we see a linear personality and not a parallel one. The neglect of the lower ethical substance is amply compensated by the fulfilment of the higher one so that it is not “tragic excess” at all-witness Mencius' epigram on the conduct of the “great man”（大人）in Li-lou（离娄） and Liu Tsung-yuan＇s superfine essay On Four Cardinal Virtues（柳宗元《四维论》）.This view is certainly borne out by our old dramas.
We are supposed to be a fatalistic people. It is therefore curious that Fate is so little used as a tragic motif by our old dramatists. But tragic Fate has at bottom nothing to do with fatalism. Fatalism is essentially a defeatist,passive,acceptant attitude which results in lethargy and inaction whereas tragic irony consists in the very fact that in face of mockeries of Fate at every endeavour,man continues to strive. Moreover,what we ordinarily mean by Fate is something utterly different from Fate as revealed in Greek tragedies. Professor Whitehead points out in Science and the Modern World:“The pilgrim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today, are the great tragedian of ancient Athens-Aeschylus,Sophocles,Euripides.Their vision of fate,remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science.... The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.”Now, our idea of Fate has not such scientific vigour and is really poetic justice which Dr. A. C. Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy asks us to distinguish sharply from tragic injustice-that prosperity and adversity are distributed in proportion to the merits of the agents. In other words, our concption of Fate is the equivalence of action and award rather than that of cause and effect.It is not the ethically neutral idea that the doer must suffer, but the sentimental belief that virtue is its own reward with additional rewards to be forthcoming. It is not merely a case of “as you sow, so you reap”; it is the case of “as you sow in joy,you cannot reap in tears.” Thus, whereas the effect cannot be in disproportion to the cause, the award may quite conceivably be disproportionate to the action. We usually explain away this disproportion by the theory of metempsychosis: we either have owed scores in a previous life or will receive compensations in a future one. This idea and the Greek idea stand at opposite poles. Again, Fate as we usually conceive of it, is menschliches, allzumenschliches asNietzsche says in another connection. Its irony is not awful, but petty, malign and “coquettish” as Hardy says of Providence-witness the interesting play The Monument of Tsien Fu Monastery（《荐福碑》）by Ma Chih-yuan（马致远）.Mr.E.M. Forster's criticism of Hardy in Aspects of the Novel holds good also with this play.
We have so far accounted for the absence of tragedy in old Chinese literature by reasons suggested by the dramas themselves. Of course we can explain the absence by racial and cultural reasons. We can make it a jumping-off place to plunge into some interesting sociological and anthropological guess-work. We can even take the hint from Whitehead and explain the backwardness of our science by the absence of tragedy. But these things I must leave to more competent persons. After all, we can only do one thing at a time. Our comparative study of Chinese and Western dramas is helpful for two reasons. First, it dispels many illusions cherished even by Chinese critics about our own drama. Second, it helps students of comparative literature to assign old Chinese drama to its proper place in the Palace of Art. Ithas been my conviction that if students of comparative literature can include old Chinese literature in their purview, they will find many new data which may lead to important modifications of those dogmata critica formulated by Western critics. For students of the history of old Chinese criticism, such a comparative study of actual literatures is especially important, because only by means of it can they understand how the data of our old critics differ from those of Western critics,and why those first principlesof Western criticism are not seized upon by our own critics and vice versa. This has ever been my aim in my various studies of our old literature. To have our fill of some aesthetic experiences, we must go to foreign literatures; to have our fill of others, to our own. Asceticism in the study of literature is bad enough, but patriotism which refuses to acknowledge“good things” coming “out of Nazareth” is even worse. 

NOTES

1.In writing the present article, the writer has profited by discussions with his former teacher Professor Y.N.Wen and his friend Dr.W.F.Wang.
2.Dr.W.F.Wang reminds me of the similarity of situation between this play and the story of Abraham and Isaac.




Correspondence: To the Editor-in-Chief of T'ien Hsia

From Tien Hsia Monthly（《天下月刊》），4（1937），pp．424-427． 

Sir,
I have received Mr.Wu Mi＇s Collected Poems（《吴宓诗集》，中华书局印行，定价二元四角）which you sent to me to revie.I shouldcertainly write a full-dress article on this interesting book, if my hands were not particularly full for the moment. But a short letter, I believe,will go some way towards remedying the injustice it has so far received.
I have not been able to keep myself au courant with Chinese literary journalism since my arrival in England which coincided with the appearance of Mr. Wu Mi's Collected Poems. The book seems to have got little “press”,and a very spiteful one at that. Mr. Wu Mi has supplied everything necessary for an intelligent appreciation of himself and his work in introductory matters, appendices, footnotes and the very poems themselves, but the press notices are neither intelligent nor appreciative. He has been copiously and embarrassingly autobiographic, and the whole book might pass for a dossier about himself whih would satisfy the curiosity of the most inquisitive police inspector. Phots, itineraries,and all things of documentary value are there-except, perhaps, a few finger-prints. He must have known that in thus taking the public into his confidence, the ungrateful public would cover him with ridicule,
and yet he runs the risk.
Now, only a great man, or perhaps an egregious fool,can be so impervious to ridicule, and Mr. Wu Mi is a great personality.His espousal of the supposedly lost cause of the wen-li is conclusive proof of his indomitable courage. To be sure, it is a bit Quixotc to tilt at the windmill of the "New Chinese Literature Movement”when it was in full swing, but it is fine,clean courage nonetheless. His crusade against Romanticism (a thing that has never been able to flourish on our soil and in our mental climate) under the banner of Irving Babbitt's Humanism is just another case in point. And thanks to his untimely and ill-starred efforts, the very name of Babbitt has become anathema to our self-conscious moderns who would have been among the first to lick the shoes of the Sage of Harvard if they had known how people as disparate in their views as T.S. Eliot and J. Middleton Mury agree in respecting his critical grasp and integrity. Curiously enough, Mr.Wu Mi who pays such pious tributes to Babbitt's memory is the sort of character whom Babbitt would have been the first to denounce as a pernicious writer and renounce as a reprobate pupil. Mr. Wu Mi's pageant of a bleeding heart, his inclination to wash occasionally his dirty linen in public, his sense of being a grand incompris, his incessant self-flagellation,all these to which his book bears ample evidence,are simply so much grist to the mill of Rousseau and Romanticism.I for one doubt whether Babbitt's influence on him has been on the whole beneficial.He has imbibed the Babbittian variety of Humanism and come to abhor intellectually what he temperamentally desires. He is really the only impenitent Chinese romantic in word (witness his poems) and in deed (witness his love affairs recorded in the poems). His poetry makes us understand why he should have fought such a doughty battle against the non-existent thing-Chinese romanticism: he is really trying to quell that blatant beast in himself. It is this mental split that has been his undoing,and his tragic unhappiness is, as it were, a splitting headache in his soul. Flaubert,for instance, knows the perennial struggle between the deux bonshommes in himself, and to know this is already to arbitrate between them. But Mr. Wu Mi is sadly lacking in such lucid self-knowledge, and his warring elements have to clash like enemies in the dark!
Surely no ordinary man can be so twy-minded. An ordinary man can have no conflicts which are spiritual, though he may have scruples which are pragmatic. His soul stff is still too much in the primordial lumpish state to form any moral distinctions, a clammy mud-cake not parched yet by the dry intellectual light, fissureless and rather featureless.But Mr.Wu Mi's soul seems to be in a state of having distinctions without order: every distinction becomes an opposition in his mind. No one talks more about synthesis or hierarchy of interests and values, and no one shows it less in actual life. And he is too sophisticated to enjoy that moral, vegetative calm which is one of Nature's gifts to simpletons, boors and children.Hence his almost desperate love-making; why, he has lost Paradise without gaining an Eve who will “share his woe” and “lighten his burden”! Upon this psychological discord is grafted a cultual conflict between the Old and the New which a man of his generation and education is bound to feel. Yet he alone of his generation seems to have felt it acutely, while his contemporaries have grown fat and pink and happy by simply muddling through. All these are faithfully mirrored in his poetry; it has, therefore, an enthralling interest independent of its purely literary merit. He is not a great poet, but he is unquestionably the most complex personality of his generation who seeks relief by writing poetry.
The most important feature of the book is of course Mr. Wu Mi's love-poetry.Whether his objects be but scatter-brained flappers or superannuated coquettes comme les mouchoirs anciens qui sentent encore l'amour, to him they are veritable femmes fatales.He can neither get on with them nor get on without them.And there is something wistful even in the note of resignation and“consolation by philosophy” which ends the book. What constitutes novelty, however, is the poet's high seriousness,a thing hitherto unknown in our “old” or wen-li love-poetry. No flippant banter,no lecherous rakishness, in a word,no lasciveté parfumée,as goes the admirable French translation of our term（香艳）under which our “old” love-poetry is subsumed. “The importance of being earnest”indeed! Mr. Wu Mi has given as the motto of his book Chénier's famous line:Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques,and he has certainly succeeded.
But then,Chénier began his poetic career with the reverse of the dictum which Mr. Wu Mi has quoted with approval. He started,as the late Emile Faguet first pointed out, by making new verses upon old thoughts, a thing that Mr. Wu Mi seems not to have done enough. For a writer of vers antiques whose very rigour of form demands and even compels a meticulous verbal and rhythmic perfection,he seems very deficient in curiosa felicitas. I will not dwell on his slipshod versification, his costive diction,his rugged and harsh texture, and a general short-windedness of his poetic breath (to employ an expressive phrase in our “old” criticism),but wish to call attention to those gnomic lines scattered throughout the book which,weighted with personality and bare of rhetoric, positively achieve the grand style of Tu Fu. Take the following couplet for a happy example:
久知安乐为身患，
略识艰难赖此行（bk．viii，p．4）
Or take that fine tz＇u （词）written to the tune of The Butterfly among Flowers（蝶恋花）which begins with（已别何须来送我）and ends with（轻尘飞扬随颠簸）（bk．xiii，p．10）．Who would have believed before seeing it that the fragile frame of that particular tune can stand the strain of such tossing and foaming emotion? Or that the “butterfly" can bear gallantly on its wings so much tense,bitter thought which may even break a camel's back? Mr. Wu Mi has triumphed over the limitations of his medium and transformed them into potentialities. His art, in this case, has changed what is meant to be merely pretty-pretty into something sublime or“very pretty” in the sense which Coleridge's lady applied to a waterfall.
It would be easy to scoff at his frequent deplorable lapses in taste.Indeed,the last section of his poems reminds me very much of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris and Sainte-Beuve's Livre d'Amour. Like the two,it represents the indiscretions of a middle-aged writer mashed on a woman whom he has failed to marry. And like the two, it caused a mild scandal. I venture to think that the poems in this section are much better than Sainte-Beuve's, though the footnotes may fall short of Hazlitt's prose. At any rate, if Mr. Wu Mi has sinned against “good form”, he cannot have sinned in better company. The following mighty line ought to redeem any fault he has committed whether as a poet or as a man:
未甘术取任缘差（bk．xiii，p．14）
Not to be aware of the austere beauty of such a line argues lack of taste; not to be aware of its burden of pathos argues lack of sensitiveness.
There are many other things which I want to say of this book and of Mr.Wu Mi himself. In the appendices, for instance, he shows himself a thoughtful and scholarly critic slightly spoiled by crotchetiness.One can also see that he is a loyal friend and a conscientious teacher. Young Chinese students of my genertion owe him a great debt.He first emphasized the “continuity of letters” and advocated the study of comparative literature which should include our own “old” literature within its purview. He alone of all practising Chinese critics of a decade and a half ago has a “synoptical”knowledge of European literary history. But it requires a monograph to do justice to this extraordinary man who, with all his faults,is,as the brilliant writer of Imperfect Understanding has rightly said,every inch of him “a scholar and a gentleman.”

Yours etc.,
CH'IEN CHUNG-SHU
16,Norham Gardens
Oxford,England
March 7th,1937 




A Note on Mr. Wu Mi and His Poetry*

* This is the “full-dressed" article on Mr Wu Mi and his poetry mentioned in the correspondence to the Editor-in-Chief of Tien Hsia monthly dated the 7th March, 1937. It was written shortly after that letter.The manuscript was rejected on the ground that it was an amplification of the aforesaid correspondence which had already been published. The same staff could not be repeatedly published. -For particulars about this article, see Wu Mi's Diary （《吴宓日记》，Vol VI，pp．96-97,107．The typed manuscript is now lost． I found out the preliminary draft (incomplete) with mendings and corrections by Qian Zhongshu. My friend Monika Motsch typed it out for me. (Note by Yang Jiang) 


Mr.Wen Yuen Ning's brilliant character-sketch of this“scholar-gentleman” appeared before the publication of his Collected Poems (1936). In reading his poems afresh, I become more and more intrigued by the hidden folds in his character. If I say that Mr.Wu Mi is the most complex personality among my senior contemporaries, I am not pitching the case too high. To be called “complex” is perhaps a distinction which we of this self-conscious and auto-analytic age all envy,but for a man of Mr. Wu Mi's principles, who aims at symmetry, poise, and the beautiful harmony of all natural impulses and faculties, in a word, a man who aims at being “complete”, to be judged as merely“complex”is damning enough. I will not here discuss his work as editor, teacher and critic. We of the younger generation owehim a great debt,because he alone of all critics of a decade and half ago seems to have a synoptical knowledge of European literary history, and is the first to start the study of comparative literature which includes our own “old” literature within its purview.
This,however, belongs to Mr. Wu Mi as a phenomenon; what fascinates me most is the noumenal Mr. Wu Mi hinted in his poetry. His noumenal self may be as elusive as the Spencerian “unknowable”,but I have no higher ambition than to push our ignorance of this “unknowable”a step further back. If I am severe in my criticism, it is not from any malice prepense.One can not help being candid in dealing with such a heroically sincere and honest man. I sometimes think that a serious and enlightened reactionary serves the cause of “progress” as well as a radical advance-guard. Mr. Wu Mi is not a stick-in-the-mud-conservative at all.No one with the slightest knowledge of that period can fail to see his essential modernity. In a sense, he collaborated with the literarary revolutionaries by his opposition just as the opposing teams collaborate in a football game. He had a vision of “Florence, Weimar,Athens,Rome”, when the radicals were dazzled by the sight of New York and perhaps the hallucination of St. Petersberg. He might not know so much about the great Russians as his opponents, but surely he knew infinitely more than they of the Greeks and Romans.And take my word for it, to us at that time, Greek and Latin literature was every whit as strange and as new as Russian literature.Like the“moderns”,the“ancients” with Mr. Wu Mi at their head drew their inspiration from the West and from that part of the West of which the Chinese up to the tim of the Critical Review had only the haziest notion. He very early translated Paul Valery, leaving the leader of the “moderns” to enjoy and paraphrase Bret Harte. It is lik his luck that his
modernity should have been ignored.
His championship of Irving Babbitt's anti-romantic humanism is another case in point. Thanks to his ill-starred and untimely efforts,the very name of Babbit has become an anathema to our young intellectuals who would have been among the first to lick the shoes of the sage of Harvard if theyhad known that people as disparate in their views as T.S.Eliot and J. Middleton Murry agree in respecting his critical grasp and integrity. Curiously enough, Mr. Wu Mi who pays so pious tributes to Babbitt's memory,is essentially thesort of character whom Babbitt would have denounced as a pernicious writer and renounced as a reprobate disciple. His pageant of bleeding heart, his nympholepsy and self-flagellation, his sense of being a grand incompris, all these to which his poems bear ample evidence, are simply so much grist to the mill of Rousseau and Romanticism. Perhaps Mr.Wu Mi does not realise himself that the Babbittian influence on him has been on the whole harmful. Under that influence, he abhors intellectually what he loves temperamentally.
As a matter of fact, he is the only genuine Chinese romantic of this generation, incorrigible and impenitent. His poetry makes us understand his brave crusade against romanticism: he is really trying to quell that blatant beast in himself without knowing it. It is this mental splitthat has been his undoing, and his tragic unhappiness is, as it were, a splitting headache in his soul. Flaubert,for instance,understands the struggle between the“deux bonshommes” in himself, and understanding is already the beginning of arbitration. As Mr. Wu Mi is sadly lacking in such lucid self-knowledge, his warring elements have to clash like enemies in the dark!
Surely no ordinary man can be so twy-minded. An ordinary man has no conflicts (which are spiritual),though he may have plenty of scruples(which are pragmatic). His soul remains too much in its primordial mud-cake state to form moral distinctions. But Mr. Wu Mi's soul is in the state of having distinctions without order:every distinction is made into an opposition. Small wonder that Mr. Wu Mi should have tackled to the problem of One and Many,a problem which, though inherited from Plato through Babbitt and P.E. More, has acquired an almost personal urgency in Mr.Wu Mi's system.No one talks more about synthesis or hierarchy of interests and values, and none shows it less in actual life.
Not for him the amoral,vegetative calm of soul which is one of nature's gifts to ordinary man. No! Humanism, like art, is not Nature,but Nature methodised! One's original image made by God after himself is not good enough; one must improve it after the fashion of Max Beerbohm's happy hypocrite by imposing on it the features of Socrates, Confucius,Dante,Byron, Arold,etc.all rolled into one. This may be a possible ideal of self-culture, but Mr.Wu Mi, at any rate, has not made a good show of it. For one thing, the composite mask contains too many alien and disharmonious features to be really beautiful; for another, the face underneath is of too stubborn a stuff to be moulded by it.The result is pathetic. Mr. Wu Mi is driven by his nature and temperament to break one social convention after another in the grand romantic style of shocking the bourgeois and the smug, and at the same time he has to settle account with his doctrine and conscience and convince himself as well as the world that what he defies is not “morality" but something called “manners”,and that his defiance is quite in keeping with the humanistic tenet of “inner check”or“decorum”.
Mr. Wu has twice compared himself to the late Mr. Hsu Tse-mo in his poems. As an artist, Mr. Wu Mi is far too slovenly to be compared to that accomplished writer of charming if somewhat mincing verse. But as a Character, Mr. Wu Mi is much more interesting and-the word must out- grand. Hsu Tse-mo, for all his aestheticism and artiness, is still a baby who can enjoy innocently the pleasures of life; his fits of unhappiness are those of a spoiled child who wails either because he has not got enough of sweets to eat or because hehas eaten more than is good for his stomach.Mr.Wu Mi has reached a higher stage of sophistication than romantic singers of the paradise lost. The romantics too often identify their loves or hearts desires with the Paradise, but Mr. Wu Mi knows enough of Babbitt's opinion on poems like Browning's Summum Bonum to make that naive identification. He talks frequently in this book of immolating himselfto the Goddess of Reason or Tao and the Goddess of Love. As if the goddesses were not even more jealous than gods! His despairis not simply that of the paradise lost, but that of losing his paradise without gaining an Eve who will “light his burden and share his woe”!
Thus, Mr. Wu Mi's poetry has an enthralling interest quite independent of its literary merit. His love-poetry is particularly characteristic.If he were more of a philosopher,he would be able to get on without woman alone. He needs woman, but he sublimates this natural craving into a pedagogic function to round off his self-culture, an architectonic necessity to complete his philosophical system. He plans a pyramid of his own existence, and Love is requested to contribute her share of stones to raise the apex.A moral must be pointed and an ethical fiat must be given to what is,to Chamfort and Baudelaire, an affair of epidermis, and to D.H.Lawrence,one of the dusky abdomen.
It would be unfair and inappropriate to compare Mr.Wu Mi to adolescent girls who se passionent pour la Passion, but his ideaof love is just as impersonal and abstract as theirs.He regards love too much in the light ofbeing a liberal education. Now,to address the queen of a country as if she were a public meeting is not half so impersonal as to regard the queen of your heart as a public school or rather a private tutorial. This pedantic theory of love,when put into practice, develops unforeseen paradoxical consequences. Mr. Wu Mi's favorite teaser of One and Many takes on a new aspect: although the grand passion that has Mr. Wu Mi in grips is absolutely and self-consciously one, its objects seem to the readers simultaneously and indiscriminately many.Mr.Wu Mi has tried to explain this discrepancy in the fiftieth section of his Talks on Poetry,and let us hope he has convinced his hypocritical censors. For my part, I am not concerned with judging his conduct, but with understanding his mentality. The doctrinaire in him has to be humoured before the lover in him is given a chance. The impulse loses its natural spontaneity and becomes grandiose,didactic and a little calculating. What is an exclusive snug relation is inflated into a hollow and capacious ideal in which scatter-brained flappers can participate with superannuated coquettes:
“comme les mouchoirs anciens qui sentent encore l'amour"
This is surely Platonism with a vengeance! No doubt that the public should have reproached him with levity while he himself has been only conscious of hislofty idealism!
One expects from Mr. Wu Mi a few poems on the femme fatale, a theme never fully exploited by our writers of “old” poetry. But in spite of the devil of a time those devil's playthings seem to have given him,he does not show any fascinated aversion or love turning against itself. Significantly, hot on the heels of two bitter tzu's which almost prepare us for an outburst about Odi et Amo,follows a translation of Catullus's famous poem to that effect. It seems that Mr.Wu Mi dared not speak his mind in propria persona,and had to “sing another love to interpret his own”. Am I being far-fetched if I suggest that the doctrinaire in Mr. Wu Mi had here characteristically queered the pitch of the poet inhim? The tenet of “inner check” disguised in the Confucian theory of poetry as a means of controlling and regulating emotions and as the expression of tender and kind feelings, keeps Mr. Wu Mi subdued. In consequence, we find a competent paraphrase where there should be an original poem on ambivalent love charged with Mr. Wu Mi's personal exerience and told in his own poetic idiom.
In one respect,however, Mr.Wu Mi is an innovator; the note of high seriousness sounds for the first time in the Wen-li poems on love. No flippant banter, no lecherous rakishness, in short, no lasciveté parfumée as the French have charmingly translated our term 香艳 under which our “old” love-poetry used to be subsumed. Mr.Wu Mi has taken for the motto of this book André Chénier's line: Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques,and he has succeeded.
Chénier, however, began his poetic career with the very reverse of the line that Mr. Wu Mi has quoted with approval.He started, as Émile Faguet first pointed out, by making new verses upon old thoughts, a thing that Mr.Wu Mi seems not to have done enough. Indeed for a writer of the vers antiques, the very rigidity of whose form demands a meticulous verbal and rhythmic perfection, Mr. Wu Mi is rather deficient in curiosa felicitas. I will not dwell on his slipshod versification, his costive diction, his rough texture and the general shortwindedness of his poetic breath (to employthat expressive term in our “old” criticism), but wish to cal attention to thosegnomic lines scattered throughout the book which, weighted with personality and bare of omnament, positively achieve the grand style of Tu Fu. Take the following couplet fora happy example:
久知安乐为身患，
略识艰难赖此行。（bk．VIII，p．4）
Or read the fine tzu written to the tune of the “Butterfly among Flowers”（die lian hua）（蝶恋花）which begins with
已别又何来送我（bk．XIII，p．10）
Who would have believed that the fragile frame of this particular tune could stand the strain of such tossing and foaming emotion? Or that the “butterfly” should be able to bear gallantly on its wings so much tense and hard thinking thatmight even break a camel's back? Well,to see is to believe, Mr. Wu Mi has triumphed over the limitations of his medium and transformed them into potentialities. In his hands, something which is only meant to be pretty-pretty becomes sublime.
I cannot read the poems of the last section without thinking of Hazlitt's LiberAmoris and Sainte-Beuve's Livre d'Amour. Like the two, this section contains the indiscretions of a middle-aged writer mashed on a woman whom he cannot marry.(...)

Old versions:

p. 1: If his noumenon is as exclusive as the Spenserian “unknowable”, that is all for the better; it will be a perennial object of search to devotees to the proper study of man. No one can help being sincere in the presence of so passionately sincere and honest a man. My admiration and respect of him compels me to be candid. He is too great a man to be damned with faint praises or praised with faint damns; we have to make a thorough job of both damning and praising.
His volume of poems seems to have got a very bad press.He has supplied everything necessary for an intelligent appreciation of himself and his work in introductory matters, appendices, explanatory notes and the poems themselves,but the reviewers are neither intelligent nor appreciative. He has been so copiously, embarrassingly, and veridically autobiographic that the whole book might be used as a dossier about our poet by the most inquisitive of police inspectors. Photos, itineraries, scraps of book-keeping,all things of documentary interest are there-except,perhaps,a few fingerprints.
He has edited himself with the fureur de l'inédit of an American postgraduate bent on exhuming all the strays and waifs of an obscure writer to a doctorate thesis. Every torso of two or three lines, every bit of juvenile lisping in numbers finds its way into this book. The poet is all for collection, leaving selection to the readers.He himself has no high opinion of many of the poems included and frankly says so, but, good or bad, they are “fragments of a great confession”, and what more do you want? True,the result is a book of good faith, as Montaigne says of his essays,but of what bad taste! He must have known that in thus taking the public into his confidence, he would be covered with ridicule, and yet he runs the risk.
Now either a great man or an egregious fool can be so impervious to ridicule, and Mr. Wu Mi is a great man. His espousal of the supposedly lost cause of the wen-li shows his indomitable courage. It is of course a bit Quixotic to tilt at the windmill of the “New Chinese Literature Movement” when it was in ful swing, but it is a clean,fine, and precious courage nonetheless.
p.3: The doctrinaire in Mr. Wu Mi has to be humoured before the lover in him is given a chance. Appetition loses its spontaneity, and becomes apologetic and grandiose. But appetition, like everything else in human nature, has the Taoist way of conquering by yielding: the idealist who in the nature of things should scorn the real and the individual because they fall short of theperfection of his ideal, now embraces them because they are partial manifestations of the universal, the ideal, the archetype.Love which should be an exclusive snug relation, is nowinflated into a hollow and capacious Platonic ideal in which one woman can participate with another, a scatter-brained fapper,let us say,with a superannuated coquette.




China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

I China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century**

*This essay by Qian Zhongshu was submitted for the degree of B.Litt in Oxford University.The manuscript formally typed out and bound up in a volume is in the Bodleian Library, cat. no. Ms B. Litt. d. 288. It was published in the Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography with a prefatory note by Qian Zhongshu. The editor divided it into two parts and published them one after the other.(Note by Yang Jiang)

From Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography（《中国图书季刊》），I (1940),pp.351-384. 

Prefatory Note

This article formed originally part of a thesis written at Oxford in the years 1935-1937,years immediately before the outbreak of the War in China and then in Europe.Once the Prufungshetzerei was over,I have lef the thesis alone. And I now value it chiefly as a reminder of those years of peace (peace precarious, 'tis true) when the undertaking of such work was still possible. Years so pleasant to recall,and yet so curiously remote: for the War, while most efficiently shortening human lives, gives one also a specious feeling of longevity,the feeling of having lived very long from being made to outlive a good deal in a short while. I only regret now with a wisdom after the event that I had done but niggarly justice to those years in not spending them to some better purpose.
My wife prepared the present article out of my typescript left at home in Shanghai,because I was prevented by circumstances from doing it myself. I wish to express my warm thanks to Dr.T.L. Yuan for kindly of fering me an opportunity of “releasing” this Work from the drawer where it lay for one third the number of years of the Horatian injunction, and perhaps should have remained.
C.C.S.
October,1940

This study was suggested by Pierre Martino's book L'Orient dans la Littérature française au XVII et au XVIII° Siècle, to which I had been led by Brunetière's essay on the same subject in the eighth series of his Études critiques. I was convinced that there is still room for such a study by a reading of Adolf Reichwein's China und Europa which,besides“lifting" whole sections from Martino's book without any acknowledgment, belies its title by leaving English literature entirely out of account.
The importance of our subject for a student of English literature lies in the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Englishmen who felt an interest in Chinese studies were often themselves men of letters, with the result that their writings on and about China form part and parcel of the history of English literature.Both the seventeenth century and the eighteenth belong to what may be called the pre-sinological age of Chinese studies: the interest in China was at that time rather humanistic than philological or pragmatic.In other words, we shall try to follow the interest in China of those whose interest was largely elsewhere, an interest fugitive, half-hearted, fringing “the centre of indifference",but withal genuine. The nineteenth century saw the moving of the waters; this humanistic interest ceased to exist with the establishment of official diplomatic relations between China and England. The Embassies to Pekin of Lords Macartney and Amherst in 1793 and 1816 respectively brought in their wake a host of civil servants, missionaries and merchants who, having first studied Chinese for professional reasons, made Chinese studies their profession and began to dominate the field. Men of letters dabbling amateurishly at Chinese studies made room for professional sinologues like Sir George Thomas Staunton, Robert Morrison, Sir John Francis Davis, John Robert Morrison, Alexander Wylie, James Legge, etc. who compiled dictionaries and made translations in the time they could spare from the writing of religious tracts, commercial guides,blue books,and customs reports-witness,for famous examples, Sir George Thomas Staunton's Miscellaneous Notices Relating to China and John Robert Morrison's Commercial Guide.Literature and sinology parted company. As Reichwein has said of the relation between China and the West at the beginning of the nineteenth century:“The breaking off of intellectual relations with the East proceeded the more rapidly as economic interests trust themselves almost exclusively into the background".' Indeed,we should be well content that there was such a pre-sinological age at all in the history of Chinese studies in England. The official diplomatic relation betweenChina and England might well have been established towards the end of the sixteenth century,had not “some treacherie been wrought by the Portugales of Macao or the Spaniards of the Philippinas” against the messengers of Queen Elizabeth to the Chinese emperor.2 If John Newbery, Richard Allot and Thomas Bromefield had arrived in Pekin and delivered Queen Elizabeth's letters, sinology would have long ago been established as a special branch of studies in England, and China could not have appealed to sevententh and eighteenth century English writers so much as a country to which distance and ignorance had conspired to lend enchantment.
Before we proceed to seventeenth century references to China,it would be well to mention the three earliest English accounts of China,one of which especially seems to have been the source-book of many seventeenth century English writers in their allusions to China.The earliest account of China and her people ever published in English is Certayne Reportes of the Prouince China,learned through the Portugalles there imprisoned, and by the relation of Galeotto Perera,a gentleman of good credit, that lay prisoner in that countrey many yeres done out of Italian by Richard Willes and included in The History of Trauayle in the West and East Indies and other countreys lying eyther way towardes the fruitfull and ryche Moluccas.This History, according to the titlepage,was“gathered in parte, and done into Englishe by Richarde Eden”,and“newly set in order, augmented, and finished by Richarde Willes”.This black-letter volume was “imprinted at London by Richarde Iugge" in 1577. The Reportes give a brief but interesting description of the thirteen“shyres”into which China was then divided, the customs and hbits of the Chinese, their worship of heaven and religious temples (“meani”),their system of competitive examination by means of which“licentiates” and “doctors” were made,their enemies(the“Tartares”),their form of local government, their prisons and corporal punishments which Perera must have learnt at first-hand much to his own personal discomfort, etc. Perera also pointed out that the “Chineans”, denying that their country had ever been called China, called it “Yamen”. The most interesting part of this document is the account of a superior caste called “Loutea”(which “is muche to say in our language as Syr")and its political and social influence.3 Perera seems to have turned a form of colloquial salutation used by the uneducated and ill-bred in addressing their superiors, into name of a caste. But since the Reportes,English books on China abound in accounts of “Loutea" or“Loytea” or “Louthea” until the downfall of the Ming dynasty (“Tamen" 1368-1643). Extracts of the Reportes are included in both Hakluyt's Principal Navigations and Samuel Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others.4 Purchas added the following judicious note:“You shall have a more full description of the Country by later Authors: who yet could not so well as this, tell their proceedings,severitie, prisons, executions etc."
Another early English book on China which is less well-known than the Reportes and did not find its way into Hakluyt's Navigations and Purchas's Pilgrimes, is A Discourse of the Nauigation which the Portugales doe make to the Realmes and Prouinces of the East partes of the Worlde and of the knowledge that growes by them of the great thinges,which are in the Dominions of China, written by Bernardine of Escalanta, of the Realme of Galisia Priest,translated by John Frampton (printed in London at the Three Cranes in the Vine-tree,by Thomas Dawson, 1579).The book is admittedly based on secondhand information supplied by“men worthie of faith".5 It is coherent but les specific in detail than the Reportes. The Harleian Collection of travels contains extracts from this curious booklet.6Apart from their chronological priority, the Reportes and the Discourse possess very little interest for a student of English literature. Seventeenth and eighteenth century English writers made little or no use of either of them.
The case is different with Mendoza's Historie of China,the earliest detailed account of China in English. The Historie of the great and mightie kingdome of China, and the situation thereof: togither with the great riches, huge cities, politike gouernement, and rare inuentions in the same was translated out of the Spanish of Padre Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza (published at Rome in 1585)by R.Parke, and Printed in London by I. Wolfe in 1588.7 The translation was undertaken by Parke at the instance of Richard Hakluyt as we can see from his dedication to the celebrated navigator "Candish"(Cavendish). This copious and well-informed work is divided into two parts, each part being subdivided into three books, and the second part which deals largely with the Philippine Islands is reproduced in Purchas his Pilgrimes.8 Just as the Reportes has formed the basis of Gaspar Da Cruz's Treatise of China and the adjoining Regiones (1569),' so Mendoza in his turn made borrowings from Cruz “in many things in the process of this hystorie".10 The importance of Mendoza for our immediate concern lies in that Bacon,Raleigh,Heylyn,etc. all seem to have drawn upon his stock. Of this,more anon.
Two early pieces on China written by Englishmen themselves should also be briefly mentioned. The first, Certain Notes or References taken out of the large map of China brought home by M. Thomas Candish 1588, is no more than a list of the names of Chinese provinces." The other An Exact Discourse of the Subtilities,Fashions,Pollicies,Religion,and Ceremonies of the East Indians,as well as Chyneses and lauans there abyding and dwelling. Whereunto is added a briefe Description of laua Maior (1606) by Edmund Scott, is very little known. Scott was an English resident n Java, and his book has really nothing to do with China proper.The“damned Chyneses” were all oversea Chinese laborers.12 The earliest reference to China in English literature proper is the account of the “island" of Cathay in the English version of The Voiage and Trauaile of Syr Iohn Maundeville Knight, which treateth of the way toward Hierusalem and of the marvayles of Inde with other Islands and Countryes, chapters lxii-lxxix.Interesting as the account is, it is almost wholly mythical and fantastic.Except that little local colour derived from Friar Odoricus in the passages about the “great cannes Palaice and Sege”, the “monture of precious stones”, etc., it is entirely devoid of verifiable information. Horace Walpole, in a letter to Lady Graven on travellers describing what they have not seen, has the following passage on the Voiage:“Incredulity went so far,that at last it was doubted whether China so much as existed; and our countryman Sir John Mandeville got an ill name, because, though he gave an account of it, he had not brought back its right name". 14 If Walpole had only known that Sir John Mandeville's case is precisely one in which “incredulity” cannot possibly go too far!
The first substantial reference to China, however,is not derived from any of those accounts mentioned above and appears to have been based on information given viva voce by an Italian traveller.In The Arte of Poesie (1589), apropos of “proportion in Figure”,that is,the reduction of “meteers” into “certaine' Geometricall figures",George Puttenham writes: “But being n Italie conuersant with a certaine gentleman who had long trauailed the Orientale parts of the world and seene the courts of the great Princes of China and Tartarie, I being very inquisitiue to know of the substillities of those countreyes, and especially in the matter of learning and of their vulgar Poesi,he told that they are in all their inuentions most wittie, and haue the vs of Poesie or riming, but do not delight so much as we do in long tedious descriptions and therefore when they vtter any pretie conceit, they reduce it into metricall feet, and put it in forme of a Lozange, or square or such other figure." Then follow three full pages of reproductions of those figures, and two examples of Chinese poetry said to be composed by the great “Can Temir Cutzclewe” and his lady-love“Kermesine” respectively, given by the “Italian friend” and translated by Puttenham himself “obseruing the phrase of the Orientall speech word for word”.15 This is positively the earliest mention of Chinese literature in an English book, or perhaps in any European book, for neither the Reportes nor the Historie says any thing about Chinese“polite learning",let alone The Book of Ser Marco Polo and other mediaeval notices of China.16
The information supplied to Puttenham by his Italian friend about Chinese poetry strikes us as surprisingly accurate. Those geometrical patterns of poetry with many others even more picturesue and irregular do exist in Chinese literary tradition and are called “games of words". For sheer ingenuity in the pictorial arrangement of words, they leave nowhere the notorious“La Cravate et le Montre” or“Du Coton dans les Oreilles" in Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes. They are used exclusively in comic squibs and light verses. Puttenham or his friend is also right when he says that the Chinese “do not delight so much as we do in long tedious descriptions", for is it not now a critical commonplace that Chinese poetry relies for its aesthetic effects on the magic of suggestion and the economy of touches? A few pages further down, in connexion with emblems or devices of the court, Puttenham writes:“But that of the King of China in the fardest part of the Orient,though it be not so terrible, is no less admirable, and of much sharpnesse and good implication, worthy for the greatest king and conqueror: and it is, two strange serpents entangled in their amorous Congresse, the lesser creeping with his head into the greaters mouth, with words purporting ama and time, loue and feare”.17 Puttenham have heard of the device from the Italian traveller, but this piece of hearsaycan be corroborated from early books of travels. Gaspar Da Cruz, in his Treatise published in Portuguese in 1569 and englished in 1625 by Samuel Purchas, said:“The five Principall [sic] with their Assistants doe weare for a Badge the Kings Armes on their breasts, and on their backs, which are certayne Serpents woven with gold thread”.18 We read, too,in Mendoza's Hitorie published in English just a year before Puttenham's book, that when the governor of the city of Chincheo sent a counsellor to meet the Spaniards on their arrival,“this counsailor was carried in a Chaire of Iuory, garnished with gold and curtines of clothegolde, and on them the kings armes, which are certaie serpents knotted together (as hath been tolde you)”. was probably Cruz's passage that Mendoza had in mind when he added the clause in parentheses, because we do not find any mention of“knotted serpents” as the device of king's arms in travels earlier than Cruz's Treatise. Marco Polo mentioned the representations of dragons or "strange serpents" on the walls of the royal palace in Pekin, but the dragons are“carved” in the company of “souldiers,Birds,Beasts of divers kinds, histories of warres",20 and are nowhere referred to as being exclusively the ensign of the king. In a passage on the Khan's palace in Chandu (Xandu or Shandu) which, in Purchas's translation, was to inspire Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Marco Polo described the gilt dragons on the lacquered columns,2 but that again, like Friar Odoricus's description of the great Khan's jar as “hooped round with gold and in every comner thereof is a dragon or serpent”,22 is insufficient to forestall Mendoza. Indeed, when Marco Polo, the thirteenth century traveller, and Friar Odoricus, the fourteenth century one, described the costumes of the Khan's royal barons,they were both so much engrossed in the admiration of the pearls thereof as to completely ignore their ensigns.23 Cruz was therefore te first to refer to that royal device. Finally,in A Letter of Father Diego de Pantoia to Father Luys de Guzman, the ninth of March,the yeere 1602 translated by Purchas in 1625,we read of “a very great Case”for "the Kings Present” which “was made fair without a thousand ingraved workes, full of gilded Dragons which are the Armes and Ensignes of this King," to which passage Purchas adds an illuminating marginal note:“Dragons or Serpents (so Cruz calls them) the Kings Arms".24 This may serve as the sum-up of our discussion, though Purchas seems to have forgotten that Mendoza had also called them “serpents”.
Ben Jonson made a very uncomplimentary reference to China.In Volpone;or the Fox (produced in 1605 and published in 1607), Jonson made the gentleman traveller Peregrine say:
“I have heard,sir,
That your baboons were spies, and that they were
A kind of subtle nation near to China.”
We find in Baudelaire's poignant intimate journal Mon Coeur mis à Nu an interesting parallel to this sentiment:“Les Japonais sont des singes".25 The truth is perhaps that the “monkey damnification”includes all mankind, not even excepting the English and the French and those who are “on the side of the angels"!
In Francis Bacon's writings, we find more references to China, most of which are well-founded. In The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605),Bacon says:“We understand further that it is the use of China and the kingdoms of the high Levant to write in Characters Real,which express neither letters nor words in gross, but Things or Notions".26 In the chapter on the fourth century in Sylva Sylvarum or a Natural History(1627), Bacon says:“The World hath been much abused by the Opinion of Making of Gold.... And we commend the wit of the Chineses, who despair of Making of Gold, but are Mad upon the Making of Silver,”to which passage R. L. Ellis adds a footnote to the effect that he could not find the source of this piece of information.27 In the chapter on the eighth century in the same work,we find another puzzling passage:“As forthe Chineses who are of an ill Complexion (being Olivaster),they painttheir cheeks scarlet,especially their kings and grandes”; well might Ellis remark:“I do not know where Bacon found this”.28 In New Atlantis (1627) Bacon started with saying:“We sailed from Peru...for China and Japan”.29 The conjunction of place names almost anticipates the famous first line in Dr. Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes. Bacon also made the governor of the “House of Strangers" on the Island of Bensalem refer to the ancient Chinese law “against the admission of strangers without licence" as “a law of pusillanimity and fear”.30 The same governor, mistaking Pekin for a seaport, mentioned“Paguin(which the same with Cambaline) and Quinzy” among the seaports “upon the Oriental seas”,to which the ships of Bensalem“went sundry voyages".31 It may be interesting to note in this connection that "the scroll of shining yellow parchment" on which the Charter of the King of Bensalem was written,32 was later compared by John Evelyn to a Chinese fan shown to him together with other Chinese rarities by “one Tomson,a Jesuit":“A sort of paper very broad, thin and fine like abortive parchment, and exquisitely polished,of an amber yellow, exceeding glorious and pretty to look on, and seeming to be like that which my Lord Verlam describes in his Nova Atlantis”.33 In the second book of Novum Organum (1620), Bacon gave as an instance of cold the Chinese method of making porcelain by burying the earthenware underground for forty or fifty years.34 Finally,in the essay “Of Vicissitude of Things” which appeared for the first time in the 1625 edition of Essays,Bacon quoted the“well-known”fact that“te use of ordnance hath been in China above two thousand years”.35 
We shall reserve the discussion of Bacon's reference to the Chinese method of making porcelain till we come to Sir Thomas Browne. As to the two allusions in Sylva Sylvarum, we must confess ignorance as Ellis did with regard to their sources. If “Chineses” of Bacon's time were bent upon the making of silver rather than gold, it was not due to “despair”, but due to cupidity, because, as Mendoza pointed out,“they do esteem for his value more the siluer than the golde: and they say the cause is,for that the prices of golde are variable, as in Italie; but the siluer is alwaies at one staye and price”.36 The other three references in Bacon to the Chinese language, the Chinese alien law and the Chinese use of ordnance all seem to have been based upon Mendoza;witness the following passages:“All that they doe write is by figures ... it is a kind of language that is better understood in writing than in speaking (as the Hebrue toongue)”;37“No stranger whatsoever shall come in by sea nor by land, without his [the king's] expresse licence, or of the gouernours of such ports or places whereas they shall come or ariue” ;38“No one thing did cause so much admiracion vnto the Portugals ... as to find in this kingdome artillerie;...They had the vse thereof long time before vs in Europe”.39
There are three reasons why we think that Bacon derived those titbits of information from Mendoza, and not from others:(1) Bacon and Mendoza are all at one with regard to the three things in question;(2) Mendoza's book is the earliest as well as the only work in Bacon's time thatgives accounts of all these three things; and (3) other works on China available in Bacon's time are either silent about these three things or flatly contradictory to Mendoza's statements,and therefore to Bacon's too. In the Reportes,we may indeed read of "a Law denying all Aliens to enter into China",40 but we are also told: "The strength of theyr townes is in the mightie walles and ditches, artillerie have they none”.41 Cruz in his Treatise also says that “they use no Ordnance".42 Hesays nothing about the law against the admission of strangers;on the contrary, he says that “the law in China is that no man of China doe sayle out of the Realme in paine of death”,43 which is of course quite another story.In An Excellent Treatise of the Kingdome of China,“written dialogue-wise" (1590), both the invention of“gunnes”and the art of printing are mentioned, but no account is given of Chinese characters.44 John Huyghen van Linschoten's The Voyage to the East Indies gives a brief account of the Chinese use of the gunpowder and the alien law,45 but Linschoten's book (published in Dutch in 1596 and englished in 1598), as A.C. Burnell has pointed oul, is almost entirely based on Mendoza. Fernando Mendez Pinto,in his Peregrination (1614), admits that“the later Kings also have made a Law that no Strangers,except Embassadors and Slaves,shoulde enter the Kingdome",4 but Bacon said that the courtesies or rather hospitalities of the port were granted to all strangers who held licenses. And in A Discourse ofthe Kingdome of China of Riccius and Trigautius (1615),the most up-to-date account of China in Bacon's time, the existence of such a law is even expressly denied: "No Stranger although of a friendly Nation and Trebutarie,may have accesse to the inward parts of the Kingdome;a thing where of I have seen no Law, but Custome".47 This clinches the matter in favour of our hypothesis.
Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) contains two allusions to China which also seem to have been derived from Mendoza.Apropos of the thesis “that the ark [Noah's] rested upon part of the hill Taurus (or Caucasus) between the East Indies and Scythia,”Sir Walter discussed the invention of printing as follows: “But from the easter world it was that John Cutenberg,a German,brought the device of printing: by whom Conradus being instructed, brought the practice thereof to Rome,...And,not withstanding that this mystery was then supposed to be but newly born,the Chinaos had letters long before either the Egyptians or Phenicians;and also the art of printing, when as the Greeks had neither any civil knowledge, or any letters among them. And tat this is true, both the Portugals and Spaniards have witnessed, who about an hundred years since discovered those Kingdoms, and do now enjoy their richer trades therein: for the Chinaos account all other nations but savages in respect of themselves".48 A similar account of the introduction of printing into Europe is given by Mendoza:“It is euident that manie yeares after they had the vse thereof [printing machine],it was brought into Almaine by way of Ruscia and Moscouia ... from whence this John Cutembergo, whom the histories dooth make authour, had his first foundation. The which beeing of a trueth ... it dooth plainlie appeare that this inuention came from them unto us”.49 No other book available in Raleigh's time contains such a circumstantial and definite statement on this head. In Hajji Mahomed's Account of Cathay as delivered to Messer Giov. Battista Ramusio(circa 1550),we find a single sentence to the effect that “they have the art of printing”,and nothing more.50 Similarly, in a Turkish Dervish's Account of Cathay as related to Auger Gislen de Busbeck (circa 1560),the narrator contented himself with merely saying that “for many centuries past the art of printing has been in use among them",51 and left the whole matter at that. In the Excellent Treatise"written dialogue-wise”, the procedure of printing is described in some detail, but not a word is said about the history of printing.52 Even in Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimage (1613) which contains the first account of China not translated but written by an Englishman, printing is barely mentioned.53Linschoten who drew heavily upon Mendoza,only observed that printing had been very ancient among the Chinese.54 Pantoia, in his Letter, only described the manner of printing, especially that of printing in white letters with “ground black".55 Mendoza is thus unique in holding the hypothesis of “Cutembergo's” indebtedness to the Chinese invention,whereas other writers, like Ricius and Trigautius in A Discourse of China, merely pointed out that “printing is ancienter tere than here”.56 Sir Walter's oter reference appears also to be based on Mendoza. He adduced as the second argument for his thesis the fact that“the eastern people were most ancient in populosity and in all human glory,"and gave for example their priority in “the use of guns and ordnance of battery” which had been “confirmed by the Portugals."57 We have already quoted Mendoza's passage on Chinese artillery in connexion with Bacon's essay,and there is no need to repeat herewhat we have just said above. As to Raleigh's thesis about Noah's ark and his arguments borrowed from Chinese history, it will suffice here to cite a passage from Mendoza:“The inhabitants in this countrie are perswaded of a truth, that those which did first finde and inhabite this lande, were the nevews of Noe (who,after they had traueiled from Armenia, whereas the arke stayed...) went seeking a land to their contentment”.58 We shall come across this curious ethnic Ursage again in John Webb's work. It is also interesting to note that Raleigh was the first English writer to refer to what Purchas later called “ignorance mother of arrogance”characteristic of the Chinese people of those times.59 When Raleigh observed that "the Chinaos account all other nations but savages in respect of themselves,”he was saying plainly what Mendoza had said metaphorically:“In their owne respect they say that all other nations in the worlde be blinde".60 In 1603, Samuel Daniel,while combatting “the arrogant ignorance to hold this or that nation Barbarous”, made the following remark:“Will not experience confute us, if we shoulde say the state of China which neuer heard of Anapestiques, Trochies, and Tribracques,were grosse, barbarous, and unciuille?”.6 Could Daniel say that in a double-edged irony?
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is a rich quarry for our purpose. What makes it perhaps less interesting to us than Bacon's or Raleigh's works, is, paradoxically enough, Burton's besetting virtue of noting his sources. Moreover,Burton confined himself almost to a single book on China.... Matteo Riccius's De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu published in 1615 and later translated in part by Purchas in his Pilgrimes in 1625 under the title of A Discourse of the Kingdome of China. In the prologue “Democritus Junior t the Reader”,Burton mentioned the Chinese arrogance (“The Chinese say,that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two,all the world else is blind"),62 the Chinese prosperity which rivalled that of Italy in the time of Augustus,63 absence of beggars in China, and proposed that holders of church livings, rectors, magistrates and judges should be examined and then chosen after the manner of choosing “literati” in China, a proposal to which he was to return in the section on “Remedies against Discontents".65 In “Causes of Melancholy" he followed Riccius in saying that Chinese were addicted to eating horse-flesh, talked of the power of auto- suggestion among the Chinese people (“If it be told them they shall be sick on such a day, when that day comes,they will surely be sick”),67 their acute sense of shame,68 their custom of infanticide,69 and their superstition.70 In the section on “Causes of Religious Melancholy”, he called China the most superstitious of nations. 71 In “Prognosticks of Melancholy”,he repeated that droll anecdote that “it is an ordinary thing in China, if they be in despair of better fortunes ... to bereave themselves of life,and many tims, to spite their enemies the more, to hang at their door”.72 In“Remedies against Discontent”,he said that the Chinese kings were seldom seen abroad.73 He mentioned the number of eunuchs in the royal family in “Symptoms of Jealousy",74 Chinese herbal medicine in “Medical Physick”,75 and the Chinese custom of compulsory marriage in“Cure of Love Melancholy".7 In almost all cases, he refers his readers to chapters and verses in Riccius's book as the loci classici.
To Bacon's passage on the Chinese method of making porcelain, Sir Thomas Browne's lengthy paragraph in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) may serve as a footnote. In Book II, chapter 5 of that work,Browne gave various accounts of how porcelain is made: “Authors agree not herein. Gudio Pancirollus will have them made of Egg-shells, Lobster-shells, and Gypsum laid up in the Earh the space of eighty years: of the same affirmation is a Scaliger.... Ramuzius in his Navigations is of a contrary assertion,that they are made out of Earth, not laid underground, but hardened in the Sun and Wind, the space of forty years. But Gonzales de Mendoza... found they were made of Chalky Earth;which beaten and steeped in Water,affordeth a cream or fatness on the top, and a gross subsidence at the bottom;out of the cream or superfluitance, the finest dishes,saith he,are made, out of the residence thereof the courser;which being formed, they gild or paint, and not after an hundred years,but presently commit unto furnace. This,saith he, is known by experience, and more probable than what Odoardus Barbosa hath delivered, that they are made of shells, and buried under earth an hundred years. And answerable in all points hereto, is the relation of Linschoten, a diligent enquirer, in his Oriental Navigations. Later confirmations may be had from Alvarez the Jesuit...in his relations of China. That Porcellane Vessels were made but in oneTown of the Province Chaiansi:That the earth was brought out of other Provinces, but for the advantage of water, which makes them more polite and perspicuous, they were only made in this.... The latest account hereof may be found in the voyage of the Dutch Embassadors sent from Batavia unto the Emperour of China, printed in French 1645, which plainely informeth,that the earth whereof Porcellane dishes are made,is brought from the Mountains of Hoang",etc." Purchas in Purchas his Pilgrimage also said that "the opinion of Scaliger touching the steeping of that their Porcelline and burying it in the earth, is gainsaid by later writers",78 and based his observation too on Linschoten. Mendoza's account is similar to Cruz's.79 Taken together,these passages will show the composite source of Bacon's description which insists at once upon porcelain being made of earth and “the steeping and burying" of it under ground.
In Hydriotaphia: Urne Burial (1658),Browne quoted from Ramuzius the Chinese custom of burying their dead and “burning great number of printed graughts ofslaves and horses” over the graves.80 As late as 1900, the great French poet Paul Claudel refers to the same custom of burning “légers simulares”cut from “un papier mince” in his sensitive Connaissance de l'Est.
In the tract OfLanguages and particularly of the Saxon Tongue included in Certain Miscellany Tracts (1683), Browne, discussing the possibility of a primitive tongue unaffected by the curse of Babel,said:“The Chinoys,who live at the bounds of the Earth, who have admitted little communication,and suffered successive incursions from one Nation, may possibly give account of a very ancient Language; but consisting of many Nations and Tongues, confusion, admixtion and corrution in length of time might probably so have crept in as without the virtue of a common Character,and lasting Letter of things,they could never probably make out those strange memorials which they pretend while they still make use of the Works of their great Confucius many hundred years before Christ and in a series ascend as high as Poncuus, who is conceived our Noah”.81 The information contained in this passage was then quite a commonplace with writers on China,but what intrigues us is that Browne should have dragged it in when he was discussing the problem of the “primitive language”. We shall soon return to this. The “one Nation" from which China had suffered“successive incursions”, is named in the tract A Prophecy Concerning the Future State of Several Nations.Here Browne foretold that “a new Drove of Tartar shall China subdue”, and explained himself thus:“Which is no strange thing if we consult the Histories of China, and successive Inundations made by Tartarian Nations.For when the Invaders, in process of time,have degenerated into effeminacy and softness of the Chineses,then they themselves have suffered a new Tartarian Conquest and Inundation. And this happened from time beyond our Histories: for according to their Account, the famous Wall of China, built against the irruptions of the Tartars, was begun a hundred years before the Incarnation".82 The ingenuity of this view which assumes that history repeats itself is coupled with the ignorance of Chinese history which has not repeated itself so often and so monotonously as Sir Thomas thought. The source of this passage could be no other than "the voyage of the Dutch Embassadors" which Browne had quoted in connexion with the making of porcelain. John Nievhoff wrote:“During the govemement of Xunus (2257 B.C.) the Tartars broke into China.... Since that time, the Tartars never left molesting and disturbing the said countries....The Tartars having thus long peaceably enjoy'd the whole, grew at last to degenerate through the Pleasures and Plenty,which they found there...till at last, instead of warlike soldiers, they were gron effeminate Chineses”.83 It may also be said in passing that the Manchurian conquest of China had already taken place in 1644, and that read in the light of this fact,Browne was either wise after the event or prophetic of so distant a future as to deprive his prophecy of any value. Browne wound up his prophecy with the following couplet: “When Nova Zembla shall be no stay
Unto those whopass to or from Cathay”,
meaning that the “often sought for Northeast passage unto China and Japan shall be discovered".84 Early in 1577,Richarde Willes, in the preface to his translation to Certayne Reportes,had spoken of this route as “consisting rather in the imagination ofGeographers then allowableeither in reason or approved by experience".85
Samuel Purchas in the 1613 edition of Purchas his Pilgrimage devoted two chapters to China and her religion, which are a cento of extracts from early travellers.86 We have already made three citations from this earliest historical account of China written by an Englishman. As Purchas later abandoned well-documented narrative for compilation and translation in his Pilgrimes,these two chapters need not detain us. It would be also idle to speculate what Sir Walter Raleigh's account of China would have been like,had he finished his History of the World and thus made it worthy of its comprehensive title. Peter Heylyn's chapter on China in Cosmographie (1652) is decidedly disappointing. Like Purchas's earlier chapters, it is a cento of extracts.87 But unlike Purchas in his earlier chapters,Heylyn never noted his sources. Heylyn's sources, however, are obvious: Mendoza, Cruz and Purchas himself. To our great surprise, the statisticsof Chinese provinces, cities and towns in this book published in 1652 were lifted bodily from Mendoza's book published in 1585, although Purchas his Pilgrimes in 1625 had already given statistics of more recent dates.88 Heylyn's own contribution amounts to nothing more than religious fervor and grunt.He admitted that Raleigh had “pleaded the point exceeding strongly" on the settlement of Noah's ark in the East.89 He grudgingly agreed with Raleigh that printing and artillery had originated in China, but he grumbled that “this excellent invention [printing] hath been much abused, and prostituted to the lust of every foolish and idle paper-blurrer”.90 He jibed at the tyranny of the Chinese form of govemnment.91 He dismissed Chinese customs and habits as being “to an illuminated mind base and contemptible".2 He waxed exceeding wrath over “the ignorance and Atheism of the darkest times” which he supposed to have been the order of the day in China.“In a word, nothing Commendable in their course of ife (notwithstanding the brags which they make of themselves) but their Arts and Industry”.93 But there is one bit of information not given elsewhere.Apropos of the Chinese use of chopsticks and of their “not touching meat with hands at all”,Heylyn remarked ruefully: “The use of silver forks with us, by some spruce gallants taken up of late, camefrom hence into Italy, and from thence to England". This is perhaps the only original remark made byour grumpy gentleman in this chapter, and we may take it for what it is worth.
If we miss Raleigh's account of China, we have more reason to lament the disappearance of John Evelyn's translation of a Dutch book on China. It has never been published, and the MSS are most probably lost. No editor or bibliographer of Evelyn has ever mentioned it, and the only proof of its one-time existence is a letter (September thirteenth, 1662) to a Mr. Vander Douse,in which Evelyn said:“I have to the best of my skill translated your Relation of China”.He showed himself quite au courant of books on China when he advised Douse to peruse“what Father Alvarez Semedo has published in Italian;Vincent le Blanc in French; and Mendelslo in high Dutch; not omitting the Adventures and Travels of Pinto in Spanish,all of them now speaking the English language ...and upon comparing of them with this piece of yours, to observe what there is more accurate and instructive".95 William Bray in a footnote pointed out that Semedo was translated by “a person of quality” and published in 1655; Vincent le Blanc, by Francis Brooke in 1660; Mendelslo, by J. Davis;and Pinto,by Henry Cogan in 1663. To this footnote we should add that Davis's translation of Mendelslo was published in 1662, and that as Cogan's Pinto was published a year after Evelyn' letter, it might have been Purchas's version in Pilgrimes that Evelyn had in mind. It should also be pointed out that Evelyn made a mistake in including Vincent le Blanc in the list, because le Blanc dealt not wth China but with India and Cochin-China. Two more references to China we find in Evelyn's other writings. This one from Sculptura: or the History of Chalcography and engraving in copper:“Sculpture and Chalcography seem to have been of much ancienter date in China than with us....Semedo would make the world believe that the forementioned Chinezes have been possess'd of this invention about sixteen hundred years”.% Another reference occurs in Navigation and Commerce: Their Origin and Progress where he wrote admiringly of Chinese vessels near Nankin-“junks of such prodigious size, as seem like cities rather than ships”.97 In one case, Evelyn admittedly derived his information from Semedo, while in the other he might have recourse to Pinto's description of “water-citie”.98 The other seventeenth cntury diarist Samuel Pepys also called Semedo's book “excellent” and bought it from his“new bookseller Martin's”.99
The search for a "primitive language" unaffected by the building of the Tower of Babel must have been very much in the English air in the seventeenth century. We have already seen how Raleigh proved that Noah's ark settled in the East. One thing led to another, and Raleigh's argument naturally led to the question which oriental language had most probability of being the language spoken by Noah. Heylyn in the “General Introduction” to his Cosmographie, while agreeing with Raleigh, argued very pertinently as follows:“Admitting it for true, that those staid behind with Noah, spake the same language which was common to the Fathers before the Flood (be it the Hebrew, or what else soever it was),I see no reason to the contrary,but that it might in time be branched into severall Languages or Dialects ofthe one same language by the commerce and intercourse which they had with nations of a different speech".100 We have seen how Sir Thomas Browne suggested the possibility of Chinese being the primitive language only to refute it himself with the very same argument as Heylyn employed.All these dangling threads were gathered up in a single book published in 1669-that curious octavo volume An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language by John Webb of Butleigh in the County of Somersetshire. The author was one of Inigo Jones's pupils and made some mark as an architect. Linguistics seems to have been but one of his hobbies, and he approached this subject in a true amateurish spirit with a dash of religious zeal. Indeed, he does not seem to have known the Chineselanguage at first-hand at all. In the dedicatory epistle to Charles II, he defined his programme as follows: “My intention being,not to dispute what in Possibility cannot, but what in Probability may be the First Speech. Neither is it my purpose with others to insist on vulgar Traditions or licentious Etymologies of Words,weak and frail Foundations to support such a Weight,but fix my Basis upon Sacred Truth and credible History";sacred truth being the Bible and credible history being “ancient records” of Chinese history retold in Portuguese and Spanish accounts of China.101 He started with the ante-diluvian period and argued that as he “cannot find the least authority to presume,that the language spoken by our first Parents, admitted any whatever alteration either in the Form or Dialect and Pronunciation thereof, before the Confusion of Tongues at Babel ... wherefore we may certainly conclude, that Noah carried the Primitive Language into the Ark with him, and that it continued pure and uncorrupted amongst his succeeding generations until the confusion of Tongues at Babel".102 “Noah was settled in the East”,103 and “China was originally peopled by some of the posterity of Noah before the enterprise at Babel".104“These plantations in the East were undertaken and settled before the remove to Shinaar,and Confusion of Tongues, by those who that never came at Babel”,105 whereas “the Scripture also plainly declareth,that the curse of Confounded Languages fell upon those only that were present upon the place at Babel, and personally acted in that ungodly design there".106 Ergo,Chinese, not Hebrew is the primitive tongue “common to the whole World before the Flood".107 Here Webb rose to a really stunning height of speculation:He had read Heylyn's Cosmographie and quoted it frequently with approval. It now remained for him to combat Heylyn's view that no primitive language could possibly keep its primitive character with the passing of time, because this unanswerable argument virtually cut the ground from under his own feet.Webb's reply is exceedingly ingenious. Conquest, he held, cannot alter the speech of a country- witness the French conquest of Italy and the English invasion into Scotland. On the other hand, he said, the victor may very well take upthe study of the language of the vanquished as the Romans did after their conquest of Greece, or the Macedonians after their conquest of Persia. Nor can time alter a language; Latin, for instance, remains what it was in Caesar's time.Intercourse and commerce may change a language just as “our Saxon tongue” has been corrupted by “Latinizing, Italianizing,Frenchizing,Refinizing,and Nonsencizing",but the language of a country will remain unaffected if commerce is only allowed along the sea-coasts and frontiers as it then was in China. 108 After witnessing such a dialecticàl feat, one is no longer surprised when Webb proved to his own satisfaction that the Chinese emperor Jaus or Yaus was no other man than Janus whom many authors maintained to be Noah himself.109 This tour de force finished,Webb gave a long account-the best and most intelligent resumé in English so far- of Chinese religion, philosophy, science,arts, morals and manners, language and calligraphy,etc. all with the view of establishing their antiquity and superiority and their conformity with the Holy Script.If anything,the account is too favorable: for example, what Heylyn had shifted at as idolatry and tyranny became in Webb's opinion City of God and philosopher-kings.110 With due allowance for exaggeration and partiality,this account contains the cream skimmed from all the writings thenavailable on China, especially on the spiritual or cultural side. Webb wound up his book with six “princpal guides" for determining that Chinese is the primitive language: simplicity, generality, modesty of expression, utility, brevity,and consent of authors."1 This shrewd and sensible discussion of the characteristics of the Chineselanguage forms quite the best part of this otherwise fantastic book, and is in some points not likely to be bettered by modern writers. Strange to say, it was done by a man who was utterly ignorant of Chinese and had to rely entirely on secondhand information and what his mother-wit could tease out of it.Webb acknowledged his indebtedness to many authors. In the exegesis of the Bible, he was largely guided by Raleigh and Heylyn;as for“credible history", he culled most from Purchas his Pilgrimage, Athanasius Kircherus's China Illustrata (1667), Martin Martinius's Chinique Atlas (1655) and Sinicae Historiae (1658),and Semedo's Relatione della Grande Monarchia della China (1643). From page 165 downwards, Webb now and then quoted Mendoza. But he does not seem to have read Mendoza carefully,because if he had, he would have seen that Chinese themselves had claimed (at least,Mendoza reported that they had) to be the descendants of Noah's nephew, and would have no need to cling to Raleigh's roundabout exegesis. Another proof of his perfunctory reading of Mendoza is that, on page 124, he referred to Heylyn for the source of the following sentence: “It is not lawful for the king of China to make any war but merely defensive”.But Heylyn owed almost everything to Mendoza, and this sentence can be found in the Historie Part I, Book III, Chapter vii. 
In refuting Heylyn, Webb had also forestalled and answered Sir Thomas Browne's objection. Browne, however, does not seem to have known Webb's book at all. Nor was Webb's book mentioned in Some Observations and Conjectures Concerning the Chinese Characters made by R(obert) H(ook) and published in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London(1685).This is the second English study of the Chinese language. Hook, “having applied himself to understand something of Chinese language and character" and “procured from China a dictionaryof the court language”,seems still puzzled and much less cocksure than Webb.He also discussed the Chinese abacus.On the whole, the article is hazy and lacking in grasp, and we cannot say for certain how much Hook actually knew of Chinese. The following passage from the article corroborates Mendoza's account of the history of printing in Europe: "For Paulus Jovius affirms that the first occasion of the art of Printing in Germany, was owng to a German merchant, who, returning from China to his own Country, related what he had observed concerning the practice of it as used in that Country".112 Sir Matthew Hale,however,referred to“Mr. Webb's essay"in his The Primitive Origination of Mankind considered and examined according to the Light of Nature (1677)113 Hale found“nothing authentic” in what Webb had called“credible history"114, and dismissed the whole theory as “found upon Conjectural Reasons".115
A word about the significance of Webb's book.Hitherto authors had contented themselves either with passing references to China for illustrative purposes like Bacon or Raleigh, or with industrious collection of facts out of geographical and antropological interests like Purchas and probably Evelyn too. Their attitude was receptive, which welcomed any“pot-shot”information about China, and their interest all-embracing, which put as much emphasis on important things as on trifles. They showed admiration for Chinese industry and ingenuity, but for little else. Even Burton who compared China to Rome under Augustus the Great and thought of introducing the Chinese system of competitive examination into England, was on the whole indifferent. Webb was the first Englishman to interpret China instead of merely retelling “travellers' tales” about her,to stress the cultural aspect of China instead of being interested in a mélange adultère de chinoiseries. He showed what the German philosophers would call a wertempfindende Vernunft which goes deeper than the bland devotion to facts. His sense of the scale of values can be best seen from the fact that he gave his praise to Chinese philosophy, the Chinese system of government, and the Chinese language rather than to Chinese junks and artillery.
In Sir William Temple,the English enthusiasm about the Chinese reached its summit.Temple, like Webb, sang eloquent praise of the Chinese government of philosopher-kings. In the essay“Of Popular Discontents", he observed that to keep mn in order,the laws must not only be “well-instituted”, but also“well-executed”. It is not the “constitution of government” that matters, but the “administration” of it. Therefore, continued Temple,“let the scheme be what it will, those are ill goverments where ill men govern....unless in that ancient government of the Chinese Empire,established upon the deepest and wisest foundations of any that appears in story".116 He returned to this praise in his other essays, as we shall see. He was also the first Englishman to discuss the Chinese garden, and thereby enriched the English language with a curious term. In the essay “Of Gardening”, after having described the “best forms of gardens” which“are in some sort regular”,he said that “there may be other forms wholly irregular that may have more beauty than any of the others", and singled out the Chinese garden as an example.“The Chinese scom this way of planting, and say a boy that can tell a hundred, may plant walks of trees in straight lines.... But their great reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures,where thatbeauty should be great, and strike the eye, but wthout any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily observed. And though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty,yet they have a particular word to express it; and where they find it hit their eye at first sight they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem".117 This essay was written in 1685, and Temple confessed to having“heard of” the Chinese garden from “people who have lived much among the Chinese".We shall attempt to decipher that queer word Sharawadgi later.In the essay “Of Health and Long Life", he mentioned many things about Chinese medical science,the Chinese physicians' knowledge of "the pulse in discovering the causes of all inward diseases”,their “method of diet” as “curse”, the modish complaint of“vapours”which among the Chinese would pass for “mists of the mind or fumes of the brain, rather than indispositions of any other parts”, and the Chinese habit of never letting blood. 118 In “An Essay upon Ancient and Modemn Learning”(1670), touching upon the old question whether the East was the fons et origo sapientiae, he said that“the antiquities of China are the oldest,for these are agreed by the missionary Jesuits”. He went on to relate the story of the burning of all Chinese books except that of physics and agriculture “by reason of the savage ambition of one of their kings", and anticipated contemporary historians of philosophie comparée in drawing an interesting comparison between Socrates and “Confucius,who began the same design of reclaiming men from the useless and endless speculations of nature,to those of morality;but with this difference, that the bent of the Grecian seems to be chiefly upon the happiness of private men or families, but that of the Chinese, upon the good temperament and felicity of such kingdoms and governments as that was and is known to have continued for several thousand years; and may be properly called a government of learned men”.119 But the Pièce de résistance for our concern in Temple's writingsis the second section of the essay “Of Heroic Virtue” which runs to twenty precious pages and is no less than a compendium of the history of Chinese culture. It is also a summary of all Temple's knowledge about China which he retailed in his other essays.Te story of the burning of books is there, and so are the exposition of Confucianism and the description of the Chinese medical procedure.120 The facts are all quite stale, but Temple succeeded in putting them in a new light. Take this sentence for instance:“As other nations are usually distinguished into Noble and Plebeian,so that of China may be distinguished into Learned and Illiterate".121 Here was put in a nutshell what the early travellers had fumbled for centuries to say clearly and succinctly and had failed. It is this attempt to interpret China by comparing her with European countries that distinguishes Temple from Heylyn or Purchas who was,to adapt what Whistler says of art connoisseurs in Ten O'clock, only bent upon“collecting-compiling-classifying- contradicting". Temple also showed to have kept himself abreast of contemporary Chinese history,for,towards the end of the essay, he wrote:“Three several times upon their records,the Tartars have conquered great parts of the Kingdom of China, and after long establishment there, have been expelled: till...about the year 1650,they achieved the complete and entire conquest of the whole empire".122 Here Sir William Temple proved himself a better historian than Sir Thomas Browne; but,like Browne, he held that “the excellence of the Chinese wit and government renders them Tartars, by great Ease,Plenty,and Luxury,in time effeminate and thereby expose them to frequent Attempts and Invasions of their Neighbors”.123 As to the Chinese government, Temple thought it to be “in practice to excel the very speculations...of European wits, the institutions of Xenophon, the republic of Plato, the Utopia's, or Oceana's of our modern writers",124 and fortunately, as Temple was told,“under the present Tartar kings,the Govemment continues still the same and in the hands of the Chinese learned".125 Here is indeed a new note, and we need only recall the meagre allusions to China in the “speculations” of an English“wit” about half a century before,to wit, Bacon's New Atlantis, to see how Temple's approach is distinctly new.
Enough has been said to make clear Temple's views on the Chinese. It would be interesting to speculate on the sources of his information. The early travels and histories were obviously out of date because they had been all written before the Tartar invasion in 1644 to which Temple referred. But it must not be supposed that the new attitude on Temple's part can simply be explained bythe fact that accounts in Temple's time contain a fuller and more flattering portrait of China. China in the later books remained substantially the same as she had been in earlier ones. Early travellers included in Purchas are on the whole very eulogistic in tone, and so exhaustive on the major issues like the form of government, the system of academic and civil service examination, the sects of Chinese religion, etc. that later writers cannot and do not add a jot. Temple's account of “colau”,for example,is essentially the same as that of "colai" in Riccius and Trigautius. Why then the one and same thing which had left Bacon or Burton indifferent, should have moved Temple to a towering state of admiration? We can only invoke the much abused Time-spirit-that tacit confession of defeated historical analysis-to explain it away. Temple's information seems largely derived from Semedo's History, to which in the English translation Martinius's The History of the Late Invasion and Conquest of that Flourishing Kingdom of China by the Tartars. Temple's knowledge of Chinese medicine,for intstance,is based on Semedo, because older accounts,as a rule, mention only Chinese herbal pharmacy.126 The Three Tartarian invasions are succinctly related for the first time in Martin Martinius,127 while Nievhoff, as we have seen, has misled Sir Thomas Browne with his vague remark that since the time of Xunus,“the Tartars never left molestingand disturbing" China. Martinius,like Nievhoff, observed the enervating effect of the Chinese “pleasures and delices” upon “the ancient vigour of mind and warlike spirits" of the Tartars. 128 But Temple's impression that “under the Tartar kings the govemment continues still the same”, could not have been derived from Martinius who was very cross with the invaders and stopped his narrative at 1653, hardly before the storm and stress was over. Nor could it have been derived from The History of the Conquest of China by the Tartars by Senor Palafox,129 Bishop of Osma and Viceroy of Mexico, which appeared in English for a reason oposite to Temple's-the Tartar kings were new brooms which swept the court clean of corrupt Chinese mandarins, and introduced salutary reforms. Temple might have been influenced by Gabriel Magaillan's A New History of China containing a description of the most considerable particulars of that Vast Empire which appeared in English in 1688.It was written under the reign o the second Tartar or Manchu emperor "Cam Hi" and was very laudatory of the Chinese “law of the learned” and “the wonderful government of this Empire”.130
Temple's summary of Confucianism was the most elaborate in English up to his time. No traveller had been so informative about Confucius.Temple must have come across the joint translation of Confucius' works entitled Confucius Sinarum Philosophus by Prosper Intorcetta, Christian Herdritch,Francis Rougemont, and Philippe Couplet (1687). This is the earliest translation of Confucius' complete works into a European language. Ignatius da Costa's bilingual translation (Chinese and Latin) published at Keen-chang Foo in 1662 contained only The Great Learning and the first part of the Analects.131 The translators were extremely enthusiastic about Confucius and called him sapientissimus et moralis philosophiae pariter ac politicae magister et oraculum.132 They seem to have imparted their enthusiasm to Temple. Indeed, one of them,Intorcetta, was so enthusiastic that, as a little known anecdote runs, the missionary authorities suspected apostacy. 133 An abridged English translation of this work appeared in 1691 and ran to a second edition in 1724: The Morals of Confucius,a Chinese Philosopher.The translator was as reverential towards Confucius as the Jesuits: he described Confucianism as “infinitely sublime, pure,sensible,and drawn from the purest Fountains of Natural Reason”,and thought that Confucius had “every considerable advantage, not only over a great number of Pagan writers,but likewise over several Christian Authors,who abound with so many false or oversubtl Thoughts".134
No one seems to have anticipated Temple in his description of the peculiar beauty of the Chinese garden. The first European traveller who gave an account of Chinese gardens was the French Jesuit Louis le Comte. Le Comte, in his Nouveaux Mémoires de l'État Présent de la Chine published in 1696, more than ten years after Temple's writing of his essay in 1685, says something about “imitation of nature”in the Chinese gardens, but nothing about “Sharawadgi".135 And this queer word was to crop up again in the eighteenth century. The O.E.D. gives the following note under the word:“Of unknown origin; Chinese scholars agree that it cannot belong to that language. Temple speaks as if hehad heard it from travellers.”But if we keep in mind the meaning of this term as given by Temple himself (“Figures... without order or disposition of parts＂）， the right phrase inevitably suggests itself： san lan（散乱）meaning“scattered and disorderly”or su lo（疏落）meaning “widely scattered and disorderly＂，and wai chi（位置）meaning “position and arrangement"-in short, space tastefully enlivened by disorder.136 It is in gardening what the“sweet neglect”(Ben Jonson in Epicoene, Act I, scene i) or“sweet disorder"(Herrick in "Delight in Disorder”) is in feminine toilet. Critical clichés like “beau désordre” or “romantische Verwirrung” all fail to convey adequately this peculiar lack of art which conceals real art in the Chinese gardens, because they want the implication of empty space. Let purists then put tip with that uncouth jawbreaker of Sharawadgi!
We now come to the first piece of imaginative English literature on a Chinese subject-The Conquest of China by the Tartars, a tragedy by Elkannah Settle,acted at the Duke's Theatre from 1673-1674,and published in 1676. In the epilogue,Settle said that
“his Muse
Had History and Truth for her Excuse."
In the first act, the Tartarian king Theinmingus talked of “aiming his Vengeance against Pequin walls" in order “to Right his Murder'd Father's death”. Then Amavanga, a Chinese princess in the disguise of a soldier, came to the Tartarian camp as the ambassador from the Chinese king to make overtures for peace. Nettled by the insolence of the Tartars as well as ashamed of the timorousness of the Chinese king, Amavanga did not propitiate but challenged to meet Zungteus, the son of Theinmiogus, in the field. Zungteus accepted the Challenge, but felt “something so sacred”at Amavanga's“sight” that he wished to “avoyd this Fight”. Amavanga, on her part, after having taken of the Tartars, confessed to her confidante Vangona:
“My Soul adores my Country's Enemy 
I love Zungteus,and with secret joy,
Admire that hand which China does destroy”.137
On the other hand, in Zungteus's conversation with his comrade Palexus, it turned out that Zungteus had spent some years in the Taymingian Court (i.e. the “Tamen” in Perera's Reportes) as the guest of the Chinese king, and fallen in love with “a Princess Amavanga"who “does a Crown enjoy” in the Empire which he was going to Wreck. He thus felt qualms in marching into China, and would like to back out but for Palexus's expostulations.The second act deals largely with what took place in the roya palace of Pequin. The Chinese king ordered his only daughter and sole heir to the throne,Orunda,to choose a husband. Orunda's choice fell upon Prince Quitazo who had already been engaged to “an innocent lady”called Alcinda. Quitazo,therefore,reluctantly acquiesced in the honor and durst not disclose his previous engagement.Lycungus, another prince of the Chinese Court and the villain of the piece, was acutely disappointed by Orunda's rejection of himself in favor of Quitazo, and planned to spy on Quitazo in order to report his liaison with Alcinda to Orunda. In the third act, the Chinese king
“to the proud Tartar has a Herald sent,
The Fateof lingering Sieges to prevent,
T'accept a Duel,and their debate,
End by a Single hand.”138
Amavanga represented the Chinese, while Zungteus, the Tartars.When Amavanga learned her combatant to beher lover, she shilly-shallied until Vangona overcame her scruples with very much the same arguments as Palexus had employed to persuade Zungteus. Meanwhile,Lycungus had reported Quitazo's double-dealing to Orunda, and Alcinda was taken and threatened with death. In the end, Alcinda was pardoned because Orunda would not take advantage of her own position and win Quitazo “by force”. “No,”said Orunda,
“that interestI'le resign:
My Merit,not my Pow'r,shall make him mine.”139
Lycungus thought that he had now poisoned Orunda's ear against Quitazo for good, and tried to step into his shoes. But Orunda had still no use for him. Embittered, Lycungus could not help being the thorough-paced villian that he was really destined to be. He thus declared:
“Well,what my slighted Passion cannot do,
That end I by Ambition will pursue”.140
the“end” in question being the throne. In the fourth act, the duel between Amavanga and Zungteus took place. One does not,of course,expect from it such profuse shedding of blood as in the duel between Horace and Curiace,from which was apparently derived the conception of settling international quarrels by a contest of force between two persons each representing his country.But the author had a surprise up his sleeve. He made Amavanga die of a fatal wound inflicted by the unsuspicious Zungteus. Amavanga revealed her identity at the “zero hour” to her lover as well as antagonist.So the Sohrab and Rustum motive is introduced. Zungteus was so over-whelmed with remorse and grief that he declared that his victory should be forfeited because “to his Disgrace he had a Woman killed". The Chinese king retained his precarious throne, and the fight was to begin anew the day after. The same act also contains the poisoning of Orunda by Lycungus's vilains and the imprisonment of Alcinda. When the fifth act opens, the Tartarian king Theinmingus was already killed in the battle and the Chinese king dethroned by Lycungus. The deposed Chinese king thought of self-destruction,and his“queens”
“Their own Murdereach bold hand performs;
Embracing Death in all those Various Forms."
How ghoulish the scene is may be seen from the stage direction: “The scene of a number of murdered women, some with Daggers in their Breasts,some thrust through with Swords,some strangled, and some poyson'd.” After having been a grim eye-witness to this universal self-slaughter, the king stabbed himself in the left arm, and wrote with his own blood: “To Zungteus China's Crown bequeath".141 At the same time Quitazo had fled to the Tartars and supplicated Zungteus's help to take vengeance on Lycungus. The Tartarian army rushed into Pequin and killed Lycungus. Zungteus at last thought of committing suicide to join Amavanga in a better world, but lo! Amavanga suddenly appeared on the scene and explained the miracle of her resurrection as follows:
“When by your Hand I bled,
My Soul possession kept,though my Sense fled.
My Wounds by care, and your kind Influence cur'd, 
I am to Life, to Health,to Love restor'd!”142
The curtain drops on “Nuptial Bliss" and Coronation-such a happy reversal of fortune would surely satisfy even the conditions of a comedy!
The motive of heroic love which runs through this play is of course one of the poncifs of the age of Dryden. Le donne,i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori-everything that Dryden named in his preface to The Conquest of Granada is duly supplied by Settle.But let us examine how much “history and truth” are contained in Settle's play. Gerard Langbaine in Momus Triumphans: or the Plagiaries of the English Stage has the following note on this play: “Plot,Heylyn's Cosmography, Book 3rd. and Conquest of China, By Senior Palafax [sic], Englished 8°”,143 In An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, Langbaino expanded the note as follows: “This is also writ in Heroick Verse, and founded on History.See Signior Palafax [sic] his History of China, translated in octavo; John Gonzales de Mendoza, Lewis de Guzman, &C.”.144 As Mendoza's book was published in 1585 and Guzman's in 1601,they may be dismissed out of hand as cntaining nothing about the Tartarian Conquest which took place in 1644. Heylyn referred to this event only in a single sentence (“The Tartars...are said to have lately broken down the Partition-wall, and let in infinite numbers of their Countrymen, and made themselves Masters in short time of the best parts of the Country").145 Palafox's History might have been the source, but Martinius's Bellum Tartaicum englished sixteen years before Palafox's book is much more likely to inspire Settle.A comparison of few passages from both will suffice to show that it is upon Martinius, not Palafox, that Settle's play is based.Here from Palafox:“It was in the 1640, when two Rebels... revolted against their Lawful Sovereign [the Chinese Emperor],one of them was called Ly (p. 3). Ly made himself sure of the whole Empire; and resolved to take possession of it (p. 15). The Emperor of China considered, how speedily to dispose both of his Royal Family and Person, which was in the most Tragical manner that ever Histories related. He had but one Daughter,very young...whose throat was cut by her own Father, and at her own Supplication (p. 38). The Empress with a cord hanged herself upon a tree (p. 35).Biting with violence one of his Fingers, and squeezing out the blood, he [the Emperor] wrote therewith these following words ... after he had thus wrote,he untied his Hair, and covering his Face, presently with his own hands he hanged himself upon a Tree near to that on which the Empress remain'd strangled (pp. 35-37). A Chinese general... went to the Tartars to solicit them to enter into China...the General,who was called Vsangué... did most passionately desire some opportunity to revenge both the death of his Master and of his Father,who was a great Officer in the Emperor of China's Court, and was put to death by the Tyrant [Ly](pp. 52-53)."Now Martinius's book contains all these and a good deal more. We read, for instance, that in 1625, the Tartars were defeated by the Chinese general Maovenlungus, and "the King of Tartary's own Sonne” was killed (p. 263). We also find that “after Thienmingus King of Tartary,succeeded Thienzungus... after whom succeeded his son Zungteus” who,“when he was young, was sent by his Father into China, where he lived secretly”(pp.264-265).We also learn that “the name of one of these chief Brigands was Licungzus"(p. 267). We need not quote in extenso Martinius's description of the death of the Chinese emperor and his account of “Usangueius's embassy” to Zungteus (pp. 275-276). The spelling of the Chinese and Tartarian names alone is enough to convince us of Settle's debt to Martinius. Our quotations from Martinius also explain two points in the play. The Inmingus's vengeance for his father and Zungteus's sojourn in China. Even Amavangus in the play seemsto have been suggested by Martinius's account of “one Heroic Lady, whom we may well call the Amazon or Penthesilcan of China,”and who “gave many rare proofs of her courage and valour not only against the Tartars, but also against the Rebels”(p.261). It is obvious that Settle took many liberties with historical facts as he found them. But when dramatic necessity made him introduce the character of Alcinda, he was a veracious historian malgré lui. Although no foreign historian of the conquest mentioned Vsangué's (or Usangueius's) mistress, it was notorious that Vsangué (i.e. Quitazo in the play) sought vengeance on Licungus (i.e. Lycungus in the play) for the sake of neither his father nor his sovereign, but solely his mistress who had been seized by Licungzus. Two other works available in Settle's time, which are not devoted to the Tartarian Conquest,also contain the same details as given by Martinius: Nievnoff's book mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne and Mandelslo's travel mentioned by John Evelyn.146 At any rate, the books mentioned by Langbaine could not possibly have been Settle's sources.
In The Fairy Queen, an Opera, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream commonly attributed to Settle,we find another Chinese scene. In the fifth act,Settle laid the scene in a Chinese garden,and gave songs supposed to be sung by a Chinese couple. The description of the garden is noteworthy.“The Architecture,the Trees,the Plants,the Fruit, the Birds, the Beasts quite different from what we have in this part of the World. It is terminated by an Arch,through which is [sic] seen other Arches with close Arbors and a row of Trees to the end of the View. Over it is a hanging Garden,which rises by several ascents to the top of the House;it is bounded on either side with pleasant Bowers, various Trees, and numbers of strange Birds flying in the Air, on the top of a Platform is a Fountain, throwing up Water, which falls into a large Basin”.147 Apparently Settle had never heard of Sharawadgi.
A tragedy from John Dryden on a Chinese subject would be a literary boon. And Dryden did toy with the idea of a play on the Tartarian Conquest. In a letter to his sons (September 3, 1697)we read:“After my return to town, I intend to alter a play of Sir Robert Howard's,written long since, and lately put by him into my hands:'tis calledthe 'Conquest of China by the Tartars'. It will cost me six weeks study,with the probable benefit of an hundred pounds".148 In December of the same year, he wrote to Jacob Tonson:“I have broken off my studies from the 'Conquest of China' to review Virgil, and bestowed my entire days upon him”.149 The“studies” Dryden never resumed, nor was Howard's play ever published. 150 In Rochester's works,however,we find A Scene of Sir R. Howard's Play.151 The Chinese emperor seems to have already died, and the empress is represented as leading the Chinese army together with Hyachian and Lycurgus. Thus the empress spoke of her own courage:
“Your Emperour Deify'd hovers in ye aire
Commands revenge and does rewards prepare....
This I'le prove ye Injustice of that scorne
Men treat our Sex withall; woman is borne
With equall thirst of Honour and of Fame,
But treacherous man misguides her in her aime.”
She snubbed the unseasonably gallant Lycurgus:
“That Prince who to my side his Army brings,
I doe expect shall fight,not say fine things.”
She praised the brave Hyachian, and made him the “General of the Field". Then she led her regiment in the attack with Hyachian and his forces to follow and Lycurgus and his to bring up the rear. Lycurgus left alone let off some of his pent-up steam in a bitter tirade in the typically Restoration vein against “the worthless woman”
“Who inye dumb green-sickness of her minde:
Still hungers for ye trash of all mankinde,”
and queried:
“You who create,what difference you can see
Twixt this admir'd Hyachian and mee?”
He thus bid his army“stand and look on”:
“If on ye Tartars side the day be lost,
I'le take the advantage of my noble Post,
When the pursuit most eager does appeare, 
I'le fallon ye Chineses in the reare...
And if my beaten Empress scape the rout
I'le let her in, but shut the Army out...
If after she'l consent to marry mee,
When she's my Slave,I'le set her Empire free.”
Then Hyachian appeared on the scene, eulogising the courage of the Empress and relating how the Tartars had spared her life in order not to “stain woman's blood their cymeters". The fragment ends tantalisingly here. We reserve for another article the eighteenth century treatments of the theme of the Tartarian conquest.
Before we leave the seventeenth century,we have to mention the writings of bot the first Englishman who visited China and the first Englishman who knew something of the Chinese language. The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia was not accessible to the general reading public till very late. He visited China in the company of Captain John Weddell, and, in the words of one English writer, "initiated the English intercourse with China”.152 Of course, Mundy saw Canton only, but his “relation”is remarkably detailed and illustrated with many vivid thumbnail sketches drawn by Mundy himself of the Chinese abacus,a Chinese hog,“sundry habits” worn by the Chinese of his time, etc. In spite of the troubles his men had with the mandarins and the skirmishes with the Chinese soldiers, Mundy concluded his relation with this significant passage:“Chinese excellencies:This Countrie may bee said to Excell in these particulars: Antiquity,largenesse, Richenesse,healthynesse,Plentifulnesse.For Arts and manner off government I think noe kingdome in the world Comparable to it”.153 Mundy visited China in 1637. A hundred years later,Lord Anson visitedthe same part of China,also had troubles with the local authorities, and was not half so shabbily treated as Captain Weddell and his men had been, yet Lord Anson, as we shall see in the next article, left China with such a bad impression of the Chinese that he gave them the worst character possible in the book of his travels. Truly, historians do not repeat each other, though history may repeat itself!
Although Robert Hook said that he knew Chinese, we do not find much evidence of his knowledge in his Some Observations. The first Englishman who seems to have really known some Chinese is a genius loci of Oxford, Thomas Hyde, the orientalist and librarian of the Bodleian.In The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, we find a record of a conversation between Hyde and King James II during the latter's visit to Oxford in September 1687. The conversation was entirely turned upon a Chinese then resident in Oxford,“a little blinking fellow” whose“picture to the life” had the honor of being hung in James II's “rooms next to the bedchamber”,and from whom Hyde admitted having “learned many things”.	In Wood's Athenae Oxonienses, we find a list of “the books by Dr. Hyde designed for the press if he lives to finish them”,which contains two titles relating to the Chinese (Nos. 6 and 23). No. 23 Varia Chinensia is described as “omnia excerpta ex ore et scriptis native Chinensis Shin Fo-burgh".155 Shin Fo-burgh must have been “the little blinking fellow" in question. Among Hyde's published writings,we find ample evidence of the “many things Hyde learned of the Chinese”. The account of Chinese measures and weights which he conributed to Edward Bernard's De Mensuris et Ponderibus Antiquius, is almost wholly derived from the writings of continental missionaries, but the sheet of Chinese characters for weights and measures betrays the assistance of a Chinese.156 In Ludis Orientalibus libro duo (1694), Hyde gave detailed explanations of the Chinese games of chess and dice which no European writer before him had described. The explanations are copiously interspersed with Chinese characters, and in only one case he got the character wrong-the character he gave for the verb “circumvenire（围棋）is really a noun meaning latitude（纬）．157 Hyde even wrote a Chinese dialogue with Latin and transliterated Chinese side by side,Xé gin tie Yen (Decem Personarum Corvivium Dialogus Sinicus sic dictus). It was left in the state of a torso, because only three out of the ten persons spoke. The conversation is extremely simple and reads like a guide to Chinese colloquial speech for the use of foreigners;for examples:“na li kiu (quo abis)?”“kia li kiu (domum sane)”,“cim leao (et vale)”.158Hyde's Chinese studies have received very inadequate notice from later English orientalists. Even Sir William Jones in his reference to the Chinese chessboard in his essay on “The Indian Game of Chess"159 did not mention the section De Circumveniendi Ludo Chinensium in De Ludis Orientalibus. Hiram Cox was equally silent about Hyde in his commentary on Jones's essay,The Burmha Game of Chess,compared with the Indian,Chinese,and Persian Game of the same Denomination.
It has often been said that England in the eighteenth century was Sinomaniac. But if our survey is correct, it is England in the seventeenth century which showed high admiration for the Chinese.In eighteenth century English literature, as we shall have occasion to show, China is virtually stripped of all her glories. She may be still ignota but she is certainly no longer pro magnifica. The very freedom from “oversubtle thoughts” which had won praise for Confucianism in the seventeenth century was in the eighteenth criticised as mere shallowness in metaphysics and theology.Even the antiquity of Chinese civilisation which had so attracted seventeenth century writers was discredited by eighteenth century ones. The absence of changes in Chinese history and language which had so endeared China to seventeenth century hunters of the “primitive tongue” was singled out by eighteenth century philosophers for condemnation as a sign of unprogressiveness. Suffice it to say for the present that towards the end of the seventeenth century,English people had already begun to show an interest in Chinese knick-knacks, an interest which was to characterise eighteenth century England. Hans Sloane, in Philosophical Transactions in 1698, already devoted unconscionable number of pages to the description of a Chinese cabinet,160 and William King's jibe that “Sloane valued anything that came from the Indies or China" in his parody The Transactioneer 161 was the beginning of the long series of eighteenth skits on the popular craze for chinoiserie.

