Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/353

there is another and far deeper reason for want of individuality in Chinese plays—the family system upon which the social life of China rests. It might even seem at first glance that the Chinese, like the early Roman, family should have been fatal to the rise of any drama of character. But the old Roman familia, with its patria potestas, children under power, perpetual tutelage of women, presented for a long time more serious obstacles to the development of personal freedom and individuality of character than the Chinese system, modified as it was by the principle of election to public offices as well as by State examination. But, though the Chinese family did not prevent the rise of a drama, it has certainly left its marks deep on almost all Chinese plays. Such marks are to be seen in the constant injunction of family virtues and the limitation of character-drawing to the virtues or vices of family life. To select a few examples, the plot of Tchao-meï-hiang turns upon the proper celebration of marriage rites; that of Ho-han-chan upon the fortunes of a family wrecked by an ungrateful impostor; that of Ho-lang-tan upon the ruin of a family by the intrigues of a courtesan; that of Pi-pa-ki upon the filial devotion of a daughter-in-law in days of famine. Indeed, so perpetually are we reminded of the formal and spiritual presence of the family in Chinese plays, that the dramatis personæ are always careful to announce the name of the family to which they belong. One effect of the Chinese family upon the drama deserves particular attention. The ancestral worship of the family, in which the representation of deceased ancestors by living persons was itself an infant drama, seems to have materialised and familiarised the associations of the spiritual world to a degree we can but faintly realise. The Koueï-men ("Ghosts' Gate") of the Chinese