LITERATURE.
Scope and quality.
THE enthusiasm of Sir William Jones, when the treasures of the Sanscrit began to reveal themselves a hundred years ago, was more than equalled by that with which Abel Remusat, fifty years later, opened the critical study of the still more remote literature of China. His glowing description of this immense product of forty centuries, "this eloquence and poetry, enriched by the beauty of a picturesque language, which preserves to imagination all its colors," has in one respect certainly failed to be sustained by later research. Chinese literature appeals to the imagination by its amount, but makes little use of this faculty in its constructions. A defective sense of the infinite excludes it from the sphere of sublimity. Such mental attitudes as depend on personal isolation, and on that sustained self-abandonment to awe and wonder which routine and prescription forbid, are here scarcely possible. The Chinese eye is too close to concrete things to get perspective or background of space. This brain is too absorbed in details to confront the vast problems of the free reason, or to dwell in mysteries insoluble by the practical understanding. This distinction of the Yellow Race from the Aryan and the Shemite is the more wonderful, when we consider what it has accomplished in spite of its inferior contemplative power. The practical achievements found packed in these stiff, isolated signs, in this apparently stammering speech, make a marvel as startling as any enchantment of an Arabian tale.
signifi-cance.
Still more impressive is the continued fertility of a force that lacks the highest elements of creative power. Here is no monumental literature, dependent on pyramid, tomb, or temple to hoard it up for ages beyond its natural life: the record is trusted to tissues whose evanescence is as close as possible to that of the spoken word. Its circulation, for all it seems to lack ethereal qualities, has grown wider and swifter with time, and it has freely assimilated with all social elements. It is the literature of a race still pregnant, in full possession of its peculiar gifts and its past achievements. After forty centuries of a strange experience, it has opened out from unpromising shells of graphic art and the stranger speech of three hundred millions of living souls upon the latest civilization of the globe, like the apparition of a fresh zone of continents, or of a planetary race : to us a new attitude of man ; a new form of genius, a type deficient in the qualities hitherto held by our traditional culture to be indispensable, yet coinciding with a tendency that is now assuming large proportions in the Occidental mind; an unsolicited comment thereon, enhanced by its age, its mass, its variety, its historical weight, and, we may add, its orderly structure and normal growth.
Resources.
The time has obviously not come for a thorough study of the colossal theme ; but the resources already at our command comprise, beyond question, its most typical forms and forces. It would be from our purpose, were it in our power, to enter into the elaborate catalogues and critical analyses of Wylie and Schott. No such items could yield any definite idea of the spirit of this race of penmen ; though the mere list of titles and divisions of books we cannot yet read leave a vague sense of immensity and variety not without its charm or its use. Suffice it here to say of the whole that this cabala of signs is a perfect die by which the whole land and people has put itself into the form of written record, and that this record includes every description of secular memorial known to our own experience, elaborated by age after age of utilizing effort. Of this systematic and all-embracing construction for practical uses, Cyclopædias the Cyclopædia is of course always, there as here, the crowning result; and its compilation is a source of fame which emperors may well have coveted. The true imperial immortality may be said to consist in collecting libraries and securing the services of scholars like Ma-touan-lin and Sse-ma-thsian; sometimes in even presiding, like Kang-hi and Kien-lung, over the whole process of literary enterprises that vie in vastness with the dreams of Mongol world-conquerors, and infinitely surpass them in success. That a still intenser elaboration is applied to the language itself appears from the sixty dictionaries enumerated by Wylie; and prodigious stores of mathematical and astronomical data testify to the patient struggles of this people to master even those sciences for which they had no such natural gifts as the star-gazing races of Assyria and Egypt.
Anthologies go back to the sixth century; and have once flowered out into Anthologies a collection of fifty thousand poems from a single dynasty, upon which two thousand compilers were employed. Where every feature in literature is colossal, we are not surprised at the mountains of commentation that are said to have been piled, during single epochs, upon the songs of more living ages that preceded them. Forms of ethical literature are exhausted; and it may suggest thankfulness that the difficulty of mastering the language is likely to save us from the sudden avalanche of didactics which the nibs of busy pens might bring upon our heads. But these snows from Chinese mountains would at least be immeasurably purer than the mud streams that pour from great sluices of the Western press. And if the vast record is a monument of patience rather than of genius, it is at least not the dead handwork of millions, directed by priesthood and caste, but the spontaneous life of a people.