NOTES

1.Adolf Reichwein:China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century,translated by J. C. Powell. London:Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co. 1925, p. 150. This book has been overrated by some historians of cultural contacts between China and Europe, while Martino's ambitious pioneer study (1906) is still unduly neglected.True,Martino's book is marred by hasty generalisations and inaccuracies (cf. Brunetière's essay mentioned above and Gustave Lanson's “Formation et développement de l'esprit philosophique au XVIII° Siècle (Influence de I'Orient et de l'Extrême-Orient)”in Revue des Cours et Conférences, Mars 1909), and has been superseded by works of more recent dates like Virgile Pinot's La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France (1932). Butit is unquestionably the Bahnbrecher in this field of comparative literature. Mr. T. Kobayashi （小林太市郎），with his alertness about the latest researches， seems to have quite ignored this fact in his painstaking articles on “The French View of China in the 18th Century and Chinese Influence upon French Thought＂ in Shina-Gaku（支那学），April and June，1936．
2. Cf. Richard Hakluyt: Principal Navigations, Voiages,Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. 12 vols. Gasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1903-1905. Vol. V, pp. 451-452;Vol. XI, pp. 417-421.
3.The History of Trauayle,239 recto.“Loutea" is verbatim “old father”, and roughly equivalent to the Cockney“guv'ner”.
4.Hakluyt:Principal Navigations, vol. VI, pp. 259 ff. Purchas: Hakluytus Post-humus or Purchas his Pilgrimes.20 vols.Glasgow:James Maclehose & Sons, 1905-1918.Vol. XI, pp. 566 ff. The Reportes should be compared to Donald Ferguson:Letters from Portuguese Captives in Canton written 1534 and 1536. Bombay.1902.
5.A Discourse of the Nauigation, 46 recto.
6. A Collection of Voyages and Travels compiled from the Curious and Valuable Library of the late Earl of Oxford. 2 vols.London:Printed for Thomas Osborne,1745. Vol.II,pp. 25 ff.
7. There is also Sir George Thomas Staunton's edition for the Hakluyt Society in 1853 with an introduction by R. H.Major. All the references in this article are to the pages of the 1588 edition.
8.Purchas his Pilgrimes,	Vol.XII,pp.142 ff.
9.Ibid.Vol.XI,p.494.
10.The Historie of China,p.25.
11. Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Vol. XI, pp. 378-381.
12. An Exact Discourse etc.London: Printed by W. W. for Walter Burre, 1606,E3.
13.The Voiage and Trauaile of Syr lohn Maundevlle Kright. Oxford University Press. 1932.p.193.
14.The Letters of Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford,edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee. 16 vols. Oxford:At the Clarendon Press, 1903-1905. Vol.XII,p.436.
15. The Arte of Englishe Poesie, edited by G. D.Willcock and A. Walker. Cambridge University Press, 1936.pp.91-95.
16.See Cathay and the Way Thither, being a Collection of Mediaeval Notices of China, edited and translated by Henry Yule. New edition by Henri Cordier.4 vols. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society,1915. The section on Greek and Roman knowledge of China (Vol.I,pp. 1-34 and pp. 183-205) is particularly interesting.
17.The Arte of Englishe Poesie,p. 106.
18. Purchas his Pilgrimes, Vol. XI, p. 524.
19. Historie,p. 185;cf. Purchas, Vol. XII, p. 181.
20. Purchas, Vol. XI, p. 238:Cf. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, translated by Henry Yule, 3r edition revised by Henri Cordier, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1921.Vol. I, pp. 363-364.
21.Marco Polo,Vol.I,p. 299;Purchas,	XI,p.231.
22. Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. II, p. 221. Cf. Hakluyt's Navigaions,Vol.IV,p. 430, and Mandeville's Voiage,p.192(on four“nedders”).
23.Marco Polo,Vol. I,p.394;and Cathay and the Way Thither,Vol. II,
24.Purchas, Vol.XII,p.337.
25.See Jonson's Volpone; or the Fox, act ii, scene 1; and Baudelaire: Mon Coeur mis à Nu,xxxii.
26. The Works of Francis Bacon,edited by J. Spedding,R.L.Ellis and D.D.Heath. 14 vols. London. 1857-1874. Vol. III, p.399.Cf. also			p.439.
27.Ibid.Vol.II,p.448.
28.Ibid.		.II,p.
29.Ibid.Vol.III,p.129.
30.Ibid.	.III,p.
31.Ibid.Vol.III,p.141.
32.Ibid.Vol.III,p.151.
33.Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn,edited by William Bray,4 vols. London: Henry Colbum, 1857. Vol. I, pp. 379-380.
34.Ibid.Vol.IV.p.237.
35.Ibid.Vol.VI,p.516.
36.Historie,p.367.
37.Ibid.pp.92-93.
38.Ibid.p.71;cf. 2nd and 3rd chapters in the 2nd book of the 2nd part of the Historie.
39.Ibid.p.99.
40.The History of Trawayle, 232 verso.
41.Ibid.239 recto.
42.Purchas,		XI,,p..495.
43.Ibid.			p.541
44. Hakluyt's Navigations, Vol. VI, pp. 358-359.
45.John Huyghen van Linschoten:The Voyage to the East Indies, from the old English translation of 1598, edited by A. C. Burnell and P.A. Tiele,2 vols.London:Printed for the Hakluyt Society,1885.Vol.I, p. 135 and pp.142-145.
46.Purchas,Vol.XII,p. 103.
47.Ibid.Vol.XII,p.440.
48. The History of the World,11th edition, printed from a copy revis'd by Himself.To which is prefix'd the Life of the Author by Mr.Oldys,2 vols.London:1736.		I,p.67.
49.Mendoza's Historie,p.101.
50. Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol.I,p.295.
51.Ibid.Vol.I,p.298.
52.Hakluyt's Navigations, Vol. VI, p. 358.
53. Purchas his Pilgrimage. London: Printed by William Stanbury for Henrie Featherstone,1613.p.377.
54.The Voyage to the East Indies,	I,p.
55. Purchas his Pilgrimes,Vol.XII,p.380.
56.Ibid.Vol.XII,p.
57.History ofthe World,Vol.I,p.67.
58.Mendoza's Historie, p.5.
59.Purchas his Pilgrimes,Vol.XII,p.355.
60.Mendoza's Historie,p. 35.
61.A Defence of Rhyme,in G.G. Smith:Elizabethan Critical Essays,2 vols.Oxford:At the Clarendon Press, 1904. Vol. II,p.368.
62.Antomy of Melancholy,edited by A. R. Shileto, with an introduction by A.H.Bullen,3 vols.London:George Bell and Sons. 1904. Vol. I,p.76.
63.Ibid.Vol.I,p.87. 
64.Ibid.Vol.I.p.102.
65.Ibid. Vol. I, pp. 115-116, and Vol. II,p. 161.
66.Ibid.Vol. I, p. 249, also p. 265.
67.Ibld.Vol.I,p.294,also p.420.
68.Ibid.Vol.I,p.304.
69.Ibid.Vol.I,p.409.
70.Ibid.Vol.I,p.419.
71.Ibid.Vol.III,pp.370,373,375,402.
72.Ibid.		I,p.502.
73.Ibid.Vol.II,pp.-
74.Ibid.	.III,p.
75.Ibid.Vol.II,
76.Ibid.Vol.III,p.282.
77. The Works of Sir Thomas Broune, edited by Geoffrey Keynes,6 vols. London:Faber and Gwyer, 1928-1931. Vol. II, pp. 154-155.
78. Pilgrimage, p. 337. Cf. Julius Caesar Scliger: Exotericarum, Exercitatiorumliber quintus decimus de Svblitate ad Hieronymum Cardarum. Lvtetiae: Ex offieina typographica Michaelis Vascosani, 1557.Exercitatio xcii,p. 136.
79. See Historie, p. 22; and Purchas his Pilgrimes, Vol. XI, pp. 505-506.
80.The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, Vol. IV, p. 11.
81.Ibid.Vol.	p.86.
82.Ibid.Vol.	,pp.127-128.
83. John Nievhoff:An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tarar Cham,Emperor of China (published in Amsterdam in 1665 and translated into English by John Ogilvy in 1669),2nd edition. London: Printed by the author at his house in White-Friers, 1673. pp. 248-251.
84. Browne's Works,Vol.	p.128. 
85.The History of Trawayle, 231 recto.
86. Purchas his Pilgrimage, Book IV, chapters xvi and xvii.
87.Cosmographie in Four Books, containing the Chorographie and Historie of the Whole World. London: Printed for Henry Seile, 1652.Book III, pp.206-212.
88.Cf. Cosmographie, p. 206;Historie of China, pp. 14-15;Pilgrimes, Vol.XII,pp.
89.Cosmographie,p. 17.
90.Ibid.p.207.
91.Ibid.p.211.
92.Ibid.p.211.
93.Ibid.p.211.
94.Ibid.p.207.
95. Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn. Vol. III, pp. 137-138.
96. The Miscellaneous Writings of John Evelyn, now first collected by William Upcott. London: Henry Colburn, 1825.p. 275.
97.Ibid.p.654.
98.The History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China,lately written in Italian by Alvarez Semedo, now put into English by a Person of Quality.London:Printed by E.Tyler for Iohn Brook, 1655.p. 55; Purchas his Pilgrimes, Vol. XII, p. 109 and pp.368 ff.
99.The Diary of Samuel Pepys with Lord Braybrooke's notes,edited with additions by Henry Whately, 10 vols. London:George Bell & Sons, 1895.Vol.VII,p. 275 and p.279.
100. Cosmographie, p. 18.
101.An Historical Essay etc. London: Printed for Nath. Brook. 1669. pp. i-iii.
102.Ibid.pp.15-17.
103.Ibid.p.21
104.Ibid.p.26. 
105.Ibid.p.35.
106.Ibid.p.36.
107.Ibid.p.44.
108.Ibid. pp.38-40.
109.Ibid.pp.60 ff.
110. Ibid.p. 93,also p.95.
111.Ibid.pp.190 ff.
112.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1681. No. 180,pp.61 ff.
113.The Primitive Origination of Mankind,London: Printed by William Godbid for William Shrowsbury, 1677. p. 135.
114.Ibid.p.148.
115.Ibid.p.163.
116.The Works of Sir William Temple,4 vols. London, 1770. Vol. III, p.
117.Ibid.Vol.III,pp.229-230.
118.Ibid.Vol.III,	289-291.
119.Ibid.		III,pp.442 ff.
120.Ibid.Vol.III,pp.322-324.
121.Ibid.		.III,p.321.
122.Ibid.Vol.III,	333-334.
123.Ibid.Vol.III,p.333.
124.Ibid.		III,p.332.
125.Ibid.	1.III,p.335.
126. Semedo's History, translated by a Person of Quality,pp.56-57.
127.Ibid.pp.
128.Ibid.p.256.
129. The History of the Conquest of China by the Tartars first writ in Spanish and now rendered English.London:Printed by W.Godbid. p. 500. 
130. A New History of China, done out of French. London:Printed for Thomas Newborough. p.193.
131.See A.Wylie:Notes on Chinese Literature. Shanghai, 1867. pp. xv-xvi.
132. Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. studio et opera Prosperi Intorcetta, Christiani Herdritch, Francisci Rougemont et Philippi Couplet. Parisiis: Apud Danielem Horthemels,1687.Aij.
133.Cf. Fernandez Navarette:An Account of the Empire in China in A. and J. Churchill; A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. London: Printed for A. and J. Churchill, 1704. Vol. I, p.126.
134.The Morals of Confucius.London:Printed for Randall Taylor, 1691. A2 recto.
135. Memoirs and Observations made in a late Journey through the Empire of China. London: printed for Benj. Tooke and Sam. Buckley, 1697. pp.161-163.
136.Mr.D.D. Stuart called my attention to Mr. Y. Z.Chang's article in Modern Language Notes, 1930, pp. 221-224. While quite ready to abandon my own hypothesis,I yet feel bound to reject Mr. Chang's far-fetched decipher of this term as 洒落瑰琦，meaning“the quality of being impressive or surprising through careless or unorderly grace". The four Chinese characters suggested by Mr.Chang forms two phrases and mean simply “graceful (easy) and wonderful (magnificent)”.Mr. Chang seems to have been at some pains to twist them to suit the text, and gratuitously interpolated the word “quality” to make a noun clause ofthem.But he failed to see that the two phrases are in the established Chinese usage only applied to human beings and rarely if ever to inanimate landscape. He quoted from the 
Dictionary of Phrases（辞源）to show that they are good idioms， but he completely ignored the illustrative quotations given in that dictionary. Besides, Temple had written explicity:“They say the sharawadgi is fine or admirable";the term must therefore be a substantive.Mr.Chang's“nice derangement of epitaphs” would make the whole statement a tautology, while missing the characteristic of the Chinese gardens.
137.The Conquest of China by the Tartars;A Tragedy. London:Printed by T.M.for Cademan,1676.p.6.
138.Ibid.p.24.
139.Ibld.p.32.
140.Ibid.p.27.
141.Ibid.pp.60-61.
142.Ibid.p.67.
143.Momus Triumphans. London: Printed for N. C. 1688. p.24.
144.An Account of the English Dramatic Poets. Oxford:printed by L. L.for George West and Henry Clements,1691. p. 440.
145. Cosmographie, p.211.
146. Nievhoff: An Embassy, the second half of Chapter xviii and the whole Chapter xix;Adam Olearius. The Voyages and Travels of John Albert Mandelslo, translated by John Davis. London:Printed for Thomas Dring and John Starkey. 1622. pp. 237 ff.
147. The Fairy Queen. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson,1692.pp. 48-49.
148. The Works of John Dryden,illustrated with notes and a Life of the Author by Sir Walter Scott,revised and corrected by George Saintsbury, 18 vols. Edinburgh:Printed for William Paterson, 1882-1893. Vol. XVIII, pp. 133-134. 
149.Ibid. Vol. XVIII,p. 138.
150.Ibid.Vol.I,p.345.
151.Colleced Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,edited by John Hayward.The Nonesuch Press, 1926. pp. 239-247.
152.J.B. Eames: The English in China.London: Isaac Pitman & Sons,1909.p.13.
153. The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia edited by Sir Richard Carnac Temple and L. M. Anstey, 6 vols. Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1907-1936. Vol. III, part i, p. 303.
154. The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary of Oxford 1632-1695,described by Himself, collected by Andrew Clark, 3 vols. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1894. Vol. III, pp. 236-237.
155.Athenae Oxonienses, a new edition with Additions and Continuation by Philip Bliss, 4 vols. London, 1820. Vol. IV, column 526.I am indebted to Mr. Hsiang Ta（向达）.for this reference.
156. De Mensuris,etc., Oxoniae: e Theatro Sheldonio,1688. Qq.3 verso et seq.
157. De Ludis Orientalibus, Oxonii: e Theatro Sheldoniano, 1694.pp.70-101,195-201,211,214-216.
158. W. Ouseley: Oriental Collections, 3 vols. London,1797-1800. Vol. III, pp. 71-74.
159. The Works of Sir William Jones, 6 vols. London, 1799.Vol. I,p.523.
160. Philosophical Transactions, 1698. Vol. XXI, No. 246, 247,No.249,No.250.
161. The Original Works of William King, 3 vols. London: Printed for the editor,1776. Vol.II,pp.14-15.Mr.H. F.B.Brett-Smith showed me this passage. 




II China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century*

＊From Quarter Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography（《中国图书季刊》），II (1941),pp.7-48;113-152. 

