6: Literature and Education
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The Chinese people reverence above all things literature and learning;
they hate war, bearing in mind the saying of Mencius, "There is no
such thing as a righteous war; we can only assert that some wars are
better than others;" and they love trade and the finesse of the
market-place. China can boast many great soldiers, in modern as well
as in ancient days; but anything like a proper appreciation of the
military arm is of quite recent growth. "Good iron is not used for
nails, nor good men for soldiers," says the proverb; and again, "One
stroke of the civilian's pen reduces the military official to abject
submission." On the other hand, it is admitted that "Civilians give
the empire peace, and soldiers give it security."
Chinese parents have never, until recent days, willingly trained their
sons for the army. They have always wished their boys to follow the
stereotyped literary curriculum, and then, after passing successfully
through the great competitive examinations, to rise to high civil
office in the state. A good deal of ridicule has been heaped of late
on the Chinese competitive examination, the subjects of which were
drawn exclusively from the Confucian Canon, and included a knowledge
of ancient history, of a comprehensive scheme of morality, initiated
by Confucius, and further elaborated by Mencius (372-289 B.C.), of the
ballads and ceremonial rites of three thousand years ago, and of an
aptitude for essay-writing and the composition of verse. The whole
curriculum may be fitly compared with such an education as was given
to William Pitt and others among our own great statesmen, in which an
ability to read the Greek and Roman classics, coupled with an intimate
knowledge of the Peloponnesian War, carried the student about as far
as it was considered necessary for him to go. The Chinese course, too,
has certainly brought to the front in its time a great many eminent
men, who have held their own in diplomacy, if not in warfare, with the
subtlest intellects of the West.
Their system of competitive examinations has indeed served the Chinese
well. It is the brightest spot in the whole administration, being
absolutely above suspicion, such as attaches to other departments of
the state. Attempts have been made from time to time to gain admission
by improper means to the list of successful candidates, and it would
be absurd to say that not one has ever succeeded; the risk, however,
is too great, for the penalty on detection may be death.
The ordeal itself is exceedingly severe, as well for the examiners as
for the candidates. At the provincial examinations, held once in every
third year, an Imperial Commissioner, popularly known as the Grand
Examiner, is sent down from Peking. On arrival, his residence is
formally sealed up, and extraordinary precautions are taken to prevent
friends of intending candidates from approaching him in any way. There
is no age limit, and men of quite mature years are to be found
competing against youths hardly out of their teens; indeed, there is
an authenticated case of a man who successfully graduated at the age
of seventy-two. Many compete year after year, until at length they
decide to give it up as a bad job.
At an early hour on the appointed day the candidates begin to
assemble, and by and by the great gates of the examination hall are
thrown open, and heralds shriek out the names of those who are to
enter. Each one answers in turn as his name is called, and receives
from the attendants a roll of paper marked with the number of the open
cell he is to occupy in one of the long alleys into which the
examination hall is divided. Other writing materials, as well as food,
he carries with him in a basket, which is always carefully searched at
the door, and in which "sleeve" editions of the classics have
sometimes been found. When all have taken their seats, the Grand
Examiner burns incense, and closes the entrance gates, through which
no one will be allowed to pass, either in or out, dead or alive, until
the end of the third day, when the first of the three sessions is at
an end, and the candidates are released for the night. In case of
death, not unusual where ten or twelve thousand persons are cooped up
day and night in a confined space, the corpse is hoisted over the
wall; and this would be done even if it were that of the Grand
Examiner himself, whose place would then be taken by the chief
Assistant Examiner, who is also appointed by the Emperor, and
accompanies the Grand Examiner from Peking.
The long strain of three bouts of three days each has often been found
sufficient to unhinge the reason, with a variety of distressing
consequences, the least perhaps of which may be seen in a regular
percentage of blank papers handed in. On one occasion, a man handed in
a copy of his last will and testament; on another, not very long ago,
the mental balance of the Grand Examiner gave way, and a painful scene
ensued. He tore up a number of the papers already handed in, and bit
and kicked every one who came near him, until he was finally secured
and bound hand and foot in his chair. A candidate once presented
himself dressed in woman's clothes, with his face highly rouged and
powdered, as is the custom. He was arrested at the entrance gate, and
quietly sent home to his friends.
Overwork, in the feverish desire to get into the Government service,
is certainly responsible for the mental break-down of a large
proportion of the comparatively few lunatics found in China. There
being no lunatic asylums in the empire, it is difficult to form
anything like an exact estimate of their number; it can only be said,
what is equally true of cripples or deformed persons, that it is very
rare to meet them in the streets or even to hear of their existence.
As a further measure of precaution against corrupt practices at
examinations, the papers handed in by the candidates are all copied
out in red ink, and only these copies are submitted to the examiners.
The difficulty therefore of obtaining favourable treatment, on the
score of either bribery or friendship, is very much increased. The
Chinese, who make no attempt to conceal or excuse, in fact rather
exaggerate any corruption in their public service generally, do not
hesitate to declare with striking unanimity that the conduct of their
examination system is above suspicion, and there appears to be no
valid reason why we should not accept this conclusion.