The revival of letters (150 b.c.) after the downfall of the Extent of T'siu was the pivot, not of this whole literary his- Revl^dof ^^^y ^^^y^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ national life of China; since. Letters. it assured that supremacy of the literary class which is her motive force. Out of that purgation by fire arose the ethical and historical writings of Confucius in their enduring form. The history of their recovery will not be related here. It is evident, however, that the fires of T'sin were far from effectual in any department. The Catalogue of the Han revival gives systematic report of thirteen thousand works recovered or gathered in all branches, comprising those of nearly two hundred schools in philosophy, discussing many of our own problems in civil and social science, as well as covering the astrological and divinatory systems which the developed fetichism of the nation had produced. Pan-kou, the compiler, a rationalist of the thinking classes, was not only without faith in these latter systems, but mourns over the degeneracy of his time amidst the wealth he records ; over careless habits of study, and neglect of the sages. He describes the nine leading schools as a reunion of sick people waiting a physician in a desert. This longing for the past is in the ordinary tone of Oriental philosophers, and no more conclusive against the value of the age he represents than the dissatisfaction of a modern critic whose eye is on an ideal future.
Nothing can be more characteristic than his comments Pan-kou's ^u poctry, of which his lists could show thirteen Report. hundred books and a hundred schools. His studies taught him that he was living in a poor prosaic age, and he longed for the old days when the missives between States were couched in verse, and statesmen fell into disgrace when they did not put high imagery enough into their documents. Had not Confucius taught that the best study for a public man was the Book of Odes, and that a noble style was impossible to one not versed therein? Alas ! wise men no longer used a metaphoric style vivid as the picture-signs ; the poet's song was empty and diffuse, and told neither the feeling nor the life of the people. Notwithstanding this plaintive strain, in which Pan-kou did but follow Confucius, there is development in Chinese literature. It is shown especially in the tendency to evolve and distribute the elements of social good.
A brief sketch of the literary qualities of successive epochs will perhaps make this evident. The Literary History of China. Ethical Epoch Tcheou dynasty (i 112-256 B.C.) was the long and stormy genesis of natural ethics, transmitting the Ethical eternal lessons and appeals of Confucius, Mencius, and Lao-tse. The Han (200 B.C.- 220 a.c.) gathered up the past into an epoch of historians. Here belong the classic catalogues ; that vast cyclopædia, the Sse-ki, covering fifteen hundred years ; the reconstruction of the recovered books ; the invention of paper, and the compilation of the old "root characters" for the better transmission of thought. A period of Tartar torpor followed in the north : but several southern dynasties collected large libraries, and the " Millenary Classic " was composed, spreading ancient examples before the children of the people to promote their love of knowledge ; and then, after the Sui had prepared the way by reuniting the nation, and put the old treasures into more attractive forms of writing, came a fresh age of lyric poetry, the immortal days of the T'ang Lyrical epoch. (618-907),—the days when the State carried peaceful sway out into the west of Asia, and learning bloomed within. History now began to be epitomized;[1] the literary examinations were fully organized, the Han-lin installed at Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/472 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/473 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/474 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/475 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/476 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/477 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/478 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/479 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/480 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/481 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/482 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/483 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/484 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/485 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/486 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/487 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/488 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/489 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/490 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/491 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/492 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/493 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/494 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/495 Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/496 Think reasonably, be strong for virtue, lean on humanity, and in all things be content. Judge not by appearance: the sea cannot be scooped up in a tumbler. The wise questions himself, the foolish others.
When the prince goes to school, he is like other boys. The highest official is subject to the law. Whoso is too subservient to masters will reap shame. A good subject cannot serve two masters: lay not two saddles on one horse. A minister who fears death will not be faithful.
- ↑ Schott, p. 72.