PART I
This essay is a hotchpotch of incidentalreferences,occasional articles and other waifs and strays in eighteenth-century English books and periodicals. Translations from Chinese literature, tales on Chinese subjects and full-length books on China will be reserved for treatment in another article. We shall say nothing of the vogue of Chinese architecture, Chinese style of gardening and Chinese furniture and wall-paper in eighteenth-century England.Readers curious about that craze should consult the chapters on taste, architecture and the garden and the interior of the house in the second volume of Johnson's England', an invaluable guide to eighteenth-century English life. Those scholarly accounts can be supplemented by Adolf Reichwein's China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century2 and the chapter on the rococo style in G.F. Hudson's Europe and China3. Of course references to that vogue which occur in belles-lettres and polite literature are grist to our mill; what we exclude from this study are only those technical discussions written by specialists like Chippendale and the Halfpenny brothers.And it is our belief that a study of literary references to the Chinese craze will complement the picture painted of eighteenth-century English taste in the above-mentioned books.
Writers have been misled by the craze for Chinese things in eighteenth-century English life to suppose that a similar enthusiasm must have also pervaded eighteenth-century English letters. As a matter of fact, the eightenth-century English attitude towards China as revealed in literature is the reverse of that as revealed in life. Paradoxically enough, sinophilism seems to have waned in English literature as it waxed in English life. Literature may be related to the life around in one of the three ways. It may reproduce the society which produces it, thus reinforcing its likes and dislikes-votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia-by simply echoing them.Or it may be an escape from the life around:the mirror which it holds up to society is somewhat like the looking-glass in Lewis Carroll's famous fantasy-a thing to be walked through rather than looked into. Finally,as in the present case,it may be an outspoken “criticism of life” in the literal sense of the term.The English literature of the eighteenth century is full of unfavourable criticisms of Chinese culture in general and the prevailing fashion of chinoiserie in particular. It seems to be a corrective rather than a reflection of the social milieu in which it is produced. Indeed,the enthusiasm for Chinese culture appears to have reached its highest pitch in the English literature of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century witnessed its gradual decline among intelligentsia and men of letters. This decline cannot be facilely explained by the proportionate increase in knowledge about China: it is not a case of contempt born of familiarity. In oriental studies the English have always lagged behind the French. Eighteenth-century Englishmen had no equivalents in their own language to D'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale (1677),Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses écrites des Missions Etrangères par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus (1780), Mémoires concernant l'Histoire,les Sciences,les Arts, les Usages des Chinois par les Missionnaires de Pékin (1776-1780) and De Mailla's Histoire Générale de la Chine (1777-1784), based upon Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou and laid under levy by Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (chap.26). And we shall see presently that the two chief source-books for eighteenth-century Englishmen on China and things Chinese are both by French Jesuits. But this familiarity with Chinese civilisation did not breed any contempt among the French at all;on the contrary, their admiration for China became excessive in the eighteenth century.Pierre Martino,for instance, says in his L'Orient dans la Littérature Française au XVIIe et au XVIIle Siecle that with the publication of Voltaire's Essai sur les Moeurs in 1760 China attained to the summit of her glory among the French.4 It is therefore undiscriminating to generalise as Reichwein does that the year 1700 was the year in which the affections of the learned world in Europe were turned towards China.5 However true that may be of Germany and France, it is certainly not true of England where that stage had already been left behind. This discrepancy is only another example of that inscrutability of the whirligig of taste, and the inevitable loose-jointedness in generalisations about the spirit of the age. The “imperfect sympathy"between England and China in the eighteenth century is clearly shown in George Lord Anson's A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL,I,II, III,IV (1748),the first book since Peter Mundy's Travels,in which an Englishman discusses Chinese people from fist-hand knowledge and experience. And what a contrast to Peter Mundy! Lord Anson skirted only the coast of Canton and had never beenin China proper, but his brief stay did not prevent him from forming the most cocksure unfavourable opinion of the Chinese character. Even the warm reception of him by the Viceroy of Canton whom he thought “more intelligent than any other person of the nation," could not tone down the asperities of his criticism.Before he set foot on Chinese soil, he saw a few Chinese fishing boats. The fishermen refused to go on board his ship even when he tempted them “by a number of dollar, a most alluring bait for Chinese of all ranks and professions". Thereupon Lord Anson flared up and cursed their “inattention and want of curiosity”,“an incontestable symptom of a mean and contemptible disposition which alone is a sufficient confutation of the extravagant panegyrics,which many hypothetical writers have bestowed on the ingenuity and capacity of this nation".°That slight incident seems to have prejudiced him against Chinesepeople ever after. Apart from a short description of the banquet given by Lord Anson tothe Chinese mandarins who were very much disgusted with the beef served,we find nothing by way of local colour in the chapter on China.Horace Walpole,in a letter to the Earl of Stratford(5 July, 1751),dismissed the book as a romance.7 However that may be, Lord Anson's outburst on the “panegyrics of hypothetical writers”is a fairly good straw to know the wind of eighteenth-century English opinion by.
Our search for sources is made easy by the fact that almost all the writers quotedbelow indicated their own sources. The sources are invariably two, Le Comte whom we have already cited in the preceding article and Du Halde who even came to supersede Le Comte. Their predecessors are but very rarely referred to. A. L. Sells, in his Les Sources Franaises de Goldsmith , rightly describes Le Comte andDu Halde as the two legitimate sources from which every writer upon China could borrow his local colour without being accused of plagiarism.8 Le Comte's Nouveaux Mémoires sur l'Etat Présent de la Chine (1696) was translated into English under the title Memoirs and Observations made in a Late Journey through the Empire of China and published by Benjamin Tooke and Samuel Buckley in 1697.° The book is extremely laudatory in tone,and in the original French edition there is a dedication to Louis XIV in which Le Comte audaciously compared the Roi Soleil to the Chinese Emperor.In 1762, thirty-three years afterthe death of Louis Le Comte the faculty of divinity of Paris fell foul of the book on account of its praise of the Chinese religion and induced the parliament to decree the book to be burnt. These facts should be borne in our mind in order to appreciate better the independence of spirit of English writers who borrowed Le Comte's facts without imbibing his opinions. In the English translation, there is an “introduction directed in a letter to Sir G. M. Baronet, and W. M. Esquire, members of Parliament”, and we find in John Nichols's Literary Anecdotes that Tancred Robinson is the author of this epistle.10 But comprehensive as Le Comte's Memoirs are, J. B. du Halde's Description Geographique,Historique,Chronologique,Politique et Physique de l'Empire de la Chine et de Tartarie Chinoise (1735) leaves them nowhere. Pierre Martino considers it the great work upon China in the eighteenth century. Its fame son spread into England and two translations appeared in rapid succession: one done by R. Brookes under the title The General History of China and printed by and for John Watts in four quarto volumes in 1736, and the other a more faithful version printed by Edward Cave from 1738 to 1741 under the title A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese Tartary, together with the Kingdoms of Korea and Tibet:Containing the Geography and History of those Countries in two folio volumes.
Johnson wrote two essays on Du Halde's book. He reviewed the second translation in the June, July and September numbers of the Gentleman's Magazine of 1742, praised Du Halde's book as “copious,accurate and authentic”,“incontestably better than all that have hitherto appeared”,and “leaving very little room for large additions from succeeding Travellers however diligent and sagacious", and gave in passing a back-handed slap on Watts for “obtruding” Brookes's translation upon the world, a translation which is marred by“disingenuity, fraud and incoherence” but which Johnson would not criticise in detail for fear of exposing himself “to the suspicion of resenting rather the injury done to ourselves than to the Publick"." This monumental work on China was curiously enough written by a Jesuit who had never been in China and had to piece together by means of ant-like industry informations given by other people. Voltaire in Le Siècle de Louis XIV described the work as by far the best work inthe world on China compiled by a man who never stirred one step out of Paris.12 Isaac Disraeli, acting too rashly upon Voltaire's verdict,ranked the book among “literary impostures” in Curiosities of Literature on the ground that Du Halde “compiled it from the Memoirs of the Missionaries and never travelled ten leagues from Paris in his life”.13 But Du Halde never for once concealed the fact that he had compiled the work from “a prodigious quantity of Memoirs sent from China” and “frequent conversations with certain Missionaries returned from China”;on the contrary he even intended to send the finished book to China “to be examined by some oldest Missionaries."14 English readers, however, did not all endorse Johnson's opinion of the book. For instance, a writer in the Monthly Review (November 1749) pointed out that Du Halde had never been in China and accused his compilation of being “not only in numberless instances a very partial one,but calculated evidently for purposes the most pernicious to truth".15
We shall begin with Jonathan Swift. His references to China are all very slight and do not presuppose much acquaintance with writings on this subject. In A Tale of a Tub (1704) he expressed the wish of having his book translated into “any of the oriental languages especially the Chinese,”16 and mentioned the shape of Chinese wagons. This partiality for the Chinese tongue can be explained by a passage in A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the EnglishTongue (1712) where he praised the Chinese language for remaining “unaltered by the frequent conquest of Tartars”, and being used in “books above two thousand years old".18 It is not unlike Bacon's preference of Latin to English because Latin cannot “play the bankrupt with books”, or Waller's advice to poets in his Of English Verse to carve in the“lasting marble” of Latin and Greek because English changes and grows. In The Right of Precedence between Physicians and Civilians enquired into (1720),Swift had a reference to Chinese physic,which is based upon Sir William Temple's essay on the cure of gout by Moxa.19 In Gulliver's Travels (1726) we find a charming joke on the way in which the Lilliputians write-“neither from the left to the right,like the Europeans; nor from the right to the left,like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians;but aslant from one corner of the paper to the other,like ladies in England".20 We are also told that the Brobdingnagians “have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of mind".2 This comparison which is evidently meant to be complimentary, shows that Swift's opinion of China is not low, though he might be unaffected by Sir William Temple's contagious enthusiasm. What a pity that Gulliver who visited Japan from Luggnagg should have gone thence to Amsterdam without paying a short visit to China!
What Gulliver had omitted to do, Robinson Crusoe did. In the second part of the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe(1720), Defoe described his hero's impressions of China (chapters xiii and xiv). In spite of Defoe's genius for realisticdetails,these two chapters are rather shadowy.His knowledge of China is apparently inadequate for the purpose, and he has to spread it thin. He forestalls our criticism by the following remark:“I shall make no more descriptions of countries and people: it is none of my business or any part of my design; but giving an account of my own adventures."But Robinson Crusoe had no adventures worthy of the name when he travelled through China with a Portuguese pilot as his guide. He recorded only his impressions and reflections on Chinese life,and very early came to the following conclusion:“It is observable,that we wonder at the grandeur,the riches,the pomp, the ceremonies,the govemment,the manufactures,the commerce, and the conduct of these people; not that they are to be wondered at...but because, having first a notion of the barbarity of these countries, the rudeness and the ignorance that prevail there,we do not expect to find any such things so far	off".22 Then he went on ruthlessly discrediting “all the fine things our people say of them at home”,and belittled Chinese architecture,manufacture,trade (“our city of London has more trade than all their mighty empire") and especially the Chinese army. He called Pekin “a city miserably cultivated" and laughed to scorn the reputed industriousness and prosperity of the Chinese,“naked savages of America being more happy".23 He said a good word for Chinese porcelain, the only “singularity” in which the Chinese “may be allowed to excel"24 and admired the Long Wall“as a very great work”25. To these charges he returned to Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (chapter IV).“Having such a boundless conceit of their own wisdom, we are obliged to allow them more than they have.”26“Their religion summed up in Confucius' maxims ... is really not so much as a refined paganism."27“Their government is absolute tyranny, the easiest way of ruling in the world”.28 Even the Chinese ingenuity in mechanics made so much of by travellers and seventeenth-century English writers, was dismissed as falling infinitely short of “ours”except in porcelain manufacture and lacquering..29	In a contemptuous reference to the Chinese worship of idols,he acknowledged Le Comte as his source.30
Defoe is evidently in reaction against the seventeenth-century view of China.His analysis of the cause of this earlier attitude is quite subtle:the excess of admiration that the seventeenth-century writers conceived of China arose partly from the pleasant surprise of finding China more civilised than they had expected, and partly from the proneness to take the Chinese at their own estimate. If Defoe had also mentioned the enchantment lent to China by distance,his diagnosis would have been complete.
As we shall see later, Defoe's remarks almost set the tone of the eighteenth-century English criticism of China. Writers repeated what Defoe had said without perhaps being aware of the fact.These adverse criticisms in Robinson Crusoe also throw a sidelight upon Defoe's earlier romance,The Consolidator or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705). We know The Consolidator to be a satire on the English parliament. What critics have ignored is the reason why Defoe should have given the Chinese the credit of having invented this train de luxe to the moon. Read in the light of Robinson Crusoe's reflections on Chinese government and Chinese ingenuity in mechanics,the double-edged irony of the conception of this romance becomes obvious. Witness, for instance, the deadly pince-sans-rire of his praise of the mechanical ingenuity of this people who invented the “Apezolanthaukanistes”or Consolidator:“What we call modern inventions are,not only far from being inventions,but fall so short of the perfection of art they have attained to, that it is hardly credible what wonderful things we are told of from hence".31 Robinson Crusoe sneered at “the gross and absurd ignorance of the Chinese of the motion of heavenly bodies"32 and yet the Consolidator could have been invented only by a people extremely advanced in the study of astronomy, as Defoe himself pointed out. The whole conception is thus subtly ironic. Defoe's other references to China in Captain Singleton and A New Voyage round the World are all insignificant, being concerned entirely with cargo and trade.33 We need not give the details of his debt to Le Comte, because in his Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe,A. W. Secord has given a five-page analysis of what he calls“Defoe's offhand elaborationsof Le Comte's suggestions".34 Nevertheless Secord is misleading with regard to the real nature of Defoe's borrowings from Le Comte. To begin with, Defoe did not “elaborate” or embroider much upon the facts he had taken over from Le Comte,and, as we have just said, the chapters on China in the second part of Robinson Crusoe are rather devoid of local colour.His “elaborations” largely take the form of sentiments and reflections which are definitely not “suggested” by Le Comte.
We have already said something about the laudatory tone of Le Comte's Memoirs. Le Comte,it is true, was rather put out by the self-conceit of the Chinese,but he hastened to add that they are really“endued with rae qualities" and that the Chinese government “furnishesus with an infinite number of examples of conspicuous wisdom".35 Compare further Le Comte's praise of Chinese astronomers and eulogy of Confucius with Defoe's thoughts on these subjects,and one will immediately see that Defoe had the courage of his own convictions and did not merely “say ditto” to Le Comte. He took Le Comte's account with a large dose of qualifying salt, and it is this dose of qualifying salt which constitutes the peculiar interest of our study.36 Seord also assumes that Defoe must have seen Dionysius Kao's Short Description of China annexed to Ides's Three Years Travels from Moscow Overland to China. But Kao, being a Chinese, was pardonably patriotic and boastful in his Description, and even his new faith in Christianity did not lessen his admiration for what Defoe contemptuously dismissd as“refined paganism”.37
Bernard Mandeville's one reference to Chinese history is slight but significant. In the sixth dialogue between Horatio and Cleomenes in The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1723),we find Confucius's account of the creation of the world dismissed as “less rational, and fifty times more extravagant, and incredible than anything contain'd in the Pentateuch”.38 This is perhaps a mistake, because Confucius was very sceptical about the myth of the beginning of the world. What Mandeville had in mind is probably the legends retold by the credulous Jesuits,which had nowhere been sponsored by Confucius himself. We shall see later many writers taking up again the charge of the “fabulous antiquity"of Chinese history and taking Jesuits severely to task for their credulity.
The Chinese tales of Addison and Steele will be dealt with elsewhere. At present, we confine ourselves to the incidental references in Addison's work. In the Spectator number 189 (1711),he quoted from Le Comte the Chinese law of punishing parricides.39 In the Guardian number 96 (1713), he quoted again from Le Comte the Chinese custom of conferring honours after death.40 In the Freeholder number 4 (1716),he referred to the "barbarous politics" of Chinese husbands in “diminishing the basis of the female figure” by spoiling the shape of women's feet so as to “unqualify a woman for an evening walk or a country dance”,and enjoined all English ladies to “be on the side of the Freeholder” to denounce this evil policy.4 The first reference to the bound feet of Chinese ladies occurs in Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia where Browne not only thinks all Chinese, male and female, to have small feet,but,being a sort of Lamarkian before Lamark,believes in the possibility of this artificial and acquired characteristic being inherited.42 Addison shows more common sense and, thanks to Le Comte,is better informed.43 Addison was also the first man since Sir William Temple to plead for Sharawaggi in gardening. In the Spectator number 414, we find the following passage:“Writers, who have given us an account of China, tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are lain out by the rule and line;because they say, any one may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to show a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the imaginatio at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect. Our British gardeners,on the contrary, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible.Our trees rise in cones,globes and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush."44 The indebtedness to Temple is self-evident. In the next number of the Spectator Addison praised the“eastern magnificence" of the Wall of China.45
If Addison did not explicitly quote Sir William Temple, Pope did. In the Guardian number 173 (1713),Pope quoted Temple and attacked the practice of “verdant sculpture” in contemporary English gardening with more acidulousness than Addison.46 In a letter to Robert Digby (August 12, 1723),he even mentioned the “Sharawaggis of China” by name, and thought that“they were certainly both very great and very wild"47 Pope also paid a tribute to Confucius in The Temple of Fame (1715). On the Eastern front of the temple,
Superior,and alone. Confucius stood,
Who taught that useful science, to be good.48
Joseph Spence, like Addison and Pope, was also a populariser of the Chinese style of gardening in England. His translation of Père Attiret's letter on Chinese gardening in 1752 is the earliest detailed document in English on this subject. Spence translated this letter under the pseudonym“Sir Hary Beaumont", and his translation was reviewed in the Monthly Review (December,1752) and later included in Percy's Miscellaneous Pieces relating to the Chinese. Jean Denis Attiret was a French missionary employed by the Chinese emperor to paint the apartments in his pleasure garden. His letter, dated November 1, 1743, was addressed to M. d'Assaut of Paris, and later included in that fine collection Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses.49 Spence's version,entitled A Particular Account of the Emperor of China's Gardens near Pekin50, was an abridged one, the last “fourteen or fifteen pages” being omitted “which treat only of the author's private affairs"51. The letter is entirely a description of Yuan Ming Yuan, the famous pleasure garden of the Manchu emperors inPeking. As a painter to the Chinese emperor “Canghy",52 Père Attiret hadaccess to this garden which was then even closed to Chinese courtiers. From the bewildering details of description, one idea stands out: the Chinese despise straight lines and “chuse a beautiful Disorder,and a wandering as far as possible from all Rules of Art”. To this Spence judiciously added a foot-note:“The Author seemshere to have form'd his opinion only from the Garden in which he was employ'd; for this is not universally the case in the Pleasure-houses of the Emperor of China. I have lately seen some Prints... in which the Disposition of the Ground,Water, and Plantations, is indeed quite irregular; but the Houses, Bridges, and Fences, are all of a regular Kind".53 This is simply another instance of the pinch of salt with which English writers of this century used to take French statements about China. We shall return to Père Attiret's letter in connexion with Sir William Chamber's Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. Suffice it to say for the present that Père Attiret unconsciously corroborated from personal observations the idea of Sharawaggi which Sir William Temple had larned by hearsay.
There are also a few passages on China in Spence's own book, Anecdotes,Observations, and Characters of Books and Men. In section II (1730-1732) there is a long report of the conversation of Dean Francis Lockier who echoed unawares Defoe's opinion on China.“Surely the Chinese are not the wise people they have been cried up.... It is true they had astronomy,gunpowder and printing, for perhaps these two thousand years: but how little have they improved on each of those articles in all that time!”The Dean went on to say that the Chinese are "the worst soldiers in the world" because they “encourage a spirit of peace”,that Chinese philosophers are “all atheists” and the Chinese classics all put together are not more than Pentateuch.54 All these remarks should be read alongside of Robinson Crusoe's criticisms: the opinions of both on Chinese gunnery, printing, astronomy, army and philosophy are surprisingly similar. In section III of the Anecdotes, we find a list of the intended publications of M. Fouquet, Bishop of Eleutheropolis: all the most select and sacred books of the Chinese in one volume which will not be so much as the Pentateuch,a Latin translation of the Chinese family ritual with a dissertation on their funerals prefixed to it,a treatise to prove that the character tao signifies the great God, and a discussion of Chinese“mystic”books in a work entitled “The Temple of the Most Ancient Wisdom”.Spence observed sardonically that Fouquet was working on so many designs that “I feared he would never finish one of them,which proved to be the case”.55
Fouquet was a Frenchman. The only English writer in the eighteenth century who felt a similar interest in Chinese philosophy and theology, and showed a thorough acquaintance with Chinese classics in translation was the Chevalier Andrew Michel Ramsay. Ramsay's book, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1749), once described as “the most remarkable book of the age”,56 is now well-nigh forgotten. It contains a fine study of the Chinese philosophy of religion, illustrated with copious citations from the Five Classics of Confucian Canon and interpreted with great philosophical acumen.If Ramsay's work had been known to the literary critic of the Eatanswell Gazette when he revieweda book on Chinese metaphysics, that ingenious writer need not perhaps“read for metaphysics under the letter M” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,and for China under the letter C in the same, and finally “combine his information”.57 He showed the resemblance between the Chinese view and the doctrine in the Old Testament, and came to the conclusion that the Chinese classics “represent God as eternal, incorporeal, sovereignly one, and supremely intelligent,the just rewarder of the good, and punisher of the bad, whose justice is mercy and whose punishments are cures”.58
Spence's criticism of what the French called the Jardin anglo-chinois is a matter-of-fact one; it aims at showing that Chinese gardens are not necessarily planned according to the principle of irregular beauty or beautiful disorder. Thomas Gray went even further and denied that contemporary English gardening had owed anything to the Chinese style. In a letter to How (September 10, 1763),he said:“That the Chinese have this beautiful Art in high perfection,seems very probable from the Jesuit's Letters, and more from Chamber's little discourse publish'd some few years ago,but it is very certain, we copied nothing from them, nor had anything but nature for our model. It is not forty years,since the Art was born among us; and it is sure, that there was nothing in Europe like it, and as sure we then had no information on this head from China at all”.William Mason's note to this passage is worth quoting:“I question whether this be not saying too much. Sir William Temple's account of the Chinese gardens was published some years before this period; and it is probable that might have promoted our endeavours,not indeed of imitating them,but of imitating (what he said was their archetype) Nature".59 Of course, Addison and Pope should not be overlooked in this matter.
Mason's criticism of the then fashionable Chinese style in gardening cuts deeper than Gray's or Spence's. He goes to the root of the matter and attacks the Jardin anglo-chinois on aesthetic grounds.But before we consider Mason's witty criticisms, we have to dwell a little on the writings of the butt of Mason's wit.Strictly speaking,Sir William Chambers's Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensils (1757) and A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) fall beyond the scope of our study. But they had an enormous influence in their day,and their drift is still misunderstood. His picture of Chinese gardens is on the whole imaginary, though the fact that he had been in China might have made his contemporaries accept it as true on his authority.Chambers first gave a brief account of the Art of Laying out Gardens among the Chinese in his Designs, which contains the germ of his later and more ambitious Dissertation :“Nature is their pattern and their aim is to imitate her in all her beautiful irregularities".60 In the Dissertation, his indebtedness to Père Attiret's letter is apparent, though he referred to Père Attiret only once,and about an insignificant point at that. For example, the description of the illumination of Chinese gardens on “the feast of the lanthorns" is bodily lifted from Attiret's letter as if what Attiret says of the Imperial pleasure garden were applicable to ordinary Chinese gardens.61
As to the three varieties of scenery in Chinese gardens-“Pleasing,terrible and surprizing”,2 the shifting scenes which can change with the different hours of the day,63 the philosophical Chinese gardeners who are not, like their European confrères, "petty architects"64 and make shrewd criticismsof “European taste" or the lack of	,all these are fictitious on the very face of them. Indeed, Chambers seems to have considered Chinese gardening a peg to hang his own ideas on, as well as a stick to beat his confrères with, confrères, as Mason pointed out in the preface to his Heroic Epistle, in “the paltry and mean English style of gardening" like“Kent, Southcote, Hamilton Brown”. The early nineteenth-century English sinologue Sir John Francis Davies alone seems to have understood the fictitious character of Chambers's essay:“The Chinese style of omnamental gardening, and of laying out pleasuregrounds, has been very much overdrawn by Sir William Chambers,in an essay on that subject, which may be considered quite as a work of imagination in itself".66
Another thing noteworthy in Chambers's essay is that it is not in the line of the Sharawaggi tradition. Temple and Addison both mentioned the scom of straight line as quintessential to the Chinese style of gardening. Attiret, too, laid special emphasis on the “serpentizing" of rivers, paths, and bridges in Yuan Mng Yuan.67 Later French writers followed suit; for instance, another Jesuit missionary wrote:“Le grand art de ces jardins est de copier la nature dans toute sa simplicité, de séparer de ses désordres, et de se cacher sous le voile de ses irregularités".68 But Chambers on his part repeatedly discredited this view:“The Chinese generally avoid straight lines;yet they do not absolutely reject them....Roads they always make straight.... Where the gound is entirely level, they look upon it as an absurdity to make a serpentine road”. Again,“The Chinese are no enemies to straight lines;because they are productive of grandeur.... Nor have they any aversion to regular geometrical figures, which they say are beautiful in themselves".69 Remarks likethese and other minor details not found in Attiret(e.g. the mention of Miang Ting on page 30)prove that Chambers was far from being a mere populariser of Temple's Sharawaggi. Besides irregularity and “serpentizing”, there is another element in the Sharawaggi style, to wit,wilderness or naturalness, which Chambers also disregarded. We have seen how Addison praised the art that “conceals art” in Chinese gardens and how Pope stressed the fact that Chinese gardens are “very great and very wild”. The Chinese gardens as depicted by Chambers, however,are out-and-out artificial, with their“buildings,statutes, busts,bas-reliefs and every production of the chisel".70 Even Chambers himself deemed it necessary to forestall the objection of “unnaturalness"by saying that most improvements upon nature are unnatural.7 What had begun as the “imitation of nature in all her beautiful irregularities” ended as improvement upon the “scantiness” of nature by“ostentatious show” of art.7 The result is that Chinese gardens, as Chambers himself admits, are entirely divested of their rural characters and have the appearance of “splendid cities”.73 Surely a long way from the Sharawaggi indeed! Perhaps the spirit of the Augustan age was too strong for Chambers: he had to tone down the Chinese audacities,and hold that the art of gardening too is “not nature, but nature methodised”!
Chambers's unwitting reductio ad absurdum was soon seized upon by William Mason. In 1773, the year after the publication of Chambers's Dissertation, appeared Mason's An Heroic Epistle in answer to Sir William Chambers, to which An Heroic Postscript was added in 1774. The Epistleset the whole town laughing and was tremendously popular.74 Indeed, it was so popular that Sir William Chambers,smarting with the darts of its satire, could also“console himself with its having sold him 300 copes of his own book,” as Horace Walpole reported.75 The satire, of course,is not entirely taken up with Chambers and gardening but concemed with many things besides. Mason attacked the English king, his ministers,his courts and his policies, and had to create a lot of mystification about the authorship.6 The couplet on Hume suggested undoubtedly by Horace's Epicuri de grege porcum (Epistolae 1, 4)
Who there supinely designs to lye
The fattest Hog of Epicurus'sty,
is delightfully quotable and has been frequently applied to the man who,in a somewhat cognate French phrase,“soigne son cochon”. Mason himself in An Heroic Postscript describes the “vein of irony”in the Epistle as“solemn"(verse 37). He unerringly laid his finger upon the artificiality of what Chambers had called nature:
For what is Nature? Ring her changes round,
Her three flat notes of water,plants,and ground:
Prolong the peal,yet spite of all clatter,
The tedious chime is still ground, plants and water...
Come then,prolific Art,and with thee bring
The charms that rise from thy exhaustless spring...
There at one glance,the royal eye shall meet
Each varied beauty of St. James's Street.”
Walpole's attitude is like that of Gray. In his notes to Mason's preface to An Heroic Epistle,he said:“Sir William Chambers,who was far from wanting Taste in Architecture, fell into the mistake of the French,who suppose that the Chinese had discovered the true style in Gardens long before Kent; and in order to deprive Him and England of the Honour of originality, the French call our style the Anglo-chinois Garden:whereas, the Chinese wander as far from nature as the French themselves, tho in opposite extremes....The imitation of Nature in Gardens is indisputably English"78. Hehad made the same contention in an earlier essay On Modern Gardening which first appeared in the fourth volume of the Anecdotes of Painting in England (printed at Strawberry Hill in 1771 and published in 1780):“They [the Chinese gardens] are as whimsically irregular as European gardens are formally uniform and unvaried-but with regard to nature, it seems as much avoided as in the squares and oblongs and straight lines of our ancestors.”Except a “determined irregularity”, he found nothing in Spence's translation of Attiret that could give him any idea of "attention being paid to nature”. Then in a lengthy footnote, he discussed the term “le goût Anglo-chinois” as a “blunder” given by the French who chose “to be obliged to more remote rivals" and “deny us half the merit".79 Thus,like Gray,Walpole denied the Chinese origin of the Jardin anglo-chinois; but, like Mason, he denied the connection between the Chinese styleand the English style not on historical grounds, as Gray did, but on aesthetic ones. It is also interesting to note that Walpol had known Sir William Chambers before the appearance of the Dissertation, and his “good opinion”of Chambers survived the “mistake” Chambers fell into.80
Walpole's sprightly Chinese Letters and Hieroglyphic Tales are reserved for discussion in the next article. In the two essays intended for the World and now included among Fugitive Pieces, there are interesting references to China. In the first paper,he simulated a letter written in “hyperbolic style of the East” by“a Chinese or Indian” on “the vaste tracts of land which Europeans call libraries".81 This fragment is perhaps the second piece of deliberate parody of the Chinese-Babu style in English,the first being done by Steele,as we shall see in the next article. In the second paper, Walpole returned to the subject of libraries and books, and declared himself the “Inquisitor of the World of Books" in imitation of the Chinese emperor Chi Hoang Ti of the Long Wall fame who had burnt books and persecuted scholars. An account of Chi Hoang Ti's ruthless vandalism follows which Walpole admitted to be based on Du Halde.82 Walpole,indeed,seems to have taken an interest in Chinese history pretty early in his life, as can be seen in his correspondence with John Whaley and Lord Hervey. As early as 1735 when Walpole was only eighteen years old,John Whaley and Lord Hervey chaffed him about his enthusiasm for China.83 Lord Hervey,though “glad to hear” the “strong effect” of Chinese history upon Walpole,and the “change” wrought in him, advised him "to continue an Englishman”.84 In 1744, John Whaley enclosed an imitation of Horace in a letter to Walpole which contains the line:“Or do you thro: Ideal China rove”.85 The year later,Walpole wrote to George Montague (1 August, 1745):“If I was not so indeed, I think I should rather put into practice the late Duchess of Bolton's geographical revolution of going to China”.86 Walpole,to be sure, outlived his youthful enthusiasm,but Paul Yvon in La Vie d'un Dilletante has certainly pitched the case too low, for instance, in dismissing the name “Poyang” given by Walpole to his goldfish pond as simply an effect of the fashion.87 It is more than that, and shows a more or less intimate knowledge of Chinese geography. Poyang is but one of the many lakes named in Du Halde, but it is the lake on whose banks China ware is manufactured.88 The christening of the goldfish pond by Poyang strikes us as singularly appropriate,when we remember Gray's lines on Walpole's drowned cat who was tempted by the glittering and golden content of "the lofty vase dy'd by China's gayest art”. Walpole's references to China in his letters are numerous. The two most interesting are concerned with the Russian embassy to China. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann(May 11,1769),he wrote:“Don't you love the Chinese? Czernichew, her sumptuous minister here, was named for the Embassy to China, but the emperor said he would not receive an ambassador from a murderess. How often what we call barbarians make Europeans blush!"89 He returned tothe story in another letter to Mann (October 26, 1777):“Is it not shocking that the law of nations and the law of politeness, should not yet have abrogated the laws of justice and good sense in a nation reckoned so civilised as the Chinese?”90
William Warburton's opinion of China is also worth recording. In The Divin Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1741),he devoted a long section to the Chinese language and reproduced two copperplates of Chinese characters from Kircher and Martini. Warburton acknowledged Kircher, Le Comte and Du Halde to be the authorities for his data, but the opinions are all his own. He considered Chinese writing an improvement upon the Egyptian hieroglyphics which in turn is an improvement upon the picture-writing of the Mexicans. Thus, Chinese characters represent“the last advance of hieroglyphics towards alphabetic writing".91“The opposite progress in the issue of hieroglyphic writing in Egypt and China...can be easily accounted for by the different genius of the two people. The Egyptians were extremely inventive...while the Chinese are known to be the least inventive people upon earth; and not much given to mystery”.“The Chinese, which, in its long duration, hath brought this picture down, through hieroglyphics,to a simple mark, or character,hath not yet (from the poverty of its inventive genius,and its aversion to foreign commerce) been able to find out an abridgement of those marks, by letters”.93 But Warburton denied emphatically that the Chinese had borrowed their “real characters” from Egypt and rightly refuted the opinion of the French academician and orientalist, De Guignes, who seems to have taken a hint from Warburton himself and developed a "fanciful analysis" of his own. The moral of Warburton's refutation is that “similitude need not arise out of communication”. Thus, Warburton arrived at the same conclusion about the poverty of the inventive genius of the Chinese as Defoe and Dean Lockier had before him, though from a different approach. We shall see presently that Johnson's aspersions on the Chinese are also based on linguistic grounds. It is interesting to notice that the English periodicals of the eighteenth century, while paying considerable attention to the controversy among French scholars on the Egyptian origin of Chinese characters and dvoting much space to extracts from De Guignes's articles in Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres,never for once mentioned the sounder view of Warburton-witness, for examples, the Gentleman's Magazine of January 1760 and October 1769, and the appendices in the Monthly Review of 1764, 1776, and 1781. It may also be mentioned in this connection that the Egyptian origin of the Chinese characters has been satirised by Goldsmith inthe Citizen of the World,letter LXXXIX.
As early as 1736, Samuel Johnson had a hand in a letter on Du Halde signed by “Eubulus”.95 The brief letter begins with the sentence that “there are few nations in the world, more talked of, or less known, than the Chinese”, and remains to the end very sympathetic in tone. The pinch of salt, however, is there. “Eubulus”characteristically wondered at the honesty of Chinese ministers,and the wisdom and kindness of Chinese emperors, and felt bound to “give an instance of like conduct in a prince of England” in order “to do honour to my country". In 1742, Johnson wrote anothe essay on Du Halde which we have already mentioned above. In this essay which consists largely of extracts from Du Halde, Johnson's colossal common sense reveals itself in his refusal to take Du Halde's authority on trust:“We may judge from the Conduct of European Monarchs that his [Confucius's] Rules have never yet been reduced to Practice",97 Again on the much admired “philosophical dignity" of Confucius in indigence, Johnson observed:“This Constancy cannot raise our Admiration after his former Conquest of himself; for how easily may he support Pain,who has been able to resist pleasure”.98 None the less,he has a high opinion of Du Halde as an industrious compiler, and frequently referred to his Description in his talks to Boswell.Once he said that Du Halde's is a book to “consult and not really to read".99 At another time, he made fun of a translation of Du Halde undertaken by a Scotchman who knew no English and an Irishman who knew no French.100 Like Walpole, Johnson toyed with the idea of a “geographical revolution”. Boswell wrote:“He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China.I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the wall of China, had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care.'Sir,(said he), by doing so, you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence.... They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious,		101 The following conversation is the most revelatory of Johnson's attitude to China:“Johnson called the East-Indians barbarians. Boswell: 'You will except the Chinese, Sir?' Johnson: 'No,Sir.'Boswell: 'Have they not arts?' Johnson: 'They have pottery.'Boswell: 'What do you say to the written character of their language?' Johnson:'Sir,they have not an alphabet.They have not been able to form what all other nations haveformed!'Boswell:'There is more learning in their language than in any other from the immense number of their characters. 'Johnson: 'It is only more difficult from its rudeness'”.102 Johnson made his attitude very clear inhis introduction to Sir William Chambers's Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines,and Utensils.“The boundless panegyrics which have been lavished upon the Chinese learning,policy,and arts, show with what power novelty attracts regard, and how naturally esteem swells into admiration. I am far from desiring to be numbered among the exaggerators of Chinese excellence.I consider them as great, or wise, only in comparison with the nations that surround them".103
The agreement in opinion between Johnson and Defoe about China hardly needs pointing out. Like Defoe, Johnson admires the Long Wall alone of all Chinese things; like Defoe, he regards pottery as the only art in which China excels;like Defoe,he thinks China a backward country,though his argument is like that of Warburton; and like Defoe, he diagnoses the contemporary rage for “Chinese excellence” as due to “novelty”. Besides the Long Wall, the Sharawaggi is perhaps another Chinese thing which Johnson likes,hence his comparison of the “excellence”ofYoung's Night Thoughts to “the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity ascribed to Chinese plantations".104 Johnson's famous first lines of Vanity of Human Wishes were sedulously aped by Thomas Warton in his poem The Universale Love of Pleasure:
All human race,from China to Peru,
Pleasure,howe'er disguised by art,pursue,
and later mercilessly reduced to a tautology by Coleridge in Table-talk. Very few, however, have noticed Alfred de Vigny's use of the same phrase,“de la Chine au Pérou” in his poem L'esprit pur.
According to Thomas Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Berkeley's Alciphron or the Minute Philosopher(1732) was ranked by Richard Hurd among the three best philosophical dialogues in English. With its quiet humour and sweet reasonableness, this series of dialogues is also the most learned of all Berkeley's works. It is richly allusive to Greek and Latin classics and mediaeval schoolmen. Into the bargain, a little oriental lore is added: Trigautius's Discourse and Francesco Bianchini's Istoria Universale are expressly referred to.105 In the first dialogue Berkeley made Euphranor, one of the interlocutors, quote Confucius's Analects:“the remark that a man should guard in his youth against lust, in manhood against faction, and in old age against covetousness, is as current morality in Europe as in China."106 He frequently resorted to China for random illustrations, thus in the fourth dialogue: “Do not the same laws of motion obtain throughout? The same in China and here?”;“the various combinations [of colours and light] he [a man born blind] doth not yet understand; not more than a Chinese, upon first hearing the words man and tree would think of the things signified by them”; and in the sixth dialogue:“They are apt ... to make great allowance for the difference of style and manner, especially in Eastern writings, such as the remains of Zoroaster and Confucius”. But the following exchange of soft words but hard arguments between Alciphron the spokesman of minuti philosophi and Euphranor who is Berkeley's own porte-parole, is very significant: “Alc.:*Tell me, are we not obliged, if we believe the Mosaic account of things, to hold the world was created not quite six thousand years ago?'Euph.:'I grant we are.' Alc.:'What will you say now, if... the Egyptians and Chinese have accounts extending to thirty or forty thousand years? What if the Chinese have also many observations antecedent to the Jewish account of creation?' Euph.: 'What if the Jesuits have shown the inconsistency of the like Chinese pretensions with the truth of the Ephemerides? What if the most ancient Chinese observations allowed to be authentic are those of two fixed stars, one in the winter solstice, the other in the vernal equinox, in the reign of their king Yao,which was since the flood?' Alc.:'You must give me leave to observe, the Romish missionaries are of no small credit in this point.'Euph.:'But what knowledge have we, or can we have,of those Chinese affairs, but by their means? The same persons that tell us of these accounts refute them if we reject their authority in one case, what right have we to build upon it in another?'Alc.:'When I consider tat the Chinese have annals of more than forty thousand years, and that they are a learned, ingenious, and acute people, very curious, and addicted to arts and sciences, I profess I cannot help paying some regard to their accounts of time.'Euph.:'Whatever advantage their situation and political maxims may have given them,it doth not appear they are so learned or so acute in point of science as the Europeans.The general character of the Chinese,if we may believe Trigaltius after other writers, is, that they are men of a trifling and credulous curiosity, addicted to search after the philosopher's stone, and a medicine to make men immortal, to astrology, fortune-telling, and presages of all kinds. Their ignorance in nature and mathematics is evident, from the great hand the Jesuits make of that kind of knowledge among them. But what shall we think of those extraordinary annals, if the very Chinese themselves give no credit to them for more than 3000 years before Christ? If they do not pretend to have begun to write history above 4000 years ago? And if the oldest book they have now extant, in an intelligible character, are not above 2000 years old?'”.107 This “debunking” of the Chinese is, as we have seen, quite the order of Berkeley's day, and he was led toit by the sinophilism of such free-thinkers as Matthew Tindal in that Bible of deism Christianity as Old as the Creation.108 The jibe at the Chinese search for the elixir from the discoverer of the panacea, tar-water, contains a rich vein of unconscious humour. 
David Hume once acknowledged Le Comte as his source.109 His references to Chinese commerce,the Chinese custom of infanticide and the Chinese superstition of beating idols when prayers are not answered,110 are all very brief. In the essay of National Characters he raised an interesting question:“The Chinese have the greatest uniformity of character imaginable: though the air and climate in different parts of those vast dominions admit of very considerable variation."111 Hume here tried to put two and two together, and explain in Chinese national character, which, he said in another passage in the same essay, is “gravity and serious deportment”,112 by Chinese climatic conditions. But the following passage in the essay In the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences is by far the most important for our purpose:“In China,there seems to be a pretty considerable stock of politeness and science, which,in the course of so many centuries, might naturally be expected to ripen into something more perfect and finished, than what has yet arisen from them.But China is one vast empire, speaking one language, governed by one law, and sympathising in the same manners.The authority of any teacher,such as Confucius,was propagated easily from one corner of the empire to the other.None had courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion. And posterity was not bold enough to dispute what had been universally received by their ancestrs. This seems to be one natural reason, why the sciences have been so slow a progress in that mighty empire.”In a footnote to this passage, he disputed that the Chinese monarchy had ever been absolute, and criticised the Chinese army, although he admitted“the happiness, riches and good police of the Chinese".113 To criticise the Chinese as non-progressive is simply another way of saying that they lack inventive genius. Thus Hume's criticism has a familiar ring to our ear, though the reason he gives in support of his criticism is something brand-new. Confucianism and uniformity in language and manners have been feathers in the caps of Jesuit writers on China, who, as Martino points out, take almost a proprietary pride in that country.114 Even Defoe and Johnson who do not think very highly of Confucianism, have not gone to such an extreme as to consider it the chief obstacle to the progress of Chinese civilisation. It says a good deal for Hume's all-pervading scepticism that he should have questioned the Confucian authority as much as the Christian authority. We may mention here that later Coleridge held a more or less similar view on China's being “a permanency without progression”(Table Talk,January 1, 1823).
We should also mention David Garrick's share in catering to the contemporary taste for the Chinese. On November 8, 1755, Garrick engaged the Swiss dancer Jean George Noverre to give a “Chinese Festival” at Drury Lane. The “Festival” had a tumultuous house and was withdrawn after the sixth night in consequence of the anti-French sentiments then running riotous.115
Besides the Citizen of the World and a review of Murphy's play on the Chinese orphan, both of which we shall discuss in the next article,Goldsmith has some interesting passages on China in his miscellaneous works. In the essay On the Study of Belles Letters, he referred to the Chinese custom of celebrating their festivals.116 In a letter to Rober Bryanton,he imagined a lecture upon himself by a Chinese Owanowitzer to a Tartarian Chianobacchus-both awful names being invented “to show my erudition"-in which he had been called “the Confucius of Europe” on the strength of his Essay On the Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe.117 In the essay On the Instability of Worldly Grandeur (1759) we have a foretaste of the Citizen of the World: Coldsmith imagined a Chinese philosopher “taking it into his head to travel into Europe,and observe the customs of a people which he had thought not very much inferior even to his countrymen”. Upon his arrival at Amsterdam, his passion for letters led him to a bookseller's shop where he asked in Dutch for the immortal works of Xixofou.The Dutchman naturally confessed his ignorance of this author,whom, by the way,even Chinese bibliophiles have never heard of. Then the philosopher exclaimed:“Alas to what purpose, then, has he fasted to death, to gain a renown which has never travelled beyond the precincts of China!"118 Another reference of Goldsmith's to China is exceedingly amusing. Boswell records in his Life of Johnson that one day in the company of Johnson and the Thrales. Goldsmith told a story of the instinctive hostility of Chinese dogs to butchers, and that the incredulous Thrale advised him not to put his story in his natural history unless he could adduce proofs of its veracity.119 Goldsmith, however, ignored Thrale's advice, and retold it in An History of the Earth and Animated Nature:“In China, where killing and dressing dogs is a trade...when the butcher moves out, all the dogs of the village will be after him".120 Indeed,he seems so fond of this apparently cock-and-bull story that he told it for the third time in another chapter in the same work, and named the village as one in Canton.121 A. L. Sells has not indicated the source of this piece of unnatural national history though it can be found in Du Halde: “It is a very good diversion to see the butchers,when they are carrying the flesh of dogs to any place,or dragging five or six to the slaughter: for all the dogs, drawn together by the cries of those going to be killed, or the smell of those already slain, fall in a body upon the butchers".122 Credit quia impossible!
William Shenstone's ferme orné at Leasowes seems to have been laid out on the Chinese plan, and his Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening show a promising hatred of “straight lines” and “regularity”. Curious to say, he never mentions China or the Sharawaggi.On the contrary, we find the following lines inscribed underneath the statue of Venus de Medicis at the entranceof a shrubbery in Leasowes:
And far [be driven] the meretricious air
Of Ghina's vain alcoves.123
The reference in Egotismsto the Chinese language as not “half so difficult as the language of refusal”124 is interesting but slight. The following reference to the prevailing made of chinoiserie is more significant(Of Men and Manners,L):“A mere citizen [as distinct from a gentleman of fortune] is always aiming to shew his riches ... and talk much of his Chinese ornaments at his paltry cake-house in the country”.125
Shenstone is rather vague about the fashion of Chinese ornaments, but John Shebbeare is very specific. Under the pseudonym Battista Angelon, he covered with ridicule his countrymen who were chinoiserie fans. We find the following passage in letter Ivii of his Letters on the English Nation (1755): 
“Every chair in an apartment, the frames of glasses,and tables, must be Chinese:the walls covered with Chinese paper fill'd with figures which resemble nothing of God's creation, and which a prudent nation would prohibit for the sake of pregnant women. In one chamber,all the pagods and distorted animals of the east are piled up ... on the sides of the room, lions made of porcelain grinning and misshapen, are placed on brackets of the Chinese taste,in arbors of flowers made in the same ware, and leaves of brass painted green, lying like lovers in the shades of Arcadia. Nay,so excessive is the love of Chinese architecture become,that at present the fox-hunters would be sorry to break a leg in pursuing their sport in leaping any gate that was not made in the eastern taste of little bits of wood standing in all directions; the connoisseurs of the table delicacies can distinguish between the taste of an ox which eats his hay from a Chinese crib, a hog that is inclosed in a style of that kind,or a fowl fattened in a coop that fabric of which is in that design, and find great difference in the flavor....The Chinese taste is so very prevalent in his city at present, that even pantomine has obliged harlequin to seek shelter in an entertainment, where the scenes and characters are all in the taste of that Nation.”Shebbeare concluded on a more hopeful note, because English ladies had not succumbed and would never succumb to “the practice of little shoes" which “are contrived to cramp their feet and oblige them to be mere domestic slaves."126 A more eloquent testimonial to the vogue of chinoiserie in eighteenth-century England can not be found.
Shenstone's sly dig at the country house of “a mere citizen” and Shebbeare's elaborate picture of the interior of a contemporary English house should be read together with Robert Lloyd's skit on the exterior of a house in The Cit's Country Box (1757):
The wealthyCit,grown old in trade,
Now wishes for the rural shade...
some three or four miles out of town
(An hour's ride will bring you down),
He fixes on his choice abode,
Not half a furlong from the road.
When“the fuss of moving” is over, “a new heap of whims”comes into his wife's head, and she proposes to the Cit:
“Suppose,my dear,instead of these,
We build a railing,all Chinese”...
Now bricklay'rs, carpenters and joiners,
With Chinese artists and designers,
Produce their schemes of alteration,
To work this wondrous reformation.
The trav'ler with amazement sees
A temple,Gothic or Chinese,
With many a bell,and tawdry ragon,
And crested with a sprawling dragon.127
In The Poet: an epistle to C. Churchill, Lloyd made the following ingenious comparison:
And when the frisky wanton writes
In Pindar's(what d'ye call 'em)-flights,
Th'uneven measure,short and tall, 
Now rhyming twice,now not at all,
In curves and angles twirls about,
Like Chinese railing,in and out.128
James Cawthorn had also the following spirited lines on the Chinese style in architecture and furniture:
Of late,'tis true, quite sick of Rome,and Greece,
We fetch our models from the wise Chinese:
European artists are too cool, and chaste,
For Mand'rin only is the man of taste;
Whose bolder genius, fondly wild to see
His grove a forest,and his pond a sea,
Breaks out-and,whimsically great,designs,
Without the shackles of rules, or lines:
Form'd on his plan, our farms and seats begin
To match the boasted villas of Pekin.
On every hill a spire-crown'd temple swells,
Hung round with serpents,and a fringe of bells:
Junks and balons along our waters sail,
With each a guilded cockboat at his tail;
Our choice exotics to the breeze exhale,
Within th'inclosure of a zigzag rail;
In Tartar huts our cows and horses lie,
Our hogs are fatted in an Indian stye.
On ev'ry shelf a Joss divinely stares,
Nymphs laid on Chintzes sprawl upon our chairs;
While o'er our cabinets Confucius nods,
’Midst Porcelain elephants and China gods (Of Taste : An Essay)129. 
Richard Owen Cambridge attacked this “wasting taste” in an
imitation of Horace to Lord Bathurst: his contemporaries
Did castles for their porter rear,
A Chinese pagoda for their deer,
Or for their horse a temple.130
One of Cambridge's essays in the World contains a satirical description of “a Chinese pyramid of many heads”.
Richard Hurd deserves to be remembered if only for his contribution to Chinese studies in England. Just as Sir William Temple had been the first Englishman to make a comparative study of Chinese philosophy and Westem philosophy, so Hurd was the first Englishman to make a comparative study of Chinese literature and Western literature. His criticism of the Chinese drama is one of the finest jugements exotiques upon Chinese literature.Considering the lucunae and even chasms in the knowledge of Chinese in his day, the production of such constructive and suggestive criticism is little short of miraculous. Hurd did not know Chinese, and had to make bricks without sufficient straw by inferring from the one specimen of Chinese tragedy given by Du Halde.One has only to compare his analysis of Chinese tragedy with the full and unintelligent account of Chinese drama in the Discourses upon the Original of Tragedy in Père Brumoy's Greek Theatre available in the translation of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox131 to see how Hurd triumphed over the disadvantages he worked under, while the Frenchman with all his better chance of gathering data from other sources than Du Halde contented himself with echoing others. In The Discourse on Poetical Imitation printed at the end of his Commentary on Horace's Epistle to Augustus (1751),Hurd discussed the Chinese play The Orphan of the House of Chao (translated by Père Joseph Henri de Premare and included by Du Halde in his Description) to show the universality of the rules of tragedy laid down in Aristotle's Poetics. One wishes Lessing who in Hamburgische Dramaturgie (19 April 1768) thinks Aristotle as unfehlbaras Euclid, could have read this.Hurd begins with the statement that “the state of poetry among the Chinese,as appears from the best accounts of that people,is very imperfect". This is excusable in view of the fact that even the “best accounts” of our time fail to give n adequate summary of “the state of poetry among the Chinese".Hurd went on:“Now in a country,so remote in situation, and secluded by circumstances, and not less by the native pride and sufficiency of its inhabitants, from all commerce with other Nations, it will not even bear a suspicion that their ideas of dramatic writing can be derived.We may be sure,that nothing but their own unassisted sense hath been their guide in these matters; for that should any conformity appear between their drama and ours, nothing could better evince the efficacy of General Principles to bring about a similitude in the method of composition."Here follows a long analytic summary of the plot of The Orphan ofthe House of Chao which we shall omit, as various English adaptations and versions of this play will be discussed in the next article.
Hurd came to the conclusion that the two essential rules of tragedy “are observed in it with a degree of exactness not always to be found in the works of more knowing dramatists. For 1.The action is entirely one....2. The action proceeds with almost as much rapidity, as Artistotle himself demands". Then Hurd praised the play with a few faint damns, pointed out where it falls short of the excellence of the Electra of Sophocles, and called attention to “the lesser marks of coincidence” between the two. He wound up his criticism with commending the Chinese for arriving at “such an identity of composition with that of Greece" in spite of the“rude state of their poetry".132 A happy coincidence is at Wang Kuo Wei, the greatest Chinese scholar of the preceding generation, arrived at a similar conclusin in his History of the Drama of the Sung and Yuan Dynasties.It is symptomatic of the eighteenth-century English attitude that Hurd could not refrain from adopting a patronising tone towards Chinese literature,for all his handsome acknowledgements of the “identity of composition between Chinese drama and Greek drama". It is even more symptomatic that he omitted this section in subsequent editions of the Commentary because, as Percy suggested, he came to find “upon a cold revisal that he had expressed himself rather too warmly in favour of the Chinese attempts,and had fancied design, and resemblances of the Grecian drama, in a much higher degree than they were found to possess”.133 We have positive evidence in addition to the omission of that section to show the truth of Percy's conjecture. In Dissertation on the Provinces of Dramatic Poetry (1713), Hurd expressed his opinions with cautious reservations:“The Chinese, who as P. de Premare acquaints us, make no distintion betwixt tragedies and comedies. That is, no distinction, but what the different subjects of each make necessary. They do not, as our European dramas, differ in this, that the one is intended to make us weep, and the other to make us laugh....I lay no stresson what an encomiast of China [Semedo] pretends, that there is not so much as an obscene word in all their language : as being sensible, that though indeed these must needs be considerable abatements to the Humour of their comic scenes,yet, their ingenuity might possibly find means to remedy these defects by the inventions and dexterous applications of the double entendre".134 His criical insight which triumphs over the meagreness of data, is again revealed here in the remarks upon Chinese comedy, but he has definitely abandoned his earlier view of Chinese tragedy.This change of attitude s not due to any increase in Hurd's knowledge of Chinese literature.Premare's remarks are found in the preliminary account to the translation of The Orphan of the House of Chao, 135 and Hurd must have known them when he wrote the earlier Discourse. In Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (1763), Hurd made Locke say that human nature in China“appears crampt, contracted and buttoned up close in the strait tunic of law and custom”.136 This approaches very much to Hume's view.
Alexander Gerard gave the same explanation for the vogue of chinoiserie as James Cawthorn. In An Essay on Taste(1716),he discussed the craze in the section “Of the sense or taste of novelty”:“When genuine elegance in furniture or architecture has been long the fashion, men sometimes grow weary of it,and imitate the Chinese or revive the Gothic taste,merely for the pleasure they receive from what is unlike to those things which they have been accustomed to see. The pleasure of novelty is, in this case, preferred to that which results from real beauty".137
Lord Kames has also a word to say on China. In the chapter on gardening and architecture in Elements of Criticism (1762),he wrote that gardening in China “is brought to greater perfection than in any other known country”. He lent a willing ear to Sir William Chambers and reduced the essentials of Chinese gardening to this formula:“An indispensable principle, never to deviate from nature: but in order to produce that degree of variety which is pleasing,every method consistent with nature is put in practice". He gave an account of artifices in Chinese gardening admittedly derived from Chambers. But he made an interesting observation on the use of decayed trees to produce a “pensive state of mind”: “Taste has suggested to Kent the same artifice".138
Another eighteenth-century English critic who discussed Chinese literature is John Brown. In A Dissertation on the Rise,Union, and Power,the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music (1763), section ix, he gives an account of Chinese music which is entirely based upon Antonie Yves Goguet's Extraits des Histoires Chinoises,and an account of Chinese drama which is entirely based upon Du Halde. But Brown has something of his own to contribute: he attempts to explain the qualities of Chinese arts by racial characteristics.“The Chinese have ever been of a mild and peaceable Character: Their Music will be found analogous”.139“For the Chinese, as they have ever been of a timid and peaceable Character,so neither are they given to Raillery and Sarcasm,but altogether to Civility and Mutual Respect.Hence, neither the Tragic nor Comic Drama could probably arise, so as to be marked as a distinct Species. Accordingly, their plays are generally of an intermediate Cast,between Terror and Pity on the one Hand, Sarcasm or Ridicule on the other".140 The explanation is very ingenious, and Brown repeated it in the revised form of the same work, The History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry, through its Several Species (1764),section x.141 Brown made a mistake, however,in saying that Du Halde had thought“The little orphan of China" a play best adapted to theEuropean taste. As a matter of fact,Du Halde was very apologetic about this play for its failure to observe the three unities.142 And Marquis D'Argens, another French writer who served as a model for Goldsmith in composing The Citizen of the World, also criticised The Orphan as“shocking to all rules of probability".143 This even increases our respect for Hurd's critical independence and perspicacity.
Lord Monboddo's opinion of the Chinese is like Warburton's. In The Origin and Progress of Language (1773-1787), he discussed once more the question of the primitive language which had much exercised the ingenuity of seventeenth-century English writers.He argued that Chinese must have been “the work of learned men" because it is monosyllabic and bears none of the agglutinative characteristics of the primitive language.44 Thus he came to the conclusion that Chinese is “the most extraordinary language in the world”,being "intermediate between language of art and barbarous language":It so far resembles the barbarous languages,that it has neither composition, derivation, nor flection." From such a “defective language”,he inferred that the Chinese are not “an ingenious and inventive people, requiring no other proof of it than their using a language and orthography so extremely defective".145 This not only echoes Warburton whom Lord Monboddo quoted,but tallies with the view of Samuel Johnson who once accused Lord Monboddo of “talking nonsense without knowing it”.146 Lord Monboddo adduced further proofs of his view by pointing out that the Chinese, with all their achievements in mechanic arts, are defective in metaphysics about God and rudimentary in astronomy. He praised the Egyptians at the expense of the Chinese, and, on the authority of "a learned academician whom I knew in Paris,M. de Guignes", affirmed that the Chinese have taken their written characters from Egypt. 147 Indeed, Lord Monboddo seems quite mad about Egypt as “the mother of all arts and sciences”,and repeated these crotchety ideas about the Chinese in his later work Antient Metaphysics (1778-1799),148 where he even compared the Chinese kings to the “demon-mings" of Egypt.149 It is curious that Lord Monboddo,while indebted to Warburton for his arguments, should have ignored Warburton's refutation of De Guignes.
Hugh Blair's view of the Chinese language is essentially like Lord Monboddo's. In Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters(1783),he also advocated the theory of the Egyptian origin of the Chinese language150 and devoted a perfunctory paragraph to Chinese prosody which contains nothing original or striking.151 But it is significant that he should have spared a paragraph or two onChinese literature in a work of that nature, a thing rarely done by modern writers on rhetorc and criticism in spite of Goethe's prophecy in 1827 apropos of a Chinese novel that the epoch of Weltliteratur would be near at hand (Gespräche mit Eckermann,21 January 1827).
Another attempt to “place” te Chinese language is Daniel Webb's Some Reasons for Thinking that the Greek Language was Borrowed from the Chinese (1787).152 Webb acknowledged to have derived hints from Fourmont's Grammatica Sinica, and tried to base his hypothesis upon linguistic reasons like that “the Greeks had not, any more than the Chinese, the letters b, d,” that “almost all the Chinese verbs even in O: so do the Greek”,etc. He thought that “the Greek polysyllable” had been“a happy combination of monosyllables beginning with a consonant, and ending in a vowel”.153 He regarded the Chinese tones as merely “the forerunners of language,a kind of pre-existing spirit destined to assume more substantial forms". 154 Like this seventeenth-century namesake,Daniel Webb did not understand Chinese.
Of the two references to China in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the following as an illustration of the influence of habit is more interesting:“In China, if a lady's foot is so large as to be fit to walk upon, she is regarded as a monster of ugliness."155 Of the numerous passing references to China in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nature (1776), we shall mention the two most important. Like Hume, Smith thought China very “stationary” in spite of her prosperity,156 and characteristically suggested that the sovereign remedy for this cultural stagnation is foreign trade: “B a more extensive navigation,the Chinese would naturally learn the art of using and constructing themselves,all the different machines made use of in other countries, as well as the other improvements of art and industry which are practised in all the different parts of the world”.157	Thus Adam Smith calmly, just as Defoe had vituperatively before him, deprived China of her only remaining glory of excellence in mechanic arts!
Gibbon,however, commended the "buttoned-up" atitude of the Chinese towards the policy o foreign trade.In Principes des Poids, des Monnoies, et des Mesures des Anciens (1759) he praised the Chinese for not working their silver mines, because “la raison en est sensible, et fait l'éloge de ce peuple de legislateurs.Isolée dans l'univers, la Chine ignore la richesse relative et le commerce étranger”.158 In Outlines of the History of the World(1758-1763) he mentioned the Tartarian conquests of China. 159 He described these conquests circumstantially in the chapters xxvi and lxiv of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Among other authorities, he paid high tribute to De Guignes's Histoire des Huns (chapter xxxv,note 73 and chapter xxiv, note 10). From the Pisgah height of his universal historical learning, Gibbon could see clearly how the East and the West affect each other, and co-relate in a causal nexus events apparently unrelated. In chapter xxx:“The Chinese annals,as they have been interpreted by the learned industry of the present age, may be usefully applied to reveal the secret and remote causes of the fall of the Roman empire.” Again in chapter lxiv, apropos of Zingis Khan's conquest of China:“I have long since asserted my claim to introduce the nations, the immediate or remote authors of the fall of the Roman empire; nor can I refuse myself to those events which,from their uncommon magnitude, will interest a philosophic mind in the history of blood.”Unfortunately Gibbon's mind is panoramic rather than synthetic, and this idée maîtresse of the great chain or network of history is not sufficiently embodied to save his work from being a mere skeleton-map of events.From the works of De Guignes, De Mailla, and Du Halde, he derived the references to Sovou's“singular adventure" of tending sheep on the shore of the Northern Sea (chap. xxiv),to the historical works of Sematsien and Semakouang (chap.xxiv,notes 24 and 34),to Yelutchousay's civilising influence on the Mongolian invaders (chap.xxxiv),to Nestorianism in China (chap. xlvii),to
the death of the “weak and unfortunate" grandson of Hongvou,
founder of the Ming dynasty (chap.lxv),etc.
On the introduction of silk and the art of breeding silkworms from China into Constantinople, Gibbon made the following wistful remark:“I am not insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury;yet I reflect with some pain that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing,already practised by the Chinese,the comedies of Menander and the entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth century”(chap.xl).He quoted the interesting confession of the Arabs that “the same God who has given a tongue to the Arabians has more nicely fashioned the hands of the Chinese and the heads of the Greeks”(chap. liii).He noticed the similarity between the Chinese law and the Roman law with regard to the government of a city by its native: ut nulli patriae suae administratio sine speciali principis permissus permittatur(chap. xviii). In Memoirs of My Life and Wriings (1789),Gibbon made the following observation in connection with his own family:“The family of Confucius is, in my opinion,the most illustrious in the world. After the painful ascent of eight or ten centuries,our barons and princes of Europe are lost in the darkness of the middle ages; but in the vast equality of the empire of China, the posterity of Confucius have maintained, above two thousand two hundred years,their peaceful and perpetual succession".160
Sir William Jones, the great English orientalist, held China in as much contempt as the amateurs who did not know oriental languages. In a discourse on the Chinese delivered at the Asiatick Society(1790),he gave the following damaging verdict:“Their popular religion was imported from India in an age comparatively modern; and their philosophy seems yet in so rude a state, as hardly deserve the appellation; they have no “ancient monu-ments;...their sciences are wholly exotick; and their mechanical arts have nothing in them characteristick of a particular family.... They have indeed, both national music and national poetry, and both of them beautifully pathetick, but of painting,sculpture,of architecture, as arts of imagination, they seem (like other Asialicks) to have no idea".161 We are rather surprised to hear such a sweeping condemnation of the Chinese from a man who ex officio should have known better. Jones's knowledge of the Chinese language is exceedingly meagre, as we shall see in the next article, and this discourse really tells us more about India than about China.
William Godwin's Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793) contains two references to China. The one on “Chinese gravity and serious deportment"162 is entirely based on Hume's essay Of National Characters. The other is a discussion of the Chinese language. Here Godwin says nothing new, but his attitude is remarkable for its detachment. Discussing the Chinese language under the head “Human inventions capable of perpetual improvement”, he does not condemn it as Warburton, Johnson and Lord Monboddo have done,for failing to develop an alphabet,“the luckiest concurence of circumstances”.163
We have referred to Gibbon's scrappy account of the Tartarian conquests in his Outlines of the History of the World.Other eighteenth-century English works conceived on a similar plan, though executed with much inferior literary skill, also take account of Chinese affairs. Samuel Shuckford's Sacred and Prophane History of the World (1728) seems to be still in the seventeenth-century tradition. One is almost tempted to say the “mediaeval tradition",for no less a man than Dante in his De Vulgari Eloquentia was already hot on the trail of the oldest as well as the only language before Babel, the tongue used by the “praesumptuosissima Eva” in speaking to the Devil. Shuckford, like other crack-brained seekers of the primitive language has quite ignored Dante's arguments in hi own learned vagaries von allem Wissensqualm entladen. With some show of reasoning,he maintains that the Chinese are directly descended from Noah because“their language seems not to have been altered in the Confusion of Babel, their learning is reported to have been as ancient as the Learning of the more Western Ntions, their History reaches up indisputably to the Times of Noah,and there are many reasons to think Fohi and Noah the same person".164 Oddly enough, Shuckford does not mention John Webb who,as we have seen in the preceding article, has made precisely the same contention. Shuckford was the only eighteenth-century English writer who still had in his bonnet the bee of the primitive language and tried to find a biblical progenitor for the Chinese race. Thomas Salmon's Modern History: or,the Present State of All Nations (1739) also contains chapters on “the present state of the empire of China".165 Salmon seems to have taken at the foot of the letter the title of Le Comte's book Noweaux Mémoires sur l'Etat Present de la Chine witten almost half a century before,and cribs almost everything from it.
The learned section on “the History of the Chinese" in that great work An Universal History,from the Earliest Account of Time (1747-1748) is a different affair. The work is admittedly "compiled from original authors,” and this section is fully documented, bristling with references not only to continental writers of the preceding century, but to up-to-date sources, like Du Halde and Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer's Museum Sinicum (1730).Shuckford's view is here refuted and French Jesuits are signifcantly taken to task for their partiality and credulity.The“reflections” at the end of the account on “the air of a fiction" of the ancient Chinese history,the “inaccurate and false” Chinese chronology, and the “romantic” Chinese astronomy'66 are sufficiently tel-tale of the eighteenth-century English attitude to China.The Modern Part of a Universal History contains a whole volume devoted to China. It is as learned as the section on China in the Antient Part and as unsympathetic. The learning of the Chinese was thought to “have been too much cried up by the missionaries”, and the inferiority of the Chinese to the Europeans in every cultural aspect not excluding morals (“How short they come not only of ours, but likewise of some of the best heathen philosophers!") was stressed.167 But in the section on “Origin and Antiquity”, the compilers who were professedly “the authors of the Antient Part”,made a volteface, agreed with Shuckford,and excused themselves by saying that“the opinions in the antient part are not their own but received opinions set down with the purpose of exciting ingenious correspondents". 168 They went back to Shuckford's view and produced “fresh and authentic proofs". John Jackson was much less critical in the elaborate account of Chinese history in his Chronological Antiquities (1752),though he shows as much learning about China as the compiler of the Universal History. He believes in the Jesuits and singles Chinese astronomy out for praise just as Le Comte and Du Halde have done.169 No one else in eighteenth-century England seems to have shared Jackson's opinion.
John Nichols's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century contain some materials for our study. In J. Ames's letter to T. Martin(December 30, 1756),we find a reference to a Chinese mandarin at the Society of Antiquaries in London,who“behaved complaisant" and could speak a little Portuguese:“What I have read of them shows that they are the descendants of Noah and his wife,after they came out of the Ark; and they are the likeliest persons in the known world to read the Hieroglyphical signatures of Thebes and Egypt, not being used to read an Alphabetical Character,as the manner was in more enlightened later ages".170 What are Ames's own opinions in the matter, it is difficult to guess, though the phrase “more enlightened later ages”,is tantalising.This mandarin is the second real Chinese who figures in English literature, the first being the one described in Anthony à Wood's Autobiography in the preceding century.Charles Godwyn in a letter to John Hutchins (21 July, 1762)says that“there is reason to think that the Chinese are a colony of the Egyptians”.171 The following passage from Richard Gough's letter to Michael Tyson (May 7, 1774) is a criticism of Chinese painting:“The two Exhibitions,which I have been viewing where Reynolds reigns unrivalled in everyting but colour, which China, by the industry of Capt.Blake's son, is to help him out in, when the Chemists have analysed her crayons, and the Botanic Painters havecaught that glow of colour which almost compensates for the stiffness of the various specimens of Chinese plans sent over to astonish European Artists”.172
We begin to realise the extent of the vogue of what Richard Owen Cambridge called “the wasting taste”,when we look through the periodical essays of Johnson's time. Tey are full of crusades against the fashion of chinoiserie. In the Rambler number 82 (1750),a collector boasts that Britain can by his care possess “a snail that has crawled upon the wall of China".173 In the Adventurer number 109 (1753) which describes an imaginary visit to Bedlam with Dean Swift, we find the cell of the“famous virtuoso lady Harriet Brittle" beautified with the Chinese vases and urns. The poor lady had purchased sometime before her residence in the Bedlam “a mandarin and a Jos at an exorbitant price” from an auctioneer,and intended to place them “at the upper end of a little rock-work temple of Chinese architecture, in. which neither propriety, proportion, nor true beauty,were considered”.A brutish waggoner crushed her purchases to pieces out of sheer inadvertence, and she immediately went out of her head. The Chinese vases in her cell which “she believed to be true Nanquin”are not Chinese at all but Chelsea urns “provided by her relations to sooth her passion".174 In number 139 (1754),the fact that“the Greek and Roman architecture are discarded for the novelties of China" is regarded as one of the public ignorances".175 Both papers are contributed by Joseph Warton. The first paper and James Cawthorn's poem Of Taste quoted above are perhaps the only two pieces of eighteenth-century polite literature in which the word “jos” or“joss” is used, all the quotations in N.E.D. illustrtive of the usage of this word being taken from trade accounts and travels. 
The World is the richest quarry of anti-Chinese sentiments. Number 12(1753) contains a protest to the prevailing taste:“A few years ago everything was Gothic.... According to the prevailing whim,everything is Chinese, or, as it is sometimes more modestly expressed, partly after the Chinese manner.”The wrter, W. Whitehead, goes on to say that “not one in a thousand”of the so-called Chinese things “has the least resemblance to anything that China ever saw.... Our Chinese ornaments are not only of our own manufacture, but of our own invention.”176 In number 15,Francis Coventry criticises the new style of gardening as “absurd”;his joke on the fashion of “serpentine lines”as the essence of the Chinese style is too delicious not to be quoted:“the most idolatrous veneration for that crooked letter at the tail of the alphabet".177 In number 38(1753), James Marriot paints a satirical picture of an upholsterer's country house furnished according to the Chinese taste with “ridiculous and grotesque figures" by a decorator“said to be of Chinese extraction”.178 In number 59(1754) are ridiculed the fashions of putting Chinese ornaments over the arms by way of coronet, and of improving the style of architecture by mixing the Chinese and the Gothic.179 Number 65 is Richard Owen Cambridge's contribution which we have mentioned above.180 I Number 117 (1755),Marriot explains away the present vogue of Chinese architecture as a“Whimsey”, criticises Chinese painting for its false lights,false shadows,false perspective, and gay colouration without any gradation of tints,and pleads that an “Anti-Chinese Society will be an important institution in the world of arts".181 Finally in number 205 (1756),the proposal is considered that English youths should be sent to China instead of France for their grand tour because China has supplanted France as the arbiter in taste.182 Marriot's criticism of Chinese painting in the World is the first piece of serious English criticism on that subject, and agrees with Gough's quoted above in the attention paid to the colouration of Chinese pictures.
In the Connoisseur, we find similar protests to the Chinese taste. Number 65 (1755) cntains a description of the toilet room of a “pretty fellow” where “everything was intended to be agreeable to the Chinese taste".183 Number 73 gives a warning that “the Chinese taste which has already taken possession of our gardens, our buildings, and our furniture, will also soon find its way into our churches"with “monuments erected in the Chinese taste, and embellished with dragons, bells, Pagodas,and Mandarins”.184 Number 113 (1756) observes that “ladies would sooner give up a lap-dog than a grotesque chimney-piece figure of a Chinese Saint with numberless heads and atms".185 Number 120 is another criticism of the current taste:“The ornaments, both on the outside and inside of our houses, are all Gothic or Chinese."186
Number 17 of the Mirror (1779) contains a letter from“Mrs. Rebecca Prune” on her husband, a grocer turned into a man of taste.Among the earmarks of a man of taste are Chinese bridges and pagodas in his garden.187
Number 79 of the Lounger (1786) describes the interior of a fashionable lady's house, and her purchase or a Chinese dragon from an auctioneer.188
We have already quoted Johnson's review of Du Halde in the Gentleman's Magazine. Of the many articles on China and copious extracts from foreign books on China in that magazine, we shall select those which contain some original reflections and sentiments on the subject. The August number of the Gentleman's Magazine contains extracts from Du Halde which continue for three numbers into the next year, and the writer introduces his extracts with the following flatterng remark: “I am persuaded no Nation ever had more sublime Notions of Moral Virtue, or produced such a number of illustrious Instances in the several Branches of it, as the Chinese."189 R. Y.'s criticism of the Jesuits' account of the ancient Chinese history in the April number of 1737 is quite “representative" of the eighteenth-century English attitude towards China and foreign writers on China:“I don't deny but we have a fine consistent story told us of the Antiquity of this People, by the Jesuits; but why don't they give us the Books of the Chinese Historians of two or three thousand years standing, that we may judge for ourselves? Else how can we tell but they have given us Chinese Tales without sufficient vouchers." R. Y.further argues that though the Chinese “truly excel in moral”,“we Europeans excel them in every science”. He frankly admits his ignorance of Du Halde's history.190 In October 1739, the writer of the article The Right of Petitioning the Throne recommends the Chinese institution of public censors described in Du Halde as “worthy the imitation of Nations who most pride themselves in the Name of Freeman".191 In March 1750, the reviewer of Lord Anson's Voyages agrees with Anson in his detraction of the Chinese and contends that the Chinese are not only inferior to the Europeans in “genius”, but their virtue is nothing more than an “affected formality".Even that “gravity and serious deportment” which Hume and Godwin find praiseworthy in the Chinese character,is condemned as but a cloak of “timorousness, dissimulation, and deceit".192 Just as Shuckford and John Webb have tried to found their admiration of China upon a biblical footing,so Thomas Hare justifies his hatred of the Chinese by a piece of ingenious exegesis of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. In the March number of 1753, he proves to his own satisfaction that China is the “beast”prophesied of in the Book of Revelation.“The beast was like unto a leopard", and the Chinese ar as crafty and cruel as the leopard, and their silk clothes give them as beautiful an appearance as that of a leopard, etc.193 One wonders what the Russian Tchernoff in Ibanez's Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis would say to this! Hare returns to the discussion which “many men of sense and learning" have well approved in the January number of 1755, and protests follow in the next number which Hare duly answers.194 The 1757 January number contains a letter from A. B. on a Chinese merchant lately arrived in London from Canton, who played several Chinese tunes to make up for the lack of conversation upon a musical instrument resembling a guitar. The tunes, though simple, “contain the life and spirit that are wanting in most of our country dances".One of the airs played by the Chinese merchant is taken down and reproduced in the magazine.195
This is the frst piece of Chinese music faithfully reproduced in English books, and it is a pity that John Brown should not have made use of it in this discussion of Chinese music. The difference between the French and the English attitude is well brought out by S. Watson's two letters on Voltaire's account of China(January and August,1758) in which Voltaire and the Jesuits are reprimanded for their obliquities of admiration for a country which is defective in morality,fictitious in chronology, and wanting an alphabet.1% In the 1766 March number, China's “fabulous pretensions to antiquity" are again attacked. 197 In the February number of 1770, we find an interesting extract from a letter written by a gentleman in the English factory in Canton to the Reverend M-at-in Gloucestershire:“I am continually mortified by the calm contempt which they [the Chinese] express for our European manners;and the worst is, we are despised for our deficiency in that point, wherein, above all others, we ought to excel those enlightened heathens.They smile at our boisterous passionate behaviour as one would at the raving of a village cur; and truly it does appear ridiculous, when contrasted by the calmness and composure of their demeanour".198 The Historical Chronical in the 1771 May number contains also an interesting bit of news about a Chinese artist Mr. Chitqua, who arrived in England in August 1769, and whose models after life have been so justly admired. Chitqua has been disappointed of a passage to China by a train of unfortunate circumstances. Having embarked on board the Grenville East Indiaman,he was “unaccountably” hated by the sailors. Then he came back to London, and was ragged in the streets.199 Chitqua and the musical Cantonese merchant are the third and fourth flesh-and-blood Chinese who have not only found their way to England but also into English literature.
The Gentleman's Magazine is the most important document for our immediate concern. While the periodical essays lightly ridiculed the vogue of the Chinese taste in England, the Gentleman's Magazine seriously carried the war as it were, into the enemy's camp and attacked China herself. Indeed, this magazine, while lenient to the Chinese taste in England-teste the laudatory account of Chambers's fantastic House of Confucius in Kew Gardens in the 1773 June number,200 was on the whole very severe on Chinese character and civilisation. To belittle the intellectual ability or “genius” of the Chinese is no new thing; but even Defoe seems to have tacitly accepted Le Comte's tribute to their“right”and “sure” sense of morality,201 and spared the Chinese character in his sweeping denunciation. Lord Anson led the way in running down Chinese “morals”, and his cue was energetically taken up by the writers in the Gentleman's Magazine.
The Critical Review is disappointingly meagre in materials. Except Goldsmith's review of Murphy which will be discussed in the next article, nothing original or representative can be found.The following sentence taken from a review of a Chinese Fragment indicates the general noncommital tone of this magazine on our subject:“The book is little more than vague general declamation, and a constant comparison of our manners with those of China, which seem to be selected because they are always preferable" (December 1786).202
The Monthly Review,in spite of the exceedingly copious extracts from books on China contained within its covers, is almost equally disappointing. The following three quotations are the only instances in which the writers venture to express their own attitude.The reviewer of Père d'Incarville's letters (September 1754) writes: “Our palisadoes and alcoves are constructed by their [Chinese] models, as are also many of the small bridges in the gardens of the great. Our pleasure barges are beginningto take the Chinese form, and the walls of our palaces will soon be covered by the paper-hangings of that country. It must be owned, that it is something more than whim and novelty that leads us into the manner of that people;there is a lightness that sets them off, and renders their architecture the most pleasing to the eye of any yet introduced into our gardens”.203 The reviewer of a French translation of the Book of Odes(December 1770) ventures the following opinion:“The morality inculcated in this work is gloomy and severe; and,if it were not of such high antiquity, we should be tempted to suspect that the Chinese had adopted the philosophy of the Stoics”.204 The following is taken from a review of Charles Morton's article on Chinese characters (April 1771) which we shall mention presently: “For our own parts, notwithstanding our learned missionary's eulogia, we rejoice that we are masters of that simple but noble invention, the 4 and 20 letters....As Reviewers particularly,we have reason to be more than ordinarily thankful on that account. Taking our whole corps together, we may modestly reckon ourselves tolerable masters of half a dozen alphabetical languages at least: but had we the 80,000 Chinese characters to cope with, to qualify us for our office, our whole body, one or two greybeards excepted, would scarce be got half through their horn books".205 Readers of Théophile Gautier's delightful Fortunio will naturally think of the learned sinologue of the Collège de France who, when asked by Musidora to translate a letter supposedly written in Chinese, excused himself that the characters therein happened all to belong to that half of the 80,000 which he had not yet mastered!
From the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society we have already quoted in the preceding article the earliest sober and scientific account in English on the Chinese language and the Chinese “abacus". The Transactions of 1747 contain a very important article by George Costard On the Chinese Chronology and Astronomyin which the author shows the improbability of the very remote eras of the Chinese historians, as well as of the skill of the Chinese astronomers. The author declares that “it is not my design to enter into any controversy with Jesuits”,but remains very firm in this opinion that “how ingenious soever the Chinese may be in works of art, their talents do not lie towards mathematics and astronomy".206 This is the earliest piece of scientific criticism in English of the Chinese “fabulous pretensions to antiquity” and forms the basis of the section on Chinese history in the Antient Part of the Universal History.207 The Transactions of 1769 contain Charles Morton's article On Chinese Characters which is really a translation of a letter from a Jesuit missionary in Pekin to the members of the Royal Society in answer to their inquiries about “the supposed relation between the hieroglyphic and the Chinese",one of the burning questions in the learned world at that time.208 As Morton's prefatory remarks contain nothing significant, we shall not dwell on them. The Jesuit writer is not mentioned by name in Morton's article, and the French text of the letter in the Bruxelles edition is also anonymous.209 But we have been able to identify the author as Père Amiot from Mémoires concernant l'Histoire, les Sciences,les Arts, les Usages des Chinois,par Les Missionnaires de Pekin,in the first volume of which this letter is included. Amiot wrote the letter in answer to the inquiry of the Royal Society of London with regard to Turberville Needham's bogus discovery of ancient Chinese characters on an Egyptian bust in Turin.Judging by Needham's own foreword to Amiot's letter,he seems to have abandoned his original position under Amiot's correction. Francis Douce's manuscript note on the fly-leaf of the first volume of his copy of Miscellaneous Pieces relating to the Chinese contains the summary judgment that “the credulity and ignorance manifested on the subject of this Turin bust are a disgrace to Needham and all those who were duped by his folly and the impudent forgery of the Chinese impostor at the Vatican”. Charles Godwyn in his letter to John Hutchins quoted above, seems to have been one of the “dupes”,because he believed that “there is reason to think the Chinese" to be “a colony of the Egyptians”,and admitted to“have nothing more to say about the Turin bust". Percy, however,was more cautious in the preface to his Miscellaneous Pieces.The irony of the whole affair is that while Needham seems to have taken the cue from De Guignes's hypothesis, De Guignes was among the first to discredit Needham's discovery. Needham's discovery that the Chinese must have learned their language, arts and sciences from the Egyptians,is in the words of the Critical Review(June 1762), “conclusive against the boasted antiquity of the Chinese".Percy also held that the discovery, if true, would “demolish at once all the pretences of the Chinese to vast antiquity.”210 The moral is thus to run down the Chinese. As to the Chinese abacus described by Robert Hook in the Transactions of 1685, Thomas Snelling discusses it under its proper name “Soan Pan” in A View ofthe Origin, Nature and Use of Jettons or Counters (1769)and points out its affinities with the Roman abacus,the Russian“schtchota”, “black money”and“abbey pieces”.211
Let us sum up the net results of our inquiry. If the English of the eighteenth century appreciate the Chinese less than their seventeenth-century predecessors, and know about the Chinese less than their French contemporaries, they understand them more. Hurd has critically studied the Chinese drama, and thus for the first time Chinese literature is included in the purview of comparative literature.John Brown has seized upon the essential characteristics of Chinese literature and music and attempted to explain them in terms of racial psychology. In the study of the Chinese language, the advance is especially obvious. Except Shuckford, nobody bothers himself with the question of the primiive language,and thanks to people like Warburton and Monboddo, Chinese is “placed” among the family of languages and included within the purview of comparative philology. Ramsay has shown the essential truth in Chinese metaphysics and theology which Sir William Temple had ignored in his preoccupation with the practical wisdom of Confucianism. In the study of Chinese history, the scepticism of writers like Mandeville, Costard and even poor Needham about legends and chronology is a salutary antidote to the Jesuit credulity. In architecture, Chambers,for all the grinding of his private axes, does correct the mistaken notion of “serpentine lines” which English writers of the seventeenth century and French writers of the eighteenth share about the Chinese styl. In the study of Chinese pictorial art, Marriot and Cough have paved the way for later critics both in what they praise and in what they condemn. The general verdict of eighteenth-century English writers on the Chinese civilisation is that it is “stationary”.Their general verdict on the Chinese“Genius”isthat it is “inferior to the Europeans in science”. Their general verdict on Chinese character since Lord Anson's voyages is that it is “wily and crafty”. Their general verdict on the antiquity of the Chinese is that it is a “boastful and pretentious fiction". The devil's advocate had his say to his heart's content in all conscience! If this is a reaction against the popularity of the Chinese taste in the English social life of the time, it is surely one with a vengeance.

PART II

In this article, we shall deal with English tales on Chinese subjects, English translations as well as pseudo-translations from Chinese literature, and miscellaneos books and discourses on China by eighteenth-century English writers.We shall exclude tales and books of travels frankly translated from continental writers like T.S. Gueulette, A. de Goudar, Peter Osbeck, J. L. de Mosheim,etc. Our attention will be confined to works in which the authors attempt to keep up some appearance of being original. Common sense and literary ethics seem to agree on the point that compilation is one remove less from original composition than translation, notwithstanding that there may be more fundamental brainwork in a conscientious translation than in a perfunctory compilation. Acting on this “gentleman's agreement", we include both original works and compilations. In the case of translations from Chinese literature, however, we cannot draw the line at English translations from continental translators. With one great exception,all eighteenth-century English translations of Chinese poetry and fiction are, as Percy admitted,“translations of translations".But the fact that these versions are from the pens of Thomas Percy,Arthur Murphy,Peter Pindar, etc.,establishes their inalienable right to belon to the history of English literature. Even Sir William Jones was regarded as a poet in his day,and his version of a Chinese ode found its way into Chalmers's English Poets.1
One will find inthis essay some further proofs of the low estimate of the Chinese held by eighteenth-century Englishmen in reaction to continental sinophilism. To refute “offensive nationalities” of this kind is always idle, and to retort to them, cheap. Giacomo Leopardi observed in one of his Pensieri that many universal human traits are mistaken for racial or national characteristics; the fact is that“man is bad per necessità though some would have him bad only per accidente”.A dose of such pessimism about human nature would be salutary to future tourists and writers who have yet time to profit by it. Meanwhile, let bygones be bygones.
Perhaps Defoe's Consolidator (1705) which we have already discussed in the last essay, represents the first English attempt at the Chinese tale. Unfortunately Defoe is too much engrossed in the moon to expatiate on any sublunary empire,and considers China only a convenient terminus a quo for his literally flying visit to the moon. Nor do those glimpses of China which Robinson Crusoe and William the Quaker caught as birds of passage, constitute a genuine and integral Chinese tale.The earliest Chinese tales are thus to be found in the Spectator.
In the Spectator number 511 (1712) Addison tells the story of a Tartarian general who,having taken a Chinee town by storm,set to sale all the women in the town by putting each into a sack marked with price, and to be purchased “unsight unseen”. A Chinese merchant bought a sack “marked pretty high”, and found inside much to his chagrin an ugly little hag. He thought of drowning the woman in the river,but restrained upon the confession of the woman to be the sistr of a great Mandarin. The woman proved an excellent wife and procured for her husband great riches from her brother.2 In numbers 584-585(1714)Addison tries his hand once more in this genre and treats his readers to an “antediluvian novel”.The “novel” is introduced by theconcluding remarks of the preceding paper on the pleasures of plantation,and is expressly written to illustrate the thesis that “the art of planting seems to have been more adapted to the nature of man in primeval state,when he had life enough to see his productions flourish in their utmost beauty and gradually decay with him".Accordingly all the characters in the story are “primeval”Chinese endowed with a Methusaleh-like longevity.The heroine Hilpa married at the tender age of 100,leaving her calf-lover Shalum(“which is to say the Planter in the Chinese language") disconsolate. Shalum tried to forget his sorrow in planting all the mountainous regions, being a man“who knew how to adapt every plant to its proper soil”. Hilpa's husband, however,“came to an untimely end in the 250th year of his age", and Shalum renewed his suit. After some becoming hesitation on Hilpa's part, and an exchange of billets-doux by post-haste (which means in the ante-diluvian time 12 mortal months), they got happily married.3
The story is on the whole rather dull, and the only fun lies in the juggling with years, and making long periods of time go a short way. But even this is not very ingenious, and one is almost tempted to adapt Johnson's criticism of Gulliver's Travels and say that“when you have once thought of long-lived men, it is easy to do the rest". The love-letters that passed between Hilpa and Shalum are not so successful as parodies of the supposedly Chinese epistolary style as Steele's jeu d'esprit in the Spectator number 545 (1712).A letter written in Italian is supposed to have been sent from the Emperor of China to the Pope of Rome containing a proposal of the coalition of the Chinese and Roman churches, as well as a demand for “a high amorous virgin suckled at the breast of a wild lioness and a meek lamb,who should be one of Pope Element XI'snieces or the niece of some other great Latin priest". Steele appends an English translation every whit as inflated in style as the faked Italian original. It is the earliest example of that “barbarously rich and overloaded”English style which Newman pitilessly parodied as Persian (“Literature” in Lectures and Essays on University Subjects), and which Arnold, taking perhaps a hint from the preface of Dionysius of Halicarnassus's De Oratoribus Antiquis, dubbed roundly as “Asiatic prose” (“Influence of Literary Academies"). The fictitious Chinese emperor styled himself as “The Favourite Friend of God Gionata the VIIth, most powerful above the most powerful of the Earth, highest above the highest under the Sun and Moon”, etc., and cnfided to the Pope that he wrote his letter “with the quill of a virgin ostrich" (scrive con la penna dello struzzo vergine).4 The touch about writing with the quill of a “vigin ostrich” to be in keeping with the Pope's august purity is priceless.
The Chinese scenes in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe are soberly matter-of-fact, if rather thin and colourless, but those in Mrs. Penelope Aubin's The Noble Slaves:or the Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies who were shipwrecked and cast upon a desolate Island Near the East Indies, in the year 1710 (1722) are absurdly matter-of-fiction and written in an entirely different spirit from that of Defoe's cold and critical narrative. Here, we find “an Indian" who“spoke Chinese" to the Spanish castaways,but who “proved to be a Japanese cast on shore".5 Really a Pan-Asiatic League of a man! We also find “a ruinous Pagan temple(the work of some Chinese or Persian), in which were several strange images, the chief of which represented a man whose head was adorned with the rayes of the sun”. This image was later shattered in a thunderstorm,and announced his own downfall first in Chinese and then in French in the following words:“Christians, you have conquered...the God you serve has silenced me"6.Any comment on this pious miracle is superfluous.
Richard Owen Cambridge also once dallied with the idea of a Chinese tale. His collaborators in the World had given delightful sketches of contemporary taste for Chinese style in gardening and architecture, and we have seen in the preceding essay his own reaction against this “wasting taste". He wrote a poetic tale entitled The Fakeer (1756) on the habit of Chinese Bonzes or Buddhists of self-mortifying and doing acts of penance in public.In the preface, he admitted having borrowed the plan from Voltaire and Le Comte. The scene,however,is strangely laid in India, and a Fakeer is represented to be in conversation with a wealthy young Indian.Why Cambridge should have changed China into India while retaining here and there bits of Chinese local colour (e.g.the Chinese word “Fo” which Cambridge rhymed with “know”), we do not understand.8
We have quoted Walpole's extract from an imaginary letter written by a Chinese philosopher paying a visit to Europe. Walpole resorted once more to this device when his righteous indignation was aroused by the cruel execution of Admiral Byng: A Letter from Xo Ho,a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lein Chi,at Peking (1757).That he owes this device to Montesquieu has been made clear by critics.9 Curiously enough, the letter is not written in such“hyperbolic style of the East" as that extract.It is really too sprightly and epigrammatic for the English conception of the Chinese prose style. Perhaps the heat of composition-the whole piece was written in one hour and a half-left our writer n time for decking the letter out with oriental frills of speech, and “hyperbolic style" would not have met the occasion so well as barbed satire. The letter is from the beginning to the end a bitter indictment of the "incomprehensible" English character, bristling with topical allusions. Apart from one invocation of Confucius, 10 it has no local colour whatever. Among the six Hieroglyphic Tales (1785),we find another Chinese tale by Walpole: Mi Li,A Chinese Fairy Tale.Mi Li,a Chinese prince, was brought up by his godmother the fairy Hih,and was assured by that“unerring oracle” that he would be the most unhappy man alive unless he married a princess whose name was the same as that of her father's dominions.His search for such a bride led him to England, and, after some wild goose chase,he arrived in Oxford, met at General Conway's house Miss Caroline Campbell, daughter of Lord William Campbell,His Majesty's late governor of Carolina,and married her."l The style is very simple and the introduction of living persons very deft.Except a few stock Chinese names like Confucius and Fohi, the tale is entirely free from lumber of oriental lore which Walpole, with his assiduous reading of Chinese histories, must have had at his command. And this insouciance about local colour and probability is indicated by the quotation on the title page from Le Sopha by Crébillon fils:“Schah Baham ne comprennoit jamais bien que les choses absurdes et hors de toute vraisemblance".12
There is one thing noteworthy about Prince Mi Li:he is the first Chinese in English fiction who has difficulty in making himself understood in English, a difficulty undreamed of by Xo Ho or Goldsmith's “citizen of the world". Indeed,judging by their letters,the Chinese philosophers seem to have mastered English as if they had been to the manner born. Not so Mi Li: when he was smitten with the charms of Miss Campbell,the only thing he could say was“Who she? Who she?”He is perhaps the forebear of all those monosyllabic,inarticulate Chinese denizens of the East End made familiar to English readers by Mr. Sax Rohmer's blood-curdling and hair-raising lucubrations. Another point about this story of international love-match calls for comment. Few have noticed that the earliest modern literary instance of an emotional entanglement involving a Chinese and a European, dated as far back as the Renaissance. Boiardo in Orlando Innamorato made the heroine Angelica,the fairest of her sex, a Chinese princess-royal-the daughter of Galafrn, king of Cathay. Ariosto followed suit in Orlando Furioso.Walpole seems to have reversed the tables in his tale by making the hero a Chinese and thesentimental Holy Grail he pursued all over the world a European lady.
The greatest Chinese tale in English is of course Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World which originally appeared in the Public Ledger of 1760-1761.The story and its characters like Beau Tibbs,the Man in Black, and the Chinese philosopher himself, are too well-known to need re-telling here. As to tracking down Goldsmith's various borrowings from Du Halde, Le Comte,Voltaire,Marquis d'Argens,Gueulette,and other French writers, A. L. Sells in the second chapter of the third part of his book Les Sources Françaises de Goldsmith has made so thorough a job of it, incorporating all the researches of his predecessors in the field (J.W.M.Gibb's notes in his edition of Goldsmith, vol. III; R-G. d'Alviny's Le Cosmopolite de Goldsmith; Martha Pike Conant's The Oriental Tale in England in the 18th Century, pp. 185ff; L.J. Davidson's Forerunners of Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World in Modern Language Notes,XXXVI,4;R. S. Crane and H.J. Smith's A French Influence on Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World in Modern Philology,XIX, 1) that nothing more need be said on that score. But there still remain one or two points which challenge our attention. The pompous and highly floriated style affected in the first two letters from Lien Chi Altangi is soon dropped to be spasmodically resumed in the book. Goldsmith himself seems to have been aware of this lackof consistency in tone, and tried to forestall the criticism of being “un-Eastern and out ofcharacter"in Letter XXXIII and Letter LI by showing that “the sonorous,lofty, musical and unmeaning style which passes for Chinese among the English"is really not Chinese at all: “I could not avoid smiling to hear a native of England attempt to instruct me in the true Eastern idiom.... In the East, similes are seldom used, and metaphors almost wholly unknown; but in China particularly ... a cool phlegmatic method of writing pervails there”.13
Gibbs in a footnote takes Goldsmith to task because Oriental literature,he says, abounds with similes. But Goldsmith's apology for his Chinese philosopher's “un-Eastern” style contains some truth,though not the whole truth: the “Loutea” is certainly more sober in his style than the “Babu" or the “Mirza”. In the preface to the book written in 1762, Goldsmith again made the following remarks about his Chinese philosopher:“The Chinese are always concise, so is he [Lien Chi Altangi];simple, so is he. The Chinese are grave and sententious, so is he....The Chinese are often dull, and so is he".14 This is certainly the reverse of Steele's or Walpole's conception of the Chinese prose style,and with the exception of the word “dull" which does as much injustice to Lien Chi Altangi and thcrefore Goldsmith himself as to the Chinese in general,we can heartily endorse Goldsmith's opinion. In his review of Murphy's Chinese tragedy which we shall discuss presently, Goldsmith also criticised the “phlegmatic” Chinese style,and cited as evidence the Percy-Wilkinson version of Hau Kiou Choaan.The review was written in 1759 (Critical Review,May 1759),a year before the appearance of The Citizen of the World in the Public Ledge,and yet The Citizen of the World began with the pomp and hyperbole of the veritable pseudo-oriental convention.Thus,we venture to think that the apology for the “concise, simple,grave, sententious, and dull” style in the preface and Letter XXXIII represents partly Goldsmith's considered opinion on the subject of Chinese literature, and partly his attempt to make a virtue of necessity.It must have been impossible for Goldsmith's simple and charming genius to keep on writing inflated and stilted prose to the very bitter end of the book. After one or two letters in the pseudo-oriental style, even the fun of parody must have begun to pall. 
The second question which we want to raise is:If The Citizen of the World is on the whole a genial satire of the English,does it also reveal Goldsmith's attitude towards the Chinese? Let us take for example the passage in the preface:“The furniture,fippery and fireworks of China have long been fashionably bought up. I'l try the fair with a small cargo of Chinese morality. If the Chinese have contributed to vitiate our taste, I'll try how far they can help to improve our understanding".15 Obviously the “help to understanding” comes from Goldsmith himself, whereas the “vitiation of taste” is a blame to be laid on the Chinese. In Letter XII,he openly criticised the “Chinese taste” by describing “a lady of distinction" who “has got twenty things from China that are of no use in the world... pea-green jars, sprawling dragons, squatting pagods and clumsy mandarins”.1 The lady,with more curiosity than good manners, buttonholed Lien Chi Altangi in the street, wanted to see him eat and use chop-sticks, and asked him to speak Chinese so that she might hear the sound of the language.The lady must have been kith and kin of that Harriet Brittle in Joseph Warton's clever paper in the Adventurer quoted in the preceding essay but a similar accidentto her“precarious furniture" did not unhinge her mind. Letter XXXI contains a caricature of the Chinese garden the very dispositio of whose groves, grottos and streams inculcated morals and wisdom.7 In Letter CX, Lien Chi Altangi gloated over the fact that the English had filled their houses with Chinese furniture, their public gardens with Chinese fireworks,and their very ponds with goldfish which had come from China.18 In Letter LXXXIX Goldsmith satirised both the theory of the Egyptian origin of the Chinese and the Noah-Fohi hypothesis:'9 both Gibbs and Sells have noted that the former was the theory advocated by the French savant De Guignes, but neither has said anything about the latter hypothesis which, as we have already seen,was indigenous to English soil, being first put forward in the seventeenth century by John Webb,revived at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Samel Shuckford, and bolstered up at Goldsmith's own time by authors of The Modern Part of An Universal History. The following quotation from Letter LXIII is most revelatory of Goldsmith's opinion of China:“Yet believe me,my friend,that even China itself is imperceptibly degenerating from their ancient greatness: her laws are now more venal, and her merchants are more deceitful than formerly; the very arts and sciences have run to decay....There was a time when China was the receptacle of strangers;when all were welcome who either came to improve the state, or admire its greatness; now the empire is shut up from every foreign imrovement,and the very inhabitants discourage each other from prosecuting their own oriental advantages".20 Is this not pure Hume or Adam Smith? This passage,taken together with those remarks on the “phlegmatic”Chinese literature and the “vitiation” of the Chinese taste, will show clearly that Goldsmith's critical sense did not fall into abeyance with regard to China in spite of his interest in her. If, as Sells has argued, it was Voltaire who had first awakened Goldsmith's interest in China,21 he did not become “le panégyiste attitré et le defenseur officiel" of the Chinese as Voltaire did.22 His case is simply another illustration of the difference between the English and the French attitude towards China. The story of the Chinese widow in Letter XVIII will be discussed later in connexion with Percy's Matrons.
How extravagant a Chinese tale can be, we may see from The Bonze,Chinese Anchorite,an Oriental Epic Novel, translated from the Mandarin language of Hoamchi-vam, a Tartarian Proselite by Monsr D'Alenzon, dedicated to Lord Kilwarling, Son and Heir of the Earl of Hillsborough, secretary of state for the Northern Colonies.With adventurous wing exploring new found Worlds,the Orient Muse unfettered with Rhyme who sings of Heaven,of Earth, and Wondrous mutations: strivs to Mingle instruction with delight, in hope to gain the smile of Approbation (1769). The title-page itself ought to prepare the readers for the content of the book. In comparison with this stry, even the absurd Chinese scenes in Mrs. Aubin's Noble Slaves seem to be sane. The style of The Bonze is quite in keeping with the story. One is almost tempted to suspect that it was intended to be a parody but for the fact that the author was in sober earnest, and that no one would have thought of carrying on a parody for two rather fat volumes.The author's worthy intention reveals itself in the dedicatory epistle and the very first sentence of the novel proper. Let us telescope the two passages: “The reason, my lord, why the Chinese author calls this piece Epic, is more from its treating of sublime subjects, than for its being narration. The flowery euberance of his numerous style may be compared to the Garden of Eden, rich with a thousand luxuriant Charms,that required the pruning knife, which at best would but sever a beauty from the grace of free Nature, who slights the prim nicely of Art”23;“Folded in the flowery figure of eastem allegory, the seminal moral of this piece may be considered as an apology at once for the Christian religion and the origin of Evil".24 
Two English merchants in China, Captain Wilford and Mr. Theodore Johnson,once talked about "the surprising opinion among the ancient Chinese of the transmigration of the soul from one body to another”, and determined to seek further information on this subject from the hermit-sage Confuciango “who dwelt in the romantic valley of Hoangti”. The whole story thus assumes the form of a Chinese night's entertainment with Confuciango playing the role of the resourceful Scheherazade.Confuciango whom we expect to be the descendant of Confucius, turns out to be the son of General Ousanguey who has figured in Settle's tragedy.25 The story of the conquest of China and the suicide of the Chinese emperor is accordingly retold with many digressions and rodomontades. After the fall of the Chinese dynasty,Confuciango and his patron Prince Zangola“were carried prisoners in the routs of the rebels" and got free by bribing their warder with a curious diamond.Having thus escaped from the rebels,they “associated with the Bonzes,taking their habit after due initiation; at length meeting with some missionaries,they were converted; but by a rational deduction, and an acquaintance with the English, they found the Romish too superstitious, and followed the Protestant plan".26
Zangola, strangely enough for a Bonze though not at all for a Christian,pined for his lover Philosanga now irretrievably lost, and died subsequently of “that ever lacerating remembrance”.Some time since his death, Zangola paid Confuciango “an angelic visitation” and told him the history of the universe and his own “pre-existent”metempsychoses.Here the whole story of Milton's Paradise Lost is retold, and that the author cribbed it from Milton is shown by a casual phrase in the dedicatory epistle on “a lofty subject glancing through the Miltonic theme".27“By the lapse of our representative [Adam],we, to expiate our failings,were to go through a course of gentle sufferings".28“The first terrene vehicle into which Zangola was obtruded, was a worm! varying from first seminal principle into form,buried in earth's gloomy enclosure". When the course of the worm's life had been run, Zangola underwent his second transmigration, “animated the male fetus of an African queen”,and was born a prince. Then he became a “cometarian”,i.e. a denizen of “a fiery-tailed comet peopled by the most wicked and notorious offenders from the earth”;then a mite;then his “naked soul propelled into the central fuid,poised in the yolk of an egg", and turned into “a sprightly game-cock”; then a leopard; then a beautiful courtesan, then a negro prince; then a turkey; then a peacock;then a beautiful woman in a Turkish seraglio; then a turtle-dove; then a man; then a Jupitarian; and finally a Chinese prince, to wit,Zangola.
The ring-leader of the rebels Ligh(the Lycungus in Settle's play) was really the Nth transmigration of Omphiel, that great friend of Lucifer's. Every transmigration-fifteen in all,though the author intoxicated and confounded by his own sesquipedalian verbosity thought there were sixteen-entails a story,and none of the fifteen stories is good. The author rings various changes upon the phrase “animating the malefetus”-“pushed into the ovarium in whose dark chambers, nature impregnates the inimitable animalcule”; “darted intolove's primeval storehouse, ripened by vital heat”; etc.The poverty of the author's inventive power can be inferred from the repetition of metempsychoses: twice a black prince,twice an inhabitant of a star, twice a disreputable woman,and four times a bird. The design of telling stories within the story of Zangola which is in turn a story within another,reveals the influence of the Arabian Nights then much in vogue.29
Why the novel should be called The Bonze at all, we cannot understand, considering the fact that both Zangola and Confuciango very early became Christians. The sentiment is admittedly Christian; the seenes are not laid in China, except the one of imperial suicide; and even the doctrine of metempsychosis in neither Chinese nor Confucian but Indian as Le Comte and Du Halde had made clear,30 and, for that matter, as much Pythagorean and Greek as Buddhistic and Indian. It is a horrible thought that this preposlerous book is not, as Montesquieu boasted of his Esprit des lois, a prolem sine matre creatam. Milton's Paradise Lost which contains references to China also inspired the conception of this monster of a Chinese tale. Let not the sins of the literary progeny be visited on their forebears!
Charles Johnston's The Pilgrim: Or, a Picture of Life in a series of Letters written mostly from London by a Chinese Philosopher to his friend at Quang-Tong (1775) is a poor imitation of Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World quite unworthy of the model.The style is flamboyant,the comments pointless,and the jokes very feeble-witness the one on the Archbishop of Canterbury becoming a missionary to China.31 From “the public-spirited politician's plan to aggrandise the Chinese empire”, we learn that Johnson's authority is curiously Thomas Salmon's Modern History.32 The philosopher is called Choang, the namesake of the hero in the story of the Chinese widow told in The Citizen of the World, and his correspondent is Changti,the Chinese term for God made familiar to Europeans by Le Comte and Du Halde. Choang, as we read in the third letter, was a mandarin of the second order and fled from China to escape the inopportune and unholy love which his friend's wife had entertained for him:“Is not he, who wanders from his native home to expiate a crime of which he hath, however,innocently been the occasion,in the strictest sense, a Pilgrim?”33.He finally returned to China when he heard of the death of Monsab's wife.The book contains scarcely any reflection on China and the local colour is of the thinnest;e.g.,the sage Tait-Song whom Choang quoted more than once,is imaginary. Even the name Confucius seems to have been unknown to Johnston!
Among the three oriental eclogues by John Scott of Amwell there is one on the Chinese:Li-Po;or The Good Governor (1782).In the prefatory note,he explained that the poem was inspired by Du Halde's eulogy of the Chinese government.34 The geography in the eclogue is that of the cloud-cuckoo-town but the name of the chief character Li-Po is a very happy coinage, a name actually borne by a great Chinese poet known in Du Halde as“Li Tsau Pe” and compared by him to Anacreon.35 The poem begins with a description of Li-Po'sbeautiful pavilion where
From business and its pomp and pain,
The pensive master sought relief in vain
because as viceroy of ten fair towns,he was worried by “the worn's transactions”.36 His slaves,wishing to ease his anxiety,
Amusive tales their soothing lay disclos'd,
Of heroes brave to perils strange expos'd; 
Of tyrants proud, from power's summit cast;
And lovers, long desponding,blest at last.
But Li-Po was too muchdepressed by the difficulties of just and sage government to take pleasure in the “amusive tales”.He then had a vision in which he went to seek the advice of Confucius: in a palace amidst palmy fields,
The gates of pearl a shady hall disclos'd,
Where old Confucius' rev'rend form repos'd:
Loose o'er his limbs the silk's light texture flow'd,
His eye serene ethereal lustre show'd.37
The result of theconsultation is Li-Po's determination to wander in crowded streets and mix with the throng in order to know better his subject's sufferings. This practical political zeal is of course alien to the character of the real Li-Po. Though his celebration of wine and woman might suggest Anacreontics and perhaps even Carmina Burana to Western readers,he is essentially airy-fairy and seems to be of less specific gravity tan reality, hovering over the world instead of being in or of it. Scott unwittingly transformed this aeromantic into a mild Chinese counterpart to Justice Overdo in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fayre. His, however, is the only eighteenth-century English poem on China which is free from mockery.
Mrs. Priscilla Wakefield, that prolific and edifying authoress of works virginibus puerisque, also wrote a Chinese tale. Her book Leisure Hours;or Entertaining Dialogues between Persons eminent for Virtue and Magnanimity,the Characters drawn from Ancient and Modern History,designed as Lessons of Morality for Youth (1794-1796), contains a dialogue between Chinese characters on “The Nature of True Riches".The Chinese emperor Tihoangdeclared: “The man,of whatever rank, who devotes his time and talents to the improvement of those arts which contribute to the happiness and accommodation of the human race, may truly be called a benefactor of his species, and is entitled not only to the gratitude of his fellow-citizens, but to the rewards of royal munificence.38 Accordingly,a merchant(Yang-ti),a manufacturer (Chiang) and a farmer(Hio) were brought to the court,each declaring his title to the rewards of royal munificence. The emperor, after hearing their respective claims,awarded the first prize to Hio, the second to Chiang, and scolded and dismissed the merchant for having discovered a mine of diamonds, “the avenue to luxury and false wealth".39 As if the moral were not painfully obvious enough in the dialogue itself, Mrs.Wakefield labored the point in long prefatory remarks that true wealth“does not consist in thepossession of the precious metals only".Although she wrote the book with the express purpose of “advancing the pupils in the knowledge of history”,40 the characters in this dialogue are fictitious. She also compiled “for the instruction of young persons" The Traveller in Africa; or A Visit to the East Indies and China(1817).
William Hatchett's adaptation of the tragedy The Chinese Orphan is the first English play on a Chinese subject since Settle's piece and Rochester's fragment. The play was originally translated into French by Père Du Halde's Description of China. Richard Hurd's analysis of this tragedy is based upon the text given in Du Halde. Two English versions appeared respectively in the two English translations of Du Halde's Description.41 In 1762, Percy gave a new English translation of Du Halde's French text in his Miscellaneous Pieces relating to the Chinese.In the prefatory remark to his translation, Percy only mentioned that“this tragedy had been given twice already in our own language in two different translations of that work [Du Halde ]”,42	and said nothing about Hatchett's adaptation. Nor did Alexander Wylie include this adaptation in his list of Chinese books translated into European languages placed at the head of his book Notes on ChineseLiterature.Hatchett's The Chinese Orphan: An Historial Tragedy alter'd from a Specimen of the Chinese Tragedy in Du Halde's History of China,Interspers'd with Songs,after the Chinese manner (1741) was dedicated to the Duke of Argyll.
The following passage from the dedication is noteworthy:“China has furnish'd us long with Produce of her Earth; with her Manufactures; and I am willing to flatter myself,the Importation of her Poetry will serve to regale in its Turn. It must be allow'd,the Specimen Du Halde has given us of her Tragedy (on which this is founded) is very rude and imperfect; tho' I imagine there are certain Strokes of Nature in it, scarce to be equal'd by the most celebrated of the European Drama”.43 And this is said exactly ten years before Hurd's masterly analysis. The discovery of “strokes of nature” in a play which the French beaux esprits have found “shocking to all rules of probability”(as we have seen in the preceding article) is just another proof that the English Augustans are not so hag-ridden by cut-and-dry rules as their French contemporaries. The plot of this tragedy, every latent subtlety of which has been extracted by Hurd in his able summary, is briefly this.The hero of the play is Ch'eng Ying, the family physician of the house of Chao.Chao,a great courtier, has by his integrity and uprightness incurred the wrath of the villain Tü-ngan-cû. The villain who happens to be the king's favourite, instigates the king to massacre all the members of the house of Chao. Ch'eng Yin smuggles away Chao's grandson, then a mere suckling, and sacrificed his own baby by palming him off as Chao's sole heir whom the villain has been especially anxious to kill, because, to quote Percy'stranslation, “to prevent a plant from shooting out again,one must pull up even the smallest root", or, as Hatchett's paraphrase runs,
He that would hinderany plant from growing,
Must not the smallest root leave undestroy'd.44
The changeling is duly butchered, while Chao's real heir is brought up by Ch'eng Ying as his own son. As the dramatic irony will have it,the villain,being barren of issue, takes a fancy to the child and adopts him. When the orphan comes of age and becomes a splendid youth educated at the villain's expense,Ch'eng Ying confides to him his real life history, and instigates him to take vengeance on the villain who is now his foster father. The play closes with ample poetic justice: The villain is cruelly done to death, theking's eyes are opened,the orphan recovers his lost property and Ch'eng Ying himself receives rewards for his heroic sacrifice. The tragic conflict between two “ethical substances” in the play is very intense: Ch'eng Ying's self-division between the love of his own boy and the painful duty of sacrificing him for Chao's orphan is powerfully presented and reminds us of the dramatic situation in Abraham and Isaac.
In Hatchett's version, the dramatis personae, originally nine in number are increased to twelve, with all their names changed. Here,the villain Siako has as his accomplice a Bonze at a time when Buddha himself is not yet born.Ching-Poei,the orphan,is here called Camhy, the name of the great Manchu emperor,the description of whose pleasure garden we quoted in the preceding article.Ousanguee, the general who has been in The Bonze made the father of Confuciango, here appears as the friend of the physician Kifang.Laotse, the founder of Taoism,figures here as an old courtier and one of the numerous victims of the villain. Incidents are multiplied and atrocity is piled on atrocity by the villain and hisaccomplice. The plot, however, remains on the whole unchanged. In the original, the dénouement comes when Ch'eng Ying shows the orphan a picture-roll which contains vignettes of his life history without any written commentary.This is a turning-point in the play, and foreshortens all the preceding events. Let us compare the original in Percy's translation with Hatchett's amplified version. Thus Percy:“Ching-Poei (solus): 'Oh,they are pictures. Here is something very extraordinary.This figure clothed in red is setting a great dog on that figure clothed in black. Here is one kills the dog, and here is another supports a chariot which hath but one wheel. And see, here is a man beats out his brains against a cinnamon-tree....Let me look over the rest of the roll.This general has before him a cord,poisoned wine, and a poniard. He takes the poniard and cuts his throat.Why does he kill himself? But what is the meaning of this physician with a chest of medicines? And this lady, who falls on her knees before him,and offers him a child which she carries in her arms? Why does she strangle herself with her girdle'?”45 The picture motif is retained by Hatchett, but the physician Kifang is represented as showing “a robe of history-painting" deliberately to the king with the villain Siako attending:
King:A robe of history-painting! Let me see-
Bold the design,and the expression srong!
First here's a man apparel'd in blue-ribbon,
Setting a dog on one that's dress'd in red,
In presence of another clad in purple.
Then here again,a man destroys the dog
The man in red lies here a mangled corpse.
A little further,there,the man in blue
Is writing with the hand of him in purple,
This seems the scene of some foul massacre!
Men,women,children, murder'd thick!
Adjoining to a house that's topsy-turvy-
The man in blue is guiding here again
The hand of him in purple-Then there's one,
Who seems a hero, in profound distress,
Receivingfrom another's hand a dagger,
Here's a Physician with a chest of med'cines-
This is a beauteous lady all in tears,
Kneeling,and holding in her arms a child,
With several physick vials 'tween her fingers-
A captain here is seizing the physician,
And falling on his sword a little farther. 
The man in blue again! Confusion on him!
He comes so oft,he covers all the piece ...
He's writing here with a dead lady's hand-
There tor'ring by bamhoo a grave old man-
Here he is cutting a poor babe in pieces;
There he is stabbing a seeming churchman;
Then offring medicine to the man in purple,
Who is surrounded by vast crouds of people,
With hands uplifted, in beseeching posture-
Who has the meaning of this mystick painting'?46
And,to complete the dramatic irony, the king asks Siako himself who is no other than the man in blue to explain the picture. The outline of the events remains the same, and many of the incidents painted on the robe are contained in the Chinese play,though they are omitted from the original picture-roll. The greatest change wrought by Hatchett is in the rôle played by the orphan; in the original, the orphan grows up to a man of twenty, capable of administering the “wild justice” himself whereas in the adaptation, the orphan remains to the end a mule character, and the king,after having meted out capital punishment to Siako, ran still dandle“the dear babe" and call him “little sufferer".4 Thus the unity of time is less violated inthe adaptation than in the original. With all his enthusiasm about “strokes of nature” in the play, Hatchett still finds it necessary to compromise with critical opinion represented by remarks of Du Haldeand D'Argens. All the more credit to Hurd!
Arthur Murphy also became attracted to the story of the Chinese orphan and made his own version of it in The Orphan of China,a Tragedy (written in 1754 and performed on April 21, 1759). As to how this play was the ocasion for “the first and indeed the last disagreeable controversy" between Murphy and Garrick who at first returned the manuscript of the piece to Murphy as “totally unfit for the stage",the reader should see Murphy's own account of the quarrel in his The Life of David Garrick.48 Although the number of characters in this piece is the same as in the original, the plot is changed beyond recognition.That is due to the fact that Murphy is concerned less with the alteration of the original plot given in Du Halde than with the improvement of Voltaire's adaptation of the play. Of this, more anon. In Hatchett's piece,we find rumours of Tartarian invasion reaching the ears of Chinese courtiers,49 but in Murphy's adapttion, the curtain rises on a China already conquered by the Tartars. Indeed, judging by the frequent mentions of the Tartarian conquest in English plays and novels on Chinese subjects,that historical episode must have had a strange fascination for English men of letters. Dryden, as we have seen, thought of writing a play on it, both Settle and Rochester actually dramatised it, The Bonze retold it circumstantially, and even Goldsmith dragged it in by the head and shoulders in Letter XLII in The Citizen of the World. In Murphy's play, however, the Tartarian conquest is already complete, and the Tartarian emperor Timurkan already on the Chinese throne when the curtain is raised:
Then Timurkan
Has conquer'd, and that burst,that rent the skies,
Was the last gasp of freedom and laws,
A dying nation's groan!50 
Thus declaims Zamti the loyal Chinese mandarin. Again:
China is no more;
The Eastern world is lost;the glorious fabric,
For ages that hath stood, the seat of empire,
Falls with Universe beneath the stroke
Of savage pow'r;falls from its tow'ring hopes,
Forever,ever fall'n!5
Zamti,it turns out,was “ordained”by the late Chinese Emperor twenty years ago “to save the royal child”, Zaphimri now known as Etan. Zamti's own son Hamet has been mistaken by the Tartars for Prince Zaphimri and is now in gaol. Zamti and Etan plan together
Revenge,Conquest,and Freedom!
The midnight hour shall call a chosen band
Of hidden patriots forth, who, when the foe
Sinks down in drunken revelry, shall pour
The gather'd rage of twenty years upon him,
And at one blow redeem the Eastern world.52
Timurkan,however,is acute enough to suspect the identity of Hamet and tries every means to force Zamti and his wife Mandane to reveal the whereabouts of the real Prince Zaphimri;“Resign your phantom of a king", says Timurkan to the old couple,“and save your child”.53 Etan then confesses himself in order to save Zamti's family,but Hamet who seems to have inherited the character of heroic sacrifice from his parents, claims to be the real and genuine Zaphimri in order to screen Etan. Finally, after a good deal of suspense, Etan seizes the sabre of Timurkan and kills the Tartarian
leader:
My father strikes,
He gives the blow; and this, thou destroyer fell,
This for a nation's groans!54
So China recovers her freedom in the end, though Zamti and his wife do not live long to enjoy the new-won liberty. Thus, in Murphy's version as in the original,the orphan plays an active part in the vengeance. But in Voltaire's L'Orphelin de la Chine,the orphan is even more insignificant than the suckling in Hatchett's adaptation.Voltaire makes the villain of the piece, the Tartarian conqueror Gengis-Kan (Timurkan in Murphy) reconciled in the end to Zamti and his wife Idamé (Murphy's Mandane):
Gengis-Kan:“Veillez,heureux epoux,sur l'innocente vie
De l'enfant de vos rois, que ma main vous confie.”
Zamti:			“Ah! vous ferez aimer votre joug aux vaincus.”
Idamé:			“Qui peut vous inspirer ce dessein?”
Gengis:			“vos vertus.”55
In a letter to M. Voltaire appended to the play, Murphy writes: “My first propensity to this story was occasioned by the remarks of an admirable critic of our own (Hurd) upon the Orphan of the House of Chau,preserved to us by the industrious and sensible P. Du Halde.... In my reflections upon it [the Chinese piece],I imagined I saw a blemish in the manner of saving the Orphan,by the tame resignation of another infant in his place;especially when the subject afforded a fair opportunity to delineate the strugglings of a parent, on so tryingan occasion. It therefore occurred to me that if a fable could beframed,in which the Father and the Young Men might be interwoven with probability and perspicuity, without being embarrassed with all the perplexities of a riddle”.56 He takes Voltaire's play to task becaus of “its scantiness of interesting business"57:“I ask your own feeling (for nobody knows the human heart better)whether an audience is likely to take any considerable interest in the destiny of a babe, who, whe your Zamti has saved him,cannot produce any change, any revolution in the affairs of China?... In your story, sir, give me leave to say, I do not see what end can be answered by Zamti's loyalty: his prospect of any real service to his country is so distant that it becomes almost chimerical".58 For this reason and “because history warrants an expulsion of the Tartars", Murphy makes his play what it is.
One ventures to suggest that while the criticism is more or less just, the History is doubtful. Goldsmith's review of Murphy's tragedy is worth quoting, because it incidentally reveals Goldsmith's own attitude towards China:“From this perversion of taste, the refined European has, of late, had recourse even to China,in order to diversify the amusements of the day.We have seen gardens laid out in the eastern manner, houses ornamented in front by zigzag lines; and rooms stuck round with Chinese vases and Indian pagodas.... Voltaire has accordingly embroidered a Chinese plot with all the colouring of French poetry; but his advances to excellence are only in proportion to his deviating from the calm insipidity of his Eastern original. Of all nations that ever felt the influence of the inspiring goddess, perhaps the Chinese are to be placed in the lowest class: Their productions are the most phlegmatic that can be imagined. In those pieces of poetry, or novel translations,some of which we have seen and which probably may soon be made public, there is not a single attempt to address the imagination, or influence the passions; such therefore are very improper models for imitation: and Voltaire who was perhaps sensible of this, has made considerable deviations from the original plan. Our English poet has deviated still further, and, in proportion as the plot has become more European, it has become more perfect". But Goldsmith finds Murphy's letter to Voltaire, though“written with fire and spirit”,liable to “subject Mr. Murphy to the censure of having made but indifferent return to a man whose sentiments and plan he has, in a great measure, thought proper to adopt”.59 On égorge ce qu'on pille! Murphy, however frankly acknowledges his debt to Voltaire in the letter: “You will perceive, sir, in the English Orphan a new occasional insertions of sentiment from your elegant performance”.60 On the whole,Goldsmith here expresses in propria persona views which he is to ascribe later to Lien Chi Altangi in The Citizen of the World. It is also interesting to note that in A Reverie, one of the Bee papers, Goldsmith describes Murphy as applying for admission into the Temple of Fame on the strength or rather the feebleness of this play.61
In 1750-1,was published a piece of pseudo-translation from the Chinese which enjoyed great popularity both in England and on the Continent: The Economy of Human Life. Translated from an Indian manuscript written by an Ancient Bramin. To which is prefixed an account of the manner in which the said manuscript was discovered,in a Letter from an English Gentleman then residing in China to the Earl of.... Although it was supposed to be translated from“an Indian manuscript", the author in the prefatory account admitted to having made his translation from the Chinese version of the Indian manuscript, and, as we shall see presently, a poetical paraphrase of his work is frankly entitled Chinese Maxims.The work met with such success that today there exist about fifty English editions, let alone the translations into French, German,Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Welsh.62 Its initial success was undoubtedly due to its being ascribed to the Earl of Chesterfield, but R. Dodsley was its real author. The following mystifying passage is from the“Advertisement to the Public":“There are some reasons which at present make it proper to conceal,not only his own name, but the name of his correspondent,who has now resided in China several years, and been engaged in a business very different from that of collecting literary curiosities".63 The letter is dated Pekin, 12 May, 1749,and its content is briefly this: In the archives of the Grand Lama's Temple at Lasa,Thibet, many ancient books had been still preserved.The present Chinese emperor sent a doctor named Cao-tsou to assess and report on those literary rarities in the Grand Lama's possession. Cao-tsou, having previously mastered the language of Thibet “by an accidental friendship with a certain learned Lama in Pekin”, stayed in the Thibetan Sacred College for six months and made many finds,the most valuable among which is “a small system of morality, written in the language and character of the ancient Gymnosophists or Bramins". Some Chinese scholars attributed it to Confucius, some to Laokium,“getting over the difficulty of its being written in the language and character of the ancient Bramins by supposing this to be only a translation and that the original work had been lost".A few savnts ascribed it to the Bramin Dandamis whose famous letter to Alexander the Great had been recorded by European writers. “One thing,however, occasions some doubt among them, and that is the plan of it,which is entirely new to the Eastern people, and so unlike anything they have ever seen, that if it was not for some turns of expression peculiar to the East, and the impossibility of accounting for its being written in this very ancient language,many would suppose it to be the work of an European”.The correspondent to the Earl of Chesterfield translated his style upon “so elegant a pattern as our version of the book of Job, the Psalms, the works of Solomon, and the Prophets". The work is divided into two parts, the second part being prefaced with another short letter from Pekin dated January,1749-1750.There are seven books in the first part, and five in the second. Almost every aspect of human life is discussed under appropriate headings which are arranged in, so to speak, an ascending series-starting with physiology and rounding off with theology. The discussion consists of little else than wise saws and modern instances, and The Monthly Review rightly dismissed the work as “rather trite” while praising its pattern or arrangement.6 It is therefore surprising that the latest editor of this work Douglas M. Gane should have called it "a galaxy of jewels of the mind polished to the utmost brilliancy”.66 That it is a pseudo-translation was transparent, and even Dodsley's contemporaries knew it-witness the phrase "apocryphal introduction" in The Monthly Review. But Gane takes it seriously as a real translation. We might run a little risk of labouring the obvious and point out one or two slips on Dodsley's part which give the show away.First, the translator made believe that he had written from Pekin at a time when no Englishman was permitted to travel outside of Canton.67 Lord Macartney recorded how one English merchant had been frustrated in every attempt of his to reach Pekin to appeal to the emperor. Even at the time of his embassy, Lord Macartney had his grave doubts about the possibility of asking the Emperor's licence for “cautious” and “courteous” British subjects to reside in Peking in order to dissipate anglophobia in the Chinese court.68 And John Barrow, Lord Macartney's private secretary,put the following lines on the title page of his Travels in China (1804):
Non cuivis Homini Contingit adire Corinthum.
It is the lot of few to go to Pekin.
Another point is that, in spite of Dodsley's assertion that there are in the work “turns of expression peculiar to the East”,there is not a single aphorism which can be called Indian or Chinese in spirit or in letter. The worship of a persnal God in the section on religion is definitely Christian in sentiment,and betrays the near East of Palestine rather than the far East of China or India.The faked letter from the Chinese emperor to the Grand Lama "the great representative of God” given in the first letter from Pekin, is another specimen of eighteenth-century English imitations of the Chinese epistolary style,but the relation between the emperor and the priest adumbrated in the letter is wrong. Dodsley's work should be judged on its own merits, and was not intended to hoodwink eighteenth-century readers. Gane's misplaced enthusiasm about its orientalism will only expose it either to the criticism of lack of
verisimilitude or to the condemnation of forgery.
Susannah Watt's Chinese Maxims (1784) is a “translation” of the first part of The Economy of Human Life. The paraphrase is done in heroic verse, and on the whole fairly close tothe original. Take the following aphorism on modesty forexample:“The first step towards being wise is to know that thou art ignorant; and if thou wouldest not be esteemed foolish in the judgment of others, cast of the folly of being wise in thine own conceit".69 Susannah Watts's paraphrase runs as follows:
Wouldest thou each step to knowledge truly go,
That thou art ign'rant humbly leam to know.
Is it thy wish,and thy aspiring aim,
T'enjoy the pleasure of an honest fame?
Reject low pride,and vain conceit despise,
Nor let thy own opinion term thee wise.70
But at times our authoress can be exceedingly periphrastic. Compare for instance the apothegm on religion in the original with her paraphrase:“There is but one God, the author, the creator,the governor of the world, almighty, eternal, incomprehensible";7
One pow'r alone commands th'all ruling rod,
And owns the dread, the glorious name of God;
Whose forming hand bids fair creation rise,
And rules the world he made,in goodness wise:
His sceptre governs with almighty sway,
And all his reign is one eternal day. 
Too high perfections for the mortal span,
Pow'r too immense to be conceiv'd by man.72
There are also omissions: the exhortation to all husbands to be “faithful to their wives' beds”,73 for instance, is with fitting feminine modesty omitted in the paraphrase.
Another pseudo-translation from the Chinese modelled also upon the style of the Authorised Version of the Old Testament should be mentioned in passing: The Oriental Chronicles of the Times:Being the Translation of a Chinese manuscript; with Notes Historical, Critical, and Explanatory. Supposed to have been written in the spirit of Prophecy,by Confucius the Sage (1785). In the dedication to the Duchess of Devonshire, the author explained that he had written this book “in defence of the firm Friend of BritishFreedom, steady Supporter of the Constitution of his Country, and determined Enemy to Eastern Tyranny, the Right Hon. CHARLES JAMES FOX".74 The book is composed of twenty-three chapters with detailed footnotes explanatory of the topical allusions in the text. There is no local colour whatever. The following sentence will give the reader some idea of its style and tone:“Behold,I am come from a fr country,yea from the great empire of China came I,to be present at the election of the Elders of the land. When fair Devonia went forth to the help of the Patriot, I was there;yea, when the Slayer of the Market saluted her,behold, my mouth watered”.75
Having disposed of these pseudo-translations, we come to authentic ones. The greatest among them all is Percy-Wilkinson's Hau Kiou Choaan or The Pleasing History.A Translation from the Chinese Language. To which are added, I.The Argument or Story of a Chinese Play, II. A Collection of Chinese Proverbs, and III. Fragments of Chinese Poetry (1761).This translation was quite the greatest piece of work ever undertaken by any European up to Percy's time,and the continental translators were for the first time obliged to translate a Chinese book at second-hand from an English version of it.  flood of light has been thrown upon the literary relations between Percy and Goldsmith and Percy's use of James Wilkinson's papers by the interesting articles of Miss Alda Milner- Barry,Dr. F. L. Powell and Mr. Vincent H. Ogburn in The Review of English Studies (Vol. II, No. 5 and No.8; Vol.III, No. 10; Vol. IX, No. 33). Dr. Powell's article is especially shrewd and illuminating and should be consulted by readers. Our concern here will be largely with determining what kind of translation The Pleasing History is, and how it seems to have been translated.
Percy seems to have been fully aware of the record-breaking character of the version of The Pleasing History:“The missionaries have given abstracts and versions of several Chinese books which may be seen in the curious collection of P. Du Halde. Among them are some few novels.As there are but short pieces,the Editor thought it would be no unacceptable present to the curious to afford them a specimen of a larger kind: that they may see how a Chinese Author would conduct himself through the windings of a long narration".” Ironically enough, the work was suspected to be just another pseudo-translation or “forgery” so that Percy had to add an “Advertisement” to the second issue in 1774 to establish its authenticity beyond cavil.78 The following passages from Percy's preface to The Pleasing History are particularly important:“The following translation was found in manuscript, among the papers of a gentleman [whose name Percy disclosed as James Wilkinson in the“Advertisement”to the second issue of the book] who had large concerns in the East-India Company and occasionally resided much at Canton. It is believed by his relations, that he had bestowed considerable attention on the Chinese language, and that this translation (o at least part of it) was undertaken by him as a kind of exercise while he was studying it: the many interlineations,etc. which it abounds with, shew it to be the work of a learner: and as the manuscript appears inmany places to have been first written with black-lead pencil,and afterwards more correctly over-written with ink, it should seem to have been drawn up under the direction of a Chinese master or tutor. The History is contained in four thin folio books or volumes of Chinese paper....The first three of these volumes are in English: the fourth in Portuguese; and written in a different hand from the former. This part the Editor hath now translated into our own language".79“As the version was the work of a gentleman whose province was trade, and who probably never designed it for Public, nothing could be expected from him but fidelity to the original: and this if one may judge from the erasures and corrections that abound in the manuscript was not neglected; which the general prevalence of the Chinese idiom will serve to confirm".80 Thus Percy made it day-clear that Wilkinson had made the translation direct from the original Chinese and under the supervision of a teacher of the language. This is amply borne out by the presence in the footnotes of Chinese phrases transliterated-witness Vol. I, p.59 and p.185 and Vol. II, p. 203. Miss Alda Milner-Barry,after abandoning her hypothesis that this work is a translation of a non-existent Portuguese version of the Chinese novel, suggests that “Wilkinson's work was completed by some Portuguese friend” in order to explain the fourth volume. Our examination of the first three volumes leads us to believe that the “Portuguese friend” is most probably “the Chinese master or tutor”in Percy's preface. And the“Chinese master” was not born tothe language he taught to Wilkinson:for, otherwise we cannot explain why a work evidently undertaken in China, supervised by a “Chinese master”,and executed with much care, should have been dismissed by a nineteenth-century sinologue Sir John Francis Davis as one in which “much was mistranslated,much interpolated and a great deal omitted altogether".81 The mistakes Sir John singled out for censure in the preface to his own translation of the same novel under the more correct title The Fortunate Union, are all insignificant. What supports our argument is the class of mistakes which may be called foreigners' errors, to wit, mistakes which result from the misunderstanding of slangs and idioms and the ignorance of customs and habits. It is these tell-tale mistakes which show decisively that the “Chinese master” who corrected Wilkinson's“exercises” could not possibly be a native of China.As a matter of historical fact, natives of China were then forbidden to teach Englishmen “the language ofthe flowery land”,and all business transactions had to be carried on in Portuguese.82 The Portuguese,because of the priority of their trade relations with the Chinese and their religion,enjoyed certain privileges denied to the English. Their missionaries very early learned the Chinese language, and we have made ample use of the Portuguese accounts of China in our first essay before the French accounts come in useful.Indeed,one of the motives of Lord Macartney's embassy to China was to petition Kien Long that the English should have the same privileges as the Portuguese. These facts by themselves have no decisive weight in enabling us to apply Occam's razor and tentatively reduce the“Chinese master” into the “Portuguese friend”,until they are clinched by internal evidence. We must also bear in mind that the novel is written in colloquial Chinese with a dash of literary turns of expression all within the comprehension of a schoolboy of ten and not necessarily theChinese counterpart to Macaulay's“schoolboy” at that. The translation of the title Hau (good) Kiou (pair) Choaan (history or biography)into The Pleasing History is already a bit freeand suspiciously inexact, because as we gather from Vol. IV, p. 168 that “The Pleasing History" was meant to be a literal translation of the original title and not an evaluating caption. The idioms in the text are often studiously shirked in the translation or amusingly misinterpreted. For instance, the word “angel" in Vol. I on p. 17 is an evasion from the difficulty of translating and explaining the good deeds of three proverbial Chinese heroes, and Percy was led by the word to make researches and conclude in the footnote that the Chinese “believe in tutelar spirits”. Another“angel” appears on p. 41, and Percy had to make another explanatory note. The mistake on p. 37 is more significant:“At this [the arrival of Imperial despatch] he greatly rejoiced,and making an offering of fire, prayed for the Emperor". Percy noted:“The Editor could meet with no account of this custom". To be sure, he could not. For the original phrase simply describes the well-known custom of burning incense and offering thanksgivingat the receipt of a royal mandate.And “burning or offering incense" is as commonplace an idiom in Chinese as it is in English. In Vol. II,on p. 51, the heroine expressed her wish to have "her enemies sacrificed and their flesh offered to herself to appease her resentment”, much to the shock of Percy and amusement of Davies (who by the way also translated the phrase wrong in his version, Vol. I,p. 151).But the heroine was by no means a vampire and meant nothing bloodthirsty or cannibalistic: she simply ground her teeth out of hatred-an act not very lady-like, perhaps, but still reasonably human.
The most conclusive proofs are perhaps the mistakes made in proper names. The word sheh 氏 meaning“surname” is mistaken to be a part of the name， and we have“Sheh-Sheh”石氏（Vol.I， p.2) instead of “surnamed Sheh".The following note (Vol.I, p. 59) by the translator is particularly decisive:“Tah quay gkeou shau lee 大悝侯沙利，of which the two first signify his name；the others his rank, answering the Duke with us”. As a matter of fact, the phrase means Shau-lee, the Duke of Tah-quay. The explanation given by the translator and no doubt derived from the “Chinese master” is tantamount to saying that in the phrase “Thomas Percy,Bishop of Dromore”,the words“of Dromore”signify the prelate's name, while the words “Thomas Percy Bishop" denote his rank corresponding to the Chinese Fakeer.Certainly no Englishman,however illiterate and stupid, would ever commit such a howler. The “Chinese master” who thus duped Wilkinson could not possibly be a native of China at all. We therefore venture to think that it must have been the writer of the fourth volume (which also abound in preposterous mistakes) who “directed” Wilkinson's Chinese studies. Percy's share in this work however is all to the good,and Sir JohnFrancis Davis who seems to have read Percy's book while running, is really unjust in his carping criticism of “Dr. Hug Percy" in the preface to his Fortunate Union. Percy, as James Grainger says inhis letter to Percy preserved in Nicholas's Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century,had the merit of turning the work into “good reading English"83.He always noted where he departed from Wilkinson's manuscript. Although he subdivided the chapters again, he preserved the original divisions in the margin. The division of the book is strictly in accordance with the original, except that chapters 15-18 are most unreasonably compressed and abridged by“the Portuguese friend” into two. Percy,of course, could not know this, and was not responsible for the omissions censured by Sir John.
We now come to Percy himself. His knowledge of China, though acquired at second-hand, seems astonishingly extensive.One finds him perhaps the most well-read Englishman on this subject since John Webb. The list of reference books given in the first volume of The Pleasing History(xxix) testifies to his wide reading on China. If he rather neglected the early writers on China collected by Hakluyt and Purchas, he at least kept himself abreast of the latest authorities. But his knowledge of China is that of a man who is interested in the country as a subject without loving it as an object. The difference between the attitude of the learned Percy and that of the equally learned Webb (at least equally learned with regard to our subject) is instructive. Let us examine a few samples of Percy's opinions taken from his preface and his notes.Percy,by the way, set much store by his notes which are exceedingly full and meaty. Two thirds of them were taken from Du Halde, and the rest from various authorities given in the list. The translator as we have already seen had misled Percy to make much irrelevant research by his misinterpretations, but Percy always brought up treasures by dippings of his bucket. The notes are copious almost to a fault:the mention of Confucius, for instance, entails atremendously long footnote on Confucius's life and works, and even such a simple word as“feast” cannot appear without causing Percy to make lengthy extracts from Du Halde on the rituals of Chinese feasts. One may confidently assert that anything about China that could be known without knowing the Chinese language,Percy knew.James Grainger's words are worth quoting:“You have been at great pains in collecting your notes to the Chinese History. They throw much light upon it; and to deal fairly with you, I think they contribute the most valuable part of the book”.84 The tone of the notes, however,is very critical, not to say contemptuous. We shall begin with the preface. After a criticism of the dryness and tediousness of this novel,he says:“That there is a littleness and poverty of genius in almost all the works of taste of the Chinese must be acknowledged by capital judges....The abjectness of their genius may easily be accounted from that servile submission, and dread of novelty,which inslaves the minds of the Chinese, and while it promotes the peace and quiet of their Empire, dulls their spirit and cramps their imagination”. He then adds a footnote to the effect that perhaps the Chinese taste in gardening ought to be excepted from the criticism of “littleness and poverty".85 But he goes on to say that although the Chinese imagination is comparatively timid,it shows “a greater regard to truth than other Asiaticks” and is free from“extravagant absurdities”.86 In short, as we pointed out before, the“Loutea” is not the Babu. He characteristically suspects the trustworthiness of Jesuit missionaries' accounts of China in spite of his own reliance upon them: “Supposing we had no reason to question their veracity, yet the very gravity of their character would preserve them from being ocular witnesses (not only of the idolatrous ceremonies, but) of many particulars of the interior Conduct of the Chinese”,87 an exceedingly shrewd remark which applies even more to modern tourists than to eighteenth-century Jesuits who enjoyed Imperial patronage and were tolerable masters of the native tongue. In a footnote to what in the original is a rather salacious passage (Vol. I, p.116), he invites the readers to “smile” at the “affectation of modesty”,and observes:“The Chinese are a very affected people, and all affectation leads to absurdity". Another footnote reads:“The Chinese,who are the most subtle crafty people in the world, may naturally be supposed to esteem subtility and craft. The reader must have observed that these qualities are predominant in the character of Shuey-Ping-Sin [the heroine],who is yet set forth by the Chinese author, as a perfect exemplar of all virtue. The Chinese morals, notithstanding their boasted purity,evidently fall short of the Christian"(Vol.I, p.129). The rarity of Christian charity even in the clergy is surprising.Subtle craftiness is a proverbially feminine birthright-“projecting a scheme for breakfast and a strategem while taking tea”.In fact,the little ruses which the Chinese heroine practised to elude the grasp of the villain remind us very much of those practised by Richardson's Pamela with the great difference that while the Chinese heroine withheld herself from her mean suitor out of her love of the hero, Pamela withheld only to sell herself dear. And Pamela is called “Virtue” rewarded! In the footnote to the passage in which the heroine was depicted as wishing to taste the flesh of her enemies, Percy again comments on “the contemptible light" in which Chinese morals appear to him(Vol. II,p.51).
Among the three appendices to The Pleasing History, the “Argument or story of a Chinese play acted at Canton in the year 1719"88 was also penned by Wilkinson. But the other two were compiled by Percy himself from various European books on China, and formed a kind of Summa of European knowledge of Chinese poetry and aphoristic literature up to Pery's time. The collection of Chinese proverbs and apothegms drawn from Du Halde and others,is really,as Percy himself said,“the first attempt of the kind made in Europe”. Percy also makes the following apology:“We desire it may be considered that they are only translations of translations,and therefore must appear to great disadvantage".89 The dissertation that prefaces“Fragments of Poetry"is but a translation of Freret,with supplementary information from Du Halde.The “Advertisement”, however,is very original in thought:“Few and trifling, as they may seem,they are almost all that have been published in any European language....The flowers of Poesy are of so delicate a nature, that they will seldom bear to be transplanted into a foreignlanguage.... The nearer any people are to a state of wild nature, while their customs and notions are few and simple, it is easy to conceive that their Poetry will be easy and intelligible to other nations.... No people live under more political restraints than the Chinese, or have farther departed from a state of nature....It will follow that the beauties of the Chinese Poetry must of all other be the most incapable of translation into other language, and especially into those,whose idioms are so remote and unsuitable as are ll those of Europe".90 The translation is very literal. The following ode is the same one as that translated later by Sir William Jones:
Behold that bay, which is formed by the winding of the river Ki,
Beset with tufts of verdant canes, how beautifully luxuriant!
So is our prince adomed with virtues.
He is like one, that carveth and smootheth ivory.
He is like one that cutteth and polisheth diamonds.
O how sublime,yet profound [is he]!
O how resolute yet cautious! How renowned and respectable!
We have a prince adorned with virtues:
Whom to the end of time we can never forget.91
We have quoted several times from Percy's Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762), a book not so valuable as The Pleasing History. The book is entirely composed of translations from continental writers (four French and one German) with the exceptions of Chambers's Essay on Laying Out Gardens among the Chinese and Percy's own Dissertation on the Language and Character of the Chinese. In the preface,we read:“The Chinese, whose judgment and fancy have in many instances been held in low esteem, are yet allowed to deserve respect for their taste in gardening, and knowledge of moral truths. These volumes will enable the Reader to judge of both”.22 As we have already seen, Percy has no high opinion of Chinese morals. With regard to his own Dissertation on the Language and Characters of the Chinese,he says that he agree with Warburton's opinion and “acknowledges to his shame” that he did not know it earlier.93 He cautiously withholds any opinion on Needham's discovery until further evidences are “in”, but points out that one of the most important inferences to be drawn from Needham's discovery is “that it demolishes at once all the pretences of te Chinese to that vast autiquity,which has been wont to stagger weak minds”.4 His own Dissertation-a title about which he has been very coy in the preface-is largely drawn from Bayer. And Percy's own conclusion is that Chinese people “would be gainers by the exchange" of their own language for Greek.95“And until the Chinese are provided with a new vehicle for their literature”,their literature is “more likely to remain what t is, than to be improved by new acquisitions.... Such an alteration in that language must be made at once”.% This is certainly drastic and radical. Other writers describe and criticise, but Percy prescribes and proposes.Contemporary Chinese fanatics for the complete Romanisation of Chinese characters little know what a patron saint they could have in this eighteenth-century English ecclesiastic!
Percy's The Matrons (1762) contains the story of the Chinese widow translated from Du Halde.7 It should be remarked in passing that the parable of the heifer in this story (p.35) appears also as an extract in The Pleasing History (Vol. IV, p. 254).This story was first translated into French by Père D'Entrecolles and inserted by Du Halde in his Description with due acknowledgement to D'Entrecolles. Miss Alda Milner-Barry asserts that D'Entrecolles's translation can be found in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, though she herself uses Du Halde for convenience. This is a mistake. D'Entrecolles's numerous communications to French Jesuits and Du Halde himself which are included in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses,8 are concered with earthquakes, the art of making porcelain,Chinese herbal pharmacy and diocesan matters.Chinese widows,indeed,are mentioned, but in connexion with their habit of remaining in widowhood in memory of their husbands-the reverse of the case of “the Chinese widow” in question.In fact this communication of D'Entrecolles's first made its publicappearance in Du Halde's Description. When Abel-Remusat included the story in his Contes Chinois (1827), he admitted in the preface having taken D'Entrecolles's version from Du Halde. We have found the following English translation of the story besides Percy's:Sir John Francis Davis: The Chinese (1836) Vol. II, pp. 119ff;Samuel Birch: The Chinese Widow (1872);R. K. Douglas: Chinese Stories (1893), pp. 249ff;E. B. Howell: The Inconstance of Madame Chuang and Other Stories from the Chinese (1925),pp. Iff.Goldsmith told the same story in The Citizen of the World Letter XVIII,and changed China into Korea. It has been suggested that Goldsmith might have derived the story from Voltaire's Zadig, chapter II,“Le Nez”. To be sure, Goldsmith must have been acquainted with Zadig; but it is one thing to read Zadig and another to borrow from it.For all we can see, Goldsmith's story is entirely different from Voltaire's version, but tallies with Du Halde's. The Philosopher is also named Choang(Chuang in Percy) and described as the disciple of Lao. Choang also saw a woman fanning her husband's grave,while Azora in Zadig saw a woman stemming a brook. In the original, the dead philosopher's brain was required as the sovereign remedy for the new lover's sudden fainting fit and Goldsmith changed the remedy into heart,which is certainly nearer to the brain in the original than the nose in Voltaire.
The results of our examination of Percy's Chinese studies confirm our total impression of the eighteenth-century English attitude towards China. If there is one eighteenth-century English writer whose knowledge of China should have been sufficient to produce tolerance,the man is Percy. Yet,for all his superior knowledge of Chinese literature,he held almost exactly the same opinion about it as Goldsmith. He had the same views on Chinese morals as Lord Anson without Anson's actual experience of Chinese “craftiness”. He was all at one with Warburton and Monboddo with regard to the Chinese language and wenta good deal further than both by trying to improve it altogether off the surface of the earth. He distrusted the French Jesuits, the very sources from which he drew his information,and welcomed Needham's mare's nest of discovery to deprive China of her reputation for great antiquity. In all these, Percy was essentialy of his age. We should also notice his latent romanticism revealed as much in his dislike of the“phlegmatic”and “timid” Chinese poetry as in his like of the “wild” sharawadgi of Chinese gardening.
Percy did not boast in saying that his Fragments of Chinese Poetry contained all that had been published in any European language up to his time. Translations of other Chinese poems did not appear until twenty years after the publication of Percy's collection. The FrenchJesuits were great admirers of the Chinese Emperor Kien Long both as a sovereign and as a man of letters-witness the verses written under the portrait of Kien Long which serves as a frontispiece to the first volume of Mémoires concernant l'Histoire, les Sciences, les Arts,les Usages des Chinois,par les Missionaires de Pékin. In 1770, Père Amiot whose letter to the Royal Society in London we have quoted in our second article, published in French an Éloge de la Ville de Moukden et de ses enwirons; poème composé par Kien Long. On y a joint une Pièce de vers sur le Thé composé par le même Empereur. The verses on the tea“écrits sur des tasses d'une porcelaine”, and translated by Amiot into French prose with the original transliterated,100 were soon rendered into English by Sir William Chambers in the appendix to the second edition of his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening(1773) entitled An Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-Qua of Quang-cheu-fu,Gent. FRSS,MRAPP;Also MIAAF, TRA, CGHMW and ATTQ. Wherein The Principles laid down in the Foregoing Dissertation,are illustrated and applied to Practice.
As far as we know this Explanatory Discourse has never been mentioned by writers on the fashion of Chinese gardening in eighteenth-century England.Judging it a sort of propriety to put in the mouth of a Chinese, what further information was wanted relative to his country", Sir William “framed these illustrations into a Discourse supposed to be pronounced by Chet-Qua,then in England.101 We have already learned something about Chet-Qua from the Gentleman's Magazine, and the following description of the man most probably based on Sir William's personal observation and knowledge is very precious:“All the world knew Chet-Qua, and how he was born at Quang-chew-fu, in the fourth moon of the year twenty-eight;also how he was bred a face-maker, and had three wives,two of whom he caressed very much; the third but seldom,for she was a virago and had large feet. He dressed well, often in thick satin; wore nine whiskers and four long nails, with silk boots, callico breeches, and every other ornament that Mandarins are wont to wear....Of his size, he was a well-spoken portly man, for a Chinese; a pretty general scholar; and for a heathen a very gentleman”.102 But for the lack of a story, this amusing and spirited discourse put into the mouth of a ral Chinese visitor to England might take its rank with the Chinese letters of Walpole,Goldsmith, and Charles Johnston. Chambers had not visited China in vain, for the local colour of this discourse is copious and exact. The theory of gardening expounded in the Dissertation was here vigorously defended and even extended.How Chambers surpassed his old self and fully merited Mason's ridicule may be seen from the following sentence:“By these means this whole kingdom [England] might soon become one magnificent vast garden, bounded only by the sea; the many noble seats and villas with which it abounds, would give uncommon consequence to the scenery; and it might still be rendered more splendid, if, instead of disfiguring our churches with monuments, our Chinese manner of erecting mausoleums by the sides of the roads was introduced amongst you; and if all your public bridges were adorned with triumphal arches, pastoral pillars, bas-reliefs, statues, and other indications of victory, and glorious achievements in war: an empire transformed into a splendid Garden, with the imperial mansion towering on an eminence in the centre, and the palaces of the nobles scattered like pleasure-pavilions amongst the plantations, infinitely surpass anything that even the Chinese ever attempted.”103 And one is tempted to add that such a design also “infinitely surpasses" the worst caricatures of the Chinese taste in the World,the Adventurer, or the Connoisseur. The Discourse is preceded by a quotation from Amiot's transliteration of Kien Long's verses on tea, and the whole poem is translated in a footnote. We shall quote a few passages:“The colours of the Mei-hoa are never brilliant,yet is the savour always pleasing: in fragrance or neatness the fo-cheou has no equal: the fruit of the pine is romatick, its odour inviting. In gratifying at once the sight,the smell and the taste, nothing exceeds these three things...,when the water is heated a degree that will boil a fish, or redden a lobster you pour it directly into a cup made of the earth of Yué, upon the tender leaves of superfine tea... and if then you gently sip this delicious beverage, it is labouring effectually to remove the five causes of discontent which usually disturb our quiet.... But I hear the sound of the evening bell; the freshness of the night is augmented; already the rays of the moon strike through the windows of my tent....I find myself neither uneasy nor fatigued, my stomach is empty,and I may, without fear, go to rest-It is thus that, with my poor abilities (Amiot:"Suivant ma petite capacité”),I have made these verses, in the little spring of the tenth moon of the year Ping yn, of my reign Kien Long".104 Chambers followed closely Amiot's translation which is “too true to be good”, let alone the mistakes made in the literal rendering of idioms. For instance,the hackneyed metaphor of comparing the bubbles of the gradually boiling water to the bulging eyes of fish and crabs（鱼眼蟹眼），was rendered by Amiot in such a manner as to remind us of the facetious distich on the moring in Butler's Hudibras. English wits soon seized upon those ludicrous details and waxed exceeding facetious about them.
William Mason in An Heroic Postscript referred to Chambers' translation in the following couplet:
Did China's monarch here in Britain doze,
And was, like western kings,a King of Prose,105
and complained in the footote of having been forestalled by Chambers because “I am vain enough to think that the Emperor's composition would have appeared still better my heroic verse".In 1775 was published Kien Long. A Chinese Imperial Eclogue, translated from a Curious Oriental MS. and inscribed by the translator to the author of an Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, Knight,in which both Chambers and Kien Long were ridiculed:
Where China's London boasts her verdant-Kew,
A fair Elysium,from her walls in view...
Kien-Long the great, the valiant, and the wise
Sweet slumber sought, but slumber shunn'd his eyes:
He frown'd,and soke; the lords in waiting round,
Knocked their broad foreheads nine times on the ground. 106
The Eclogue concluded with the same idea as Kien Long's own verses on the tea, though the phraseology was borrowed from Mason's couplet:
And night sweet slumber brought to overwhelm
The drowsy monarch,and his drowsy realm.107 
The author admitted in the footnotes having derived his local colour from Du Halde,Chambers and The Pleasing History,but he seems to have mistaken the Chinese title of the last fora personal name,hence his constant references to“H.K.Choaan”.This piece was curtly reviewed in The Critical Review of the same year as its publication:“We are no advocates for pieces of satire on the conduct and character of a virtuous and amiable monarch. On this account,we cannot applaud the performance".108
Lord Macartney's embassy to the court of the emperor who wrote the above-mentioned verses added food for fun.Peter Pindar alias John Wolcott published in 1792 Odes to Kien Long, the Present Emperor of China. A letter is prefixed to the odes:“Dear Kien Long, At length an opportunity presents itself for conversing with the second potentate upon earth, George the Third being most undoubtedly the first, although he never made verses. Thy praises of Moukden, thy beautiful little Ode to Tea, &c.,have afforded delight.... Now to the point-As Lord Macartney, with his most splendid retinue, is about to open a trade with thee....Why might not a literary commerce take place between the Great Kien Long, and the no less celebrated Peter Pindar?"109 There are altogether five odes,of which the first and the last are relevant to Kien Long and the English embassy. The first compliments Kien Long on his poetical talent and condemns the want of it among Western sovereigns:
Dear Emp'ror,Prince of Poets,noble Bard,
Thy brother Peter sendeth thee a card,
To say thou art an honour to the times-
Yes,Peter telleth thee,that for a king,
Indeed a most extraordinary thing,
Thou really makest very charming rhymes.110
Now for the embassy:
Kien Long,our great great People, and 'Squire Pitt,
Fam'd through the universe for saving wit,
Have heard uncommon tales about thy wealth;
And now a vessel have they fitted out,
Making for good Kien Long a monstrousrout
To trade,and beg, and ask about his health.11
In Pindariana, or Peter's Portfolio (1794), we find Peter Pindar's translation of Kien Long's verse on tea into an ode:
The flow'r mehò is not so bright,
And yet it gives the eye delight;
It likewise has a charming smell:
The pines,too,are a pretty fruit,
That much indeed my palate suit,
And much in flavor, too, excel...
Heat in this kettle, to your wish,
The water fit to boil a fish,
Or turn the blackest lobster red;
Pour then the water on the tea,
Then drink it, and 'twill drive,d'ye see,
All the blue devils from your head' etc.
concluding with 
And now I'll take a nap...thus ends my song,
Compos'd by me (a humble bar)Kien Long.112
Peter Pindar also wrote an Ode to Coffee in the manner of Kien Long.113
The most pitiless satirical is T.J. Mathias's The Imperial Epistle from Kien Long,Emperor of China to George the Third,King of Great Britain,	&c.Sc.in the year 1794. Translated into English Verse from the Original Chinese Poetry.With notes by various Persons of Eminence and Distinction,and by the Translator (1796).In the boisterous preface Chambers's version of Kien Long's ode in praise of drinking tea was unsparingly satirised:-for example,“I cannot help observing, that all other Emperors and authors would be happy to have all their causes of discontent limited to fire, and removed by a little tea”;“the Emperor resumes his lyre,which it may be necessary to observe he never does but at night,and generally by moon light”,“the Emperor is poetical to the last a proposof the phrase 'empty stomach'” etc.114 With regard to the Imperial Epistle, Mathias wrote:“I have therefore been under the necessity of supplying many passages from conjecture, or by the analogy of meaning; and this must be considered by any person who may have an opportunity of comparing my English with the Emperor's Chinese".115 The poem is generously sprinkled over with words like “Meihoe”,“Manchew”, “Outongchu”,for the sake of verisimilitude, and Le Comte,Du Halde,Osbeck are all laid under contribution. Anglo-Chinese relation is described in the following symbols: 
Where,broider'd bold, thy lion's golden might
With China's five-claw'd dragon should unite.	116
Pitt,Macartney, Horne Tooke, Warren Hastings are all dragged into the poem, even the poor Chet-Qua:
Or Chet-Qua's self, admir'd by beau and belle,
Chet-Qua,whom all the world knew passing well.117
Sir William Jones, the first Englishman to master Sanskrit,was the third to have a first-hand though exceedingly limited acquaintance with Chinese, the first being undoubtedly Thomas Hyde and the second James Wilkinson. In the list of “Desiderata”prefixed to his works, we find his plan of translating The Book of Odes and having “the text of Ca-fu-tsu verbally translated".118 In the Discourse on the Second Classical Book of the Chinese (Odes), he acknowledged his French predecessors in the fields, and gave three specimens from The Book of Odes and the transcription of the Chinese text of one of them. In all three cases, he first gave a verbal translation and then a metrical one, and considered this method of double version “the only method of doing justice” tothe original. We shall give the first half of both the verbal and the metrical translation of the ode quoted above from Percy:
(A) the verbal translation:
Behold yon reach of the river Ki;
Its green reeds how luxuriant! how luxuriant!
Thus is our Prince adorned with virtues; 
As a carver, as a filer,of ivory
As a cutter,as a polisher, of gems.
(B) the metrical paraphrase:
Behold,where yon blue riv'let glides
Along the laughing dale;
Light reeds bedeck its verdant sides,
And frolick in the gale.
So shines our Prince! In bright array
The Virtues round him wait;
And sweetly smil'd th'auspicious day,
That raised Him o'er our State.
As pliant hands in shapes refin'd
Rich iv'ry carve and smoothe,
His Laws thus mould each ductile mind,
And every passion soothe.
As gems are taught by patient art
In sparkling ranks to beam,
With Manners thus he performs the heart,
And spreads a gen'ral gleam.
The conclusion of this essay is worth quoting:“A native of Canton, whom I knew some years ago in England... has favoured me with the Three Hundred Odes in the original together with the Lun Yu [i.e.“the text of Can-fu-tsu"]....But he seems to think,that it would require quite three or four years to complete a translation of them; and Mr. Cox informs me that none of the Chinese to whom he has access, possess leisure and perseverance for such a task;yet he hopes, with the assistance of Whang Atong,to send me next season some of the poems translated into English".119 This is the explanation of the two items cited above from Sir William's “Desiderata”. Judging from the passage, we see also that Jones's knowledge of Chinese was not enough to enable him to undertake a translation of the books unaided. In the Discourse on the Philosophy of the Asiaticks, he indeed said that he had compared the Chinese text of Lun Yu with Couplet's Latin translation of it in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus and found the translation very faithful. But it seems that Jones cold not read Chinese books without cribs; indeed, the three specimens of the odes given in his Discourse quoted above, had one and all been translated in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.120 It should be mentioned that Jones also made a Latin version of the ode on the virtuous Prince and that both the Latin version and the English one are included in his poetical works.121
Among discourses and treatises on China, we mention first the little known Irregular Dissertation, occasioned by the Reading of Father Du Halde's Description of China which may be read at any Time,except in the present YEAR 1740.The anonymous author asserted at the very beginning of the Dissertation:“It has taught me to love the Constitution of my own free country still more after I have compared it with the Chinese,which is supposed to be the completest Model of an arbitrary Govemment".122 Having pointed out that China is an isolated country and Chinese “a dead language",the author explains the social supremacy of the Chinese scholars, a supremacy much envied by Robert Burton and others, by the reason that “the Chinese reading is very hard” while“with us an Undersheriff is an Attorney; a Bailiff can read and write;and an exciseman stick in a Pen at his ear".123 He dismisses the European admiration of the Chinese system of government by saying:“Our Wonderseems to be reduced to this, that from the very Beginning the Chinese have been Slaves”.124 He attacks the Jesuits “who are too wise to give a true and ample Confession of a Court-of-Rome Faith at Peking,and too wise to let any in Europe, except special Confidents, know the exact History of their Manoeures in China”.125“What a pity is it that Christianity is thus misrepresented in the great Empire of China! We have as good Mathematicians,as good Engieers and Artificers of all sorts, as those Fathers,but we have not the same temporal Views".126 Finally Chinese mandarins are compared to the Laputan“flappers”in Gulliver's Travels, and China herself to“Dr. Mandeville's Commonwealth where private Views [sic] are publick Benefits".127 In short, the tone of the whole book confirms the conclusions we have reached about the eighteenth-century English attitude towards China. The author also makes many topical allusions to English politics,and is fond of laborious joking which he calls “badinage”and “getting into the road of fooling".128
The other two eighteenth-century English books on China are not so characteristic.The Chinese Traveller,containing a Geographical, Commercial,and Political History of China. To which is prefixed the Life of Confucius (1772) is admittedly a compilation from the Jesuits“who”,as the compiler says in the preface,“were well qualified to furnish us with the best materials for this purpose", and the“fidelity”of whose accounts “we have no reason to distrust". The book is just a light rechauffé of Le Comte and Du Halde, and the life of Confucius seems perfunctory even compared to the footnote on the same worthy in The Pleasing History.A Chinese Fragment containing An Enquiry into the present estate of Religion in England (1786) is another hack's work compiled from the Jesuits. The“fragment” is the introduction in which, E. Bates (the compiler who prefers to remain anonymous) takes hints from Couplet,Navarette,Le Comte and Du Halde, proves that Confucius is really Christian in his sentiments, and laments the prevalence of Buddhism and Taoism in China:“O Ye disciples of Confucius! where is the zeal of your Master?”.130
After 1760, books of travels on China by Englishmen began to multiply. Peter Mundy in the seventeenth century and Lord Anson in the first half of the eighteenth had only skirted the coasts of China. John Bell is perhaps the first Englishma we have on record who penetrated into the mighty fastness of Pekin. He was a member of the retinue of Artemy Petrovitch Valensky, the Russian ambassador to the Chinese emperor Camhi,and his description of Camhi's reception of the Russian ambassador is Travels fromSt. Petersburg in Russia to Diverse Pats of Asia (1763) might be compared with the Macartney's account of his interview with Kien Long.131 John Meares's voyages in China were only along the sea coast and his Voyages made in the years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North West Coast of America (1790) touched on China only very briefly.His was the time before Lord Macartney's embassy, and he complained that “the present exclusion of the European nations from all the parts of the Chinese empire, except Canton, is a serious disadvantage to Great Britain".132 Aeneas Anderson's A Narrative of the British Embassy to China in the years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (1795)is more interesting. Anderson was “in the service of Lord Macartney” and followed the embassy to Peking. He took pride in his accuracy at the risk “of dullness and tautology".133 We find in his book many amusing titbits which are not to be found in the more official record of Sir George Staunton-for example,he dispelled the legend that “Chinese women are excluded from the view of strangers” by showing that he himself actually addressed some of the country lasses with the Chinese word “Chou-au”(beautiful) much to their amusement.134 He also admired very much the Chinese art of decoration. An Authentic Account of An Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (1797) compiled by Sir George Staunton from official papers is very mild and conciliatory in tone. The following noncommittal passage is typical:“The Orphan of China,however improved in an English dress,by a very respectable poet, may be considered as no unfavourable specimen of Chinese tragedy; and The Pleasing History of whichan English translation, under the care of a learned and ingenious prelate, was published several years ago, is an instance of Chinese novel writing, that is interesting and simple".135 Lord Macartney's own impressions of China can be seen in Some Account of the Public Life and a Selection from the unpublished writings of the Earl of Macartney by John Barrow (1807).Macartney's Journal is singulrly free from rancour and animadversion. In spite of sentences like “however meanly we must think of the taste and delicacy of the Court of China"(Vol.II, p.286),“the royal garden falls very short of the fanciful descriptions which father Attiret and Sir William Chambers have intruded upon us as realities" (ibid. p. 275), etc., he admitted: “Nothing could be more fallacious than to judge of China by any European standard. My sole view has been to represent things precisely as they impressed me”.136 Even in the appendix where he criticised the Jesuit accounts as “inadequate and unjust”,he gave praise where it seemed due. He went so far as to think that the difficulty of learning Chinese had been “exaggerated”.137 John Barrow,Lord Macartney's private secretary, showed the same judicious and judicial spirit in his own Travels in China (1804).In the second chapter, he discussed various opinions on Chinese national character, contrasted Voltaire's opinion with Lord Anson's, and dismissed the latter as “presumptuous and unfair”.138 The contrast is a good proof of the thesis which we want to maintain.
The survey of books which we have made in this essay thus reinforces te conclusions we have arrived at in the preceding one. Since the embassy, we notice a slight change for the better in the English attitude towards China. The undercurrent of xenophobia among the Chinese, however, soon made itself manifest;the amicable relation between China and England patched up by the embassy was,like all international friendships,only made to be broken, and mutual mud-slingingsoon became the order of the day.The Opium War put the lid on the matter. Macaulay's powerful philippic The War against China and De Quincey's fire-eating articles on The Opium Question and The Chinese Question will suffice to giv the reader some idea of the nineteenth-century English attitude. What had been contempt and jibe in the eighteenth century now became bitter hatred and abuse. To be sure,English men of letters continued to produce exquisite pieces of imaginative literature on Chinese subjects throughout the nineteenth century, but from Landor's Imaginary Conversation between Emperor of China and Tsing Ti and Lamb's Dissertation upon Roast Pig to Richard Garnett's delightful Chinese tales in The Twilight of Gods and Mrs. Augusta Webster's charming fantasy Yu Pe-ya's Lute,we find nowhere the seventeenth and eighteenth-century spirit of supplying information about China besides indulging in the free play of imagination.Defoe,for instance, had consulted Le Comte when writing those Chinese scenes in his Robinson Crusoe,but what did Lamb or Landor consult in order to get the right local colour? They simply did not care. Ever since Lord Macartney's embassy, sinology has become established in England as a special branch of knowledge, and the penalty of specialisation is that while professional students know more and more about their subject, the general public cares for it less and less. The subject ceases to be a part of humane cultural interest. At the beginning of the twentieth century, we notice another change.The late G. W.Dickinson's Letters from aChinese Official combine “instruction” with “entertainment” in the veritable eighteenth-century manner and show a sympathetic understanding which eighteenth-century writers lacked. Earl Russell has made his enthusiasm about the Chinese contagious by his numerous writings and,like Sir William Temple, seems to be able to understand Chinese philosophy of life without knowing the Chinese language. Similarly,the fine essays on Chinese poetry by the late A. Clutton-Brock (in More Essays on Books), the late Lytton Strachey (in Characters and Commentaries),Mr. F. L. Lucas (in Authors Dead and Living) and Mr. Desmond MacCarthy (in Experience)are quite the best ever written on the subject in any European language. They have kept alive the tradition of Hurd without themselves knowing it. For them,the curse of Babel does not exist.Samuel Parr's mot on Sir William Joneswho forgot his logic when dabbling in metaphysics, and his taste when meddling with oriental literature'39 loses its sting for them and their like. Of course,free as they are from racial prejudices in their quest of wisdom and beauty, these writers do not see us as we in ourselves really are, and their views on things Chinese would furish not a few significant examples to Samuel Butler's propped “Essay on Human Misunderstanding". To be so intelligently misunderstood is yet to be paid the compliment of being worth understanding. However,both nineteenth-century abuse and twentieth-century encomium of China fall beyond our scope. Closing John Barrow's book we take leave of our subject with the reassuring thought that the eighteenth century ends auspiciously for future relationship between the Chineseand the English, and round off our lengthy enquiry with the cheery lines of Goethe who never heard of Kipling's depressing utterance on the twins that will never meet:
Sind nicht mehr zu trennen
Orient and Okzident.

NOTES TO PART I

1.Johnson's England, edited by A. S. Turberville,2 vols.(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1933). 
2.Adolf Reichwein:China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century,translated by J. C. Powell(London:Kegan Paul,Trench,Trubner & Co.,1925).
3.G.F.Hudson: Europe and China (London: Edward Amold, 1931).
4.Pierre Martino: L'Orient dans la Littérature Française au XVIle et au XVIIle Siècle (Paris: Librairie Hachette,1916), p, 181.
5. China and Europe, pp. 77-78.
6.A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL,I, II, III, IV,by George Anson,Commander in Chief of a Squadron of His Majesty's Ships, sent upon an Expedition to the South Seas, compiled from his papers by Richard Walter(London: Printed for the author by John and Paul Knapton,1748),pp.348-349.
7. The Letters of Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford, edited by Mrs.Paget Toynbee,16 vols. (Oxford:At the Clarendon Press, 1903-1905),Vol. IV,p.72.
8. A. L. Sells: Les Sources Françaises de Goldsmith (Paris:Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion,1924),p.98.
9.For various subsequent versions of Le Comte, see Henri Cordier: Bibliotheca Sinica, 2nd edition, 4 vols. (Paris: Librarie Orientale et Americaine,1904),Vol.I,columns 40 and 41.
10. John Nichols: Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century,9 vols. (London:Printed for the author, 1812-1815),Vol.IV,p. 262.
11.the Gentleman's Magazine, 1742, p. 486.
12. Quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson,edited by G. B. Hill, and revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936),Vol.II,p.483.
13. Isaac Disraeli:Curiosities of Literatue.A new edition by B. Disraeli in 2 vols.(London:Routeledge,Warnes,and Routeledge,1859),Vol. I,p.133.
14.A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese Tartary,from the French of P. J.B. Du Halde,2 vols.(London:Printed by Edward Cave,1738-1741),Vol.I,p.iii.
15.the Monthly Review, 1749,p. 52.
16. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, edited by Temple Scott, 12 vols. (London:George Bell and Sons, 1897-1908),Vol.I,p.79. 
17.Ibid.,		I,p.87.
18.Ibid.,		p.
19.Ibid.,		II,p.42.
20.Ibid.,		 VIII,p.58.
21.Ibid.,Vol.VIII,p
22. Romances and Narratives of Daniel Defoe, edited by G. A. Aitken, 16 vols.(London:J.M.Dent,1895),Vol. II,p. 272.
23.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.276.
24.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.286.
25.Ibid.,	Vol.II,p.287
26.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.116.
27.Ibid.,Vol.III,
28.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.121.
29.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.122.
30.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.125.
31.The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel Defoe including all contained in the edition attributed to Sir Walter Scott, with considerable additions,20 vols.(Oxford:D.A.Talboys, 1840-1841),Vol.IX, p.211.
32.Aitkens's edition, Vol.II,p. 255.
33.Ibid.,Vol.XIV,p.189.
34.A. W.Secord: Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe (University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature,1924),p. 65.
35.Le Comte:Mémoires,p. 125.
36.Mr. Rice-Oxley made to methe interesting suggestion that religious bias might account for this “pinch of salt".Defoe,for example,being an English Dissenter, could not possibly be expected to swallow the stories of a French Jesuit, and the same thing might be said of other eighteenth-century Englishmen. I venture to add another reason. Praises “laid on too thick” always induce reaction, and the excessive adulation of the Chinese by the French naturally defeated its own end and made the English sceptical. Over-strong praise is certainly sometimes even more damning than faint praise.
37.E.Y. Ides:Three Years Travels from Moscow Overland to China. To which is annexed a Short Description of China by Dionysius Kao (London: 1706),pp.167-181.
38.The Fable of the Bees,or Private Vices, Publick Benefits,edited with a commentary by F. B.Kaye, 2 vols.(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924),Vol.II,p.316.
39. The Works of Joseph Addison, edited with notes by Richard Hurd,6 vols.(London:Henry G. Bohn, 1856),Vol.III,p.60.
40.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p. 166.
41.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.408.
42. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne,edited by Geoffrey Keynes,6 vols. (London:Faber and Gwyer, 1928-1931), Vol.III,p.239.
43.Mémoires,p.129.
44. The Works of Addison, Vol. III, pp. 405-406.Cf. our preceding article for Sir William Temple's description of Chinese gardening.
45.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.408.
46.The Works of Alexander Pope,edited with introductions and notes by W. Elwin and W.J.Courthope, 10 vols. (London:John Murray, 1871-1889),Vol. X,pp.530-533.
47.Ibid.,Vol.IX,p.84.
48.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.209.
49. Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses écrites des Missions Etrangères par quelques Missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jesus, 24 vols. (Paris:Chez J.G. Merigot le Jeune,1780),Vol. XXII, pp. 490ff.
50.Printed for R. Dodsley and sold by M. Cooper,1752.
51.A Particular Account,p. 49.
52.Ibid.,p.36.
53.Ibid.,p.38.
54.Joseph Spence:Anecdotes,Observations, and Characters of Books and Men,edited by S. M. Singer. 2nd edition (London: John Russell Smith,1858),pp.51-52.
55.Ibid.,pp.73-74.
56.The Monthly Review, April 1751.
57.Charles Dickens:Pichwick Papers,chapter li.
58.Andrew Michael Ramsay: The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Printed and sold by Robert and Andrew Foulis,1749),Vol. II,p.44. 
59. Correspondence of Thomas Gray, edited by Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley,3 vols.(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), Vol.II,p.314.
60.William Chambers:Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture,Dresses, Machines,and Utensils (London,1757),p. 15. Cf. A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening(London:Printed by W.Griffin, 1772),p.12.
61. Dissertation, p. 69. Cf. A Particular Account, pp. 32-33.
62.Dissertation,pp. 35ff.
63.Ibid.,p.22.
64.Ibid.,p.11.
65.Ibid.,pp.43ff.
66.John Francis Davies:The Chinese:A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants, 2 vols. (London:Charles Knight, 1836),Vol.II,p.266.
67. A Particular Account,pp. 9, 10,14.
68.Mémoires concernant l'Histoire, les Sciences, les Arts et les Usage des Chinois,16 vols.(A Paris: chez Nyon. Tome, VIII), p. 318.
69. Designs,p. 18, and Dissertation,p.15.Cf.Dissertation,p. 44.
70.Dissertation,p.17.
71.Ibid.,p.18,cf.p.14.
72.Ibid.,p.14.
73.Ibid.,
74. See John W. Draper:William Mason (The New York University Press, 1924),chap.xi.
75. Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee,Vol.VIII, p.257.
76. See Satirical Poems published anonymously by William Mason with notes by Horace Walpole,edited with an exposé of the mystification by Paget Toynbee (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1926).
77.An Heroic Epistle in Answer to Sir William Chambers. 4th edition (Dublin: Printed for W. Wilson, 1774), verses 45-48, 53-54, 113-114.
78. Satirical Poems,p. 42.
79.The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Oxford, 5 vols.(London: Printed for G. G.and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, 1798), Vol.II, pp.533-534. 
80.Letters,Vol. VII,p. 435.
81.Works,Vol.I,p.198.
82.Ibid., Vol. I, pp.201-203.Cf.Du Halde,Vol.I,p.172.
83. Supplement to the Letters of Horace Walpole,edited by Paget Toynbee, 3 vols.(Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1918-1925), Vol.III, pp.96-97.
84.Ibid.,		III,p.97.
85.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.121.
86.Letters,	II,p.124.
87.Paul Yvon: La Vie d'un Dilletante: Horace Walpole (Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1924),p. 509.
88.Du Halde,Description,Vol.I,p.172.
89.Letters,Vol. VII,p. 277.
90.Ibid.,Vol.X, p.146.
91. The Works of the Rt. Rev. William Warburton, edited by Richard Hurd,7 vols.(London: John Nichols, 1788),Vol. II, p. 397.
92.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.399.
93.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.404.
94.Ibid.,Vol.III,pp.668-671.
95. The Works of Samuel Johnson, edited by Sir John Hawkins, 15 vols. (London,1787-1789),Vol.XIV,pp. 552-556.
96.Ibid.,p.554.
97.The Gentleman's Magazine, 1742, p.356.
98.Ibid.,p.355.
99. Boswell's Life of Johnson, editedby G. B. Hill and revised and enlarged by L.F. Powell,Vol. II,p. 55.
100.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.30.
101.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.269.
102.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.339.
103.Ibid.,Vol. IV,p. 188. Cf. Designs,p.1.
104.Lives of the English Poets, edited by G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1905), Vol. III,p.396.
105. The Works of George Berkeley, edited by A. C. Fraser, 4 vols. (Oxford:At the Clarendon Press, 1931), Vol. II,p. 288.
106.Ibid.,p.62.
107.Ibid.,pp.287-299.
108. Ibid.,p.288.
109. David Hume: Essays Moral, Political,Literary,edited by T.H. Green and T. H.Grose,2 vols.(London:Longmans,Green & Co., 1875),Vol.II,p.321.
110. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 296,396, and Vol. II,p. 321.Mr.Brett-Smith drew my attention to a similar practice described in Ludus super Iconia Sancti Nicolai; see A. W. Pollard: English Miracle Plays,7th edition (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press), p.163.
111.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.249.
112. Ibid.,Vol.I,p.253.
113.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.183.
114. L'Orient dans la Littérature Française, p.124.
115.Arthur Murphy:The Life of David Garrick, 2 vols. (London:Printed for J.Wright, 1801),Vol.I,pp. 276-281.
116.The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, edited by J. W.M.Gibbs,5 vols. (London:George Bell and Sons,1886),Vol.I,p.343.
117.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.437.
118.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.416.
119.Life of Johnson, Vol.II,p. 232.
120.Goldsmith:A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 8 vols. (London:Printed for J.Nourse,1774),Vol.II,p.395.
121.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.297.
122.Description,Vol.I,p.314.
123. The Works of William Shenstone. 5th edition in 3 vols. (London: Printed for J. Dodsley,1777),	Vol.II,p.320.
124.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.141.
125.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.196.
126.John Shebbeare:Letters on the English Nation by Battista Angeloni,a Jesuit,translated by the author of the Marriage Act a Novel,2 vols. (London,1755),Vol.II,pp. 261-64.
127. Poems by Robert Lloyd (London:Printed for the author by Dryden Leach,1762),pp.43ff.Cf.The Connoisseur,number 135.
128.The Familiar Poems of Robert Lloyd. A new edition (London:Printed for Longman,Hurst,Rees, and Orme, 1805),p.66. 
129. Poems by the Rev. Mr. Cawthorn(London:Printed by W.Woodfall, 1771),pp.115-116.
130.The Works of Richard Owen Cambridge,edited by his son George Owen Cambridge (London:Printed by Luke Hansard,1803),p.57.
131.The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy, translated by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox,3 vols.(London,1759),Vol.I,p.xxiii.
132. Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola ad Augustum with an English Commentary and Notes,to which is added A Discourse concerning Poetical Imitation (London:Printed for W. Thurlbourn in Cambridge, 1751),pp. 162-167.
133.Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese, 2 vols.(London:Printed for R. and J. Dodsley),Vol. I,p.217.
134.The Works of Richard Hurd, 8 vols. (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies,1811),Vol.II,p.68.
135.Description,Vol. II,p. 175.
136.Works,Vol.IV,p.197.
137.An Essay on Taste. 2nd edition (Edinburgh,1764),p.7.
138. Lord Kames: Elements of Criticism. 5th edition in 2 vols. (Edinburgh,1774),Vol. II, pp. 450-452.
139. John Brown:A Dissertation on the Rise, Union,and Power,the Progressions,Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music (London: Printed for L. Davies and C. Reymer, 1763),p. 166.
140.Ibid.,p.169.
141. The History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry, through its Several Species (Newcastle,1764),pp.217-233.
142.Description, Vol. II,p. 175.
143.D'Argens:Chinese Letters, translated from the original into French, and now done into English (London: Printed for D. Browne and G. Hett,1741),p.162.
144.Lord Monboddo:The Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. (Edinburgh,1773-1787),Vol.I,p. 345.
145.Ibid.,Vol.I, pp.427-433.
146.Life of Johnson, Vol. II,p. 77.
147. Origin and Progress, Vol. I, pp.438-439.
148.Lord Monboddo:Antient Metaphysics, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1778-1799), Vol. IV, pp. 271,276,344,357.
149.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.161.
150.Hugh Blair: Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Letters. 7th edition in 3 vols.(London,1798),Vol.I,p. 149.
151.Ibid.,	Vol.I,pp.124-125.
152.Daniel Webb: Miscellanies (London, 1802),p.279,p.287.
153.Ibid.,p.280.
154.Ibid.,p.308.
155.The Works of Adam Smith, edited by Dugald Stewart, 5 vols. (London,1812),Vol.I,p.345.
156.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.108.
157.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.32.
158. Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, edited by John,Lord Sheffield,5 vols.(London:John Murray,1814),	V,p.87.
159.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.
160.Ibid.,Vol.I,
161.The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol.I,p. 102.
162. William Godwin: An Inquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols. (London: Printed for G. G.J.and J. Robinson,1793),	II,p..66.
163.Ibid.,Vol.II,pp.47-79.
164.Samuel Shuckford: The Sacred and Prophane History of the World,3 vols.(London:Printed for R. Knaplock and J. Tonson, 1728),Vol. I,pp.101-102.
165.Thomas Salmon:Modern History:or,the Presenu State of All Nations, 3 vols.(London,1739),Vol.I,pp.1-43.
166. An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time. Compiled from Original Authors, 20 vols. (London, 1747-1748),Vol.XX, pp.109-157.
167. The Modern Part of a Universal History by the authors of the Antient Part, 44 vols. (London, 1759-1766), Vol. VIII, pp. 179-194.
168.Ibid.,pp.320-321.
169.John Jackson: Chronological Antiquities, 3 vols. London:Printed for the author, 1752), Vol. II, pp.403-492.
170.Literary Anecdotes,Vol.IX,pp.604-605. 
171.Ibid.,Vol. VIII,p.228.
172.Ibid.,Vol. VIII,p.611.
173.The Rambler, 7th edition in 4 vols.(London, 1767),Vol. II, p.148.
174. The Adventurer, new edition in 4 vols. (London, 1778), Vol.IV,
175.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.291.
176.The	World,4 vols.(London:Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1753-1757),	.I,pp..68-72.
177.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.
178.Ibid.,Vol.I,pp.229-232.
179.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.356.
180.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.392.
181.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.705.
182.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.705.
183. The Connoisseur. 3rd edition in 4 vols.(London:Printed for R. Baldwin,1757),	II,p.231.
184.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.21.
185.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.71.
186.Ibid.,Vol.IV,p.125.
187.The Mirror. 5th edition in 3 vols. (London:Printed for W.Strahan and T.Cadell,1783),Vol.I,p.128.
188.The Lounger (Edinburgh:Printed for Wm. Creech, 1786),p.315.
189.The Gentleman's Magazine, 1736, p. 470.
190. Ibid.,1737,p.198.
191.Ibid.,1739,p.537.
192.Ibid.,1750,p.116.
193.Ibid.,1953,pp.116-119.
194. Ibid.,1755,pp.9-10,71-72,116-117.
195.Ibid.,1757,p.33.
196.Ibid.,1758,pp.58-60,416-418.
197.Ibid.,1766,pp.130-132.
198. Ibid., 1770,pp. 68-69.
199. Ibid.,1771,pp.337-338.
200.Ibid.,1773,p.281.
201.Mémoires,p. 125.
202.The Critical Review, 1786, p.411.
203. The Monthly Review, 1754,p.226.
204.Ibid.,1770,p.553.
205.Ibid.,1771,p.319.
206. Philosophical Transactions, 1747,p. 497.
207.A Universal History,p. 110.
208. Philosophical Transactions, 1769, pp. 489-504.
209. Lettre de Pekin sur le Genie de la Langue Chinoise et la nature de leur Ecripure Symbolique comparée avec celle des Anciens Egyptiens (Bruxelles:Chez J.I.De Boubers, 1773).
210.Mémoires concernant l'Histoire etc.,tome 1, pp. v-x, 273-323; Percy:Miscellaneous Pieces, Vol. I. Abff;The Critical Review, June,1762.
211.Thomas Snelling: A View of the Origin, Nature and Use of Jettons and Counters (London,1769),p.15.

NOTES TO PART II

1.English Poets from Chaucer to Couper, edited by Alexander Chalmers,21 vols. (London, 1810), Vol. XVIII, pp. 468,470.
2. The Spectator, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 8 vols. (London: J.M. Dent,1897),Vol.VII,pp. 137-138.
3.Ibid.,Vol.VIII,pp.99ff.
4.Ibid.,Vol. VII, pp.262-268.
5. The Noble Slaves: or the Life and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies who were shipwrecked and cast upon a desolate Island near the East Indies, in the year 1710, by Penelope Aubin (Belfast:Printed for Simms and M'Intyre, 1812),p. 9. Miss Martha Pike Conant in her The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia University Press,1908) makes the mistake of thinking that there is a Chinese character in the novel, p.46.
6.Ibid.,p.24. 
7.Cf.Le Comte:Mémoires,pp.323ff.
8.The Works of Cambridge, pp. 283ff.
9.See Conant: The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century, pp.174ff.
10.The Works of Walpole,Vol.I,p.208.
11.Ibid.,Vol.IV.pp.342ff.
12.Ibid.,Vol.IV.p.319.
13. The Works of Goldsmith,Vol.III,p.127.
14.Ibid.,p.10.
15.Ibid.,p.11.
16.Ibid.,p.55.
17.Ibid.,pp.118-120.
18.Ibid.,p.396.
19. Ibid.,pp.338-339.
20.Ibid.,p.238.
21.Les Souces Françaises,p.93.
22.Martino: L'Orient dans l Littérature Française, pp. 317-318.
23. The Bonze,Chinese Anchorite, an Oriental Epic Novel, 2 vols. (London,1769),Vol.I,p.ii.
24.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.2.
25.See my article on “China in the English Literature of the 17th Century”.
26. Ibid., Vol.I, p. 62.
27.Ibid.,Vol.I.p.iii.
28.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.
29. For the influence of the Arabian Nights upon eighteenth-century European fiction,see the Introduction toThe Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century.
30.See Mémoires,pp. 330ff,and Description, Vol. I, p. 652.
31.The Pilgrim, by the Editor of Chrystal, 2 vols. in 1(Dublin,1775), p.122.
32.Ibid.,p.127.
33.Ibid.,p.32.
34.The Poetical Works of John Scott (London:Printed for J. Buckland, 1782),p.154.
35.Description,Vol.I,p.394. 
36.The Poetical Works of John Scott, p. 157.
37.Ibid.,p.159.
38.Priscilla Wakefield: Leisure Hours; or Entertaining Dialogues,7th edition (London: Printed for Harvey and Darton, 1821),p.193.
39.Ibid.,p.197.
40.Ibid.,p.iv.
41. In Cave's publication,Vol. II, pp. I75ff; in Watt's, Vol. III, pp.193ff.
42.Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese, 2 vols.(London:Printed for R. and J. Dodsley,1762),Vol.I,p.103.
43.The Chinese Orphan: An Historical Tragedy (London:Printed for Charles Corbett,1741),p.vi.
44.Ibid.,p.5,cf.Miscellaneous Pieces,Vol.I,p. 120.
45. Miscellaneous Pieces, Vol. I, pp. 186-187.
46.The Chinese Orphan,pp.60-61.
47.Ibid.,p.73.
48.The Life of David Garrick, by Arthur Murphy, 2 vols.(London: Printed for I.Wright, 1801), Vol. I, pp. 330-338. Cf,Percy Fitzgerald: The Life of David Garrick (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent& Co., 1899), new and revised edition,pp.181-184.
49.The Chinese Orphan,p. 59.
50. The Works of Arthur Murphy, 7 vols.(London:Printed for T.Cadell, 1786),Vol.I,p.2.
51.Ibid.,p.9.
52.Ibid.,p.18.
53.Ibid.,p.55.
54.Ibid.,p.87.
55. Oeures Complètes de Voltaire, 66 tomes (Paris:Chez Antoine-Augustin Renouard, 1819-1825), tome IV, pp. 450-451.
56.The Works of Murphy,Vol.I,p. 100.
57.Ibid.,p.102.
58.Ibid.,p.103.
59.The Works of Goldsmith,	Vol.IV,pp.350-355.
60.The Works of Murphy,		p..103
61.The Works of Goldsmith,Vol.II,p..392. 
62. S. Gibson in The Atheaneum, August 8,1904.
63.The Economy of Human Life. New edition prepared with a preface by Douglas M. Gane (London: Louzac & Co., 1902),p.xiii.
64.Ibid.,pp.xv-xx.
65. The Monthly Review.November,1750.
66.The Economy of Human Life,p. v.
67.J. B. Eames: The English in China (London: Isaac Pitman&Sons Ltd.,1909),pp.82ff.
68. An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China.Taken Chiefly from the papers of H. E. the Earl of Macartney,Sir Erasmus Gower and of other gentlemen in the several departments of the Embassy,by Sir George Staunton, 2 vols. (London: Printed by W. Bulmer & Co., 1797), Vo1.I,p.24.
69.The Economy of Human Life,p. 3.
70.Chinese Maxims, translated from The Economy of Human Life into Heroic Verse,by Susannah Watts (Leicester:Printed by John Gregory, 1784),pp.2-3.
71.The Economy of Human Life,p. 64.
72.Chinese Maxims,p.65.
73.The Economy of Human Life,p.38.
74. The Oriental Chronicles of the Times (London: Printed for the Author), p.i.
75.Ibid.,p.4.
76.For translations of this book into other European languages, see Cordier: Bibliotheca Sinica: Vol. III, columns 1755-1757.
77. Hau Kiou Choaan or The Pleasing History, A Translation from the Chinese language, To which are added, 1. The Argument or Story of a Chinese Play, II. A Collection of Chinese Proverbs, and III. Fragments of Chinese Poetry,4 vols.(London:Printed for R.and J. Dodsley,1761),Vol.I,p.xi.
78.See The Review of English Studies, Vol. II, No. 8,pp.446ff;Vol. III,No.10,pp.214ff.
79.Hau Kiou Choaan,Vol.1,pp. ix-x.
80.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.xx.
81.The Fortunate Union, by Sir John Francis Davis,2 vols.(London, 1829),Vol.I,p.xvi.
82.Cf.note 67.
83. Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century,by J.and J.B. Nichols, 8 vols. (London: Printed for J. B. Nichols and Son, 1817-1858),Vol.VII,p.
84.Ibid.,Vol.VII,pp.
85.Hau Kiou Choaan,		I,p..xiii.
86.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.xiv.
87.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.
88.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.184.
89.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.184.
90.Ibid.,Vol.1IV,,pp.199-201
91.Ibid.,Vol.IV,pp. 233-34.
92.Miscellaneous Pieces,Vol.I,A3 verso.
93.Ibid.,Vol.I,A5ff. Mr. Ogbum says that a MS. of sixteen 4° pages containing Percy's unfinished remarks on the History of China in the Modern Universal History, Vol. VIII is in the Henry E. Huntingdon Library,and that these remarks are largely concemed with the Chinese language (The Review of English Studies, Vol. IX, No.33,p.34).
94.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.iv.
95.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.12.
96.Ibid.,Vol.I,p.14.
97.The Matrons, Six Short Stories (London:Printed for R. and J. Dodsley,1762), pp.19ff. Cf.Description Vol. II, pp. 167ff (in Cave),Vol. III,pp. 134ff(in Watts).
98.Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses, Vol. XVIII, pp. 56ff, 84ff,224ff, 353ff;Vol.XIX, pp. 91ff,98ff;Vol.XX,pp. 394ff;Vol.XXI, pp. 5ff,42ff;Vol.XXII,pp. 91ff,193ff.
99.Ibid.,Vol.XVIII,p.384.
100.Éloge de la ville de Moukden et de ses Erwirons;Poème composé par Kien-Long.On y a joint une Pièce de vers sur le Thé Composé par le même Empereur, traduit en français par le P.Amito (Paris: Chez N. M.Tilliard,1770),pp.329-337.
101.William Chambers: A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. 2nd edition (London,1773),p. 113. 
102.Ibid.,pp.114-115.
103.Ibid.,pp.132-133.
104.Ibid.,pp.118-121.
105.William Mason: An Heroic Postscript,verses 33-34.
106.Kien Long: A Chinese Imperial Eclogue. Translated from a Curious Oriental Manuscript and inscribed by the translator to the author of a Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,Knight(London:Printed for J.Almon,1775),p.5.
107.Ibid.,p.18.
108. The Monthly Review,1775, p. 160.
109. The Works of Peter Pindar, 4 vols. (London, 1816),Vol.II, pp.331-336.
110.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.365.
111.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.377.
112.lbid.,Vol.III,pp..198-199.
113.Ibid.,Vol.III,p.
114.The Imperial Epistle from Kien Long,Emperor of China to George the Third,King of Great Britain,			in theyear 1749,2nd edition(London:Printed for R. White, 1796), pp.vii-ix.
115.Ibid.,pp.iii-iv.
116.Ibid.,p.6.
117.Ibid.,p.25.
118.The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. I, p. ix.
119.Ibid.,Vol.I, pp. 365-373.
120. Cf. Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, p. 10, p. 23, and p.27.
121.Sir William Jones: Poems in Three Parts (Calcutta: Printed by Thomas Hollingbery,1800),pp.2-3.
122. An Irregular Dissertation, occasioned by the Reading of Father Da Halde's Description of China which may be read at any time,except in the present YEAR 1740 (London: Printed for J. Roberts,1740),p.3.
123.Ibid.,p.11.
124.Ibid.,p.34.
125.Ibid.,p.39.
126.Ibid.,p.41.
127.Ibid.,p.58. 
128.Ibid.,pp.28,29.
129.The Chinese Traveller, containing a Geographical,Commercial and Political History of China.To which is prefixed the Lifeof Confucius : 2 edition.2 vols.(London:Printed for E. and E. Dilly,1775),p.iv.
130. A Chinese Fragment containing An Enquiry into the Present State of Religion in England.With notes by the Editor (London: Printed by J. Davis,1780),p.21.
131. John Bell: Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia to Diverse Parts of Asia,2 vols.(Glasgow: Printed for the Author by Robert and Andrew Foulis,1763),Vol.II,pp.6ff.
132.John Meares:Voyages made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North West Coast of America (London:Printed for J. Debrett, 1795),p.ix.
133. Aeneas Anderson: A Narrative of the British Embassy to China in the years 1792, 1793,and 1794.London: Printed for J.Debrett. 1795. p.ix.
134.Ibid.,p.103.
135. An Authentic Account, Vol. II, p. 297. In 1798, a work entitled A Complete View of the Chinese Empire was published by C.Cawthom which is frankly compiled from Staunton.
136. John Barrow:Some Account of the Public Life and a Selectionfrom the Unpublished Writings of the Earl of Macartney,2 vols.(London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807),Vol.II,p.409.
137.Ibid.,Vol.II,p.501.
138. John Barrow: Travels in China (London: 1804), pp. 125-128.
139.Recorded in Memoir of John,First Lord of Teignmouth,by his son, Vol.II,p.79. 




Chinese Literature

From Chinese Year Book（《中国年鉴》），1945，pp．115-128．

It is the boast of the Chinese that their literature has the longest uninterrupted tradition among all the literatures of the world. This unique historical continuity of which the patriotic Chinese are justly proud, must have filled conscientious students with despair and even annoyance. Like certain ladies, Chinese literature has too much past, too much altogether for the comfort of a historian ex-hausted in the effort to be exhaustive. A period of more than two thousand five hundred years is a big slice of eternity, and even when the teeth of time have done their worst, an enormous amount of good prose and poetry still remains and spreads joy in wide commonalty. Beginning at a time almost contemporaneous with the heyday of Greek literature, Chinese literature had wound without haste and without rest across the ages, unfolding new aspects, developing new forms and techniques, complacently self-sufficient though not inaccessible to occasional good things out of Nazareth or rather India,and ignoring the passing away of the Graeco-Roman antiquity as well as the rise of literatures of modern European languages until its smooth course was rudely checked by the New Chinese Literature Movement in 1917.As a great German poet once said,“every literature ends by being bored with itself,if foreign curiosities do not arrive to refresh it.” Since then, Chinese literature has looked outward to foreign literatures, English, French,German,Russian,Scandinavian and even Japanese,for model and inspiration rather than backward to its own classics. But the New Literature in spite of foreign debts contracted and foreign influences submitted, is at its best as homemade, as racy,as the Old Literature. L'influence ne crée rien; elle éveille.
One thing may be disposed of at the outset, the relation between Chinese written characters and Chinese literary style. Ezra Pound has made laudable attempts to mitigate the curseof the Babel and included a knowledge of Chinese among his linguistic repertory. With afanciful ingenuity which always distinguishes the clever Scheingelehrter, he harped on the “concreteness”of Chinese literature as a result of the “concreteness" of Chinese written characters.The Chinese,according to him, excelled in the art of casting images onthe visual imagination, and attained the known maximum of phanopoeia, owing to the nature of their written ideograph which consists simply of abbreviated pictures. Pound talks as if all images were visual. But auditory and olfactory images are no less concrete than visual ones, and no less numerous in Chinese poetry,though“abbreviated pictures” of them are in the nature of things impossible. He makes the further mistakeof assuming that all Chinese written characters are pictorial ideograms with self-evident meanings which any one can understand prima facie without study. As a matter of fact, ideograph is only one of the six traditional ways of wordmaking in China, and most of the ideograms have either become so simplified in structure as to cease to represent objects at all, or been used to denote suprasensible entities precsely as the abstract terms in European languages are “fossil poetry” or faded concrete metaphors. He also seems naive enough to imply that the meaning of a word or character by itself remains unmodified when it forms part and parcel “of a group”, and that in reading Chinese, one needs only to see each individual “abbreviated picture” and add up one by one in order to arrive at the sense of a passage. But ein Text ist gar nichts ohne den Kontext. In our total consciousness of a passage, the meaning of each individual word loses its sharpness of contour to fit into a prescribed pattern of associations. Pound is construing Chinese rather than reading it, and, as far as Chinese literature is concerned, his A. B. C. of Reading betrays him as an elementary reader of mere A.B.C.
So the Chinese poets are not so many Théophile Gautiers or Charles Demaillys for whom only the visible world exists. But Pound's fantastic view, like a lucky shot in the dark, does hit something which students of Chinese literature are apt to overlook. The Old writers, especially the poets, have a keen sense of form which extends to the very shapes of words. And Chinese words, because of their visual aesthetic character,can arouse feelings which have little to do with their meanings. Out of the different forms of the same word, a writer would choose the one most suited to the atmosphere or effect he wants to achieve. For example,the term ts'iao ts'ui, meaning “pale and wan”, can be written in two forms：憔悴 and 蕉萃.If，in writing a verse couplet or a prose parallelism,the author employs some concrete adjective in the first line,he would prefer the latter form at the corresponding position in the second line to balance it，because 蕉萃 with the abbreviated picture of grass 艸 as its component looks more concrete than 憔悴. In a poem， characters with the same p＇ien p＇ang（偏旁）or component sign should be used sparingly to avoid visual monotony, except in a cumulative description like Mu Hua's celebrated prose-poem on the sea（木华《海赋》）which seems almost hydropsical with words containing the p＇ien p＇ang of water（氵）.This subtle consciousness of the formal aspect of words can of course alo be discovered in the West. Novalis, in discussing human physiognomy, says,“Die übrigen Gesichtsgebärden,oder Mienen, sind nur die Konsonanten zu den Augenvokalen.”2 According to Charles Monselet, Victor Hugo “estime que l'écriture a sa physionomie et veut voir les mots.”3 Gautier also insists on “un rhythme oculaire" in writing.4 Francois Coppée objects to simplified spelling because “les mots sont d'autant plus beaux qu'ils sont plus remplis d'ornements.”5 But the sense of the physiognomy of words is phenomenally developed among the Old Chinese writers. And no wonder. China alone has raised calligraphy into as fine an art as painting,and as early as the first century, a Chinese stylist laid down the law shu sin hua yeh（书，心画也），6i．e．，scripta imago animi.
At the risk of binding the leviathan with a ribbon, we shall in the limite space at our disposal attempt to define the characteristics of various Chinese literary kinds.
I.POETRY
There is no epic in Chinese literature. Nicolas de Malezieu would certainly say that the Chinese, like the French, have no tête epique. The Chinese drama is, as we shall see, more lyrical than dramatic. Chinese poetry is, therefore, if not toute la lyre, preponderantly lyrical. Pure lyricism or liricitā, the quintessence and summit of poetic consciousness,appears very early in Chinese literature.The same precocity can be discerned in other branches of Chinese civilization which indeed seems to grow on the sunny side of the wall. Chinese pictorial art has reached the stage of pure painting such as developed by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in the West long before it perfects the technique of creating realistic illusion. Chinese philosophy boasts of a supple dialectic method while Chinese logic remains elementary.
Chinese poems would have met even Edgar Allan Poe's exigent standard of brevity as the soul of a lyric. The Chinese have a Long Wall,but short poems. Compared with the great architectonic poems of the West,the long Chinese verse narratives seem but short swallow-flights of song.A Chinese poem is structurally much more compact and close-knit than a Western poem and has no breathing spaces in the form of sharp-cut stanzaic divisions.The arrangement of words follows almost rigid tonal patterns. One word should not be used twice as a rhyme in the same poem, and sometimes should not even appear twice in it. All these restrictions naturally hamper large movements and long flights, and often make a Chinese verse form as scanty a plot of ground as the sonnet,fit only for the ancient Chinese belles' notorious bluehenden Lilienfuesse to walk in. Moreover, the Chinese used to think minute details and elaborate descriptions, i.e., amplification in the Longinian sense， prosaic.When the Tang poet Yua Chen（元稹） praised the great Tu Fu＇s（杜甫）poetry for the skill of amassing facts and making a pageant of them（铺张排比），he was severely taken to task for mistaking the pinchbeck in Tu Fu for his refined gold（少陵自有连城璧，争奈微之识珷玞）．7Po Chü-i（白居易），whose circumstantial realism and autobiographic expansiveness have made him popular among Bildungsphilisters, was not considered a poet of the highest order of merit.There was a legend that he used an illiterate old woman as a sort of foolometer, and made his verses according to her level of understanding. The same story has been told of Molière and Swift. Unfortunately, Po Chü-i's poems often seem to have been written,not for an old woman, but by an old woman, garrulous,trivial, sentimental, with loose texture and obvious morals. But one man's bête noire may very well be another's black swan. Western translators have recently made a fetish of him because,one suspects,he is easy to read and translate and therefore keeps them in conceit with themselves. Caelum non animum mutant,poor progeny of the old woman!
In probably the earliest reference to Chinese poetry by a European critic, the Chinese poets are correctly characterized as “not to delight so much as we do in long tedious descriptions.”8 Generally speaking, the Chinese poets, carvers of two-inch ivory bits and cherry-stones beside the Western wielders of big brush and cutters of rough rock, have the knack of making the infinitesimal a window on the infinite. A short poem should open long vistas and awaken long reverberations in the soul.“The words stop,” as one Chinese poet said，“but the sense goes on to infinity”（言有尽而意无穷）.“A poem should，” said another poet， “describe elusive scenes in such a way that they seem present to the eye, and contain inexhaustible meanings so that they seem at once within and beyond
the words”（状难写之景如在目前，含不尽之意见于言外）.Thissimultaneous concealment and revelation constitutes the magic of suggestiveness which all Western readers hav noticed in Chinese poetry.The most finished form can yet evoke something vague and hint at something indefinable. We might call the art one of eloquent or pregnant silence. What is said matters much less than what is left unsaid and only adumbrates what cannot be said. It springs from the same root as the subtle flair of leaving spaces beautifully empty in Chinese painting and Chinese gardening. Sometimes the poet leads the reader to the brink of silence-
“There is true meaning in these scenes,
But I forget the words to express it.”
（此中有真意，欲辩已无言）
Sometimes he leaves the reader in a teasing uncertainty-
“One sees the tear-stains on her cheeks,
But knows not for whom the tears are shed.”
（但见泪痕湿，不知心恨谁）
The ubi sunt formula which has found its way into the poetry of all European languages, was also a favorite with the Chinese poets because of its haunting inconclusiveness:
“The river outside flows on desolately,
But where is the prince who used to be in this room?”
（阁中帝子今何在？槛外长江空自流）
“The moonlit scene is like that of the last year,
But where is the man who looked on it with me?”
（同来玩月人何在？风景依稀似去年）
Duke Orsino in The Twelfth Night says-
“Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet as before,” 
But the Chinese poets prefer to ask à la Villon:
“Mais où sontles neiges d'antan?”
A poignant exclamation is subdued into a quiet interrogation,and the rest is silence charged with pathos too deep for tears.The art of talking intimately in half-tones and demi-mots is perfected in that intricate verse pattern called tz＇u（词），which， with its lines of unequal length，enjambements，（《易馀龠录》卷十七：长句不可界断， 字字可顿挫而实不必断），and tours，détours et retours of phrasing， presents a sinuous form beautifully adapted to the chiaroscuro insinuation of shy feelings and twilight moods.
There is an old definition of poetry as the art of restraining one's emotions（诗者，持也）.Sobriety and concision， lightness of touch and quietness of tone should have won for old Chinese poetry the epithet of “classical”. Yet its magic of evocation and technique of making speech and silence hand in glove with each other,have suggested to many a discerning Western critic the symbolist poetry of Verlaine.10 Thus one ought to be wary and chary of subsuming Chinese poets under Western critical categories.The cap rarely fits.For example，Li Sao（《离骚》）contains some of the most magnificent pieces of escapist literature in the Chinese language. Chu Yuan（屈原）sought to leave his gnawing sorrows behind by wandering afar only to discover, as all persons in the same predicament have discovered-
Post equitem sedet atra cura.
It is a typically romantic mood, but there is nothing about him of that febrile restlessness and self-conscious deliberation which make Wanderust a malady in many Western romantics, and a vocation in others. The difference is simply one of emphasis; but a little more, and how much it is！ Again， Tao Ch＇ien＇s（陶潜）return to nature is totally free from any trace of didacticism and misty religiosity so common in Western nature poets. He enjoyed nature without fuss, and sang of it without fustian. His hermitage is rather the Horatian fallentis semita vitae, and his rural lyricism is very urbane, if not urban.Li Po（李白）who is in verse what Chuang-tz（庄子）is in philosophical prose,"l is an aeromantic rather than a romantic;the old Chinese soubriquet“poet-fairy”（诗仙）suits his airy-fairy personality better.The Chinese poets are more “naive”,less “sentimental” or sicklied over with metaphysical reflection than their Western confrères. In dealing with such poets of light specific gravity,glissez et n'appuyez pas should be the motto of the critic.
The old Chinese punctuation signs merely denote pauses for the reader and do not express the meaning of the writer.It is slightly Shakespearean. In many modern editions of old Chinese poets, Western punctuation has been adopted. But the studious avoidance of finality and the skillful exploitation of ambiguity2 so characteristic of Chinese Poetry, make the Western art of pointing sometimesbreak down. A psychological state of ambivalence is compelled to assume an appearance of false simplicity. The clearness punctuation brings is often a mean clearness, and the precision, a rigor mortis. It gives undue decision to the buzzing blooming confusion and robs the reader of his luxury of imagination. Even in the West, writers protest against the inadequacy and chafe under the rigor of punctuation. Alcanter de Brahm wanted to supplement the ordinary stock of points with “the point of irony”, and James Joyce tried to do without punctuation in his conscious-stream passages. In punctuating a line of Chinese poetry,one occasionally feels that only a combination of dash, interrogation and exclamation marks would be adequate to its complex of feeling values.
II.THE DRAMA
The drama is the crudest of all Chinese literary kinds. The practice of talented playwrights of three dynasties, the Mongol,the M'ing and the Manchu, had not succeeded in discoverng the technical secret of purity of form, singleness of purpose, and unity of interest. It remained a glorious muddle. There are many passages of poetic splendour and psychological clairvoyance, there are many very dramatic scenes, but there are few well-made plays.The plots as bare plots are neither better nor worse than those of Western plays, and indeed they may be all arranged under the famous thirty six headings.13 But the exposition is rarely free from arbitrariness and haphazardness. There is also something unreal about the characters who often seem figures walking offfrom Charles Lamb's set of old china onto the“red carpet”（红氍毹）or stage.The dramatic movement is clogged and the issue confused by episodes and “reliefs".The tragedians all showed a constitutional inability to stop at the psychological moment and leave well enough alone. “Superfluous lags the play on the stage” until poetic justice is rendered and everything is again for the best in this truly best of all possible worlds.Though the comedies are better constructed, the violation of logic and probability is still too frequent. The long arm of coincidence is stretched to the point of dislocation, and the shabby device of deus ex machina is shamelessly exploited.There is little ornone of comique de caractère, plenty of comique de situation and most of all comique de mots. This verbal wit is largely ribald,what Freud calls Tendenzwitz, bent upon exposing the inherent grotesqueness and ridiculousness of sexual behavior.14 It is rarely mot de situation or mot de caractère and often put into the mouths of the characters with a total disregard of dramatic as well as moral propriety.	At its worst it becomes word-catching pure and simple,the sort of thing in English which Leigh Hunt parodied in his essay Wit Made Easy.16
The Chinese valued the beauty of poetry in a play above everything else. A master of stagecraft like Li Yü（李渔）was underrated because he was an indifferent versifier. That the Chinese with their love of finished form, should have produced plays which are sprawling invertebrate masses of dialogue and action， is a literary mystery. The late Wang Kuo-wei（王国维） boldly assered that some of the dramas written in the Mongol dynasty are worthy of the company of the greatest tragedies of the world.17 But Wang Kuo-wei,with all his Chinese scholarship and assiduous study of Schopenhauerian aesthetics, is a poor critic. Richard Hurd who elaborately proved the Chinese play The Orphan of the House of Chao（《赵氏孤儿》）as showing “an identity of composition” with the great Greek tragedies, was wise enough to say that it falls short of the excellence of Sophocles's Electra,18 and eventually recanted his youthful enthusiasm for it.19 The plys praised by Wang Kuo-wei all contain beautiful poetry but they are not tragic except in the journalese sense of the epithet.Pei Jen-fu's lyrical drama Rain in the Trees（白仁甫《梧桐雨》），like Antony and Cleopatra and All for Love, deals with the theme of a kingdom lost for love. The emperor's mistress dies in the third act, leaving a whole act to her imperial lover to pine and whine and eat away in impotent grief the remains of his broken heart. The emperor is a weak,feckless and selfish sensualist who drifts along the line of least resistance. He loses the world for loving his mistress and then gives up his mistress in the vain attempt to regain the world. He has neither character enough to be torn between two worlds nor sense enough to make the best of both worlds. Far from being of the stern stuffof which tragic heroes are made, he can at best only be a pathetic figure.20 The other two plays, Kuan Han-ch'ing's A Girl＇s Martyrdom（关汉卿《窦娥冤》）and Chi Chün-hsiang＇s The Orphan of the House of Chao（纪君祥《赵氏孤儿》），end with ample poetic justice and almost universal jubilee. The heroine in A Girl's Matyrdom is a virtuous widow who refused tomarry the villain of the play after the death of her consumptive husband. The Chinese code of morality inexorably demanded women to be univirae, and the heroinebecame a willing martyr to this ethical ideal. Indeed she might be used to dispel the bad reputation of Chinese womanhood in eighteenth-century Europe incurred through that notorious Chinese matron who, like the Ephesian matron and Hamlet's mother, seems to have considered brevity the soul of widowhood.21 Her character as presented by the playwright is so noble and flawless, the wrong done to her so outrageous, and her execution such a crying injustice that the readjustment of the reader's and spectator's emotional balance in the last act is perfectly justified. The playwright's sympathy is with her, the moral judgment is with her, and even Fate Divinity is with her-witness the drought and snow as a result of her imprecation to the Heaven. 
Why then-in the name of all jealous gods and wanton boys who kill for sport-not a little poetic justice to soothe our exacerbated feelings?The tragic conflict is purely external. The widow's mind is all of a piece:she embraced the conventional code of conjugal morality wholeheartedly and opposed the physically as well as spiritually detestable villain with an undivided soul.In the Orphan of the House of Chao which contains a pretty big“butcher's bill”, the tragic conflict is more innerlich. But the competing forces, paternal love and feudal loyalty, are not of equal strength,so that the issue of the conflict is almost a foregone conclusion. Chinese ethical values were arranged in a hierarchy. The antagonism between two incompatible moral claims loses much of its sharpness, because the conflict becomes simply an act of insubordination of one's lower half to one's higher self and is to be checked as quickly as possible. “To sigh as a lover, but to obey as a son,”seems to have been the Chinese ideal of a well-integrated personality,a personality linear or serial, but not complex or manifold.Such materials are unpromising for the purpose of tragedy.
The absence of tragedy in Chinese literature has been variously explained.22 After the Mongol dynasty, even attempts at tragedy became rare. The M'ing and Manchu dynasties were ages of comedies.A European historian has pointed out that the expression of the “peaceful mixed-feelings"(ruhigen Mischgefuehle)like the tragic and the sublime is more frequent in the ancient times,while that of the "prickling mixedfeelings" (prickelnden Mischgefuehle) like the cynical, the lascivious and the sarcastic is more frequent in the modern times.23 The history of the Chinese drama seems to confirm this observation. 
III. FICTION
Chinese short stories can be divided into two kinds.24 There is the plain unvarnished report of a marvellous event or a witty remark or a good deed, like the faits divers in a modern newspaper. It is indeed often news in the sense of the famous definition that a man biting a dog is news. It records such things as a woman giving birth to a monster, a dog warning its master of some approaching evil,an old fox transformed into an incubus or sucsubus-the foxes,like Milton's spirits,“can either sex assume, or both”-all with a literal matter-of-factness which constitutes not the least part of its charm. The other kind is more artistic and imaginative, a well-plotted story in a well-written style.This genre, fully developed in the T＇ang dynasty，is known as ch＇uan chi（传奇）literally，“history of a wonderful event”, though its theme is frequently romantic love treated with great psychological acumen. The dialogues are often very vivid and show an endeavour on the writers' part to capture the accent of vivacious colloquial speech and preserve it in a literary bookish language.25 Many dramatists of the Mongol,M'ing and Manchu dynasties derived the plots of their plays from these stories, just as the Elizabethan dramatists drew upon Decameron and the Palace of Pleasure.By a curious coincidence,precisely as the Elizabethans sometimes called theirplays“histories”(e.g.The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth), the Chinese dramatists called theirs ch'uan chi. Some of the stories were embroidered upon,tinkered up,and expanded into novelettes in such famous collections as the one from which the eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary D'Entrecolles translated The Chinese Widow.26
Hau Kiou Choaan or The Pleasing History,the first Chinese long novel translated into a European language, is by no means a fair “specimen”of the way “a Chinese author conducts himself through the windings of a long naration."27 The Chinese novel which so delighted Goethe and made him hope grandiosely for the advent of the age of Weltliteratur,28 is even worse. It is curious that in literary export, even as in emigration, the worthless always lead the way. One recalls in this connection that the first English poem translated into Chinese is Longfellow's Psalm of Life.29
A few points may be raised with regard to the Chinese novel in general.
Chinese novels have as a rule large canvasses and contain dozens of well-delineated characters, not to mention dummies and lay figures. The reason is not far to seek. Most Chinese novels are picaresque.Even the famous Red Chamber Dream（《红楼梦》）is a “chronicle” and not a “dramatic novel”. Hence the leisureliness of pace,the multitude of characters, and the variety of incidents in these“large,still books”.
The historical element predominates in Chinese fiction. The rise or fall of almost every dynasty has been the theme of a novel. No Chinese hero need lament like the strong men before Agamemnon that caret vate sacro. The household work Romance of Three Kingdoms（《三国演义》）is indeed so veracious as to be a triumphant proof that historical fiction need not be very unhistorical, and fictitious in order to be highly entertaining.One might reverse the hackneyed formula of Western novelists and inscribe on its flyleaf:“None of the characters in this story is imaginary.”Sometimes history is enlivened with mystery as in the popular romance Apotheosis of Heroes（《封神榜》）.Even in the novels that are not historical, the authors love to place the scenes and imaginary characters in some past age. They rarely ostensibly deal with what is contemporary to them. Aestheticians who study the problem of psychical distance, will have a good deal to say about this.
Love interest is not the sine qua non of a Chinese novel.The historical novels are almost entirely devoid of it. Love figures in them only in the light of damnosa Venus as the surest cause of the ruin of a personal career or the downfall of a royal house. The Chinese novelists take a Corneillian attitude towards love as a literary ingredient.The heroes are never“herotic”,and the way of a man with a maid has no place in “he-mannerism.”For example, the wonderfully wel-told love episodes in All Men Are Brothers（《水浒》）are calculated to bring out all the sordidness in clandestine love-making and show how womanising is utterly unworthy of a real hero and he-man.The attempt to present a hero who is the epitome of all possible virtues including sexual athleticism and a chaste, strictly nuptial though polygamous love in the absurd Old Fogys' Tale（《野叟曝言》）shows the wisdom of Voltaire＇s remark that love must reign as a tyrant or not appear at all. There are of course Chinese novels in which love reigns as a tyrant.The courtship is often Illicit, but the marriage is sure to be legally solemnized after many mishaps and difficulties. The lovers, especially the men,are pale-faced,sickly milksops, because extreme delicacy of health was supposed to be the earmark of good breeding, culture and even genius. If such timid weaklings deserve the fair,no wonder the brave in Chinese fiction find sexual love a bore and a shame.An outstanding exception from the milk-and-water romances is the Red Chamber Dream,a poignant love-story and panorama of Chinese high-life,though its principal male character is also an effeminate mollycoddle. It is almost a realization of Baudelaire's plan of a musée de l'amour où tout aurait sa place. One finds in it every variety of love, fulfilled or sublimated, homosexual as well as heterosexual,of the heart,of the body, and of the brain, as sensuality,as sympathy, as vanity and as passion. The writer or writers have with the subtlest insight and deftest touch made convincing a case of almost complete dissociation between sexual relation and what American movies would call “superlove.” The principal male character is at once a promiscuous lecher and an almost virginally passionate lover of the consumptive girl who, as he has to admit to himself after odious mental comparisons, is rather wanting in“glamour.”30
There is no novel of pure humour in Chinese, but a good deal of social satire. The satire is almost exclusively directed against the corruption and snobbery of officialdom and literati. For thousands of years, literati chosen after elaborate competitive examinations formed the ruling class in China. Robert Burton in the seventeenth century and Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth both spoke wistfully of this system as worthy of adoption by England.31 If they could have read,e.g.,The Unofficial History of the Literary World （whose subtitle might very well be A Book of Nobs and Snobs）（《儒林外史》），their views on the Chinese literati would certainly have been less rose-colored. These hand-picked intelligentlemen of China have one aim, viz., to mount higher on the official ladder, and keep one commandment,viz., the eleventh.But the Chinese satirists glide off the surface and never probe into the essential rottenness of human nature. They accept the traditional values, social and moral, believe in the innate goodness of man, and poke gentle fun at what they regard as unfortunate backsliding from probity and decorum. They lack that clear-sighted and dry-eyed misanthropy which understands that “the best of men are but men at the best".Just as the Chinese dramatists have no sense of “tragic justice”, so the Chinese satirists also lack that terrible saeva indignatio which like fire can purify the filth it touches.They remain only witty and shrewd observers.
The supernatural element in Chinese fiction is never weird or mysterious. It appears only as a part of the natural. In Chinese theology,there is no hard and fast line of demarcration between gods and men. Men are the dough of gods, and vice versa.A good man may become a god after death, and a god maythrough natural physiological processes (without even the face-saving convention of “immaculate conception”) become a man for some special reason. Schiller's lines on the Homeric world, da die Goetter menschlicher noch waren, waren Menschen goettlicher, might be applied to the supernatural-natural world in Chinese fiction and drama. One finds this world in the other, and the other world in this. Almost all Chinese novels of real life contain episodes of supernatural intervention. Meanwhile, realism and satire keepobtruding into pure fantasies like the delightful Journey to the West（《西游记》）.
Chinese fiction is impersonal in art. It possesses to an eminent degree the mediaeval characteristic of anonymity. In the ch'uan chi of the T'ang dynasty, one occasionally finds accounts of adventures, amorous or otherwise, told in propria persona .32 But in the long novels, Ichroman or autobiographiction is almost nonexistent.In the rare cases of authobiographie romancée (which is not to be confused with Ichroman),the author's ego under the conventional disguise of the third person is treated with such cold detachment and aesthetic distance as to constitute a veritable feat of jumping out of one's own skin-witness the Red Chamber Dream.
IV. THE ESSAY
The conception of the Chinese as a scholarly, contemplative people,turning idleness into an art and extracting and savoring the very essence of life, was popularized in the West by Letters from John Chinaman. Bertrand Russell,finding it a good stick to beat the Western hustlers and go-getters with, made great play with it in his Sceptical Essays. The Chinese ideal is to live on a small scale and at a slow pace in order to live fully and deeply. It is a life étroite et forte rather than étendue et faible. The Western craving for a great variety and wide range of experiences denotes a greedy gluttony and not a delicate taste for life. A connoisseur of life needs leisure which allows him to stand and stare, to chew and absorb. This hedonist idleness is entirely different from the mystical inactivity of the Indian philosophers on the one hand, and the “fecund idleness” sung by the European romantic poets on the other. One has only to compare the eloquent vindication of indolence in Giordano Bruno's Spaccio dela Bestia Trionfante orthe vociferous Idylle ueber Muessigang in Fr. Schlegel's Lucinde with such a line from a Chinese poet,“Illness isn't bad, leading to idleness”（因病得闲殊不恶），to see with what ease the Chinese take their ease. The difference is again not so much of purpose as of emphasis. The Chinese can afford to be indolent without defiance or apology.
The best literary expression of the hedonism of idleness is the kind of essay which, after long cultivation in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, came to perfection in the M'ing dynasty.“A rose in a moonlit garden,the shadows of trees on the turf ... the moment that glides forever away with its freight of music and light,into the shadow and mist of the haunted past...to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what is called Literature.”So wrote John Chinaman, and he might very well limit literature with capital “I” to the essay. It is destined to be the chosen form of the minor writers. Pose, aesthetic trivialism, a lurking fear of the grim realities of life, and an excessive preoccupation with bagat elles et bibelots are the bane of the Chinese essay. A few years before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War,the M'ing essayists had a boom with editions and imitations galore. It is significant that the most ardent populariser of the M'ing essayists is also a professed admirer of George Gissing's Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.Any comment on thisis superfluous.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The New Chinese Literature Movement was only the coming to a head of things.The Chinese literary history of the last thirty years seems a foreshortening rehearsal of the history of the literary movements in Europe of the last two centuries on the biological principle that ontogeny repeats philogeny. Who would say again that“fifty years of Europe” is better than“a cycle of Cathay”? Literary Schools and sects with Western names and programs, classic,romantic,realistic, naturalistic, symbolist,even dadaist and expressionist, sprang like mushrooms on Chinese soil. A joint stock company of writers industriously transplanted humour,the name as well as the thing, and the low fun of Punch was taken with high seriousness. As the Germans have their acclimatised Humor, the French,humour, and the Italians, umorismo, the Chinese, thanks to those jestsmiths， now have their you mo（幽默）.The leftist writers and poputchiki write about the “mases” in the now almost genteel tradition of brutal realism. Chinese literature, aroused from its customary slow motion, seems to catch up and match the younger literatures of the West.At any rate, the Chinese would no longer say as their spokesman once said in Theodore Fontane's charming ballad:“Aber wir lassen es andere machen.”
This acceleration of the pace of Chinese literary history shows one thing. The old literature is not dead, nor is the new literature powerless to be born. True, it is “fecund in abortions". But the best is yet to be, of course.After all,what is thirty years? In the history of a people burdened with so much dust of the ages, it is a mere speck. The influence of Western literatures is all to the good, but it has produced different effects upon different genres.While liberating Chinese poetry from the shackles of rigorous formalism,it imposes restraint upon the Chinese drama and novel. No self-respecting playwright or novlist will now write those loose, shapeless works which fling artistic unity and probability to the winds. Modem Chinese plays and novels may be often heavy and dull and fail to combine gravity of matter with gaiety of manner,but they are certainly better constructed than the rank and file of old plays and novels.
The excruciating experience of the greatest war in Chinese history has left indelible scars on the soul of those who have survived it almost by a miracle. Will the literary aftermath of this war be more or less similar in character to that in Europe and America after the War of 1914-1918? No one can tell. A seventeenth-century English poet said:“A warlike, tragical age is thebest to write of,but worst to write in.” An eighteenth-century Chinese poet said:“The misfortune of the country is the fortune of its poets. When one writes of national calamities，one inevitably writes well”（国家不幸诗家幸，赋到沧桑句便工）.A historian of literature is a Leibnizian optimist like Pangloss. He believes that,whatever may be the tendency of the postwar literature,whether saying “yea” to life or saying “nay”,Chinese literature will be enriched and its panorama enlivened.

NOTES

1.See A. B. C. of Reading, p. 7; How to Read, p.28.Both books were before the War cherished by the not-very-intelligentsia in China, and,I think,Japan.
2.See Fragmente,1165.
3.Cited in Leopold Mabilleau: Victor Hugo.
4. See Journal des Goncourts, 3 mars, 1862.
5. Quoted in Remy de Gourmont:Le Problème du style,p.281. 
6．杨雄《法言问神篇》。
7．元好问《论诗绝句》。
8.George Puttenham: The Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589),ed.by G.D. Willcock and A. Walker, p. 91. The passage was quoted by Sir John Hawkins in his History of Music, Vol. III, p. 416, and Robert Southey in his Commonplace Book, Vol. I, p.286.
9.See E.Gilson: Les idées et les lettres,pp.31-38.
10.E.g.Lytton Strachey in Characters and Commentaries, and Desmond MacCarthy in Experience.
11．See，e．g．，刘壎《隐居通议》卷六．
12．See 李光地《榕村语录》卷三十，王应奎《柳南随笔》卷五 for examples of“holding two meanings in solution”（虚涵两意）in the Tang poets.cf. Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity: Analysis of Shakespeare's 16th Sonnet on the danger of inserting more punctuation-marks with a view to simplification.
13. Georges Polti in Les trente-six situations dramatiques gave three Chinese examples: Kouan-han-king: Le ressentiment de Te-oun-go (situation III,B3);Tchang-koue-ping: La tunique confrontée(situation III,A1); Anonymous:La chaneuse (Situation III,A1).The first serious attempt to“place” the Chinese drama in particular and Chinese literature in general from the viewpoint of “world literature", is found in H. M. Posuett's Comparative Literature (1886), especially pp.294 ff,318 ff. The book which contains some hard thinking and a good deal of dogged argufying, is now well-nigh forgotten, though it won honorable mention in the writings of Comparatists like Joseph Texte. It is a worthy successor to John Brown's A Dissertation on the Rise and Corruption of Poetry and Music (1763) and The History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry(1764),perhaps the earlist English works of general criticism which take Chinese literature,especially Chinese drama,into account. (Dissertation, pp. 166-9; History pp. 217-33). Incidentally,Posuett mentioned Brown's History in connexion with the Indian festivals on p. 97 of his book.
14. Cf.Hans Licht: Beitraege zur antiken Erotik,S.16 ff.
15．For examples：汤显祖《邯郸记》第四折（the lady＇s whispered questioning of her nurse），第二十四折（the dialogue between the hero and his wife at a banquet）；李日华《南西厢》第二十四折（the dialogue between the heroine and the maid at the end of the scene）；高濂《玉簪记》第十八折(the heroine's soliloquy and poem).The characters jest and talk with an indecency all the more shocking because they are polite gentlemen and demure ladies.
16．For examples：梁辰鱼《浣纱记》第二十四折（the dialogue between the maids and the eunuch）；梅鼎祚《玉合记》第四折（the dialogue between the maids and the eunuch).
17．《宋元戏曲史》第十二章。
18. Q.Horatii Flacci Epistola ad Augustum with an English Commentary and Notes,1751 ed., pp.162-167.
19.See Thomas Percy: Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese,Vol.I, p.217.
20.See Th. Lipps: Aesthetik, Bd. I. S. 599 for the distinction between tragedy and pathos.
21.See J.B. du Halde: Description de la Chine, Eng. tr. printed by Edward Cave, Vol. II, pp. 167 ff.; Voltaire: Zadig,Ch. ii; Goldsmith: Citizen of the World, letter xviii;Percy:The Matrons, pp.19 ff.
22.E.g.Irving Babbit in the note on "Chinese primitivism" in Rouseau and Romanticism.
23.See R. Baerwald:Psychologische Faktoren des modernen Zeitgeistes, S.39 ff.
24．纪昀《姑妄听之》盛时彦跋。
25．E．g．《太平广记》卷四百八十七《霍小玉传》（the talk of the procuress Pao）．
26．《警世通言》卷二《庄子休鼓盆成大道》。
27.Percy-Wilkinson:Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), Vol. 1,p.ix.
28.J.P.Eckermann:Gespraeche mit Goethe,31 January 1827.
29．方濬师《蕉轩随录》卷十二。
30．E．g．《红楼梦》二十八回（His thoughts on seeing the plump white arms of the girl's rival).
31.See Anatomy of Melancholy,“Democritus,Junior to the Reader,”and “Remedies against Discontents”;Heroes and Hero-worship,Lecture V.
32．E．g．张鹫《游仙窟》，牛僧孺《周秦行纪》． 




Critical Notice I

From Philobiblon（《书林季刊》），1（1946），pp．13-19 

Le Père Matthieu Ricci et la Société Chinoise de son temps (1551-1610). By R. P. Henri Bernard. 2 vols. Tientsin. 1937.
Father Bernard, a learned Jesuit, has devoted himself to the gigantic task of tracing the history of the propagation of Roman Catholicism in the Far East, and published quite a number of studies on that subject,of which this work is “le medaillon central”(Vol.I,p.vii). In making these studies,he is guided throughout by a very lofty purpose, that of “faciliter l'intélligence sérieuse, profonde,du miracle par excellence: I'Homme-Dieu ressuscité, vivant, agissant dans I'Eglise, et modifiant ainsi, par une intervention constante, l'ordre naturel des choses aux quatre coins de l'univers, en Extrême Orient aussi bien qu'en Occident!”(ibid.) In short, he too in his prosaic way tries to “justify the ways of God to men.”We may not share his belief, but we respect it all the same. Unfortunately religious zeal is little compatible with what sixteenth-century European scholars called judicium, that discerning spirit which enables a learned man to see things in their true perspective and take things at their true values. It is therefore no wonder that our pious and conscientious author should be guilty of special pleading and pitching his case too high.
Father Bernard has followed patiently Matteo Ricci's career step by step, laying special emphasis upon the rôle he played in the advancement of learning in China. The picture, though marred by puerile and often erroneous digressions about Chinese history and civilisation,is clear-cut enough in outline and reveals great labours of research. The heroic and saintly life of Matteo Ricci was ong ago summarised in sixelegant lines in a poem by Ts'üan Tsu-wang （全祖望），which might very well be inscribed on the fly-leaf of this fully documented work.Had Father Bernard known that poem,he would have been saved from the egregious mistake about “l'historien de la philosophie, Hoang Tsong-hi”(Vol.I,p.364). Hoang Tsong-hi is 黄宗羲 of course.Father Berard holds him responsible for the posthumous oblivion of Chinese Catholic scholars like Li Tche-tsao（李之藻），and explains his “oubli volontaire” by his “prejugés bouddhistes” under the influence of Tchou-hong（株宏）. It is really a great feat to make so many mistakes in so short a sentence.One only wonders how Father Bernard would explain the similar omission of all Buddhist thinkers in Hoang Tsong-hi's history.Father Bernard naively goes on to say:“II est vrai que Li Tche-tsao fut essentiellement un traducteur...toutefois ce manque partiel d'originalité empêche-t-il un écrivain comme Amyot, traducteur de Plutarque, defigurer honorablement dans la galérie des littérateurs français du XVIe siècle?” The analogy is certainly not on all fours. While translators are often mentioned in histories of literature,they rarely figure honorably or otherwise in histories of philosophy. Plutarch is in some sorts a philosopher, and Amyot also translated his Moralia. It would be ridiculous to claim on that ground for Amyot a niche in the temple of philosophical fame. For argument's sake,let us assume in the teeth of facts that Hoang Tsong-hi wrote a history of philosophy of the Ming dynasty which aims at reportig every climate of opinion and including every wind of doctrine. What then does the omission of Li Tche-tsao from his pages signify? "Oubli volontaire”? Not necessarily. Migt it not also mean that Li Tche-tsao in the eyes of a non-Christian writer is simply too small beer to be chronicled? The fact is that Romnan Catholicism with its sugar-coating of scientific lore (cf. Vol.I,p. 85;Vol. II,p.377) was in China, as Wagner would say, ein durchaus uebersetztes Wesen-a “translated being" which appealed because it was exotic and alienated because it remained foreign. It was not sufficiently acclimatised to form an integral part of the furniture of the Chinese mind. Outlandish doctrines and ideas are not fully assimilated unless we unconsciously act on it as the new rich insensibly adapt their modes of life to their increased income. Hoang Tsong-hi,in spite of Father Bernard's fantastic assertions to the contrary,was a hostile critic of Buddhism, and,like Li Tche-tsao,an eager student of European science,as shown by Ts'üan Tsu-wan's poem. But one wonders whether he, with all his hospitality of soul, would have included“a translated being" and its advocates in a work professedly on thoughts indigenous to Chinese soil. A Chinese might as well accuse historians of European philosophy of “oubli volontaire” for not devoting some space to the seventeenth-century translators of Confucius Philosophus Sinarum and Sir William Temple whose Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning contains the earliest critical exposition of Confucianism in moder European languages. 
To regard Matteo Ricci as the great formative agent of modern Chinese civilisation and the Society of Jesus as the fons et origo of Chinese literaryreforms, is therefore sheer extravagance.We can excuse many things in a work of love.But there is such a thing as loving not wisely, but too well. When we read, for example,that Matteo Ricci was the precursor of “the Chinese Renaissance” of 1917(Vol. I, pp. 117-120, p.160),that the course of Chinese thought might have been profoundly changed, and European thinkers like Descartes and Leibniz and Spinoza would have been translated long ago if the philosophical and logical studies introduced into China by the Jesuits were “adoptées par la masse des intele sctuels de la Chine" (Vol. I, pp.162-163),and that Matteo Ricci's work in restoring Confucianism to its pristine purity was continued by“l＇école du retour aux Han 汉学”（Vol．I，p．325 ff.),that “les promoteurs de la Renaissance littéaire dans la Chine moderne se rattachent, par les savants les plus originaux de la dynastie mandchoue et par ceux de la fin des Ming,au groupe de lettrés fortement influencés par le Père Ricci”(Vol. II,p.301), and otherstatements to similar effect, we rub our eyes or shrug our shoulders according to our several temperaments.“L'action universitaire de l'Eglise en pays d'Extrême-Orient”(Vol. I, p.329) is the leit-motiv of Father Bernard's work. Nothing like leather,if we believe the cobbler. But on the other hand, there is the no less classic rebuke which enjoins the cobbler to stick to his last.Unless and until he is better equipped, Father Bernard should have left Chinese history alone.One is only relieved to find that he has not gone the length of arguing like his Chinese co-religionist that the Chinese were descended from the Jews and converted to Christianity long before the birth of Christ.2
First of all, the great scholars of “l'école du retour aux Han”, far from being fosterlings of the Jesuits,were often open antagonists to the “new learning.” Even in the field of mathematics and astronomy where European superiority should be undisputed,“les savants les plus originaux de la dynastie mandchoue” obstinately refused to see any novelty in the contribution of theJesuits and tried to belittle it. Ch＇ien Ta-hsin（钱大昕），Mei Ke-cheng（梅瑴成）， Sun Sin-yen（孙星衍），Ts＇üan Tsu-wan，Yü Chen-si（俞正燮），to mention a few prominent names at random, were unanimous on this point.3 If the Roman Catholic missionaries adopted the subtle policy of dorer la pilule, the Chinese intellectuals often made the summary response of emptying the baby together with the bathwater. The former made capital out of their knowledge of science in order to propagate their faith,but the latter suspected and rejected Western science because of its association with Christian proselytism. One finds an amusing instance of this in Yü Chen-si's essay on human anatomy as taught by the Jesuits. With much wrong-headed ingenuity, he proved to his own satisfaction that the description of human physiology made by the Jesuits applies only to the bodies of the Europeans,bodies whose seat of intellect is not heart but brain. The moral is that only those Chinese as “heartless" as Europeans would believe in Christianity.4 No one can deny that Yü Chen-si was one of “les savants les plus originaux de l'école du retour aux Han”.And this man of vast erudition was by no means a die-hard conservative. He boldly vindicated the rights of woman,even more boldly studied sexual phenomena with a dispassionate thoroughness worthy of Havelock Ellis,S and above all knew whatever“doctrine de l'ouest” then was available, including the Latin word caelum for heaven.6 We certainly can not accuse him of being unduly influenced by Buddhism or Chu-hiism（朱熹），Father Berard＇s two pet abhorrences. His attitude is therefore quite tell-tale. Indeed, we find an almost persistent effort on the part of the scholars of the Manchu dynasty to explain away Christianty simply as an old Chinese religion somehow transplanted in Europe. According to some，it was a religion which flourished in the Chin（秦）dynasty and was brought to the West by Chinese emigrants. According to others,it was an overseas branch of that very Neo-Confucianism or Chu-hiism which Father Bernard hates with so much heartiness and so little knowledge.8 There were still others who discovered in Hinduism the source of Christianity and Western science.'Towards the end of the nineteenth century,when “les doctrines de l'Ouest”came into China in shoals and left the Jesuits' antiquated lore nowhere, it became a fashion among liberal-minded Chinese scholars to regard both Christianity and Western science as derived from the Chinese thinker Mo-ti（墨翟）．10 All these are of course very fantastic,but they are not more fantastic than Father Bernard's thesis that the Society of Jesus shaped the Chinese scholarship and culture of the last three hundred odd years. A fantaisiste, fantaisiste et demi!
As to Matteo Ricci's influence on the “New Chinese Literature Movement" of 1917, we are fortunately,near enough to the Movement to know that it is nil.The “prime movers” looked back to the playwrights and novelists of the Mongol, M'ing and Manchu dynasties. Later, the colloquial style used by Father Bernard's detested Chu-hiists in their philosophical discussions（语录体）（cf. Vol.I,p. 118) was sedulously aped. One famous essayist went so far as to praise the Chinese vernacular of the Protestant version of the Bible. Matteo Ricci＇s experiments in writing pei-hua（白话） were clean forgotten.It is very wrong of the New Writers not to find a patron saint in him, but the fact shows clearly the diminutive and almost negligible part the Roman Catholics played in the formation of Chinese culture. Father Berard once guardedly qualifies his assertion with the word “indirectement”(Vol.I, p.119). “Indirect” is beautifully non-commital, and one remembers Voltaire's famous retort to his physician on coffee as “a slow,very slow poison”.
Father Bernard allows himself the luxury of imagining the glorious thing Chinese civilisation would have become if “l'action universitaire de l'Eglise" had not been checked in China.The “Renaissance” would have taken place ages before 1917. Descartes,Leibniz and even Spinoza would have been long ago at the disposal of Chinese scholars. Under the guidance of such master minds, scientific studies would have progressed by leaps and bounds. Before so glowinga picture of missed opportunities, we should have become depressed but for Father Bernard's repeated assurance that the deferred hope actually came true in 1917 and that we are,thanks to the indirect agency of the Jesuits with Matteo Ricci at their head, enjoying the benefits of a“Renaissance”. Suppose we, too, indulge ourselves in a little luxury of imagination. It is true that the Chinese were backward in natural sciences, with the ancient Romans to keep them barely in countenance." It is also true that the Jesuits introduced the study of natural sciences into China. But, as we have seen and as Father Bernard himself almost admits, with the early Jesuit missionaries in China,science was simply an ancilla theologiae or rather meretrix theologorum to be kept as long as it suits the purpose and pleasure of religion.Science has a way of nibbling God away bit by bit,12 while religion, like party politics, is often a body of scruples and taboos which checks the free exercise of intelligence.13 Once Chrstianity or rather the Roman Catholic version of it became generally “enracinée en Chine”, would and could scientific researches continue untrammelled and unshackled?14 All of us who know something of the “rise and influenc of rationalism” or the “conflict between science and religion” in Europe, will not even give the result the benefit of doubt. On Father Bernard's showing, it would seem that the Church which was in Europe the stronghold of obstructionism and obscurantism and against whose spiritual influence the Renaissance was largely a protest, became in China a nursery of enlightenment,radicalism,science and “Renaissance”. A sea change indeed! Weknow,for example,that Matteo Ricci's astronomy was the geocentric Ptolemaic system(cf. Vol. I, p.256).We also know that the Church espoused this unscientific system and anathematised with bell, book and candle astronomers for daring to differ with it. Would the Jesuit missionaries in China have tolerated free scientific enquiry, if the study of natural sciences they were instrumental in intrducing threatened to get out of control and become a Frankenstein? We have no doubt on this matter. Besides, either “l'action universitaire de l'Eglise" in China was interrupted at the beginning of the Manchu dynasty or it was not. If it was, then Roman Catholicism could not have been the remote source of that movement which “aboutir au XIXe siècle avec Tseng Kou-fan et au XXe avec la Renaissance d'aujourd'hui" (Vol. I,p.160). If it was not, why exercise our imagination on the might-have-beens? Father Bernard tries to have it both ways;he by turns wistfully imagines things that it might have accomplished and jubilantly points to them as proofs of what it had actually accomplished. This is bad history and worse logic.
There are other points in Father Bernard's book which we want to discuss.For example, he thinks that Chu-hi travestied Confucius, while Matteo Ricci and “l'école du retour aux Han” saw Confucius as he really is. Apparently he is unaware of the commonplace in historical interpretation that a great man or a great period presents different facets to different ages and that each succeeding age has its own “reading" of him or it. 15 Father Bernard also confides to us his“suspicion” that the Jesuit missionaries sided with the Neo-Confucian Tung-lin party（东林党）against the eunuchs（Vol.I， p.311,cf. Vol.I,p.viii). The idea is simply preposterous,and we are almost tempted to retort that suspicion i only the intelligence of the ignorant. Father Bernard regards Ts'eng Kuo-fang（曾国藩）as the sort of man upon whom the mantle of Catholic scholars like K＇iu Tai-sou（瞿太素）descended.Obviously he has never heard of the anti-Christian diatribe in Ts'eng Kuo-fang's famous proclamation against the Tai-ping “rebels".16 Ts'eng Kuo-fang's encouragement of “Western learning"does not redound to the credit of the Christian missionaries. War or the menace of war seems to have been a more efficient teacher of applied sciences than the Messianic gospel of “peace on earth and goodwill among men.”China found predatory younger nations knocking and even kicking at her doors, fas est et ab hoste doceri. Apparently it is not God's will that the contact between Chinese culture and Western civilisation “se soient toujours produites sous le patronage de I'Eglise"(Vol.II, p.133), unless we take into account the fact that the early Jesuit missionaries were welcomed by the Chinese because of their deadly efficiency in the murderous science of gunnery..17However,we will not dwell on these and similar points.
Father Bernard assures us that he has consulted “innombrables auteurs”(Vol. I, p.vii). We believe him. But in a book which ostensibly deals with Chinese society and culture, the Chinese authorities laid under contribution are surprisingly few. Father Bernard levies heavily on some recent Chinese monographs and articles. We may rub in John Selden's warning to scholars on “quoting a modern Dutchman where a classic author may be used”, but we need not. Father Bernard gives a plausible reason for his parsimony in using the works of Matteo Ricci's Chinese contemporaries:“La plupart des livres intéressants (plusieurs milliers) de cette époque ont été impitoyablement détruits dans la proscription de l'empereur Kien-long à la fin du XVIIIe siècle”(Vol.I, p.viii). Unfortunately emperor Kien-long was not thorough enough in his vandalism to save the labour of research students. The works of many “chroniqueurs et mémorialistes” of the M'ing dynasty are still extant, and Father Bernard, lulled by the false belief about Kien-long's wholesale destruction, has entirely ignored the relevant materials in them. The only citation from one of such works was communicated to him by a Chinese professor (Vol. I,p. 258，李日华《紫桃轩杂缀》）．We feel that Father Bernard，in spite of his towering admiration of Matteo Ricci, has not taken pains to imitate his great predecessor and master the Chinese language. He does not give us the impression of being at home among Chinese books. The orthographical errors in Chinese characters are too numerous in this book to be purely accidental,and the phrase“le mandarin spécial des lettrés ou tihio （Jouhio？儒学）”（Vol.II， p.770) confirms our impression. Only a man who does not read Chinese works of the M＇ing dynasty can fail to decipher tihio as 提学.He correctly suggests that“Liciou” mentioned in Ricci＇s writings is no other thanLi Tche（李贽）（Vol．I，p．316），but he overlooks the fact that Li Tche's friends, the Yüan brothers whom the New Chinese writers have successfully rehabilitated as model essayists, were also among Matteo Ricci's distinguished acquaintances.18 He mentions the great artist Tung Hs'iang-k'uang （董香光）several times without knowing his recorded opinion of Matteo Ricci.19 He regards the Chinese writings of the Jesuits as anticipations of the New Chinese style without knowing that they were at that time praised precisely for their delightful flavor of archaism.20 He refers twice to the controversy between the bonze Tchou-hong and Matteo Ricci（reserved in《辩学遗牍》），and quotes Tchou-hong as saying that “le christianisme copie l'amidisme”(Vol. II,p.137) without knowing Tchou-hong's emphatic denial of any connexion between Christianity and Buddhism.21 He enumerates the references to Matteo Ricci in a recently reprinted M'ing book, but fails to notice that in a long passage on phonetic languages in the same book European languages are conspicuously absent.22 He has not even consulted that vast repository of anecdotes and vade-mecum of all writers on the M'ing dynasty, Sheng Te-wu's Gleanings in the Wilderness. Besides a detailed entry of Matteo Ricci's progress to Peking which Father Bernard might very well use to supplement his own account, the book contains some curious titbits about his personal habits,e.g.,his great appetite in eating and drinking（饮啖甚健）.	It is very reassurinag to us earthly beings to learn that this angelic character was also a magnificent trencherman. There is a host of other authors who would have proved helpful to Father Bernard in settling the vexed question as formulated by Browning, “How it strikes a contemporary”．24 Ch＇ien Ch＇ien-i（钱谦益）in his monumental Lives of the M'ing Poets pronounced the incursion of Christianity as one of the three omens of the decline and fall of the M'ing dynasty.25 Father Bernard makes Matteo Ricci out an arch-enemy of Chu-hiism.By an irony of fate,the Chu-hiists would rather make common cause with him against Buddhism, because they thought Christianity the lesser ofthe two evils.26 It was and, I think, still is a common dodge among the close-fisted in China to turn away mendicant bonzes by saying curtly, “I am a Christian.”Miserliness,like misery, makes strange bed-fellows.
We have said enough to show that Father Bernard's “biographie critique”of Matteo Ricci is very unsatisfactory and even misleading. If our criticism seems unsympathetic, it is not because of any odium theologicum.As we said at the beginning, we respect and even envy his faith. Controversies are almost always futile, especially those on religious matters. The ancient Chinese were in fact a placidly tolerant people, whatever Western sinologues choose to say to the contrary (cf. Vol.I, p. 81).“To the populace,all religions are true; to the politician, all religions are expedient;to the philosopher, all religions arefalse.”This might be said of the ancient Chinese as much as of the ancient Romans. Words like “superstition” and “idolatry” come a little too readily to Father Bernard's pen. Just as sentimentality is simply other men's emotion, so superstition is other men's belief. In the book whose briefer edition Father Bernardtreats with lofty scorn(Vol.I, p.152),the controversy between the Buddhist Tchou-hong and the Christian Matteo Ricci is wittily characterised as“two bathers each accusing the other of being indecently naked”（犹同浴而讥裸裎也），27 Anglicè，pot and kettle each calling the other black．It is a typital remark,and affords some food for reflection.

NOTES

1．《鲒埼亭诗集》卷二《明司天汤若望日晷歌》：“为忆利生初戾上。”etc．Cf．姚燮《复庄诗问》卷十《阜城门外利玛窦坟》：“一天开别教”etc.
2．See 杨光先《不得已》卷上《与许青屿侍郎书》。
3．See《潜研堂集》卷三十三《与戴东原书》；《畴人传》卷三十九（《借根方说仪象论》）；《五松堂文摘》卷一《杨光先传》；《平津馆文稿》卷下《释方》；《癸已类稿》卷九《盖地论》；《鲒埼亭诗集》卷二汤若望日晷歌》。
4．《癸已类稿》卷十四《书人身图说后》卷十五《天主教论》。But cf．《窳櫎日记钞》下卷and《纯常子枝语卷》十一卷三十三 for the old Chinese lre on thebrain as the seat of intellect.
5．《积精篇》which his editors were too shocked to include in his posthumous 《癸已存稿》。
6．《癸已类稿》卷七《天字音说》。
7．徐昂发《畏垒笔记》卷三。The term 天主 is as old as the Chin dynasty．
8．王闿运《王志》。
9．蒋湘南《七经楼文集》卷三，《经咒本旨》卷四《西法非中国所传论》。
10．陈澧，黄公度，郑献甫，宋育仁，杨佩瑗，王树柟etc．Cf．江瀚《石翁山房札记》。See《复堂日记补录》“光绪十二年四月朔”for the man who started thisfashion.
11.Cf. Louis Weber:”La nullité scientifique des Romains n'a pas eu d'égale, si ce n'est celle des Chinois"(Le Rhythme du progrès,1913,
p.232).
12.Cf.Gavarni's striking expression recorded in Journal des Goncourt,I, p.47.
13. Cf. Salomon Reinach's definition of religion as “un ensemble de scrupules qui font obstacle au libre exercice de nos facultés,” cited in J.Huxley's Essays of a Biologist,p.244.
14. They must remember that values, like gods, are jealous with the consequence that every value tends to tyrannise ovr the whole human ethos at the expense of other values.See N. Hartmann:Ethics (Eng. tr.),Vol.II,p.423.
15. Cf. Theodor Litt's suggestive book Geschichte und Leben, 1918,S.9: “Historisch verstranden wird also nicht nur die Gegenwart aus der Verganenheit,sondern auch die Vergangenheit aus der Gegenwart." Also Sidney Hook's thoughtful essay "A Pragmatic Critique of the Historico-Genetic Method”in Essays in Honor of John Dewey,1929, p.162:“The present is the basis from which we determine the kind of interpretation we must apply to the past.”Of course the interpretation of the meaning of a fact must presuppose the existence of that fact.
16．《曾文正公文集》卷三《讨粤寇檄》。
17．李逊之《崇祯朝记事》卷四《杨若桥举汤若望制火炮》。
18．Cf．袁中道《游居柿录》卷四《得利玛窦讣中郎衙舍数见之》etc．
19．《画禅室随笔》卷四。
20．《乾坤正气集》卷四百三十六陈忠裕公集》卷七《农政全集》凡例。
21．《竹窗三笔·说天一》。
22．《郁冈斋笔尘》卷三、卷四。
23．沈德符野获编（钱枋辑本）卷二十、卷三十》。
24．E．g．汤显祖《玉茗堂尺牍》卷六《寄虞德园》，张煊《疑耀》卷二、卷四，谢肇淛《五杂俎》卷二、卷四。
25．《列朝诗集》丁十二《谭元春传》。
26．《不得已》卷上《辟邪论》下，张尔歧《蒿庵闲话》卷一姚椿国朝文录》卷四《应为谦天主论》。
27．《四库全书总目》卷一百二十《辩学遗牍》。 




CRITICAL NOTICE II
The Chinese: Their History and Culture, by Kenneth Scott Latourette. Third Edition Revised. New York:The Macmillan Co. 1946.

From Philobiblon（《书林季刊》），1（1946），pp．30-37． 

This is a completely revised edition of Professor Latourette's well-known book published in 1934. The author has spared no pains“to bring the book fully down to date” (p. vii), but Time which antiquates antiquarians has played its usual trick here. The historical narrative in the first part ends with the events of 1944, when the Chiese were still in the throes of a war which had begun all wars and have not yet gathered the fruits of a peace which threatens to end all peace. The twelfth chapter on “the crumbling of the old Chinese culture and foreshadowings of the new”, however, still retains a great deal of its actuality. Professor Latourette even showed himself a good prophet when he wrote in the spring of 1945 as follows:“In 'occupied' China Japan went through the motions of turning over to Chinese administration several of the foreign concessions in the ports....All these measures were transfers of nominal authority to a puppet government which was controlled by Japanese and so were more apparent than real.However,when Japan had been expelled,Occidental powers would find difficulty in reestablishing their special privileges in the areas affected”(p. 453). It remains only to be seen whether the “difficulty”proves insuperable.
To have gone through three editions and four reprints in twelve years,is,I suppose,for a scholarly work of such generous size, gratifying popularity. The popularity is well deserved for the book is readable, informative and on the whole trustworthy.But,apart from its intrinsic merits, circumstances must have also contributed greatly to its success. The sinophilism in eighteenth century Europe was a mere flash in the pan. In the nineteenth century, China ceased to interest the general Western public. To some, e.g. Leigh Hunt,she meant simply China tea; to others,e.g.William Hazlitt,she was of no more account than a China orange.Chinese men's long queues and Chinese women's small feet were of course familiar to every “foreigner at home”, and, judging by contemporary Western comic drawings, the former still seem to wear well, so to speak, and the latter, go strong. On the jacket of a recent American translation of a contemporary Chinese novel,one can see the drawing of a Chinaman with a pigtail which almost ends where,if the Renaissance legend of les Anglois coués could be believed, Englishmen's tails were said to begin. That such a pictorial anachronism could have been committed long after the disappearance of the queue (cf. p.716),shows clearly how sedate ignorance can be. To be sure, there havealways been specialists or sinologues. But a specialist cannot rely upon his fellow specialists for the wide sale of his book any more than laundresses can make their livelihood by taking in each other's washings. The interest of the general reading public must be aroused. And it takes nothing less than the Mukden Incident in 1931 to do this. When Japan started to reduce China to einer geographischer Begriff, the Western world began to sit up and take notice. An English art critic once said that the rank and file of Europeans were not interested in Japan until she beat a first-class European power,Russia. The case seemed unhappily reversed with regard to China.She caught the attention of the Western public when she was menaced by a first-class Asiatic power. While China held on like grim death,wriers on China came to their own and had the time of their lives.That was my impression during my stay in Europe in the years immediately before and after the outbrea of Sino-Japanese War in 1937.I do not mean to deny that Professor Latourette's book can win readers' suffrage by its own merits, but merely wish to point out that a fortuitous concourse of circumstances also helps it to its popularity.
The book was originally published in two volumes. As a matter of fact,it should be published in two separate books. The first part is an outline of Chinese history, while the second is a sort of Varia Chinensia' arranged under headings like “Government”, “Religion”,“Social Life”,etc. The unity of a book of such disparate parts is due to the binder's pack-thread rather than to the author's thread of discourse. As the first part already contains sections dealing with “China's cultural advances, dynasty by dynasty",the second is obliged to traversea good deal of trodden ground. This is awkward, for much unnecessary repetition ensues. Thus we are twice told of the meanings of Tien（天）and Shang Ti （上帝）（p．68，p． 608），of the Five Classics （pp．63 ff，pp．777 ff），of the facts that the Dream of the Red Chamber（《红楼梦》）is a capital novel （p．329，p．783），that Wang Hsi-chih（王羲之）is a distinguished calligraphist (p.157, p.746) etc. Tales twice told are all very well, but why at such short intervals which allow one no chance to forget? While feeling grateful to Professor Latourette for constantly refreshing one's memory, one hopes,like Themistocles, to be taught "the art of forgetting" first. Is it because history is said to repeat itself, a historian must repeat himself too?
Professor Latourette seems to have consulted all the important works on China and the Chinese witten in the three major Western languages.The bibliographies at the end of the chapters are very imposing. The absence of authorities in Chinese is conspicuous but not unexpected, because, I suppose, the bibliographies are compiled not to show the author's Belesenheit, but to guide general readers.Many profound and true things have been written of China by authors who are not sinologues and in books which do not ostensibly deal with the Chinese. An ounce of mother-wit is often worth more than tons of sinological lore, and one rather misses the titles of such works. Perhaps specialists on any subject, while free from petty professional jealousies towards each other, are still human enough to show a strong tendency to trade-unionism where outsiders and amateurs are concerned. But there must be something wrong with Professor Latourette's readings, for how can we otherwise account for such an astonishing remark,“the Chinese have devloped no epic and lyric poetry" (p. 782)? By a strokeof pen,and lo! as at the touch of a magic wand, the whole corpus of Chinese lyric poetry ceases to be. In its sweeping comprehensiveness, this literary judgment is not unworthy to be ranked with Père Bouhours's“Si un Allemand peut être bele sprit?”or Sydney Smith's “Who reads an American book?” These two worthies,however, had at least the excuse of rashness and ignorance. One need not consult many authorities on the Chinese, but has only to read a few authors in Chineseto see that Chinese poetry is predominantly lyrical, lyrical not only in the critical sense but also in the literal sense of the term. i.e. susceptible of being sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument（弦诵）．2That so serious and obvious a misstatement could have been made,and, once made, allowed to stand unchallenged through four reprints and two editions in a book acclaimed in the American press as-I quote from the jacket-a guide through the maze of Chinese culture, shakes a little our faith in experts and authorities on China.
Professor Latourette's sketches of Chinese political events, social customs and economic institutions are sensible, sympathetic, and, taking them by and large, quite admirable. But in dealing with cultural matters, he presents the spectacle of a good man struggling valiantly but vainly with adversity. His characterisation of individual philosophers and artists is often wide of the mark. He fumbles,rambles, temporises, and in the end says something utterly irrelevant. In the sections devoted to “China's cultural advances, dynasty by dynasty", he tries to define the general spirit of each age, but rarely with any success. For instance, a non-Chinese reader might closely scan his pages on the civilisation of the Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties (pp. 154-172) and still remains ignorant of the most important cultural event of that age, the rise of the art of“fine conversation”（清谈）and the study of “speculative philosophy”（玄学）.In the history of Chinese civilisation, certain epochs have become conceptualised, and their names,like“Medieval”,“Renaissance”,“Restoration”or “Victorian” in English, are used not only chronologically but also critically and descriptively to denote certain stylistic peculiarities or philosophic types：e.g.Earlier Han（西汉，西京）vs Later Han（东汉，东京）in scholarship or Tang（唐）vs Sung（宋）in poetry.But apparently Professor Latourette has never heard of such things so that in his summary, the rhythm in Chinese cultural development is muffled and the relief obliterated. His roll-call of famous writers and artists of each age often strikes me as very capricious.One example is enough. Professor Latourette, ignoring the proverbial difference between the Earlier Han and the Later Han scholarship, states roundly that “the energy of China's intellectuals” in the Han dynasty “went largely into historical and literary studies"(p.134), and gives several names, and titles including that of Shou Wen （《说文》），but he strangely enough omits the greatest and most influential scholar of all，Chêng Hsüan（郑玄）who was to set the tone of Chinese studies for hundreds of years. Professor Latourette says something about the "Back to the Han” Movement of the scholars of the Manchu dynasty (pp. 330-1),does he know that it was largely a movement back to Chêng Hsüan?
What Professor Latourette seems to want is a philosophical grasp of cultural facts. When he tries to explain, he becomes inconsequential. The passages on “the reasons for Buddhism's success"(pp. 162-3) are muddled enough. I shall give another example.Professor Latourette is fond of dwelling on the influence of Buddhism on Chinese painting. He explains the greatness of T'ang painting and the mediocrity (!) of M'ing painting by the dominance and the decline of Buddhism respectively (pp. 206,305).He may be right or he may be wrong. But his reasons are, to say the least, curious.“The T'ang was the age of the greatest Chinese poetry and of some of the best painting. Such tides of the spirit are always difficult to account for. In this case they almost certainly had some connection with Taoism and Buddhism,for both these faiths encouraged the man of insight to look below surface appearances-held to be illusory-to the reality beneath and to do so through the approach of the mystic.” This is surely a non sequitur. To disregard the world of the senses would spell the very death of such a representative art as painting, for all representative arts have to do with the appearance or semblance. Beauty, in a sense other than the proverbial one, is skin deep. Plato's condemnation of art for being at a second remove from reality is too well-known to need quotinghere.Besides,mystics all the world over distrust the power of speech to convey their experience;witness the Brahmin with his na iti or the Christian with his non immerito Nihilum vocatur. When they do sing of their vision, there is a note of inebriation,a throbbing of fervor or a gnomic illumination in teir strains.The “mystic approach," instead of adequately explaining why T'ang poetry is great, would have either sterilised it or made it something entirely different from what it is. If T'ang painting and poetry owed their greatness to Taoism and Buddhism, the “peeling of the onion”3 in the mystic approach, i.e.,“looking below surface appearances to the reality beneath",had nothing to do with it. Some other reasons must be adduced. Painting is a subject on which one is almost licenced to utter pretentious platitudes. But for sheer otioseness,I wonder whether the following statements can be beaten:“Many experts freely assert that at its best Chinese painting is one of the outstanding expressions of man's ability to create beauty”(p.742);“Chinese paintings, like those of any other people,must be seen to be appreciated”(p. 745).
I have criicised Professor Latourette's characterisation of historical personages. Two examples on one page will suffice to show what I mean.“A poet still famous was T＇ao Ch＇ien（陶潜）， who had several times been in official life but who longed for quiet and retirement. Interesting enough, late in life he made the acquaintance of Hui Yüan（慧远），who more than any other appears to have been responsible for the early stages of the growth of the Pure Land School of Buddhism....Wang Hsi-chih（王羲之），one of China＇s most distinguished calligraphists，a Taoist by belief, belongs to these centuries” (p. 157). Calligraphy, perhaps, like painting, “must be seen to be appreciated”,but Professor Latourette surely might give a word or two on T'ao Ch'ien as the greatest Chinese poet of rural nature. Besides, the two statements are misleading. Wang Hsi-chih is called Taoist probably because after his retirement he made friend with the Taoist Hsü Mai （许迈）and took medicine prepared according to the Taoist prescription（服食）.However，he had been keenly interested in the Taoist elixir very early in his life,4and that did not prevent him from attacking the basic tenet in Taoism (viz., the identification of life and death） as “utterly fallacious and nonsenscal”（固知一死生为虚诞，齐彭殇为妄作。）5 in that“famous example of hispenmanship" mentioned by Professor Laturette on p.747. Just as many a modern “heathen Chinese” seeks medical relief from Christin missionaries without believing in Christianity, so many ancient Confucianists lived on a Taoist diet whil violently attacking the Taoist philosophy，e.g.，Ts＇ui Hao（崔浩）and Hah Yü（韩愈）．6As to T＇ao Ch＇ien＇s acquaintance with Hui Yüan， there is nothing strange about it. Professor Latourette's special mention of it gives readers the false impression that T'ao Ch'ien was inclined to Buddhism. But one of T'ao Ch'ien's many distinctions lies in the fact that he remained a loyal Confucianist in an age of Taoism and Buddhism.' Of course, he is not a Confucianist in the pristine sense of the term. For that matter, is there ever sucha man except the sage himself? Is there a Christian pur sang? “There has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” Christianity produced the monk in one age, the knight errant in another, and the social worker in third. So Confucianism, too, moved with the times and moulded new types of men in accordance with the climates of the ages.
A man or an age is always a bundle of contradictions;but the contradictions arise only because of the bundle, just as the “incompatibility of temperaments” so much invoked in the divorce courts presupposes the act of cohabitation. Historians do not have to learn from Dilthey that every great historical cause is single (einheitlich) without being simple (einfach), or from W. Stern that a person is a unitas multiplex. They have known these truths all along, but their difficulty is to have such knowledge as would enable them to see an epoch or a great personage as from a vantage-ground, to comprehend it in its singleness and to discern its singularity. This knowledge Professor Latourette seems to lack, hence the undue prominence he gives to what is trivial or accidental. He has made his mistakes in facts, but who has not?Such mistakes (e.g.,p. 136 on Pan Ch'ao as a“novelist”, p. 209 on the T'ang short stories as being written in the vernacular,etc.)are mere peccadillos and can be easily removed. The fault of his work lies much deeper.
I will discuss only three points in the second part of Professor Latourette's book.
Professor Latourette gives an intelligent account of the Chinese conception of “face" (pp. 689-691).If I mistake not,this Chinese trait was first emphasised by A. H. Smith in the very first chapter of his Chinese Characteristics. Smith's is a shrewd and occasionally even witty book, though, considering the author's cloth, also a good example of “the rarity of Christian charity under the sun.”He lacks humour, and is very parochial in his outlook with the result that he often mistakes for Chinese what is only human.8 Professor Latourette judiciously points out that the Chinese are not alone in their sensitiveness about“face”:“After all,Westerners attach an immense amount of importance towhat they call 'honor'.”But, according to his examples,“face” is nearer to the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out”, than to the real sense of honor. To save“face”, so to speak, one must“have cheek”and not “lose countenance”. At any rate,the fact that the Chinese phrase“lose face”（丢脸）has found its way into English dictionaries, proves that it supplies a“felt need”in the West. Perhaps, we may say of “face” as Matthew Arnold said of “Philistinism”,that the Westerners have not the word because they have so much the thing.
In his account of feng shui（风水）Professor Latourette contents himself with indicating its absurd superstitions without penetrating to the core of the matter (pp. 651-652). This sort of geomancy peculiar to the Chinese is based upon what may be called topographical animism, in essence not different from the empathy in the aesthetic appreciation of landscape. From empathy to belief in mana is but a short step. Feng shui starts with sympathetic symbolism which attributes vital modes to shapes of earth, and ends in a farrago of fantasy, magic and taboo. Significantly,feng shui and the Chinese art of landscape painting have quite a few basic concepts in common， e.g.， water as the artery（血脉）of a mountain and the division of the mise-en-scène into “host" and “guest”（宾主）．9Embedded in this fantasia，however，there is sometimes a grain of sound common sense. For instance,a house should face south (cf. p. 651) simply because such a house would be warmer in winter and cooler in summer. The esoteric reasons offered by feng shui about the mana inherent in certain positions and shapes is often just a case of that human weakness which seeks to dignify common sense by making it uncommon and nonsensical.
Like almost all writers on modern China, Professor Latourette makes much of the conflict between the West and the East, between the old tradition and the new ideology on the contemporary scene(pp. 483-484;pp. 813-816).This may be true of China thirty or forty years ago, but is certainly not the whole truth as regards Chinaat present. La querelle des anciens et des modernes has faded into a thing of the past. The confict is no longer between the West and the East,but between the West and the West in the East.The West is not of all a piece; its scientic knowledge,e.g., is at variance with its religious creed. Moreover there is the West of the extreme Right,there is the West of the extreme Left,and there is the West of liberal democracy, idealistic and inefficient,which is in right mind but rather left-handed. Each of the three has its Chinese converts and camp-followers, crying up its nostrums and disputing for supremacy. For the sake of local colour,all three, like parvenus cultivating a genealogical tree or bastards claiming distinguished parents, look for their roots in te old Chinese tradition, and, as can be expected, find them,for the tradition of any country is always something handy:
In quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit in illo dogmata quisque sua.
It would be invidious to mention names, but anyone who has made a close study of contemporary China will see that my picture is nearer to the fact than Professor Latourette's. Augustin Thierry ridiculed the German conception of history as a perpetual war of ideas, and revived Prudentius's word psychomachia to designate it.10 But psychomachia or war of ideas is becoming a grim reality in China as in the world at large. What makes it so damnable is that it does not spend its force and fury in mere controversies. Words lead to blows and an inky affair becomes a bloody one. Whether blood is thicker than ink,I do not know; it is certainly nastier.

NOTES

1.I borrow the title of Thomas Hyde's proposed book; see Anthony à Wood: Athenae Oxonienses, new edition by Philip Bliss, 1820, Vol. IV, column 526.
2.The gradual divorce of “immortal verse" from“soft Lydian airs” in the history of Chinese poetry fumishes an interesting example of what aestheticians call“the competition of interests in a work of art”；see《通志》卷四十九《乐府总序》，《雕菰集》卷十四《与欧阳制美书》，《青溪集》卷二《诗论第十五》。For the technique of Chinese lyrical poetry,I may refer to the section on poetry in my article on Chinese literature in The Chinese Year Book,7th issue.
3.See W.R.Inge:Philosophy of Plotinus,Vol.II,p.146.Among the old Buddhist metaphors for the same process, the most striking is perhaps that of “removing an abscess”（医治痈疽）， see《瑜珈师地论》卷五十八.
4．《晋书》卷八十（羲之雅好服食养性，不乐在京师。初渡浙江，便有终焉之志。）
5．Cf．乔松年《萝摩亭札记》卷四。
6．See《魏书》卷三十五（浩不好老庄，斥为矫诬，修服食养性之术。师道士寇谦之，受其袖中图经）。Many scholars have disputed thefact that Han Yu was poisoned by the Taoist elixir，see 洪庆善《韩文公年谱》，李季可《松窗杂说》第四十五，崔述《考信录提要》卷上，《十驾斋养新录》卷十六。But none of them has noticed theentry under the heading “Materia medica”（药门）in that curious book《清异录》according to which this staunch champion of Confucian orthodoxy died of an over-dose of the Taoist aphrodisiac. One immediately thinks of the legend of Lucretius amatorio poculo in furorem. Brother Ass the body has a way of taking vengeance upon its too philosophical owners.
7．See《困学纪闻》卷十八翁注引罗端良《陶令祠堂记》，《真西山题跋》卷三，《李恕谷年谱》三十九岁选陶集题词，《榕村语录》卷三十续编卷八，《西溟文钞》卷二《敦好斋记》，《思益堂日札》卷五。I havediscussed elsewhere the strain of naturalism in Confucius's teachings.
8. It's a pity that few writers on China read Leopardi.“In ogni paese i vizi e i mali universali degli uomini e della socièta umana sono notati come particolari del luogo...Gli uomini sono miseri per necessità, e risoluti di credersi miseri per accidente" (Pensieri,xxxi).
9．For a curious rapprochement， cf． the following passages：山大物也，其形欲耸拔，水活物也，其形欲深静（郭熙《林泉高致山水训》）；山本乎静，欲其动，水本乎动，欲其静（《青乌先生葬经》“山欲其凝，水欲其澄”旧注）。The same idea has found expression in many Chinese poems on landscape. For the application of this feng shui principle of Andersstreben to literary criticism，see 李绂《穆堂别稿》卷四十四《秋山论文》. 




CRITICAL NOTICE III



The Rapier of Lu, Patriot Poet of China, translations and biography by Clara M. Candlin Young. The Wisdom of the East Series. London: John Murray. 1946.
Why this fanciful title? I am almost tempted to dismiss it as an aspiration from a penny plain to two-pence coloured.Lu Yu（陆游） rather fancied himself a master of fence, and was much given to reminiscing his youthful feats of valour. His contemporaris, however,were to a man silent about his exploits, and no legend like that about Cyrano de Bergerac has ever arisen about him. He wrote several poems on the rapier,' the most curious of which tells how one night hedreamed of a bright short rapier shot forth from the flesh of his right arm. One shudders to think what the oneirocritics of the Freudian school would make of this. But Mrs Young has translated none of these poems. Perhaps just asFriedrich Rueckert entitled his patriotic poems “armoured sonnets"(geharnischte sonnete), so the weapon here is a symbol of Lu Yu's militant patriotism.The blurb assures us that no other Chinese writer in any century shows in his life andpoetry such warlike spirit (cf. p.18). Then the choice of the symbol isfar from happy.Of the upwards of forty poems in this book, only nine are patriotic, and two out of that number are certainly not very warlike. There is a string of tempered steel to Lu Yu's lyre, and Mrs Young can easily find about a hundred martial songs in his complete poetical works, which,if translated, would have answered better to the formidable description of the rapier. I am afraid that she has not taken the trouble to read Lu Yu's complete works. As it is, the rapier appears only in the poem whose title《闻虏乱有感》is mistranslated as “On Hearing of Disorder amongst the Prisoners of War"2:
秋风抚剑泪汛澜
“In the autumn wind
I grasp my rapier
With surging tears.”(p.34)
This is surely letting women's weapons, water-drops, stain his man's cheeks.The Chinese word which Mrs Young translates as “grasp” to impart a manly vigour to the gesture, means only “to stroke or feel.” The rumour of a riot among the Juchens convinced our poet, now hard on fifty, that the Chinese should seize the chance to get some of their own back, and the mere thought of this set the sluggish blood coursing faster in his aged veins, but,alas! like Samson,he found restless thoughts presenting
Times past, what once he was, and what is now.
Mrs Yonng's version misses the point and-the pathos.
Miss Dorothy Rutherfurd in her Preface is great on the topical interest of Lu Yu's poetry.“Modern China sees in these far-off events of history a parallel with their[sic〕 country's present plight, and forthis reason Lu Yu's stirring words are on the lips of China's patriotic youth today.”Again:“no writer is more widely read and quoted or more passionately admired in China today than Lu Yu.”This is sheer literary salesman's patter calculated to break down the sales resistance of the reading public. To take it seriously is not to know how to be serious.
The biographical sketch in the Introduction is very inadequate. For instance, Mrs Young says not a word about his love affairs which inspired some of his most beautiful poems. Lu Yu's matrimonial adventures cost him dear; with him, wife (or rather concubine)and child are indeed hostages to fortune and impediments of virtue.3 Curtain lectures, it seems, had a great effect upon his character which was none too strong or austere, and his reputation in old age was tarnished because he fawned upon a powerful but unpopular politcian at the instigation of his concubine.But Mrs Young's Lu Yu is every atom the patriot-poet and has no such human weaknesses in his composition. With a fanciful literal-mindedness,she takes his poems on poverty at the foot of the letter, states roundly that “in old age he was so impecunious that he often was without rice but for a few bowlfuls given him by a neighbouring priest” (p. 21), and quotes a Confucian adage to show her approval. Lu Yu retired on a pension and surely led a more comfortable life than Tu Fu or Su Tung-po. Even if he did not apply for a renewal of the pension when its term expired,4 he had influential friends and patrons and was before long recalled to Court. His sons, one of them rather notorious as an extortionate magistrate,5 looked after him quite filially. He retired for the second and last time again on a pension and was so lyrical in expressing his pleasures that a critic commented on his effusions almost wit envy. The Chinese literati used to believe in the ennobling and purifying effect of poverty, though,unlike the Franciscans,they never made a vow of it. Even nowadays,a Chinese millionaire, when passing as a man of culture,will with exaggerated meiosis refer to his lucrative job as “begging for rice,”and his money-bags as “a few coppers scraped together.”The Chinese poets talked ostentiusly of their poverty just as the Western poets of their grand passion. But diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen,und sie nimmt's fuer Poesie. Sometimes rightly so. One knows all these to be mere manner of speaking, and reads them with a willing suspension of utter disbelief.“Poetry”etymologically means“fiction”; an intelligent reader of poetry should have in him also something of Charles Lamb's matter-of-fiction man.
As a general appreciation of Lu Yu's poetry,Mrs Young gives “an Extract from T'ang Sung Shih (Spirit of Tang and Sung Dynasties),by a Ch'ing Emperor" (p. 22). The passage is really translated from Emperor Kien Lung's T'ang Sung Shih Ch'un,or The Best Poems of the T'ang and Sung Dynasties.'Why Mrs Young should have truncated the title by omitting the word Ch'un (perfect,purest), and translated the word Shih (poetry, poem)as “spirit,” passes my comprehension. As literary criticism, it is worthless. The chief defect of Lu Yu's poetry is a certain resonant and mellifuous copiousness which J. S. Mill and Verlaine would have agreed to stigmatise as “eloquence.”8 In a poem which Mrs Young ought to translate to substantiate her thesis of Lu Yu as a poet of "military sirit”(p.18), he said that the secret of poetry had flashed upon him while listening to the rapid and inspiriting music of pi-pahs and drums at a barrack-room mess.This is significant. Drum effects and “gong and cymbals din” in poetry are more popular than the “gradual violin,” because to the crude primitive taste, as R. Wallaschek neatly lays down the law, je lauter,desto schoener. In reading the poetry of a foreign language, we are especially prone to lapse into the primitive taste for loudness.We notice more readily the poet who sings and paints in tones loud enough to reach us across the vast chasm of languages. In every language, there are poets who are oncoming and meet us half-way,“crying out, Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a primrose!” It is such poets who attract our first attention, and,in case we are foreigners, retain very often our lasting love. Like the school-boy doing his“construe,” we are pleased to meet with something obvious because it saves our labour, and tend to praise it beyond its meed because it saves our face. Subtle grace and difficult beauty bombinate in the void of incomprehension caused by an imperfect mastery of the language. This accounts for a good deal of what the French critics dub as jugement exotiques. It also explains the obliquities of admiration which many Western students feel for Po Chu-I. Now Lu Yu is ina sense a more polished, dandified Po Chu-I, a Po Chu-I who, to adapt the famous simile on Pope and Crabbe, dons silk stockings instead of worsted ones. Lu Yu himself was dissatisfied with the obvious and facile attractiveness of his own verse, and repeatedly experimented in a style austere and ruged. I have pointed out elsewhere that in spite of his avowed dislike of the pretty-pretty Late T'ang poets,he never succeeded in shaking off teir influence and frequently borrowed from them.For example,the lines in the poem “Seeing a Hill”（《看山》）on p．52- 
门前木落须霜晓，
且看西南一角山。
“The leaves are falling
at my door
as on a frosty dawn;
and in the South-East,
there,I see
the corner of a hill.”一
are imitated from a little poem by Han Wu（韩偓）．10
About nine thousand two hundred twenty of Lu Yu's poems are preserved. I will not make any criticism of the present selection which is no more a selection than a dip into the lucky-bag is a judicious choice. Mrs Young expresses her thanks “to Mr.C. Su, descendant of Su Tung Po, who selected the poems" (p.10).I heartily congratulate Mr C. Su on his pedigree, and, as the archbishop of Granada did in giving his best wishes to Gil Blas,lui souhaite un peu plus de goût. The translations are divided into three groups： Patriotism，Nature， and Travel. The poem《书愤》(translated as“Ardour”) is one of patriotism,and should not be included in the group Travel(p.45). A man who reads Lu Yu while running knows that the poet gave the title “Ardour” to most of his patriotic poems． Again the poem《睡觉闻儿子读书》（p．64， “Advice to My Son”), a string of precepts on books and life worthy of a Polonius turned schoolmaster, is for some inexplicable reason put in the group Nature. There is not a single image of nature in this prosily didactic poem. The last lines which Mrs Young quaintly translates as-
“Self-pity,age and illness, 
these are hard to face.
Often study in the night
at your window
leaning on the low
lamp-table”-
mean literally that Lu Yu himself was too stricken in years to burn much midnight oil（老病自怜难预此，夜窗常负短灯檠）.
I prefer not to pass any judgment on the literary merits of Mrs Young's translation. In Author's Note, she says:“I have abandoned any attempt to adhere to the pattern of the Chinese Classical Form in translation as in each case the poem lost its original quality....After reading the original over and over again till the thought, quality and rhythm wrapped me about like a cocoon, I saw it in its Chinese setting in my mind. I then transferred the poem into as exact an equivalent in English as the differences of the two languages would allow,letting the English words fall as they could"(p.9).This is all right, on the condition that the translator correctly understands the original thought and sees the Chinese setting. Otherwise the “cocoon” which“wraps him about” would be, like the real cocoon of the silkworm,all spun out of himself. That the idea or content of a poem is poetical in itself regardless of its verbal expression, and therefore can be conveyed from one language to another without any aesthetic loss, is a view which, absurd as it is, has the authority of Hegel." But then,the translator must first grasp the idea as it is presented in the original form. Most of the poems translated in this book are written in the form of li shi＇h（律诗），i.e.，eight lines with the third and fourth lines forming one neatly antithetical couplet(the“neck couplet"), and the fifth and sixth lines forming another(the“belly couplet”). The convention is to have one couplet subjective in its content(i.e. expressing what the poet thinks and feels) and the other objective (i.e. describing what the poet sees and hears),or one giving a vue d'ensemble while the other specific details.The pattern, though not rigid to a cast-iron degree, is generally followed by the poets. Mrs Young, like many Chinese apostles of the Higher Illiteracy who expound our old poetry to Westerners,does not even know the rudiments of its rules and principles. The result is that she often tacks the half of one antithesis to that of another,thus upsetting the balance and making the parallels meet. The neck, so to speak, is elongated at the expense of the belly. I confine myself to one egregious example. Lines 3-6 in the poem “Late Spring" run in the original as follows:
凭栏投饭看鱼队，
挟弹惊鸦护雀雏。
俗态似看花烂漫，
病身能斗竹清癯。
In Mrs Young's translation they read:
“I lean upon
the palisade,
to scatter rice
to shoals of fish.
I clasp a cross-bow
underneath my arm
to startle crows, 
thus succouring
nestling-sparrows,
like tender orchid-boom
beset by wrangling crows.
My ailing body strives
with pale and thin
bamboo bow.”(pp.56-57)
This passage is a good example of Mrs Young's method of“letting the English words fall as they could.” To me,it seems to have been written according to Lewis Carrol's useful hint in Poeta fit, non nascitur:
“For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits,and sort them out
Just as they chance to fall.”
The phrase “like orchid-bloom beset by wrangling crows” does not make good sense. In the neck couplet,Lu Yu names two of his pastimes,viz.,to feed the fish by casting bread upon waters and protect the nestling-sparrows by playing the rôle of a scarerow. After such concrete titbits, comes philosophical reflection in the belly couplet:“The worldly things seem to me as transient in their glory as the blooming flowers of the late spring, while I myself, though ill in body, can rival the lean bamboo in weathering the seasons."Mrs Young completely misunderstands the first line of the belly couplet (on the worldly things and the blooming flowers),and aggravates her mistake by attaching the line to the second line of the neck couplet (on the sparrows and crows). For similar mistakes, see p. 39,“Travelling by Wu T'an's Southwest Hamlets”（《行武担西南村》），p．48，“The Hill Temple”（《山寺》），
pp．48-49，“Cold Food Festival”（《寒食》），etc．
The following are a few of the serious howlers I have noticed. There is quite a snow-storm of them.
In“The Long Song”（《长歌行》）the lines-
人生不作安期生，
犹当出作李西平。
name two alternative careers for a man to choose from. Mrs Young's rendering-
“Mortals need not be,
like An Ch'i Sheng;
They ought to emulate
General Li Hsi Pin”-
turns a disjunctive proposition into a categorical imperative.By the way,“General Li Hsi Pin” is a mistake,Hsi Pin being the name of the land which General Li held in feud.The lines-
平时一滴不入口，
意气顿使千人惊。
mean that he usually touched not a drop of wine, but now after a cup or so, his sudden fit of high spirits (or rater“pot valour”in a good sense) frightened a thousand men. Mrs Young does not translate the first line and translates the second as
“Cherished plans
affright a thousand men.”
In“The Moon of Frontier Hills”（《关山月》），the line 朱门沉沉按歌舞 is rendered as
“Ruined,ruined,red doors,
singing,dancing,acting!” 
One cannot help thinking of Mr Alfred Jingle's excited and exciting staccato,and rather misses the dashes in the place of the commas. The line means that in the inmost recesses of the red-doored mansions of high officials,people were still dancing and singing, oblivious of national humiliation and frontier troubles.The line 三十从军今白发，i.e.，enlisting at thirty years of age and grown old in the ranks, becomes in the translation:
“Thirty warriors went to camp.
All are white-haired men.”
In the poem “On Hearing of Disorder Amongst the Prisoners of War，”the line 头颅自揣已可知 is translated as
“A skull I saw;
my own head came to mind.”
It is not so gruesome as that. The term rendered by Mrs Young as “skull,"refers only to the scalp and the hair, and is an idiomatic expression for growing or feeling old. The lines-
儒冠忽忽垂五十
急装何由穿袴褶一
are also mistranslated into-
“I,who wear a scholar's cap,
suddenly,arrived at fifty years,
impatiently a soldier's cloak
and breeches don.”
No,precisely the contrary. Fifty years old and a scholar all his life,he felt it too late to be a soldier. The phrase which Mrs Young translates as “impatiently don” means “tight military uniform.”
桑干in the quatrain“In the Snow-storm”（《雪中忽起从戎之兴》） is the name of a river made famous by the old Chinese poets, and should not be translated verbatim as “withered mulberry trees.”
Her version of the poem“Accidentally I pass 'Washing Flowers＇”（《偶过浣花感旧游》）is a perversion on a grand scale. We know that Lu Yu womanized a good deal during his sojourn in Szechuen. In this poem he recalls one of his bouts of wine,woman and song.He once brought， he says，a“jade person”（玉人）or beautiful lady to a wine-shop overlooking the River of Washing Flowers. In the English version, the lady mysteriously vanishes, and a “serving-maid” is produced by Mrs Young ex nihilo like a rabbit out of the conjuror's hat. Having paid for the wine with a precious hair-pin, the poet and his fair boon-companion left the shop together.But in the English version,the“serving-maid,”having brought “fresh wine” to the poet's table,“suddenly disappeared" and the sweet odour emanated from the “jade person's" perfumed body is attributed to the serving-maid.Lu Yu scribbled something on the western wall of the shop, which, he fondly believes，is still visible（至今西壁余小草），but Mrs Young makes him say:
“Until today the little weeds
grow on the Western Wall!”
She should know that a white wall is not only a fool's,but also an old Chinese poet's, paper.
In the poem“I Anchor at Chao Valley in the Rain”（《雨中泊赵屯有感》），the phrase 人烟（the smoke from the chimney of an inhabited house) is translated as “men stir like smoke.”
In the poem “Travelling by Wu T'an's South-west Hamlets,”the term市朝，a synecdoche for dynasties and reigns， is mistranslated as“the early market.” 
The title 望江道中（On the Way to Wan-kiang） is translated literally as“Looking at〔wang〕 the Huai Waterway〔kiang].”The last line 红树青山合有诗，meaning“red leaves and green hills should inspire poems,”becomes in the translation-
“Red leaves,green hills
like poems harmonise.”
In“Ardour，”the line 塞上长城空自许，translated as“In vain am I on the Great Wall Frontier,” means only “I was once conceited enough to fancy myself the defender of China's frontier.”
In“The Hill Temple，”the phrase 送客 is rendered as“speeding parting guests.” This borrowing from Pope does not strike me as very appropriate. The Chinese custom was not“speeding,”but following the parting guest a good part of the way in order to enjoy his company as long as possible. The same objection can be made to the phrase “to speed the moon” on p.59.
In“Cold Food Festival,”the word translated as“seek” means simply“in.”In the poem“I Stand Alone”（《独立》），the phrase translated as“stave off poverty” means simply “conceal poverty”（讳穷）.
In the poem“Late Steps”（《晚步》），the lines-
今年复止酒，
歌舞陈空觥，
不如且逍遥，
出门随意行。
are thus rendered:
“This year again
do I abstain.
I sing and dance
with empty cup upraised,
wandering at my will
beyond the doors.”
That year,the poet says,he abstained from wine, and, with the unfilled cu before him, took but little pleasure in the dancing and singing of his female entertainers. He thus preferred to go outdoors and take a walk. To sing and dance in the open while brandishing an empty cup, would be the sign,not of temperance, but of having a drop too much.
In the poem “I Lodge at Mr Chang＇s House”（《宿江原县东张氏亭子》），the phrase 征袍 does not mean“warrior＇s garb”，but the salopette or dustoverall worn in tavelling. Similarly the “battle-dust”on p．43 is simply“travel-dust”（征尘）．Mrs Young seems to have been obsessed by Lu Yu's“warlike spirit.”
The first line“Reading at Night in Autumn”（秋夜读书每以二鼓尽为节）is Lu Yu＇s lament over the commonplaceness of his own studious life（腐儒碌碌叹无奇），but becomes in the translation-
“Declining scholars
often sigh that life
is stripped of wonder
in the end.”
The “Index of Dates"(pp.67-68) contains,among other smaller inaccuracies, the gross blunder:“Lu's two brothers,Wu Chai, Wu Ling,won great victories over Tartars.” I have been shocked by this.Wu Chai（吴玠）and Wu Ling（吴璘）were two famous generals. How they and our poet could be brothers,their surnames being entirely different, must remain forever a mystery between them and Mrs Young. The sentence, “Lu Yu's eldest son compiled Complete Poetical Works with commentaries," convinces me that Mrs Young has never seen Lu Yu's Complete Poetical Works.
About twenty years ago, a Chinese authoress wrote a gushingand unbalanced book on Lu Yu, a Patriot Poet. Vulgar errors in literary history die very hard; the Sino-Japanese War has given a new lease of life to this one. Some college professors of Chinese literature discovered a way of being patriotic by writing on patriots, and made Lu Yu's poetry a text or pretext for their prose. A foreign voice now adds its distant solo to the general chorus. But it is one thing to be a patriot, and quite another to be a poet of patriotism. The theme of revanche had been as common among Lu Yu's contemporary writers as it was later among the French intellectuals after Sedan. Even on Mrs Young's own showing in this book,Lu wrote at least two poems of nature and travel to one of patriotism. True,he wrote more-I will not say “better”-poems on the patriotic motif than all his contemporaries, but we must remember that he wrote far more poems on other themes as well. I have mentioned his love poems. Specimens of his poetry of nature and patriotism are given by Mrs Young. He wrote besides all these a number of moralising andphilosophising pieces, e.g.,the poem “Advice to My Son” on p. 64. It is not for nothing that he was an admirer of the great philosopher Chu Hsi.Thus,Venus,Salus and Virtus,the three themes of serious poetry, are all present in his works. To regard him as essentially a poet of Salus is to be guilty at once of mental squint and tabloid thinking. It leads not to literary criticism,but to catchword or cant which is indeed good enough for wartime propaganda and ought to be reserved for it. Besides,the praise of his “warlike or military spirit” is in fact a doubtful tribute.Poetry,I should say, is the last refuge of such a fire-eating patriot. Heroics on paper are worthy only of heroes en carton,and rather too common a practice among modern men of letters to deserve any special praise. In Lu Yu's patriotic poems, I find one phrase recurring with disagreeable insistence, to wit,“deed and glory”（功名）.Indeed，there is a good deal of what the French call panache in his patriotism. A touch of bravado argues the miles gloriosus, the Much-Too-Happy Warrior, and the civilia in uniform, and makes all three kin. Does Miss Rutherfurd think that the thought of personal glory ever enters the mind of“China's patrioticyouths today in shedding their blood for their country's freedom”? The“parallel” she has adduced would, I am afraid, only fulfill the geometrical definition of parallel lines.
Some might think this notice disproportionately long for a small book of translations. There is a justification for its length. The translation of poetry is a most difficult literary feat, and requires the all too rare combination of scholarship and art. A translator, however bad, has to grapple openly with the difficulties of the original Chinese text which the writer of a passable book on Chinese letters or politics often quietly shirks while keeping his own counsel. Of course too many Chinese poets have been translated only in the sense that Bottom in the Midsummer Night's Dream is translated. But as labours of love, such translations deserve our respect and careful treatment. Mrs Young, modestly conscious of the “imperfect results” of her endeavour to convey Lu Yu's poetic effect,“apologizes to all her Chinese friends, and begs them to be lenient in their criticism.” Though not honoured with her friendship, I have obeyed her. I have refraíned from literary criticism, and devoted myself to the much humbler task of correcting some of the verbal and factual errors. I only hope my strictures would not appear unduly severe, and might prove of some use to other translators and perhaps to Mrs Young herself in preparing a revised edition of this book.

NOTES

1．E．g．《剑南诗集》卷七《剑客行》，卷八《融州寄松纹剑》，卷十四《甲午十一月十五夜梦》，etc.
2．The word 虏，originally meaning “the prisoners of war，”comes to denote any enemy race. It is a curse hardened into a prophecy.
3．See 刘埙《隐居通议》卷二十一，陈振孙《直斋书录解题》卷十八．Not quoted inthe scholarly biographies of Lu Yu by Ch＇ien Ta-hsien（钱大昕）and Chao I（赵翼）.
4．See《渭南文集》卷二十《居室记》。Cf．Mrs Young＇s not very accurate translation on p.24.
5．See 俞文豹《吹剑录·外集》．
6．See《瀛奎律髓》卷六．
7．《唐宋诗醇》卷四十二。
8.See Mill: Dissertations and Discussions, Vol.I,p. 73,which I venture to regard as the best footnote to Verlaine's line Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou. I need not say that the old Chinese critics would have endorsed this opinion.
9．《九月一日夜读诗稿走笔作歌》。
10．《全唐诗》第十函第七册韩偓《二寄邻庄道侣》（夜来雪压村前竹，賸见溪南几尺山）。
11. Aesthetik, Bd. III, S.227,227. 




The Return of the Native

From Philoiblon（《书林季刊》），1（1947），pp．17-26． 

According to Hobbes,Locke, Reid, and even Coleridge,wit is an intellectual power, which, like “a nimble spaniel,”pounces quickly upon resemblances in dissimilar things. It seems to be akin to the ability of creating metaphors which Aristotle regarded as the surest sign of a poet's originality. Metaphor which is the making of the pet, may prove the undoing of the philosopher, though the birth of many a system of philosophy is simply a metaphor worked to exhaustion. Austere writers on the art (ought we to say “science”?) of thought have been very emphatic on the danger of picture-thinking and the abuse of metaphor and analogy in reasoning. By a sleight of the mental hand, thinkers often turn the juxtaposition of two things or situations into the subtitution of the one for the other. Such a process is perhaps justified in poetic imagery-witness many conceits in Metaphysical Poets and examples of what Addison called “mixed wit." In philosophy, however, comparaison n'est pas raison, and inference by metaphor is of very doubtful validity. The popular comparison of the unconscious to a basement oran underground cellar is a case in point. Many unwary Freudians have been misled by this picturesque simile to speak of repressed desires as if they were so many“Marchionesses”in the OldCuriosity Shop with the censor playing the role of Miss Sally Brass. The unconscious is supposed to have its hidden contents-“ou of sight,but not out of mind”-even as the basement can have its lurking inmates; entities are thus unnecessarily multiplied. The ancient Buddhist thinkers, themselves much addicted to similitudes and parables, sounded a warning against reasoning by metaphor. I telescope two passages from Mahaparinirvana Sutra and an old Chinese glossary of Buddhist terms respectively:“A face of regular and well-proportioned features can be compared to a full moon, and a clean white elephant to the snow-covered Himalaya mountains. But the moon is not therefore the face, nor is the snow-covered mountain the elephant.The snow-covered mountain likened to an elephant is not expected to show a tail and tusks; as to the full moon comparable to the human face, has it also eyebrows and eyes?"2 Of course,even language at its plainest is cluttered up with dead metaphors, just as a room to all purposes empty is really full o particles of matter. But matter in particles does not matter much, and a dead metaphor, like a dead man, tells no misleading tales.
Of all philosophers, mystics alone have the privilege of using highly fgurative speech because their ineffable experience beggars description in plain language, and silence, unless heralded by words,argues the dumb rather than the deep.In my reading of the Chinese mystics, I have come across one metaphor which seems to be the pivot of all Taoist and Zenist teachings, viz., that of the return of a wanderer to the native land, or ofa prodigal son to his father,or simply the return to one's own home. Students of Neo-Platonism will immediatey recall Proclus's division of the Soul's pilgrimage into three stages: a staying at home, a journey forth, and a return to itself (épistrophe).3 I propose to study this metaphor and its psychological implications.
The metaphor applies to that state of mind in the quest for truth when the ship,so to speak,finally comes home. It should not be confused with another, more or less similar in phrasing, which represents an attempt to remove the stingfrom death and has indeed become in common parlance a euphemism for death. A good deal of ancient Chinese philosophy is also a commentatio mortis from which one learns to die. The belief of the Chinese philosophers in the other world and human immortality was too vague to afford any consolation for, or give meaning to, the end of lif.Their reading of life must have been as unsatisfying as the reading of a mystry novel with its last chapter missing; and death has all the terror,but littleof the lure, of the unknown. They therefore tried to explain death by explaining it away. It was called a deliverance,4 a rest,5 and more often, a return to one's real home. In one of the canonical books of Confucianism, it is written:“All living creatures will die; when dead, they return (kuei) to earth and mud: that is why they are called spirits or ghosts (kuei).” The Chinese delighted in jingling etymology, half rhyming and half punning， and Liu Hsi＇s ingenious book On Terms（《释名》）is packed with examples comparable to the derivation of world from warre-old because it gets worse as it grows old or that of woman from woe-man because Eve brought woe to all mankind. The definition of the ghost as “one who returns home” naturally makes us think of the French word revenant with the important difference that revenant refers to the ghost's unwelcome return to this world whereas kuei refers to a living body's return to dust. This conception is tinged with emotion and deepened in meaning in Taoist philosophy. Lao Tzu spoke of the dissolution of things as the return to their root and renewal of their life;7 Chuang Tzu described a man in fear of death as a wanderer who does not know his home;8 and Huai-nan Tzu（《淮南子》）compared death to the return or reversion(kuei) to earth of shattered earthenware.But it is inthe works attributedto Lieh Tzu（列子）that the idea found its most eloquent expression. After a long discourse on life and death, generation and extinction, Lieh Tzu said: “To become a ghost or spirit (kuei)is to return(kuei),to return to the real home, that is.”Again in words suggestive of Raligh's apostrophe to “mightie death,”he says:“Great is death! it gives peace to the wise and wins victory over the foolish....In our ancient idiom, a dead man is one who has returned home. A living person is therefore still a wanderer.He who ranges over all four quarters of the world and never thinks of returning home, must be a foolish tramp."10 This is bravely and even finely said. But all the time one has the impression of a lonely child in a dark chamber resolutely singing lullaby to himself. The eloquence is that of a man who stands in secret fear of death, who needs to have the fear lulled by fine words and allows himself to be persuaded that death is not death but something else. Confucius's attitude is more courageous: he faced death squarely and called a spade a spade. “If I could discover Tao in the morning, let death come to me that very night."11 Compared with such calm acceptance of the inevitable, talks of“deliverance”or“rest”or“return” seem but an inebriating exuberance of verbosity which the nervous need for want of whisky. Confucius's agnostic answer to an inquisitive disciple,“We have not known life yet, how can we know death?”12 also implies much in common with the wisdom of Spinoza's free man.13
But metaphors are simply wasted on death which,as a grim fact, no amount of verbal finery can hide; the skull is past all skill of face-saving. Fortunately, a metaphor can change its application without losing its appropriateness. In Chinese mysticism, the intuition of the ultimate reality or absolute truth is also compared to a return to home by way of the well-trodden negative road (via negativa) known to all mystics. The desire to grasp the ultimate reality,whether it is called Self, Way,Brahma or even Nothing (which, as Dr. Johnson very sensibly remarked of the subject of Rochester's famous poem, “must be considered as having not only a negative but a kind of positive signification"), is thus a kind of home thoughts from abroad. A few quotations will suffice to show how the metaphor was used by the Chinese mystics.
“To catch even a distant view of one's native land fills one with delight," said Chuang Tzu in a beautiful passage. Old commentators were agreed that the“native land” is a simile for the primal or essential state of human nature. 4 In the dialogue between the Wandering Cloud（云将东游）and the First Cosmic Principle（鸿蒙），Chuang Tzu made the latter advise the former to “return home,”i.e.,“to revert to the root in the nebula and night of Nescience.”15 As befits a man who dreamed of himself as a butterfly,Chuang Tzu had what piano strummers call the“butterfly touch”;he was charmingly casual and never laboured a point. What is a simple simile in his works becomes a long-winded allegory in Buddhist classics which are often intolerably prolix and repetitious, at once a compliment to the reader's patience and an insult to his intelligence. In the famous Saddharmapundarika or Lotus Sutra, the whole lengthy chapter of Adhimukti is taken up with the allegory of a poor beggar who, having renounced his wealthy father and wandered about for many years,finally returned to his native city without recognising it until his father “put him wise."16 In the equally popular Buddhavatamsaka Sutra translated into Chinese at about the same time, anuttarasamyaksambodhi or Supreme Universal Wisdom is compared to a palace, a fine residence, a house, a city, and what not;17 this Wisdom is said to be the spiritual home of the bodhisattvas.18 Both books supplied the Chinese bonzes with numerous texts and tags. When,for example, Shen Hsiu（神秀），founder of the Northern School of Zenism，said in a gatha that to seek the Ultimate Truth outside of one's own mind is to renounce one's own father,19 he evidently alluded to the allegory in the Lotus Sutra. Those were the days before psychoanalysts explain the Devil as the projection of the child's thoughts about the father and German expressionist writers inculcate patricide as filial duty. In a supposititious translation of Surangama Sutra made in the T"ang dynasty and greatly admired for its fine prose and close reasoning, we light upon a variation of the metaphor. Gotama's discple Ajnatakaundinya spoke the following parable:“A traveller puts up at an inn as a paying guest. He comes for bed and board and cannot stay permanently. If he were the master of the house, he could be at home here, and need not travel farther."20 Hence plausible sophistry or pretentious cleverness is sometimes called “the wisdom of the paying guest”（客慧）.A man who has attained the Ultimate Truth is， on this view，like an idle king by a still hearth, who rests from travel and makes an end.21 Such a view contrasts piquantly with that of Malebranche or Lessing who would let truth fly out of the hand in order to have the fun of pursuing it. I must deny myself the cheap pleasure of generalising about the difference between the Eastern and the Western mentality.But to pursue truth for the fun of the pursuit is to pursue not truth, but fun; it might be compared to a kitten's sportive chase of its own tail, though such a comparison would do that unpretentious animal some injustice.
In the T'ang dynasty, this metaphor gradually passed beyond philosophical terminology into poetic diction. It was a great favourite with Po Chü-i who of all the T'ang poetsis the most versed in Zenist mysticism.“Where my mind is at ease, there is my home,”is a constant refrain in his songs.22 The words recall those of Pacuvius, patria est ubicumque est bene, but the sentiment is that of astudent of Buddhism.Chao Chün（晁迥）who was so fond of quoting Po Chü-i for his descriptions of mystic experience, said that our mind or spirit rests in truth and dhyana “just as birds come home to roost."23 The Confucianists of the Sung dynasty frequently toyed with the metaphor; a few instances may be given from the works of less known thinkers. Hsieh Liang-tso（谢良佐）was reported as saying:“Ordinary pursuers of knowledge ae too easily contented: when they gain a little knowledge, they immediately stop from further pursuing. The Buddhists speak of 'the small stopping or resting place' and 'the great stopping or resting place.' When one has attained the level of wisdom of Mencius, one has to make just another effort to rise higher, and then one can very well take rest. Yen Yüan alone knew how to pursue knowledge, hence Confucius's lament of his early death.”24 A follower of the very orthodox Chü Hsi rightly condemned this dictum as an example of Hsieh Liang-tso's confusion of Confucianism with Zenist teaching.25 We have seen Lieh Tzu's apologetic of death as the return to our real home；Ch＇en Kuan（陈瓘）went even one better and held that a philosopher worthy of the title should be able to discover his spiritual home and take repose while alive. “Lieh Tzu's words show his lack of enlihtenment.Why should a man wait till death for his return to home? When he is alive, his mind reposes; when he is dead, his body decomposes.”26 The truculent controversialist Hu Yin（胡寅）while attacking Buddhism employed the very metaphor in Surangama Sutra. Many shallow Confucianists became converted to Buddhism in their old age because,he says,“their mind wants to rest and cannot. One puts up at an inn when one has no comfortable home. No one who is at home will yet stay in an inn."27 Most of the Confucianists of the Ming dynasty suffered from what may be characterised by a schoolboy's misspelling of the Hungarian capital,“Buddha-pest.”I shall give one instance ofthe use of this metaphor in connexion with the passage in the Analects referred to by Hsieh Liang-tso.Confucius lamented the premature death of his most brilliant pupil Yen Yüan, saying:“What a pity! I saw him ever advancing, and never saw him stop.”28 The passage is not esoteric at all; it means simply that a long career of pursuing knowledge is cut short by untimely death. But ingenious commentators with Buddhis inclinations could see depth on depth of meaning in this plain sentence. Here is their exegesis:“Yen Yüan is to be pitied because his very advance shows that he is still a traveller on the road and has not reached home.The wise,with all their zeal for knowledge,have a place where their mind takes its final rest. People do not understand this, and have failed to see what Confucius meant by the word 'stop.'”29 Such audacious adulteration of Confucianism with mysticism leaves Hsieh Liang-tso's timid attempts at Confusionism nowhere.The word“stop”（止）employed in the sense of final rest in our knowing process is a characteristicallymystic usage. Lao Tzu, for example, compared Tao to music and good cheer which will make the passer-by “stop."30 The Confucianist usage is entirely different. When Hsün Tzu observed that “to know is to know to stop,”31 he was preaching agnosticism and the limitations of knowledge; he advised us to curb our insatiable curiosity, to refrain from advancing in a certain direction rather than to stand stock still at a certain point. It is an injunction of “Thus far, and no further”:one may face about and beat a retreat or walk in another direction, but surely not, as the mystics would have it, pitch one's tent, spread one's rugs and lie down supinely, murmuring Hic jaceo. Hsün Tzu saidelsewhere explicitly that knowing stops only when life stops.32 This strenuous doctrine is opposed sharply to the mystic teaching of lighting on the “great stopping or resting place” while one is alive.The co-founder of the Neo-Confucianist school of the Sung dynasty has put the contrast clearly:“The Book of Change also teaches the doctrine of 'stop'or 'rest'; but one stops and rests where one ought to stop and rest. The Buddhists only say 'rest!''stop!'without specifying where.Do they really understand the meaning of 'rest' or 'stop'?”33 Of course, the full-fledged mystic,once convinced of the immanence and omnipresence of Tao or Brahma or Godhead, can rest here, there,anywhere, a cosmopolitan everywhere at home.To the question “Where is your home?”he would answer,
“Where is not my home?”
Examples can be easily multiplied, but these will do. The important question is: How far is this metaphor appropriate? Does it describe a real state of experience? I think it does.There is nothing mysterious about mystic experience; it is continuous with ordinary everyday experience, such as, to quote only the Zenists,eating and sleeping,fetching wood and carrying water,lying down and getting up.34 Omnia exeunt in mysterium , or as Blake says,“all emotion, if thorough enough, would take one to heaven." Heaven,like the great palace of death, has thousand doors unbarred for all and led to by thousand ways, by the contemplating of art, or the taking of drugs. Wine and sex can “take one to heaven” by producing mystic transport, and are not improperly called “artificial paradises" which are lost by resisting temptation and regained only by yielding to it. The Chinese mystics seriously think that a wine-intoxicated man is complete（全），as complete as a gotttrunkener Mensch．35 The working of our intellect may have the same effect too. When we are totally absorbed in an object or situation so that our mind is for the moment emptied or purified of all other cares and assertive self-consciousness, when the concentration of attention brings about the unity of the subject (because all its energies and impulses are focused on a single point) as well as the unity of the subject and its object(because the former loses itself in the contemplation of the latter), we are in a state akin to the ecstasy or exaltation of the mystics. The so-called self-estrangement and absorption in our process of learning are but prosaic names for that serene and blessed mood in which we are laid asleep: 
In body,and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony,and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”36
I shall examine the appropriateness of the metaphor of “returning home"first in the light of our experience of discursive thought, and then in the light or darkness of Chinese mystic writings.
To return home is both torest and to regain. The mind has arrived at a terminus which gives a familiar feeling as if it were a recovered property. This, I venture to suggest, describes admirably the affective side of a thinking process whih has achieved its purpose. As a war is said to end war and restore peace, so all mental activity is to end activity,to restore the stationary state or equilibrium of the mind which has been destroyed or in some way disturbed by the confrontaton of a doubt or a regret, a difficulty or a problem.37 Mind abhors a teasing and worrying uncertainty very much as nature abhors vacuum; and every departure from the stationary state sets up a tendency to return to it. Problems must be either solved or dismissed, and desires, either satisfied or suppressed. A question is raised to be answered, i.e.,to be made no longer a question; thinking, like teaching,travaille à se rendre inutile; and doubt either overcomes itself so as to end in belief or domesticates itself and settles into comfortable scepticism. To re-establish the equilibrium, the disturbing uncertainties and doubts are often dealt with summarily. We jump at conclusions, build caprices into laws, assert the prerogative of the Will to Believe, and submit to the tyranny of catchwords and clichés, in short, resort to all expedients to cut short the unpleasant labour of thinking and give mind peace by stupefying it. It requires the most alert intelligence to keep a tentatively accepted hypothesis from being turned into a firmly cherisheddogma.This passion for finality and cocksureess is responsible for all philosophical fallacies and most of political crimes. Flaubert, that great student of human follyand stupidity,rightly regards it as the root of all evils.38 To allay its own perturbations, the mind must deproblematisieren by fair means or foul. Chuang Tzu set the fashion in Chinese philosophy of comparing the mind-in-itself to “still water”;39 he is not far out when we consider that the fundamental craving of the whole human organism is for the maintenance or recovery of a stationary state, unruffled by restlessness or anxiety. Regarded in this light, the phrase“still water" is not really incompatible with Western psychologists'“stream of consciousness."”The great psychologist who considers “a river or stream the best metaphor for our subjective life,”also points out that there are“stopping places”or “periods of comparative rest” in the continuous flow when “substantive conclusions" are reached.40 The mind restlessly seeks rest and never stops in looking for stopping places. A stopping place,transitional in the ceaselessly progressive train of thought as a whole,is also terminal as regards a particular point about which the mind is “made up” and need exert itself no further. In this sense, all purposive thinking on its affective side can be figuratively expressed as a sort of homesickness or an impulse to seek repose.41 The home may be only a kind of Sailors' Home to which one is driven by the weakness of age and weariness of life;but it is a stopping place all the same.
Nor is that all. The conclusion reached and the discovery made after prolonged cogitation often have an old familiar feel as if we had or should have known them before. It is said of Beau Brummel in his heyday that whenever he wore a suit of clothes for the first time,he had it carefully scraped with a piece of glass so that it would not appear crudely and noticeably new. Mind seems equally foppish about its discoveries;their novelty is less marked than their inevitability.This is, I think, the psychological basis of Plato's view in Meno that “all enquiry and all learning is but recollection."42 Many thinkers not in the least mystical record their experience of anamnesis,though they never infer from it a former state of existence or deem it an intimation of immortality. Fontenelle,for instance, says:“La verité entre si naturellement dans l'esprit, que quand on l'apprend pour la première fois, il semble qu'on ne fasse que s'en souvenir."43 Keats's opinion that poetry should “appear almost a remembrance"can be quoted too in this connexion.The feeling of familiarity about a new discovery which seems-
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams-
Of something felt, like something here45;
Of something done one knows not where-
makes the metaphor of returning home even more appropriate.
Nor is that all. Chinese mystics, unlike Christian mystics, discover the ultimate reality or absolute truth in themselves.They would have agreed with the Indian mystics that the Self is the World-soul (ayam atma brahma). The mind, in mystic apprehension, comes boomeranging back to itself. Thus Lao Tzu advises his disciples to “stay indoors” because “the farther one travels,the less one knows.”46 Chuang Tzu has a parable to the effect that the Yellow Emperor（黄帝）lost the Black Pearl，a symbol of Tao, through his desire for travelling.47 Lieh Tzu characterises the perfect traveller as one who stays at home and enjoys the paysages introspectifs（务内观）．48 We have seen how one Zenist dismissed the pursuit of Truth outside of one's self as the unfilial renouncement of one's own father. To the question “What is Buddha？”（何者是佛），another Zenist replied：“This is like looking for an ox while you are riding on his very back.”49 A third Zenist's variation of this neat answer reads like a verbatim translation of Cervantes's joke on the wool-gathering countryman who “looked for his ass while he was mounted on his back.”50 In other words, for the Chinese mystics, wisdom is either a case of Bei-sih-sein or one of in teipsum redi, and to seek it outside of one's self is as futile as looking for spectacles which are on the nose all the time.The mind, in knowing, either abides in itsel or,if it has journeyed forth, comes full circle and returns to itself.“The Soul's natural movement,” in the words of Plotinus,“is not in a straight line.... On the contrary, it circles around something interior, around a centre. Now the centre is that from which proceeds the circle, that is, the Soul.”5l Proclus,too,describes the movement of mind as circular. This is precisely the view of the Chinese mystics:“The Spirit ends where it begins like a ring and thus attains Tao.”52 The circularity of a mental process whose termini ad quem and a quo meet, makes the metaphor of the return of the native or the return to home peculiarly appropriate for the mystic apprehension of, the Taoists, Zenists and their kindred in India and Alexandria. An English poet might say:
“Our destiny,our beings heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there.”53
but the first remark that suggests itsef to a Chinese mystic would be that the home is not there, but here. Witness the following allegorical poem by a Zenist nun:
All day long I looked vainly for a sign of Spring,
My grass shoes raising clouds from the dust of all fields.
Returning home,I smilingly pick a plum-blossom and sniff it, And lo! here on the sprig is Spring in its fullness.54
This would sound ridiculous to modern globe-trotters and devotees to tourism who
-see all sights from pole to pole,
And never once possess their soul.
But then most of us never care to possess a soul, except perhaps just enough of it to keep together the body from decomposition.

NOTES

1. Cf. Vaihinger: Philosophie des Als Ob,7th and 8th ed.,pp.39-42.on “tropische Fiktionen verwandt mit den poetischen Gleichnissen" and “Metaphysik”as "Metaphorik,Hyperbolik”;Lanson:L'Art de la Prose, p.288:“Je ne sais qui a dit de la construction métaphysique qu'elle n'était, en somme,que l'art de développer une métaphore.”
2．《大般涅磐经》卷五《如来性品》第四之二（The Tripitaka in Chinese，ed．by
J.Takakusu and K.Watanabe,Vol． XII，pp．396,636）：面貌端正，如月盛满，白象鲜洁，犹如雪山；满月不可即同于面，雪山不可即是白象；《翻译名义集》卷五第五十三篇（Ibid.，	.LIV,p.1140):：雪山比象，安责尾牙，满月况面，岂有眉目。 
3.See Thomas Whittaker: The Neo-Platonists, 2nd ed.,pp.166-7,253, 281;W.R. Inge: The Philosophy of Plotinus, Vol.II,p.145.
4．Cf．Chuang Tzu，ch．iii（《养生主》）on“untying”（悬解）．In the same chapter, death is also called “an awakening from a dream.”
5．Cf．Ibid．，Ch．vi（《大宗师》）on“taking rest in death”（息我以死）．
6．The Book of Rites，Ch．xxiv“On Sacrifice”（《祭义》）：众生必死，死必归土， 此之谓鬼。
7.Lao Tzu,Ch.xvi.
8．Chuang Tzu，Ch．ii（《齐物论》）：予恶乎知死之非弱表而不知归者耶。
9．Huai-nan Tzu，Ch．vii（《精神训》）：已成器而破碎漫烂复归其故。
10．Lieh Tzu，Ch．i（《天瑞篇》）：鬼归也，归其真宅。大哉死乎。君子息焉，小人伏焉。古者谓死人为归人，则生人为行人矣。游于四方而不归者，世必谓之狂荡之人矣。
11.Analects,Ch.iv.
12.Ibid.,Ch.xi.
13.Ethics (E.T.by H.Hale White and Amelia H.Stirling,p.235),Pt. IV,Proposition Ixvii:“A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life.”
14．Chuang Tzu．Ch．xxv（《则阳》）：旧国旧都，望之畅然。郭象注：得旧犹畅然，况得性乎？宣颖注：故乡喻性也。林自注：见性之乐，犹见旧国都之乐也。
15.Chuang	，Ch.xi（《在宥》）：仙仙乎归矣，各复其根，各复其根而不知，浑浑沌沌。
16．《妙法连华经信解品》第四（The Tripitaka in Chinese，	.IX.		16-19）：譬若有人，年既幼稚，舍父逃走，etc。
17．《华严经入法界品》第三十四之十六（Ibid．，			755-6)：菩提心者，则为宫殿，安住修习三味法故；则为胜宅，一切众生所归依故；则为居宅，纳受一切功德宝故；则为大城，菩萨商人所住故。
18．《华严经入法界品》第三十四之十七（Ibid．，		：以菩提心为家，如说修行为家地，具菩萨行为顺家法，赞摩诃衍为绍家法。
19．《傅灯录》卷四：一切佛法，自心本有；将心外求，舍父逃走。
20．《楞严经》卷一（The Tripitaka in Chinese，					：譬如行客，投寄旅亭，宿食事毕，俶装前途，不遑安住，若实主人，自无攸往。
21.Tennyson:	Ulysses.
22．E．g．吾土：身心安处为吾土，岂限长安与洛阳；出城留别：我生本无乡，心安是归处；重题：心泰身宁是归处，故乡可独在长安；种桃杏：无论海角与天涯，大抵心安即是家。 
23．《法藏碎金录》卷二：棲禅棲神棲真，如鸟之棲宿。
24．《上蔡语录·卷中》：学者才少有所得便住。佛家有小歇场，大歇场。到孟子处更一作，便是好歇。惟颜子善学，故孔子有见其进未见其止之叹。
25．《黄氏日抄》卷四十一。
26．上吕吉甫书：此御寇未了之语，保待死为归乎？其生也心归，其死也形化（Cited《宋元学案》卷三十五）。
27．崇正辩：心欲遽止焉，又不安也。夫托乎逆旅者，不得家居之安也。未有既安於家而又乐舍於旅也（Cited《宋元学案》卷四十一）。
28.Analects,Ch.ix.
29．王肯堂《郁冈斋笔尘》卷二：“惜他尚涉程途，未到得家耳。今人但知圣贤终身从事于学而不知自有大休歇之地，则止字不明故也。”
30．Lao Tzu，Ch．xxxv：乐与饵，过客止。
31．Hsün Tzu，Ch．xxi（《解蔽篇》）：“学也者，固学止之也。”Cf．Ch．viii（《儒效篇》）and Yang Ching＇s（杨倞）emendation of the word 正 into 止。
32．Hsün Tzu，Ch．i（《劝学篇》）：“学至乎殁而后止。”
33．《二程语录》卷八：“艮其止，止其所也。释氏只曰止，安知止乎？
34．《传灯录》卷六慧海：“饥来吃饭，困来即眠；卷八庞居士：“神通并妙用，运水及搬柴；”卷十招贤：“困即睡，健即起，夏天赤骨力，冬寒须得被。”
35．See《庄子·达生篇》，《列子·黄帝篇》，《法藏碎金录》卷一。The ChineseMuse,too,“smells of wine,”and I need not quote here Chinese poets' testimonies to the “truth in wine.” Cf. Baudelaire:Du vin et du haschisch and Les paradis artificiels on le goüt de l'infini and l'homme-dieu, and an interesting poem “Nirvana at the Dentist's" quoted in Oliver Elton: Modern Studies,"A Word on Mysticism.”As to erotic exaltation, D. H. Lawrence's “materialistic mysticism” is a handy example; see Aldous Huxley's Introduction to. Letters of D.H. Lawrence,pp.ixff.
36.Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey.
37.Cf.Eugenio Rignano:Psychology of Reasoning (E.T.by W.A.Holl), pp.1-7,and Vaihinger,op. cit. pp.220 ff. on "Ideenverschiebung."
38.See Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert,ed.Louis Conard,II,p.239, IV,p.183,	V,p.110 on la rage āe vouloir conclure.
39．Chuang Tzu，Ch．v（《德充符》）and Ch．xiii（《天道》）。
40. William James: Principles of Psychology, Vol. I,p.243.
41. Cf. Novalis: Fragmente, § 24:“Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb,ueberall zu Hause zu sein.”
42. Dialogues of Plato, E.T. by Jowett, Vol. II,p.40.
43. Préface a l'Historie de l'Academie Royale.
44.Letter to Taylor,27 Feb.,1818.
45.Tennyson:Two Voices.
46．Lao Tzu，Ch．xlvii：“其出愈远其知愈少。”
47．Chuang Tzu，Ch．xii（《天地》）
48．Lieh Tzu，Ch．iv（《仲尼》）
49．《传灯录》卷九：“大似骑牛觅牛。”
50．《传灯录》卷二十：“骑驴觅驴。”Cf．Don Quixote，Pt．II，Ch．Ivii．
51. Enneads,vi. 9, § 8(Plotinus' Complete Works, E.T. by K.S. Guthrie,Vol.I,p.163).Cf.ii.2,§ 1:The Heavens move in circle in imitation of Intelligence (pp.227,230); iii.8,§7:Intelligence is like a circle(p.543);iv.4,§ 16:The natural aspiration of the Soul is to move in circle(p.462).
52.Huai-nan	，Ch.vii（《精神训》）：“终始若环，莫得其伦，此精神之所以能假于道也。”
53.Wordsworth:	Prelude,Bk.vi,
54．Cited《鹤林玉露》卷六。 




Correspondence: To the Editor of Philobiblon

From Philobiblon（《书林季刊》），II（1947），pp．27-30． 

Sir,
I have read with much interest your ingenious article“The Return of the Native" in the fourth number of Philobiblon.Although I don't know about its sinology, I find its psychology quite convincing. But you have relied a bit too heavily on Rignano's theory which has been exploded by John Dewey in Logic:the Theory of Inquiry.I am also not satisfied with your dismissal of erotic mysticism with a passing mention of D.H.Lawrence in a footnote. Anyway,Lawrence's exaltation lacks the quality of the experience of great religious mystics.
Another thing.In the critical notice of the Rapier of Lu in the third number,you wrote accusingly:“With a fanciful literal-mindedness, Mrs Young takes Lu's poems on poverty at the foot of the letter and states roundly that 'in old age he was so impecunious that he often was without rice but for a few bowlfuls given him by a neighbouring priest.'”“Fanciful literal-mindedness” is a smart phrase, but what are those poems on poverty, and why shouldn't we take them at their face-value?
Yours,etc.,
Paul E.Burnand
New York City

In studying the psychological implications of the metaphor“to return home,”I obeyed the mystics' injunction of looking inward. I “relied” primarily on my own experience of discursive thought,and only secondarily appealed to the authority of philosophers like Rignano and Vaihinger. I might almost say, je ne les chercherais pas si je ne les avais pas déjà trouvés. Dewey's refutation ofRignano in Logic:the Theory of Inquiry, pp. 29 ff., I have since read and wish to thank Mr Burnand for calling my attention to it. My withers are unwrung, however. There are two aspects to the question,the existential and the affective. Mr Burnand seems to have confused the two,or is it because the phrase “the affective side of thinking" is not sufficiently reiterated in my article to prevent misunderstanding? Existentially, an organism is dynamic, and an experience or “behaviour”is a “modification” of the organism: therefore there is no“stationary state” to return to. But affectively,it does have the feeling of losing equilibrium and then recovering it.The very idiom “to settle the question or doubt" (cf. the use of arreter in French expressions like Qu'a-t-on arrétê?) bears testimony to man's collective experience of such “a stationary state.”What else can Dewey himself mean in the following passages?“When thinking is successful,its career closesin transforming the disordered into the orderly....It is empirically assured that the goal of thinking does not remain a mereideal,but is attained often enough” (Experience and Nature, 1st series, p. 66);“There is no rest for the thinker, save in the process of thinking" (Ibid.,p.118).The italics are mine.The second quotation may be compared with the passage in my article on“the mind restlessly seeking rest,” etc. I still think Rignano's description remains valid as regards the feeling-tone of purposive thinking.
My perfunctory treatment of the community between mysticism and erotic transport is not due to want of materials. I regret having omitted the following passage from the printed text of my article: “Thanks to the studies of Jung,Rank,Reik,Pfister and others, the closeness of much religious emotion to sexual emotion has now become a commonplace. Students of English literature might have noticed the significant fact that Rochester,by a few deft touches, adapted Francis Quarles's poem to God in The Divine Emblems into one 'To his Mistress.' The following description of mystical experience from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads, IV, iii.2,is equally revealing:'Now as a man, when embraced by a beloved wife,knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within,thus this person, when embraced by the intelligent Self, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within.' It refers of course to the 'absorption' of the soul by the Lord in 'an arnorous confusion' that St Teresa so gushingly recorded in Relacion de su vida.” After considering this passage, Mr Burnand would perhaps change his opinion about D.H.Lawrence.
I wish to avail myself of this opportunity to amplify a little about "the wayside inn and the paying guest" mentioned in my article. A metaphor more or less similar to that in the Surangama Sutra suggested itself also to both Chuang Tsu and Epictetus. Chuang Tsu in the fourteenth chapter（天运）of his book compared the virtues of benevolence and justice to an inn（蘧庐）on the road to the Land of Freedom（逍遥之墟），where one should put up for one night only （止可以一宿）.Epictetus，in speaking of “the faculty of expression”or rather rhetorical and literary studies, thus warned his disciples: “What then do we see men doing? They are like a man returning to his own country who finding a good inn on his road, stays on there because it pleases him. Man, you are forgetting your purpose! You are not travelling to this, but through it”(Discourses,Bk.ii, Ch.xxiii, E.T.by P. E. Matheson,Vol.I,p. 237). Though the things compared to the wayside inn are different, knowledge in one case, virtue in another, and eloquence in the third,the “metaphorical consciousness" as well the philosophical significance is the same. To quote Epictetus again:“Your purpose is yonder;to return to your country, to relieve your kinsfolk of their fears, to fulfil your own duties as a citizen.... Some people are attracted by the very means they are using and stay where they are....like those whom the Sirens entertain.... Are you going to stay where you are just because a pretty phrase or certain precepts please you, and choose to make your home there forgetting what you have left at home?”(Ibid., pp. 237-8;Cf. another use of the metaphor in Encheiridion, Ch. xi, ibid., Vol. II, p. 217). The idea of“the return of the native” cannot be more persuasively put.
To return to Mr Burnand's letter. Lu Yu's poem on the“Frosty Wind”（霜风）is probably the source of Mrs Young＇s information. The wind of the tenth moon of the year is implacably cold:
“Not only am I so hungry as to beg for rice from the neighbouring priest,
But also in this cold weather my visitors find no carpet to soften the hard seats.”
岂惟饥索邻僧米，
真是寒无坐客毡。 
At first sight, the lines seem but plain statements of fact. A practised reader,however, will see that they are really allusions to two T'ang poets whom Lu Yu invoked “to keep himself warm.”The first line refers to Lu Tung of whom Han Yu wrote:
“A neighbouring priest gives you the rice he has begged;
Much to my shame,I,a magistrate,cannot help you.”
至今邻僧乞米送，
仆忝县尹能不耻。（韩愈《寄卢仝》）
The second line refers to Chêng Ch'ien of whom Tu Fu wrote:
“With a great reptation of thirty years' standing,
You,in cold weather,have no carpet on your seat.”
才名三十年，
坐落寒无毡。（杜甫《戏简郑虔》）
The latter lines are more popularly known in their misquoted form in The New History of the T'ang Dynasty,Bk.ccii:
“With your great reputation of forty years' standing,
Your visitors in cold weather find no carpet on their seat."
才名四十年，
坐客寒无毡。（《新唐书》卷二百二）。
Lu Yu incorporated the actual words of Tu Fu and Han Yu into his own poem. Old Chinese poetry is often deceptively plain, and full of booby-traps even for modern native readers who, innocent of the classics, are only too apt to take a litrally allusion for an autobiographic statement. Our old poets practised cunningly the art that conceals art, or as one of them beautifully said:“Allusions in a poem should be like a pinch of salt dissolved in a cup of water: one can tell its presence only by the taste of the water but not by the look of it.”R. M. Rilke in a letter to Countess Sizzo was of opinion that all allusion would spoil “the indescribable 'being-there'" of a poem. On the other hand, there are poets(e.g., Mr T.S. Eliot) who try by means of allusions to enrich their poems by starting a train of literary associations and evoke a sort of atmosphere or background for them. The simile of salt dissolved in water shows that the allusiveness of Chinese poetry seeks to combine the aesthetic effects of both the immediate “being-there”and “a yonder to all ends.”Whether this technique of swallowing the cake and having it is possible, I will not discuss here. Of one thing I am certain: it makes the separation of the Dichtung from the Wahrheit a delicate and difficul task for biographers. Lu is the most skilful of all Chinese poets in hunting down parallels in ancient classics and marrying them happily into couplets, a fact noticed very early by his younger contemporary Liu K＇o-chuang（刘克庄）in his Complete Works（《后村大全集》），Bk.clxxiv. Curiously enough,he is also the only great Chinese poet who has not yet the honour of a variorum edition. With such an edition,the biographer's task would be made considerably easier. In an obscure work on the Calligraphers and Painters of Wusih（《梁溪书画徵》） written by a man called Chi Cheng-hsien（稽承咸）in the middle of the Manchu regime,a copiously annotated edition of Lu's poems by Hsu Mei-tseng（许眉岑）is said to be ready for publication. Apparently that edition never saw the light.
C.S.CH'IEN 




An Early Chinese Version of Longfellow's “Psalm of Life”

From Philobiblon（《书林季刊》），II（1948），pp．10-17． 

The obstinate popularity of “A Psalm of Life” is simply due to the fact that it is preaching to the converted: the Will to Live loves to-though it need not-be told the Reason-not-to-Die.This would explain the wonders of life-preserving it had allegedly wrought, e.g.,the saving of an American stuent from suicide or a French civil servant from despair.' Man clings bloodthirstily to life on any pretext, even if it were only a bad and rather foolish poem.For the Psalm, with all its platitudinous wisdom and proverbial philosophy, is in places quite foolish. The late Thomas R. Lounsbury, I think, was especially caustic about the psalmist's advices to the young man that he should leave a permanent footprint on the sandy beach and that he should be a hero not only in the battle but also in the bivouac.2 But a poem, however bad, always has the readers it deserves, and in this case they must have been innumerable. The Psalm is a hardy perennial in the textbooks for the English courses in Chinese middle schools; generations of Chinese boys have been cram-throated with it. As the method of teaching English in Chinese schoolsis considered extremely unsatisfactory by British and American pedagogues, the poem has perhaps not yet saved an appreciable number of superfluous Chinese lives.
The Psalm has some interesting and even astonishing literary associations. One is Baudelaire's admitted plagiat of its fourth stanza in his sonnet Le Guignon where, by changing “our hearts”into“my heart,”3 this alchemist of words puts a note of personal urgency into what was originally the drone of prosy moralising. Another-a fact I wish to call attention to-is that, of al1 poems in the English language, it is perhaps the first that was ever translated into Chinese.
The Englishman Robert Ferguson who visited Longfellow in the September of 1864, gave a pleasant account of his stay in Craigie House in America During and After the War.In his description of the poet's study we read:“The table is strewn with books and presentation copies in various languages,-ay,even in Chinese. But the ways of the Chinese are not as our ways; and this presentation copy was in the shape of a fan,on which a poet of the Flowery Land had wrtten a translation of the Psalm of Life;and if the translation were only as good as the writing, assuredly the work was well done."4 In Longfellow's Journal, we find the following entry on November 30th 1865:“I gave a dinnerto Mr.and Mrs. Burlingame, in honor of the Chinese Fan sent to me by a mandarin, with the 'Psalm of Life' written upon it in Chinese.”5 Anson Burlingame, it will be recalled, was originally American minister to China; upon the resignation of that post in 1867,he, with a sudden change of role possible only to “lightning make-up artists" on the music-hall stage of old days and politicians of all times,became immediately the Chinese minister plenipotentiary to head a mission to America and Europe.6 As to the text of the Chinese translation and the identity of the mandarin, Longfellow and Ferguson gave no clue. Samuel Longfellow in an appendix in the enlarged edition of his Life gave the very un-Chinese and somewhat Germanic name of the translator as “Jung Tagen.” The question whether the Chinese version I give below is the one presented to Longfelow,can be answered easily by those who have the chance to examine the “mandarin fan” among the poet's relics now preserved in the Longfellow House.When it is not necessary to indulge in guesswork, it is perhaps necessary not to indulge in it.
In Fang Ch＇ün-shih＇s（方濬师）unduly neglected Chiao Hsien Sui Lu or the Commonplace Book of the Palm Pavilion（《蕉轩随录》）， there is an entry under the caption Ch＇ang-yu Shih（长友诗）， verbatim,“Tall Friend's Poem.”8 The author first gave a sample of poetry of the ancient “barbarians” on the south-western frontier of the Han empire, and quoted with approval the remark that the languages of the “barbarians" are as strange as plants of a different flora and animals of a different fauna（草木异种鸟兽殊类）．9After this lengthy preamble, he took a broad leap across the centuries that separated the Han dynasty and his own times,and plunged into the heart of the matter:“The English envoy to China Thomas Francis Wade（英吉利使臣威妥玛）once translated into Chinese nine poems（诗九首）by a European named Tall-Friend（欧罗巴人长友）.The number of sentences（句数）varies in different poems，a characteristic suggestive of our ancient irregular odes. Wade rendered the poems literally,giving stanzaic divisions but no rhyme （有章无韵），and submitted his version to His Excellency Kan Ch＇üan（甘泉尚书）to be reduced into the pattern of the seven-word stop-short（裁以七言绝）.His Excellency，finding the poems full of moral uplift and not at all contrary to Truth and Good Sense（皆有策励意无碍理者）graciously consented. Here I give the translation with Wade's original text written under each sentence for the use of future historians.”A careful reading of the translation convinces us that the European Tall-Friend is no other than the American Longfellow after a “sea change” and that the nine poems are but the nine stanzas of “A Psalm of Life." The mandarins were superciliously hazy about Western nations; to them the distinction between an American and a European seemed a piece of pedantry and,like the proverbial distinction between a Scot and a Jew,one without a difference. The translation rather than transliteration of the name“Longfellow” is also symptomatic. Foreign names were simply jaw-breakers and possessed for the mandarins nothing of the charme qui vient de leur absence de significations:“prawns must be stripped of all flourishes before we trust them to our throats,”and foreign names had to be curtailed, smoothed and disguised until they became amenable to Chinese mouths. Just as Torquato Tasso becomes “Twisted Yew” in English,or Bacon and Lamb may be known to the French as“Cochon”and“L'agneau,”so Longfellow assumes the Chinese name “Tall-Friend."10 We learn from Longfellow's biography that a lady imagined the poet to be“a tall, thin man,”while a little girl cried“Mr.Longfellow!”on seeing a daddy-long-legs;" the name “Tall-Friend” is therefore admirably descriptive and much more appropriate than the modern meaningless transliteration“Lang-fa-lo”（郎法罗）.
From Fang Ch'ün-shih's circumstantial account we see that two men,a Chinese mandarin and an English diplomatist, collaborated in the translation of this American poem. What propagandist purpose such a slight Triple Alliance of the A.B.C.countries might have been made to serve during the latest war to end all wars,I do not know but can well imagine,for persons ever ready to do the right thing at the right moment have never been wanting. The Chinese mandarin who touched up Wade's crabbed and almost inarticulate prose into sententious verse is Tung Hsün（董恂），a native of Kan-ch＇üan（甘泉）.Connected with the Tsungli Yamen （总理衙门）since its establishment in 1861， he was for many years a sort of Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Manchu Empire and took part in the negotiations with Belgium, Austria,the United States, etc. In his collected prose works can be found two forewords he wrote to W.A.P.Martin's Chinese books.12 In the foreword to Martin's translation of Wheaton's Elements of International Law written in 1864,he mentioned Fang Chün-shih as one of the Chinese secretaries he had instructed to revise Martin's manuscript.13 Thus both Tung and Fang had some literary connexions with the Americans, and yet Longfellow was called a European! From scattered passages in Fang's prose and poetry,we gather that he entered the Tsungli Yamen on its foundation in 186114 and left it to be a tao-t＇ai（道台）in Kwangtung in 186815．
That the Commonplace Book of the Palm Pavilion, though printed in 1872, had been written before 1868, can be inerred from Fang's letter to Tung Hsün shortly after his arrival in Kwangtung.16 There is a close synchronism between these dates (1861-1868)and the dates of the references to the “mandarin fan”in Longfellow's biography (1864-1865). Might not “Jung Tagen”be a clerical error for“Tung Ta-jen”（董大人）i.e.“His Excellency Tung"? At any rate, Fang Chün-shih's account is interesting for its own sake as the earliest one in Chinese in which a translation of an English poem can be found.Tung Hsün did not include the translation in his now deservedly forgotten Collected Poems,though he took care to preserve some occasional verse written at a banquet in honour of a French Prince.7 Fang's phrase “for the use of future historians”（他日史乘之采择）shows that he was fully conscious of his book being the first and even the only record of this literary event. His failure to catch the eye of historians so far is simply another instance of the vanity of human, all too human wishes.
To facilitate comparison, I shall give the original beside the Chinese translations:

Longfellσw	Wade	Tung Hstin

Tell me not,in mourful numbers,	勿以忧时言	莫将烦恼著诗篇
Life is but an empty dream!	人生若虚梦	百岁原如一觉眠
For the soul is dead that slumbers,	性灵睡即与死无异	梦短梦长同是梦
And things are not what they seem.	不仅形骸尚有灵在	独留真气满坤乾
Life is real! Lifeis eamest	人生世上行走非虚生也总期有用	天地生材总不虚
And the grave is not its goal;	何谓死埋方至极处	由来豹死尚留皮
“Dust thou art,to dust thou retumest,”	圣书所云人身原土终当归土	纵然出土仍归土
Was not spoken of the soul.	此言人身非谓灵也	灵性长存无绝期
Not enjoyment,and not sorrow,	其乐其忧均不可专务	无端忧乐日相循
Is our destined end or way;	天之生人别有所命	天命斯人自有真
But to act,that each to-morrow	所命者作为专图日日长进	人法天行强不息
Find us further than to-day.	明日尤要更有进步	一时功业一时新
Art is long,and Time is fleeting,	作事需时惜时飞去	无术挥戈学鲁阳
And our hearts,though stout and brave,人心纵有壮胆远志	枉谈肝胆异寻常
Still,like muffled drums,are beating	仍如丧鼓之敲	一从薤露歌声起
Funeral marches to the grave.	皆系向墓道去	邱陇无人宿草荒
In the world's broad field of battle,	人世如大战场	扰扰红尘听鼓鼙
In the bivouac of life,           如众军在林下野盘 风吹大漠草萋萋
Be not like dumb,driven cattle!	 莫如牛羊无言待人驱策	驽骀甘待鞭笞下
Be a hero in the strife! 争宜勉力作英雄  骐骥谁能辔勒羁

Longfellow	Wade	Tung Hstin

Tiust no Future,howe'er pleasant!	勿言异日有可乐之时	休道将来乐有时
Let the dead Past bury its dead!	既往日亦由已埋己	可怜往事不堪思
Act-act in the living Present!	目下努力切切	只今有力均须努
Heart within,and God o'erhcad!	中尽已心上赖天佑	人力殚时天佑之

Lives of great men all remind us	著名人传看则系念	千秋万代远蜚声
We can make our lives sublime,	想我们在世亦可置身高处	学步金鳌顶上行
And,deperting,leave behind us	去世时尚有痕迹	已去冥鸿亦有迹
Footprints on the sands of time	势如留在海边沙面	雪泥爪印认分明

Foxtprints that perhaps ancther,	盖人世如同大海，	茫茫尘世海中沤
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,	果有他人过海	才过来舟又去舟
A forom and shipwrecked brother,	船只搁浅受难失望	欲问失风谁挽救
Seeing,shall take heart again.	见海边有迹才知有可解免	沙洲遗迹可探求

Let us,then,be up and daing,	顾此即应奋起动身	一鞭从此跃征鞍
With a heart for any fate; 心中预定无论如何总期有济  不到峰头心不甘
Still achieving,still pursuing,	日有成功愈求进功	日进日高还日上
earn to labour and to wait.  习其用功坚忍不可中止 肯教中道偶停骖

In the Chinese versions there is no punctuation, a practice I have observed in my transcription.
Wade would paraphrase a line into several sentences for the sake of clearness. But he is apparently struggling with an imperfectly mastered and intractable medium, hence he is often obscure and incoherent. In many of his fearfully and wonderfully worded lines we cannot even see the meaning as through a glass darkly unless we look up the original. The very first line in his translation, for handy example, puzzles us like a conundrum.Awkward barbarisms like 人生世上行走for“Life，”由己埋已 for“Let the dead Past bury its dead，”看则系念 for“remind us，”奋起动身 for“be up and doing”etc. are worthy Chinese companions to the “idiotisms” in the celebrated English as She is Spoke. To translate “Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant” as“Don't say you would some day enjoy yourself,”or“forlorn” into words which merely mean “disappointed,” is something worse than a mistake because it is not exactly one. If Wade's choice of the Psalm for translation should make us sceptical about his taste, his rendering of the wise saw “Art is long, andTime is fleeting" makes us more than suspicious of his knowledge of Chinese. With a number of proverbial equivalents to choose from, he yet labours to produce a couple of stuttering sentences to the effect that “to do work needs time,and it is a pity that time flies." This naturally makes Tung Hsün allude wistfully in his version to the legendary Chinese hero who, like Joshua,could make the sun stand still. Tung Hsün,however, succeeded in giving an admirably clear and fluent version. Wade must have supplemented his own text with some explanations viva voce; thus Tung Hsün's translation of the first line is all that it should be and contains the equivalent of the word “numbers" left untranslated by Wade.The fluency is unfortunately that of the facile and glib writing which, flowing like water, cannot excel. Decked out with some refuse of Chinese poetic diction, the version has all the banal naturalness of an original poem by a mediocre Chinese versifier who has redeemed from the pawn-shop a lot of the cast-off finery of our old poets. It is also reasonably faithful,adhering strictly to the original order of lines, though the suppression of the connectives due to the exigency of Chinese prosody blurs somewhat the series juncturaque of Longfellow's ideas.The “bivouac” vanishes from the scene, and “the footprints on the sand" become “the footprints of a wild goose in the snow-mud”-a metaphor taken from Su Tung-po's famous poem to his brther.It is to be wondered whether Lounsbury would have regarded the latter as an improvement.The metaphor of “muffled drums" that appealed to Baudelaire,is replaced bya hackneyed Chinese cliché.Except in one instance,Tung Hsün's versification is impeccable: in the fourth stanza，he made the word（羁），a sound of the fourth section of the “upper flat”（上平四支），rhyme with 萋 and 鼙，both of the eighth section（八齐）.For a rhyme thus“to go astray”（出韵）is in the eyes of the old critics as bad as for some of us to look over the fence,but such “trespassing” is now very common in the doggerels or bitcherels which their writers innocently fancy to be the survivals or revivals of the classical tradition in Chinese poetry.18
This translation remained for many years to come a lonely example of Chinese recognition of modern Western literature. The Chinese intellectuals of those days admired most of all Western ingenuity in sciences and Western efficiency in government, enjoyed fully the “modern conveniences”(especially the water-closet), praised Western visual arts like painting and stagecraft, and with prurient prudery sniggered at the “looseness" of Western morals and manners.Yet as to Western literature, they all showed a stony incuriosity inexcusable even on the plea of their ignorance of the languages.The first mention of Goethe in Chinese,e.g., occurs as late as 1878 in the diary of the Chinese Minister to Germany, and that because Goethe had the luck of being translated by the American Minister to the same country.19 This indifference or intellectual sloth is all the more strange because the Chinese diplomatists of the old regime were as a rule quite cultured,in fact,much better read in literary classics than modern career-men, and even numbered among them some excellent men of letters.
The explanation might,paradoxically enough, lie in their very learning and culture. Culture made them exclusive, and learning, self-complacent. In short, it is a case of what Aristotle, in defining eutrapelia, calls “educated insolence."20 Immured in the only self-conceit that was still left to them, they fancied that, in the artof writing at least,they had nothing to learn from the “barbarians." This indeed seems to have been the attitude of most Asiatics of that time-witness the following passage from Edmond de Goncourt:“Tholozan, médecin du shah de Perse depuis vingt-neuf ans, nous faisait une curieuse révélation: 'Les Persans disent aux Européens: Vous avez, vous autres, des horlogers, des mécaniciens, des ouvriers dans les arts mécaniques, supérieurs aux nôtres, mais nous vous sommes bien supérieurs en tout, -et ils demandent, si nous avons des littérateurs, des poètes.'”21 It is the same feeling of cultured self-sufficiency,I imagine, that made Saint-Evremond refuse to learn the English language and ignore English literature during his forty years' residence in England. A Celestial who showed proficiency in the “barbarian”languages would have aroused the disgust rather than the envy of his fellow mandarins.2 Fang Chün-shih ends his account of the collaboration of Wade and Tung Hsün with a patronising remark which is perhaps not a "face-saving formula":“To encourage the barbarians in their laudable effort to become civilised（曳而进于中国则中国之）， that is His Excellency＇s intention （用心）.”This is a significant reversal of the normal relation between a poet and a translator.
The obscurantism of the mandarins could not arrest the study of foreign languages in China. Of course,the study was-and still is-undertaken largely for a utilitarian purpose;English,for instance,is significantly associated with“pidgin,”and German and French used to be the languages, not of Goethe and Montaigne, but of Olivier et Cie and Schmidt Bros. Ltd. But som knowledge of Western literature inevitably penetrated into a few Chinese heads without the painful necessity of surgical operations. The great progress in English studies during the decade since the translation of the Psalm, can be inferred from another ignored reference to Longfellow in an anonymous Short Account of a Voyage（《舟行纪略》）．In the late sping of 1882，the author travelled to America on an English boat and,the weather being bad, tried to while away the tedium of the cabin by reading. He lit upon the works of “the American poet Lung-fei-lu（龙飞露），”spent a whole day in reading them and quite appreciated their poetic beauty（竟日观玩颇得诗中佳趣）.Among his fellow-passengers was an Anglo-Catholic priest, and our author questioned him about the comparative merts of the English poet “Pai-lun（拜轮）”and the American Longfellow.The priest, surprisingly enough for a man of his nationality though not at all for a man of his calling, regarded Longfellow as superior to Byron whose poetry，according to him，“abounds in wanton notes（多靡曼之声）.”This encourged our author to launch out on his own into literary criticism, and compare ecstatically Longfellow's “Arsenal at Springfield,"“The Open Window" and “Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass＂ to some stock quotations from Li Po，Ts＇ui Hu（崔护）and T＇ao Sung（曹松）.To his regret， there are too many masterpieces in Longfellow's works for him to name all of them. The long narrative poems， he added， leap and pour forth like a welling fountain（气若涌泉）and would make Po Chü-i and Yüan Chên-were they alive-look nervously to their laurels. He concludes his glowing tribute in an elegiac mood:“I hear that Mr Lung joined the ancients some months ago.Perhaps another Castle of White Jade has been built in Heaven, and God needs a genius to celebrate it in verse."23 This hackneyed Chinese euphemism for death is the exact equivalent to “Whom the gods love die young,” and originatesfrom a legend about the poet Li Ho（李贺）who died at twenty-seven.To apply it to Longfellow who died full of years as of honours, and to imagine the God Longfellow worshipped as pressing the poet into his service, are rather instances of discordia concors, piquantly inappropriate. All the same, the passage shows a marked advance on Fang Chün-shih's reference to “the European Tall-Friend.”Our author had apparently never heard of that mistake and rendered unto America the poet who is America's without any self-conscious accuracy.
That the Psalm of Life should have been the first sample of “European" literature imported into China is depressing but not surprising. The sample might have conceivably been worse. Foreign fame may be a kind of contemporary immortality,but what is temporary and mortal in a nation's literature is more likely to be among the nation's first exports together with its riff-raff of adventurers and emigrants. There is a natural law that things of little weight rise rapidly to the surface and drift a long way with the current by sheer lightness in floating.
NOTES
1.Life ofH.W.Longfellow,by Samuel Longfellow,Vol.I, pp. 271-2;cf. p. 303. I use the original 1886 edition in two volumes.
2.For the amusing explanation of Lounsbury's dislike of the bivouac metaphor, see W.L. Phelps:Autobiography with Letters,p.324.
3.-Bien qu'on ait du coeur à l'ourage,
L'Art est long et le Temps est court.
Loin des sépultures celèbres,
Vers un cimetière isolé,
Mon coeur,comme un tambour voilé,
Va battant des marches funèbres-
4. Quoted in Life of Longfellow, Vol. II, p. 412 (Vol. III, p. 43 in the enlarged edition).
5.Ibid.,p. 429(Vol.III,p. 64 in the enlarged edition).
6.In faimess to Burlingame, it should be said that his Chinese colleagues had very high opinions of his character;see for example the entry in A Journal of a Mission to the West《初使泰西记》on 24th day，1st moon in the 9th year of the reign of Tung Chi(1870) where he is praised for his frankness, generosity and impartiality.
7.Life of Longfellow, Vol.III,p. 437.
8. I use the first edition of 1872. The entry is found in Vol. XII, leaves 37-40.
9. The zoological garden is much in evidence whenever one describes the foreign languages one cannot understand.The Frenchmen's gazouillement des oiseaux for English and the Englishmen's“monkey chatter" for French are good instances of such“offensive nationalities.”The following passage from the famous sixteenth-century zoologist Piere Gilles is especially interesting in this connexion: Simul et quemadmodum bestianun sruum auribus,non intelligentia capimus, si Britari colloquentes anserum clangorem fundere, atque strepitu tantum aut longiori aut breviori nobis ui videntur(quoted in G.Boas: The Happy Beast,p.41).It must be admitted, however,that the Chinese mandarins were particularly fond of similes from the jungle or the barnyard in their descriptions of European languages.
10.The first example is from Leigh Hunt's skit “Rhyme and Reason” while the other two are taken from Remy de Gourmont's very amusing essay on the translation of foreign names in Promenades littéraires,Ille série. Gourmont did not know that Iamb in his Paris letter to J.H.Payne actually signed himself “Charlois Agneau alias C.Lamb.”
11.Life,Vol.I,p.380.
12．《荻芬书屋文稿》卷一：《万国公法序》，《格物入门序》。
13．《万国公法序》：爱属定远方濬师删校一过。
14．《退一步斋文集》卷四：《书汉票签中书舍人题名后》。
15．《退一步斋诗集》卷三：《粤行集》。
16．《退一步斋文集》卷四：《复董韫卿尚书书》。
17．《荻芬书屋诗稿》卷四：《春雪宴故法王孙五律二首》。
18．If the word 羁，instead of being the rhyme-word of the last line，were that of the first line,then it could pass muster as a “lonely swan leading the pack”
（孤雁出群）.The first lines of the second and ninth stanzas are examples of
the“lonely swan.”
19．See Li Feng-pao：Journal of a Mission to Germany（李凤苞《使德日记》），the 29th day of the 11th moon in the 4th year of the reign of Kuang Hsu.Goethe is transliterated according to the English way of pronouncing th as 果次. The American diplomatist is of course Bayard Taylor.
20.Aristotle,however,regards such insolence as characteristic of the Young Man in contradistinction to the intellectual cautiousness of the Old Man who only says“I think,” never“1 know.”See The Works of Aristotle,ed.W. D.Ross,Vol.XI,Rhetorica,1389b 11 ff.
21. Journal des Goncourt,. VII,p.210;entry of September 9,1887.
22． Cf． the interesting entry in the diary of Wêng Tung-ho（《翁文恭公日记》）of the 10thday of the 1st moon in the 13th year of the reign of Kuang Hsu: "The day of New Year greetings in the Tsungli Yamen. I avoided the foreign ministers and watched them at a distance. The young Marquis Tseng talked to them in their own barbarian language and chirped like a bird incessantly （曾侯与作夷语，啁啾不已）”（Weng＇s Diary，Vol．XXVI，4；cf．Vol．XXIII， 4 recto）．Cf．note 8 supra． The word 啾 is also used to denote the sound made by the ghosts-the Virgilian vox exigua,quite appropriate for the “foreign demons.” It is curious that the spirits are everywhere supposed to make the same sounds as the birds and the mice；e.g.，啾，唧，Homer＇s trixein,Shakespeare's “squeak and gibber of the sheeted dead,”etc.
23． Geographical Miscellanies（《小方壶斋舆地丛钞》）1st series，12th case，Vol． II,126 verso. 




A Note to the Second Chapter of Mr Decadent

From Philobiblon（《书林季刊》），II（1948），pp．8-14． 

Liu E＇s（刘鹗）delightful“autobiographiction”Lao-ts＇an yu-chi（老残游记）（1905）promises to be the spoiled child of translators． The English versions called Tramp Doctor's Travelogue and A Nun of Taishan were published before the war by the Commercial Press.Mr Harold E. Shadick,now of Cornell University,told me some time ago that he had made a new translation of the novel;but for all I know it has not yet emerged from his portfolio. In last October appeared an admirable translation under the title Mr Decadent' which,I understand, is changed into Mr Derelict in the London edition.Liu E's novel is of perennial interest to students of Chinese literature,history and social manners alike, and other translators will no doubt try their skill on it too. Unless human nature has much changed, we should be treated before long to the usual spectacle which Sir Richard Burton, speaking of the numerous English translators of Camoens,likens to that of the Simoniacal Popes in a Malebolge-pit, each one struggling to trample down his elder brother.2
I have adopted Professor Yang's translation of the name Lao-ts'an as “Mr Decadent",but I am not really happy about it. There is a definite suggestion of the mad, bad and sad fin de siecle about the English word“decadent” which would be here quite misleading.True,Liu's book is,as Professor Yang said in his preface, “the expression of a deep pessimism... and sadness at the decadence of China”.3 He is not therefore“decadent”,is he? -except perhaps on the principle that who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.The word“decadent”, with its fringe of peculiar associations for Western readers,creates an utterly wrong impression of the character of Lao-ts'an as if he, in witnessing the death-agony of the Sick Man of the East,4 had also experienced the blend of mystic participation and masochistic rapture that finds expression in the line.-
Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence!
If “Mr Decadent" sounds like a New Hedonist of the 'nineties,“Mr Derelict" is equally wide of the mark and suggests a lachrymose“lone lorn creetur."We have, straight from the author's mouth, an explanation of the name Lao ts'an at the very outest of the story.The tramp-doctor took the fancy-name Ts＇an（残）after the Buddhist priest Lan-ts＇an（懒残）which becomes“Lazy and Decadent＂ in Professor Yang's translation.5 Now Lan-ts'an is the nickname of the bonze Ming-tsan（明瓒）of the mid-Tang dynasty. A biographical sketch of Ming-tsan is included in Book XIX of the third series of The Lives of Eminent Buddhist Priests（《宋高僧传》）by Tsan-ning（赞宁），a monk of encyclopaedic knowledge in the Sung dynasty.According to it,Ming-tsan won that nickname as a result of two rather endearingly contemptible traitsin his character:“He took his ease while his fellow bonzes were busy at work and, even when scolded,was not the least bit ashamed of his laziness (lan).Besides,he was fond of eating the left-over food(ts'an) of his fellow bonzes. Hence the nickname.”6 This passage is really the amplification of a very short sentence in an earlier book entitled Sweet-rain Rhapsodies（《甘泽谣》）7from which the whole sketch is derived. T'an does not, therefore, mean “decadence”or “derelict”, but denotes the sort of broken meats which the Parisian restaurateurs dub as arlequin or bijou and the Oxford scouts claim as “perquisites”.8The bonzes live and even get sleek on a vegetarian diet; otherwise the nickname lan-t'an might be translated into something like“Lazybones and Gnaw-bones”.“Taking rest and eating the restes”is also its exact rendering but for two objections: it is too much of a dribbling mouthful for a name, and it is “writ in no language” or rather in a bastard kind of language. Besides,a stickler to the original sense of ts'an as the debris of a repast would come to grief in rendering the name Pu-ts＇an（补残）which Professor Yang neatly translates as “Patcher of Decadence”.Thus I feel rather like a tinker,a“patcher of decadence” indeed, though only in pots and kettles-who stops one hole and makes two. Quite unable to suggest anything better,I content myself with a mild demurrer to“Mr Decadent”and “Mr Derelict".
Liu E, with all his skill in vivid description and vivacious dialogue, shows but little inventive power; the novel is a roman à clef of the most bare-faced kind, and many who start reading it as literature end with studying it as history. Without scruple, he put real characters into the book in thin disguises,often indecently or cruelly thin.On one or two occasions, he even dispensed with cloaks and masks altogether and showed no qualms in leaving his acquaintances to die of exposure. The identity of some of the characters has been recognised long ago. In this article, I wish to make another identification as a good example of Liu E's abject adherence to the actual or unnecessary matter-of-factness in fiction.
The passage in question occurs near the end of the famous second chapter which contains the marvellous description of Miss Little Jade's singing. I shall transcribe from Professor Yang's version:
After a while the tumult began to die down and a young man less than thirty years old in the front seat under the stage startd to speak with a Hunan accent,saying,“When I studied in the past and read descriptions of good singers, it was said that the echoes of their songs would linger about the roof for three days;but I would not believe it.... But since I heard Miss Wang singing I realise how well the ancient scholars expressed it.... Indeed I felt that even three days was rather inadequate,and would rather use Confucius' words:'For three months I cannot taste the flavour of meat.'Three months would be more correct." All the people beside him sid: “His criticism is quite right,and expresses our own feeling.”10
Now in the original， the fist half of the sentence is：梦湘先生论得透辟极了：to wit，“Mr Mêng-hsiang＇s criticism is quite right，or“Mr Mêng-hsiang has put it very sensitively". So this young man (who is never to appear again in the story) has a local habitation,viz.,Hunan, as well as a name, viz., Mêng-hsiang. But the fact is so unimportant that Professor Yang has some justification i omitting the name from his version.To other writers on Liu E's novel, the name has also meant nothing; for all they care, it might be Tom,Dick or Harry, or, as we say in Chinese,Chang the third brother or Li the fourth. After all, there is nothing original or profound in the opinion Mr Mêng-hsiang expressed; it bears no stamp of personality and is only a platitude which might be uttered by any Chinese schoolboy in those days when the Confucian Analects were the sine qua non of his satchel and quoting Confucius was no intellectual feat.
Liu E,however,is here referring to a real person by his real name. Mêng-hsiang is the courtesy name of Wang I-min（王以敏），native of Wu-ling（武陵），Hunan，graduate in the third or doctor＇s degree（进士）in the year 1890．A poet of genuine talent， well-known rather than famous among his contemporaries, he is now completely forgotten-a phenomenon not uncommon in the natural history of reputations.He got married in Shantung in 1875 and largely lived there till 1890. In the autumn of 1886, he received an appointment in the Yellow River Conservancy (cf. his poetical works Vol. II, chuan vi, leaves 18,20, 24) under that very goveror of Shantung who was to appear in Mr Decadent (Vol.III, chuan ix, 26 verso). His poetical works contain an ecstatic tribute to Miss Little Jade in the form of a long ode of seven-word lines." The ode, an obvious attempt to combine the mellifluous narrative of Po Chu-i and the orate diction of Li Ho,was written in 1887 after repeated attendances to Little Jade's “concerts". Wang I-min numbered himself among the few and select to whom Little Jade's singing appealed; the vlgar majority,on the other hand,gave their suffrage to a certainKuo Wa or “Kuo the cute baby",Little Jade's senior rival who, alas! like most of their profession, died in destress.With the Cute Baby's sad end in mind, our poet was tenderly solicitous about Little Jade's future and advised her in a commendably avuncular tone to retire from public entertainment into-he did not specify what, but a private harem is certainly implied. Now Kuo the Cute Baby is elsewhere known as Kuo the BigHussy（郭大妮），and an enthusiastic account of her beauty and skill can be found in that guide to the gay life of ＇Tsinan in those days，Sun Tien＇s（孙点）A Traveller＇s Notes on Tsinan（《历下志游》），Pt II.The all-inclusive Geographical Miscellanies（《小方壶斋舆地丛钞》）give copious extracts from Sun Tien's work,12 but, being concemed with a kind of geography other than that mapped in the carte du Tendre , omits its luscious panorama of singers and prostitutes. Sun Tien visited Tsinan before Liu E and Wang I-min and saw Little Jade when she was about fifteen or sixteen: “a pretty but shy girl，sitting in a corner and hanging her head（低头隅坐），but dropping her shyness when she warmed up to her singing（歌至兴酣，不少羞涩）”．3 To Mr Decadent，Little Jade seemed a girl of eighteen or nineteen; Wang I-min who apparently knew her better, said her to be well past twenty; yet Wang had met her almost four years before Liu Ê who came to Tsinan in connexion with the Yellow River Conservancy in 1890. Of course, a woman is only as old as she looks and, as Beau Brummel was anxious to fix five-and-forty as l'âge de tout le monde, Chinese convention almost fixed eighteen or nineteen as l'âge de tout le demi-monde. Liu extended this chivalrous “short measure" even to Wang's age: we gather from Wang's poetical works that he was born in 185514; so he was “a young man over thirty" and not one “less than thirty" when he first heard Litle Jade in 1886. Sun,Wang and Liu were all agreed about Little Jade's modesty and quietness; the habit of hanging her head was also noticed by Mr Decadent.She apparently could weather success and flattery,those hard tests of character which few of us can pass.
Thus in the reference to Mr Mêng-hsiang, Liu E is recording an actual event. As I said, Mr. Mêng-hsiang's remark is not one which, if we met it howling in the wilderness, would make us curious about its author.It is a commonplace that can pass muster with a vague on dit. The problem of a writer of vie romanée is:What's the most he can say without actually telling a lie? while that of a writer of “autobiographiction” is:What's the most he can say without actually telling the truth? Yet Liu E refused to practise here a little economy of truth and, with a tenacious clinging to facts quite unnecessary in a work ostensibly fictitious, supplied us with all the tabs of identity about a character who, like the shadow of a bird in its flight, is no sooner seen than lost and forgotten. What other name for this than “lying-on-the-belly before insignificant facts"?15 Little did he know that despite his conscientiousness, oblivion has used its snuffers so efficiently that “Mr Mêng-hsiang” might as well be “Billy Anon” to the modern readers!
Liu E wrote Mr Decadent nearly sixteen years later than Wang I-min composed his ode. We may safely assume that Liu had the poem in mind when he wrote that famous description of Little Jade's singing.16A comparison of the two is very rewarding,but I shall confine myself to one general obeervation.
That description is the one gleaming purple patch on the ground-fabric of clean homespun prose in which the story iswritten.A piece of fine writing which would make Mr Tony Weller query “Tain't in poetry, is it?” It has naturally caught the eye of all critics, lecturers, schoolmasters and compilers of anthologies. These estimable gentlemen have rubbed the bloom off the passage by making it a showpiece of pei-hua or vernacular literature as well as a set piece in high schools. The thing has been killed with kindness and is probably to be revived by means of artificial respiration in classrooms where only too often the dead exhume dead. Considering the fact that pei-hua was still a despised and neglected literary medium in Liu E's time, the whole description is a triumphant proof of its resources and possibilities for artistic prose. On the other hand, Wang I-min's poem,fine as it is in its way, would not have attracted much notice among readers of old Chinese poetry. Yet both, Liu in his novel and Wang in the first half of his ode, in spite of the difference of medium, were bent upon one and the same purpose, i. e., to embody the mass of impressions made by music in a luxuriance of images, as varied an assortment as the ingenuity of the Demon of Analogy could suggest,so
Qu'on le lit de l'oreille,
Et qu'on l'écoute des yeux.
To paint musical sounds in odes of seven-word lines has been a venerable convention among old Chinese poets;Po Chu-i's famous ode on the playing of pi pa is an example familiar to most Western readers."7 Wang I-min, therefore, was simply writing in a time-hallowed and even stereotyped mould. Whether his poem is good,bad or indifferent, it is in a form that was then taken for granted. Liu E, on the contrary, had no precedent for his tour de force in pei-hua; what models he could think of are all in verse. That he did think of those conventional odes is betrayed by his quoting from Po Chu-i's Pi Pa Ode:“One of Po Chu-i's poems has the words: 'Like big pearls and small pearls falling upon a jade disc'; and these lines would apply to the excellency of this song."18 In other words, this description of music which,with a modem Chinese writer disinherited of our literary tradition, would be an attempt to raise prose to poetry, is, with a man of Liu E's education and cultural background, clearly an experiment to acclimatise poetry in prose. He made pei-hua prose do the work that had hitherto,from Po Chu-i to Wang I-min,been reserved for wen-li poetry, and succeeded wonderfully. It is not merely a case of reddiderit junctura, making an old thing new by transposing it into a new setting, but a veritable contest of media as well as a transformation of genres. 

NOTES

1． Mr Decadent （bilingual text），p．319． Nanking：Tu-Li ch＇u-pan-shê（独立出版社）．1947．
2.Cf.Inferno,canto xix.
3.p.5.Two sentences telescoped;Italics mine.
4. Towards the end of the Manchu dynasty,Chinese joumalists appropriated this jewel six-word-long as an elegant designation of the ramshackle Chinese Empire.As the Republican regime has been also “a long disease”,the cliché remains in the style sheet of many newspapers.
5.p.8.
6.The Tripitaka in Chinese,ed.by J.Takakusu and K.Watanabe,Vol.L, p．834：众僧营作，我则晏如；纵被诋诃，殊无愧耻。时目之“懒瓒”···一云：好食僧之残食，故残也。
7．The story is preserved in Tai-p＇ing Kuang-chi（太平广记），chuan xcvi．The sentence is：性懒而食残。
8.The locus classicus is in Mr Verdant Green,ch.vi.“Put away these bits o'things as is left, sir!"quoth Mr Filcher of Brazenface College,“you see, you's fresh to the place,”etc.
9.Cf.Professor Yang's preface,p.6.
10.p.52.
11．《檗坞诗存初集》卷七“济上集”之二《济城篇》（Vol．III，chuan vii，4 verso 6verso). I very much regret my inability of making a worthy translation, and content myself with a transcription. The book is curiously rare; I called attention to the poem in a Chinese article in 1945, but had lost my copy a year earlier.The following transcription I owe to the good offices of Mr Ku Ting-lung（顾廷龙）and the courtesy of Mr Tung Tai-tsung（董太冲），Wang I-min＇s grandson.济城篇井序：
“鼓书不知所昉，法用三弦一鼓双铁板。三数人递演俚词，杂以曼声，殆古弹词之流亚欤？王生小玉，以是艺噪于济南有年。岁丙戌予自泝州返济，听之而善。越岁一，再听之于城西，又数月，始作诗以传之。小玉，廪邱人，自余见已二十馀，其为人端庄婉丽，不事涂泽。稠众广场中，初默不一语，间一发声，则抑扬抗坠，分寸节度，不溢参黍。其幼眇曲折处，较歌者为难能，抑又非善歌者所能及也。往同治时，济中擅名者有郭娃，与玉殆有雅俗之别，知者谓玉过之远甚，不知者或反乙玉，故玉名终不及郭。郭今沦落死矣，玉方盛年，赏音邈若，予成是诗，深为玉危，并将以质当世之识曲听真者。
济城流水清如玉，佛髻干丸映帘绿。帘外鱼波吹白频，帘中美人娇暮春。春云覆城柳丝碧，钿车夹道花如织。晓妆随手艳神仙，铅华净洗翻倾国。淳于炙骒君卿舌，粉黛千秋少颜色。变调何人采竹枝，居然谈笑千金值。君不见王家有女淡丰容，玉娘小字香春风。明眸含睇水新剪，登场按拍天无功。稗官野史资嘲谑，，铜弦铁板来丁东。溪松吟风晚雨细，啄木空山鸟声碎。积雪太古萧无人，湘妃罗袜摇琼佩。鱼龙曼衍鸾风清，珠喉再转调新莺。坠如空庭杂花落，抗如百丈游丝行。凄如寒泉咽哀壑，寂如幽梦萦帘旌。呜呼！秦青不作韩娥死，曼歌绕梁竟谁是。别样新声托雅弦，幽幽合洗筝琶耳。祗今年已过碧玉，绰约芙蕖媚秋水。想见明蟾三五时，琼花压尽千桃李。济城之水清且深，红鸳比翼眠莎阴。春波摇情碧无路，浣纱日暮愁谁住。玉娘劝汝一杯酒，阳春白雪人知否？十载纷传郭密香，先朝此技推能手。生死杨花水上萍，青娥紫塞今何有。独有罗敷未嫁身，缘窗理瑟随鹦母。城南偶逐踏青队，汉上重逢赠珠后。溪水桃花今日门，瑶池朱鸟谁家牖。绝调分明沧海琴，盛名珍重章台柳。落魄江湖老钓师，济城再返旧游非。有娀北调还征曲，谢傅东山未息机。肯向雍门悲老人，不堪禅榻惜芳菲。君不见漱玉泉边春草肥，芝芙绮梦冷斜晖。蛾眉自古伤谣诼，何况知音此日稀。玉娘！玉娘！汝须毁弦息鼓刺船去，无使西风尘起沾罗衣，来日吹箫吾亦归。”
12.1st series, 6th case, vol.iii,leaves 225-237.
13.Vol. II, chuan iii, leaves 6-7 in the Shun-pao reprint. Sun Tien's notice of Little Jadeis rather perfunctory;he reserved his hearty admiration for some of her riper and more piquant contemporaries.
14．Vol．I，chuan i，15 verso（我生之辰惟乙卵）；Vol．III，chuan viii，8 recto （生年三十五）；Vol．IV，chuan xi，2 recto（四十初度）．
15.“Auf-dem-bauch-liegen vor petits fais"; cf. Nietzsches Werke (Alfred Kmener:Taschen Ausgabe),Bd XI,S,363.
16.pp.44-53 in Professor Yang's translation.
17.E.g.the prose translation under the title “The Lute-girl's Lament”in H.A. Giles's Gems of Chinese Literature, I, pp. 149-151 (2nd ed.). All the translations I have seen,from Giles's to Mr Witter Bynner's“A Song of the Guitar”,contain the same mistake of rendering an otherwise beautiful line from the corrupted,though commonly accepted,reading of it. But that is another story.
18.p.54 in Professor Yang's translation. 
 




Classical Literary Scholarship In Modern China

I am a student of the Chinese classics, and I believe I am not exaggerating out of professional bias if I say that a keen interest in her classical literature is an important aspect of the cultural life in modern China. The long queues before the Peking bookshops on the publication of a new anthology of the Tang poets,duly reported in the foreign press a few months ago, provided a good example;comparable queues to buy a reissued translation of Shakespeare's plays showed that this literary interest embraces the Westem classics too. A modern Italian philosopher used to say,“Ogni vera storia è storia contemporanea.”The classics are indeed ancient, but the interest in them and the study of them are modem, and are informed by an awareness not only of the presence,but also of the presentness of the past.
I shall not deluge you with the names of scholars and the titles of leamed publications. Times does not permit me to do so,nor does the occasion call for it. I shall limit myself to a quick overview. To overview is necessarily to overlook; the manifold delightful sights that greet a traveller on foot are invisible to the remote air-borne eye. I only hope that I am not too much mistaken in the general topography.
In modern China, that is,in China after the Liberation,the main tendency in the study of her literature is the application of Marxism to interpret and evaluate individual authors and their works and to explain the general historical development of Chinese literature. Of course, to say that the Marxist approach is the main tendency does not at all mean that it is the sole tendency in literary scholarship. Other lines of approach,non-Marxist or traditionalist, also exist;formalist analysis, impressionist appreciation, and biobibliographical research continue unabated,as can be seen from the published articles and books, but they are not representative.The impact of Marxism on classical literary scholarship has brought about profound changes.I shall mention what I take to be the two chief ones.
First,“the revolt against positivism” in classical literary scholarship,if I may avail myself of René Wellek's phrase which has the merit of both being more familiar to you and describing aptly the case. The Ching Dynasty was distinguished by a phenomenal development of meticulous philological and antiquarian scholarship loosely called pu hsueh or “plain solid learning". The prestige of pu hsueh,little affected by the dynastic fall, soard when the “scientific method" of literary study was introduced by our returned students from Europe and America. The twain, native Chinese factualism and imported Western positivism, met and each found the other kindred. In the pre-Liberation days, literary scholarship considered worthy of the name was factualist or positivist research which became almost a synonym for “scientific inquiry”. Literary criticism was treated as a pastime of the belletristic dilettanti, the soft snap for the weak sisters. The great controversy over the study of the Red Chamber Dream in 1954 was, among other things, an assault on the positivist establishment in classical studies. The futile pedantry and fanciful literal-mindedness of academic literary scholarship were the special targets. To be sure, abuse does not invalidate proper use. Biographical, historical and textual researches,far from withering away,are as vigorous and as rigorous as before, but they now play an auxiliary, albeit indispensable, role and have ceased to dominate the study of classical literature. Fussy antiquarianism and learned gossip have dwindled. For example, in the pre-Liberation days a great scholar,when discussing Po Chu-i's famous “Song of Everlasting Sorrow”,devoted much erudition and acumen to settling the question: “Was the heroine a virgo intacta when she entered the imperial harem?"-a question arguably more trivial than “What porridge had John Keats?" or “Did Pushkin smoke?" Today it is difficult to imagine that such disquisitions could once have been acclaimed as serious scholarship. Classical literary studies have now become more intelligent, but not less exact withal. At the same time,general respect for an accurate knowledge of literature has been fostered to an extent unknown before. An example ready to hand is the popular editions of oldChinese novels and plays. Our common readers now read,say the Pilgrimage to the West or the Scenes of Bureaucratic Life or the Pavilion of Peonies, in a carefully collated text, often equipped with notes.Such labour expended on editions of popular reading matter is unprecedented in China's long publishing history. The recently completed edition of the Tienty-Four Histories,of which at least six or seven are masterpiecesof prose, is also a big achievement of textual criticism.
Second,the incursion of literary theory into the study of the classics. In the past, only those Chinese who took up the study of foreign literatures felt some interest in literary theory. Generally speakng, those engaged in the study of Chinese classical literature had targets. To be sure, abuse does not invalidate proper use. Biographical, historical and textual researches,far from withering away,are as vigorous and as rigorous as before, but they now play an auxiliary, albeit indispensable, role and have ceased to dominate the study of classical literature. Fussy antiquarianism and learned gossip have dwindled. For example, in the pre-Liberation days a great scholar,when discussing Po Chu-i's famous “Song of Everlasting Sorrow”,devoted much erudition and acumen to settling the question: “Was the heroine a virgo intacta when she entered the imperial harem?"-a question arguably more trivial than “What porridge had John Keats?" or “Did Pushkin smoke?" Today it is difficult to imagine that such disquisitions could once have been acclaimed as serious scholarship. Classical literary studies have now become more intelligent, but not less exact withal. At the same time,general respect for an accurate knowledge of literature has been fostered to an extent unknown before. An example ready to hand is the popular editions of oldChinese novels and plays. Our common readers now read,say the Pilgrimage to the West or the Scenes of Bureaucratic Life or the Pavilion of Peonies, in a carefully collated text, often equipped with notes.Such labour expended on editions of popular reading matter is unprecedented in China's long publishing history. The recently completed edition of the Tienty-Four Histories,of which at least six or seven are masterpiecesof prose, is also a big achievement of textual criticism.
Second,the incursion of literary theory into the study of the classics. In the past, only those Chinese who took up the study of foreign literatures felt some interest in literary theory. Generally speakng, those engaged in the study of Chinese classical literature had no use for abstruse ideas. Complacently matter-of-fact, a literary scholar collected data, tracked down sources, noticed philological niceties,etc. He might not have openly declared with G.Berchet:“Al diavolo quelle corbellerie!”or with F.Grillparzer:“Der Teufel holle alle Theorien",but if asked, he would certainly have said:“Leave theores to the students of foreign literatures!” Even historians of Chinese criticism were more historical than critical, in other words, more factual than theoretical.With the establishment of the Marxist appproach in the study of classical literature, such“wretched, unidea'd” state of affairs has undergone a great change. The study of literary history involves the theory of the stages of social development; analysis of characters in fiction and drama involves the theory of the type;correlation of literature with reality involves the theory of Wiederspiegelung or reflection; the contradictions between the form and the content of a work, between what De Sanctis would call “il mondo intenzionale”and “il mondo effetivo",etc.-all present theoretical problems which a literary scholar can dodge only at the price of abdicating his title and function. Thus, students of Chinese classical literature have taken up the study of Marxist social and literary theory in earest as witness, in addition to the books and articles,the various large-scale discussions held on the periodization of Chinese literary history, on the typical character in fiction and drama,etc.The study has been extended also to non-Marxist theories. The latest general discussion of poetic imagery in connection with a theory adumbrated in the Book of Odes has led scholars to go far afield,to Vico's“universali fantastici” for instance. Fresh impetus is given to the study of our own ancient literary theorists; a team of scholars in Shanghai has been compiling an almost exhaustive work of loci critici. 
In spie of a number of important editions, monographs and histories, our work on the whole is desultory and inadequate. We still lack a rounded and detailed history of Chinese literature;many of our major authors and works can be read still only in imperfect and even garbled texts; very few authoritative biographies of authors and commentaries on works have been written; comprehensive bibliographies and source-books relating to literary history are wanting. The revised edition of the Complete Sung Songs is a monument of scholarship,and the Complete Tang Poetry is being revised, but the revision of both the Complete Pre-Tang Prose and the Complete Tang Prose has not yet been undertaken.These are only a few of the arduous tasks confronting us. We must also shamefacedly confess to our almost total ignorance of the valuable contributions made by foreign scholars to our subject; the ignorance is inexcusable, and, in the past few years, perhaps inevitable, but fortunately not invincible. In La letterature italiana nel secolo ottocento, the great critic De Sanctis linked Italy and China together in a rather uncomplimentary remark:“L'Italia non è la Cina per tenersi dal resto d'Europa”. Much water, however, has run under the bridges since his time, and under the Loo-kou Bridge known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge, that famous ancient monument in the outskirts of Peking,much water has likewise flown. China no longer keeps aloof from Europe. Although Marco Polo himself showed a sort of monne incuriosité about the humanities,let the bridge named after him remain the fitting symbol of the continuing traffic between the cultures of Europe and China! 




The Mutual Illumination of Italian and Chinese Literature

A big theme: some small instances

I am a student of the Chinese classics and have but the barest nodding acquaintance with Italian literature. This paper is a mere token of esteem on the part of a guest to the learned host and also an expression of my fervent hope for closer cultural relationship betwen Italy and China. It does not tell you about modern China, which is the subject of the present conference, but it perhaps can do something just as useful. It may serve, in a humble way, to illustrate an aspect of the cultural life in moder China, namely,the lively all-embracing interest in world literature and the everwidening study of Chinese as well as Western classics including Italian. As a famous Italian philosopher used to say:“Ogni vera storia è storia contemporanea.”The classics are indeed ancient, but such interest and study is modem; it is cultural phenomenon in China today.
In his La letteratura italiana nel secolo XIX,the great critic De Sanctis linked Italy and China togetherin a rather uncomplimentary remark:“L'Italia non é la Cina per ternersi dal resto d'Europa.”Much water,however,has run under the bridges since then, and under the Marco Polo Brige, the famous ancient monument in the outskirts of Peking, much water has likewise flown. Italy no longer holds herself aloof even from China; Italian scholars have made extensive and valuable contributions to Chinese studies, and we on our part have been making steady,albeit slow, advance in the knowledge of Italian thought and letters. Although Marco Polo himself showed a sort of morne incuriosité abut the humanities and the life of the mind in China,let the bridge named after him remain the fitting symbol of the continuing traffic between our two old and yet ever-young civilizations!
In the course of studying a foreign literature, one experiences a gamut of emotions. Not the least of them is a pleasurable“shock of recognition". In a national literature which apparently never hadany truck with the literature of one's own tongue,one often unexpectedly lights upon certain close parallels or similarities to the techniques, themes, dramatic situations and doctrinal formulations found in the literature of one's own country. One has the feeling of seeing a familiar face in a strange land. In affective tone, it is not unlike the literary experience summed up by Do Sanctis in the words, “Ecco una vecchia conoscenza!”in his masterly essay on Hugo's poems. Such parallels and similarities may be due to a common historical source or they may simply exemplify a meeting of minds. At any rate, they are intriguing and instructive, enhancing our understanding and enriching our appreciation. At the beginning of the present century, the German scholar Oskar Walzel,in an influential book, coined the term“die Wechselseitige Erhellung der Kiinste."Even as there is the "mutual illumination of the arts”, there is a mutual illumination of national literatures. And parallels and similarties have at least the value of rushlights in such mutual illumination.
For a verbal example. One of Machiavelli's basic ideas is the so-called“il contrasto famoso Foruna-Virtù”. Both Mo Ti, a great Chinese thinker and logician of the third century B.C.,and the pseudo-Lie Yu-kou,a subtle Taoist mystic of the early fourth century, have given eloquent expressions to the same “contrast".There is nothing strangein that; the views have their common roots in the condition humaine. The interesting point is that the Machiavellian virtù,which has bedevilled translators, finds its exact equivalent in the terminology of the two ancient Chinese philosophers. To min (fortune) they contrasted li,i.e.force or qiáng,i.e.strength,in fact virtù in the Machiavellian sense. Take another example, noticed by R. Petrucci long ago. Leonado da Vinci advised painters that as a help to the “invention of some scene" they should look at walls with many stains or stones of mixed colours to find there “resemblances to various landscapes". A famous eleventh-century Chinese painter Sung Ti suggested the same thing to his star pupil, with the difference that he confined the source of inspiration to a dilapidated wall (see Shen Kuo, Méng Chi Pi Tan or Jottings by the Dreaming Brook,Bk 17).The style of painting of the Song dynasty and that of the Italian Renaissance are wide apart. The identity of approach in artistic incubation is all the more striking because of the divesity of execution in the actual artifacts.
Carducci once said in a characteristic outburst: "Con la meticolosità e la puntigliosità che portiamo anche nelle piccolezze, noi fiorentini saremo forse i cinesi d'Italia." Unabashed by this reproach of the Chinese failing of preoccupation with trifles,I venture to give two more small instances.
There is a story variously told by St John of Damascus and Caesarius von Heisterbach and in the Cento novelle antiche. Its best-known version is found in Boccaccio's II decamerone, giomata quarta, “Introduzione". Filippo Balducci,on the death of his wife, became a kind of dropout and lived with his child son in hilly wilderness away from all human contacts. When the boy was eighteen years old, Filippo took him on a trip to town. Everything the boy saw on the way was to him a novelty, and he asked his father about the names and uses of horses,cows,houses.etc. Some pretty well-dressed girls happened to cross their path. The boy was naturally curious over them,but the father forbade him to look at them, saying sterly:“Elle son mala cosa.Elle si chiamano pápere.”When they returned home,the father asked the son about his impression of what he had seen in the day.The son answered that all things except one left him cold:“io vi priego che vi facciate che io abbia una di quelle pápere.” In a collection ofshort tales by the eighteenth-century Chinese poet Yuan Mei,who,I believe, was first made known in Europe under his courtesy name Yuan Tseu-ts'ai by an early French sinologue, Camille Imbault-Heart, we read:"The abbot of the historic Buddhist monastery on the Wu Tai Mountain took in a child of three as a novice bonze. After a lapse of about ten years, the abbot made of his rare descents from the mountain,taking the young monk as his companion. Having never left the monastery before, the boy was insatiably curious and inquisitive even about the dogs and chickens. A young girl passed by and he asked:'What is that?' The master looked very grave, saying: 'Beware! Tiger is the name of that thing.Anyone who approaches it will be eaten up clean!'Back at the monastery,the abbot asked the boy:'Among all the things you saw down there, what pleases you most?''I can not take my mind off the man-eating tiger!' was the prompt reply"(Hsin Chi Asie or New Strange Tales . 2nd series.Bk 2; of an old commentator's note to the story" Green Plum in Liao Chai Chi Yi or Stories from the Pastime Studio. Variorum ed., Bk 7).The story has been called “the second oldest in the world", but its appearance in Chinese literature is curiously late. Incidentally,the story may well serve as a parable for the predicament in which literary critics have often found themselves: fascination by works which they know they ought to repudiate- the kind of predicament naively admitted by Brunetière only to be mocked by Croce in La Poeisa.
An ancient Chinese anecdote has become proverbial down the ages. Kung Jung, a distinguished writer of the third century, was a precocious boy. At ten, i.e., at most nine according to Western count,he asked for an audience with a high mandarin. His ready wit astonished and delighted all the people present.A late comer was told the conversational feats of the child prodigy, and he chillingly commented: “A bright lad as a rule grows into a dulard."Kung Jung said without hesitation:"Juging by your remark, sir,you must have been a bright lad"(Hou Han Shu or The Book of the Later Han Dynasty, Bk 70; cf. Shi Shuo Hsrinyu or Well-knoun Anecdotes, ch.2). You all know the riposte of a clever Florentine boy of ten recorded in Poggie' s Liber facetiarum.Cardinal Angelotto observed: “Children,such as this, who are talented and learned at a young age, become dull-witted when they grow older; and by the time they are old they turn stupid."Whereupon the boy said:“There is no doubt that when you were a boy, you must have been the wisest of all."A similar retort is recorded in Sacchetti's Il trecentonovelle, No.67. Worsted in a verbal encounter by a boy,Messer Valore tried to retrieve his lost face and proclaimed to the bystanders:“E'non fu mai nessun fanciullo savio da piccolino, che non fusse pazzo da grande.”The boy answered:“In fé di Dio,gentiluomo, voi dovest' essere un savio fantolino.”The Chinese and Italian stories bear a twin-like resemblance to each other. Could there have been a hitherto undiscoverd connecting link between them? Or is it just a matter of similar responses to similar challenges? Here is some food for thought and, I should say, not a little fodder for dissertations.
There are bound to be numerous such instances awaiting notice and demanding explanation. They all reward study and can more or less contribute to the mutual illumination of our two national literatures, an illumination certainly different from “l'illuminazione di Pret Cuio che con di molti lumi facea buio”. 




Appendix I: A Letter to Donald Stuart

28,Avenue Laplace
Arcueil(Seine)
France
12,iii,1938

My Dear Stuart,
We are overjoyed at your generously long letter.We have been rather worried about you since your reticent Xmas card from Spain. We thought that your indignation at the Fascist terrors might have made you join the Spanish Republican army on leaving Oxford.In that case,the world would certainly gain a hero, but we might(O horrible thought!) lose a friend. You can imagine our relief to hear from you again.
We are very,very sorry indeed to hear about your viva. We do hope that it will not be prejudicial to your chances of getting a job.As your favorite Walter Raleigh used to say, Oxford final schools and the Last Judgement are to examinations,not one. You are quite right to take the whole thing lightly.
We shall be here for another four or five months yet. My scholarship expires this August,and we shall sail home in September.Not that we have homes to retumn to! Our houses, spared by the shell-fire,have been looted and gutted of all their valuable contents. Our respective famiies have taken refuge in mountains honeycombed with bandits.My wife lost her mother, and I myself have no prospect whatsoever of getting decent jobs in China. Still, one's lot is with one's own people; I don't mind roughing it a bit. The revolution of the Fortune's wheel might bring us up, and, as Goethe was fond of saying, abwarten Sie. You see,I spare you my patriotic heroics.
Yes,my clairvoyant Stuart, I have been working entirely on my own.I have tried to read French literature systematically downwards, beginning with Villon,and already got as far as the mid-nineteenth century.I have also laboriously tackled the German romantics.I am reading Taine's novel Graindorge and Novalis's Fragmente . Besides, I have not neglected my English and Chinese studies. I am reading no,I am not going to tell you my reading debauches. This paragraph reads already like a snippet from that model letter of a schoolboy to his parents (“or parent according to circumstances") in Anstey's Vice Versa.
The baby is burstingly fat. She already boasts of six teeth(each tooth meaning a week or so of worries and sleeplessness on her part as well our own). She is very naughty and mutinous and self-willed, altogether an ugly customer to deal with. She will be able to walk a little next month.
You are a disquieting feller,my dear Stuart. You always give me the impression of some impendingcatastrophe. Why this sudden “treachery”to your“former interests”? You seem to have a goût trop facilement dégoûté.Your mind seems to slough its idea as frequently as the snakes their skins. No doubt you will call me smug and incorrigible.Do keep me abreast of your latest developments. 
My wife sends you her best wishes, to which I say ditto.Write to me at your earliest convenience.
yours ever,
Chung-shu Tch'ien
P.S.My wife wants me to tell you that the baby is really “her father's daughter".She loves nothing so much as books-to tear and nibble at, certainly not to read. She has already destroyed a German primer, not to mention innumerable tradesmen's circulars and booklets.She throws away her toys to grab at the books we happen to be reading.




Appendix II: Information Provided by G. Dudbridge

CH'IEN CHUNG-SHU...
matriculated into Oxford University in Michaelmas Term 1935.
listed as a commoner of Exeter College;the college magazine-The Stapeldon Magazine vol. VIII, under Michaelmas Term 1935,gives as his home university "the National Tsing-hua University,Peking,China"(p.526).
-his B. Litt. thesis,“China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries", is in the Bodleian Library,cat. no. MS B. Litt. d. 288. It contains vi, 235 leaves. The preface is dated April 1937; it includes acknowledgements to Ch'ien's supervisor, H.F.B. Brett-Smith(then University Reader in English Literature,died around 1950-51), to Hsiang Tà (who was then in Oxford), and to a fellow B.Litt. student with whom he had many discussions, Donald Duncan Stuart (also of Exeter; matriculated same year; now Associate Professorin English Language and Literature, Memorial University of Newfoundland,St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada).The Stapeldon Magazine for 1936-37 contains several poems by Stuart,but nothing by Ch'ien. 

- it will be possible to disregard technicalities of copyright and permission in getting this thesis photocopied. Payment is expected in advance. (A list of current rates is enclosed.) If you wish a copy to be made,for instance on microfilm,please let me know: I can then supply the initial stages of the business with the help of a friend in the Bodleian. He will then send you a completed application form for signature, together with a bill,and the copying can then proceed.
- I have recently discovered (although you may well know this already) that the painting used for the cover illustration in the 晨光文学业书 edition of Wei-ch＇eng-Pissarro＇s 'Ennui'-is in Oxford, in the Ashmolean Museum. It seems quite likely that Ch'ien knew this work and suggested its use.
I see, however,that C.T.Hsia,in his History of Modern Chinese Fiction p.642, gives references for the published version of both parts of this thesis.

in a subsequent letter, G. Dudbridge corrects this-the painting is not by Pissarro, but by another painter and it was acquired by the Ashmolean oe or two years after Ch'ien's departure from Oxford.




Appendix III: A Speech by Qian Zhongshu

Ladies and Gentlemen:
At the begnning of last year, upon having the honor of being elected as the chairman of our class,I protested that I would make a mess of the whole business and a damn fool of myself. Out of sheer kindness, you would not let me resign. And you have witnessed wat a delinquent,negligent and inefficient duffer I have been as a chairman. If anything was done in the last year, it was done through the co-operative effort of or class officers among whom Miss Tsiang,Mr. Kang,Mr.Yao and Mr.Wan call for special mention, and I was,to my infinite shame, a mere roi faineant. I, therefore beg to tender to our classmates in general my sincerest apologies and to these officers in particular my heartfelt gratitude. I cannot be too thankful for your indulgence towards me, but the very fact that I was successively unsuccessful in calling up meetings shows plainly, as goes the common parlance,“where I stand.”
With the opening of a new year, my term expires. In accordance with our constitution which, like that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, enjoys the dubious advantage of being an unwritten one,a new election of officers ought to take place. In view of the eventfulness of this last year of our college life, a thoroughly competent chairman- or, for that matter,a chairwoman-shold especially be installed in my stead. A class meeting is to be held in room No. 8, 3rd Court at 8 p.m.on next Tuesday (Sept.20) for this purpose. As my private affairs might call me away from the school for a week or two,the sooner we call this thing done, the better. All class members are implored to turn out.
I remain,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Your obedient though undutiful servant,
Ch'ien Chung-shu
IX,XVI, MCMXXXII
（即1932年9月16日）




Appendix IV: Opening Address to the First Sino-American Symposium on Comparative Literature

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Allow me to extend, on behalf of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,a warm welcome to you to the symposium of American and Chinese comparatists. This conference, sponsored by the Institute of Foreign Literature and the Institute of Literature in my Academy in conjunction with the American Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People's Republic of China,is the first ever of its kind held here.Although there always has to be a first time,yet considering the significance of the present occasion for future Sino-American dialogues on our discipline, we may perhaps flatter ourselves that we are not only establishing a record, but also, in a modest and unspectacular way, making history.
If we take T. S. Eliot's remark for what it's worth, the literary relationship between the United States and China should be particularly close.He, so to speak, issued to Ezra Pound a patent of "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time". Once Chinese literature was “invented”, American scholars with characteristic acumen and energy have been conscientiously and steadily discovering it. A similar state of affairs obtains here. Early Chinese translators and writers, in their fashion,“invented" European and American literature, and our professional students have since set about industriously discovering it. To all appearances,discovery is a task far more onerous and arduous than invention. It betrays, I am afraid, Chinese backwoodsmanship to talk as if there were a hard and fast distinction between invention and discovery.Now that the Saussurian dictum,“c'est le point de vue qui crée l'objet”, has been widely embraced in the West as an open invitation to invent and intuit in reading and interpreting literary texts, the distinction between the two has presumably become one without much difference.
This conference will serve a twofold purpose: comparing the literature and,inevitably,comparing the comparatists,i.e.comparing the American comparatists'way or ways with the wayor ways of their Chinese opposite numbers. Thus, the conference itself may be considered an object lesson in cultural diversity and contextual relativism. There are proverbially many ways of skinning a cat or dressing a calf's head. Are there also many different ways of comparing the literature? At any rate, the meetings of scholars to discuss literary problems are unlike the meetings of, say, diplomatists to negotiate military pacts or commercial treaties.At meetings of our sort, perfect agreement is not so essential, nor perhaps is it entirely desirable.The participants need not be in unison and are reasonably content with something like concordia discors. Unison, after all,may very well be not only a synonym of, but also a euphemism for,monotony.
I started with a rather inflatedclaim for ourselves as makers of history;In recent years, it seems to have been a fashion among American and British critics to adopt the eschatological view of history and harp on “the sense of ending”. I firmly believe, however,that the present company all share a buoyant sense of beginning with a long vista of many such Sino-American symposiums to come,symposiums which will progressively count more participants, range over wider fields,and approach nearer the ideal meeting of true minds.