The whole system is now undergoing certain modifications, which, if
wisely introduced, should serve only to strengthen the national
character. The Confucian teachings, which are of the very highest
order of morality, and which have moulded the Chinese people for so
many centuries, helping perhaps to give them a cohesion and stability
remarkable among the nations of the world, should not be lightly cast
aside. A scientific training, enabling us to annihilate time and
space, to extend indefinitely the uses and advantages of matter in all
its forms, and to mitigate the burden of suffering which is laid upon
the greater portion of the human race, still requires to be
effectively supplemented by a moral training, to teach man his duty
towards his neighbour. From the point of view of science, the Chinese
are, of course, wholly out of date, though it is only within the past
hundred and fifty years that the West has so decisively outstripped
the East. If we go back to the fifteenth century, we shall find that
the standard of civilization, as the term is usually understood, was
still much higher in China than in Europe; while Marco Polo, the
famous Venetian traveller of the thirteenth century, who actually
lived twenty-four years in China, and served as an official under
Kublai Khan, has left it on record that the magnificence of Chinese
cities, and the splendour of the Chinese court, outrivalled anything
he had ever seen or heard of.
Pushing farther back into antiquity, we easily reach a time when the
inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom "held learning in high esteem, while
our own painted forefathers were running naked and houseless in the
woods, and living on berries and raw meat." In inventive, mechanical
and engineering aptitudes the Chinese have always excelled; as witness
—only to mention a few—the art of printing (see below); their
water-wheels and other clever appliances for irrigation; their
wonderful bridges (not to mention the Great Wall); the "taxicab," or
carriage fitted with a machine for recording the distance traversed,
the earliest notice of which takes us back to the fourth century A.D.;
the system of fingerprints for personal identification, recorded in
the seventh century A.D.; the carved ivory balls which contain even so
many as nine or ten other balls, of diminishing size, one within
another; a chariot carrying a figure which always pointed south,
recorded as in existence at a very early date, though unfortunately
the specifications which have came down to us from later dates will
not work out, as in the case of the "taxicab." The story goes that
this chariot was invented about 1100 B.C., by a wonderful hero of the
day, in order to enable an ambassador, who had come to the court of
China from a far distant country in the south, to find his way
expeditiously home. The compass proper the Chinese cannot claim; it
was probably introduced into China by the Arabs at a comparatively
late date, and has been confused with the south-pointing chariot of
earlier ages. As to gunpowder, something of that nature appears to
have been used for fireworks in the seventh century; and something of
the nature of a gun is first heard of during the Mongol campaigns of
the thirteenth century; but firearms were not systematically employed
until the fifteenth century. Add to the above the art of casting
bronze, brought to a high pitch of excellence seven or eight centuries
before the Christian era, if not earlier; the production of silk,
mentioned by Mencius (372-289 B.C.) as necessary for the comfort of
old age; the cultivation of the tea-plant from time immemorial; also
the discovery and manufacture of porcelain some sixteen centuries ago,
subsequently brought to a perfection which leaves all European
attempts hopelessly out-classed.
In many instances the Chinese seem to have been so near and yet so
far. There is a distinct tradition of flying cars at a very remote
date; and rough woodcuts have been handed down for many centuries,
showing a car containing two passengers, flying through the clouds and
apparently propelled by wheels of a screw pattern, set at right angles
to the direction in which the travellers are proceeding. But there is
not a scrap of evidence to show what was the motive power which turned
the wheels. Similarly, iron ships are mentioned in Chinese literature
so far back as the tenth century, only, however, to be ridiculed as an
impossibility; the circulation of the blood is hinted at; added to
which is the marvellous anticipation of anaesthetics as applied to
surgery, to be mentioned later on, an idea which also remained barren
of results for something like sixteen centuries, until Western science
stepped in and secured the prize. Here it may be fairly argued that,
considering the national repugnance to mutilation of the body in any
form, it could hardly be expected that the Chinese would seek to
facilitate a process to which they so strongly object.
In the domain of painting, we are only just beginning to awake to the
fact that in this direction the Chinese have reached heights denied to
all save artists of supreme power, and that their art was already on a
lofty level many centuries before our own great representatives had
begun to put brush to canvas. Without going so far back as the famous
picture in the British Museum, by an artist of the fourth and fifth
centuries A.D., the point may perhaps be emphasized by quotation from
the words of a leading art-critic, referring to painters of the tenth
and eleventh centuries:—"To the Sung artists and poets, mountains
were a passion, as to Wordsworth. The landscape art thus founded, and
continued by the Japanese in the fifteenth century, must rank as the
greatest school of landscape which the world has seen. It is the
imaginative picturing of what is most elemental and most august in
Nature—liberating visions of storm or peace among abrupt peaks,
plunging torrents, trembling reed-beds—and though having a fantastic
side for its weakness, can never have the reproach of pretty tameness
and mere fidelity which form too often the only ideal of Western
landscape."
Great Chinese artists unite in dismissing fidelity to outline as of
little importance compared with reproduction of the spirit of the
object painted. To paint a tree successfully, it is necessary to
produce not merely shape and colour but the vitality and "soul" of the
original. Until with the last two or three centuries, nature itself
was always appealed to as the one source of true inspiration; then
came the artist of the studio, since which time Chinese art has
languished, while Japanese art, learned at the feet of Chinese artists
from the fourteenth century onwards, has come into prominent notice,
and is now, with extraordinary versatility, attempting to assimilate
the ideals of the West.
The following words were written by a Chinese painter of the fifth
century:—
"To gaze upon the clouds of autumn, a soaring exaltation in the soul;
to feel the spring breeze stirring wild exultant thoughts;—what is
there in the possession of gold and gems to compare with delights like
these? And then, to unroll the portfolio and spread the silk, and to
transfer to it the glories of flood and fell, the green forest, the
blowing winds, the white water of the rushing cascade, as with a turn
of the hand a divine influence descends upon the scene. . . . These
are the joys of painting."
Just as in poetry, so in pictorial art, the artist avoids giving full
expression to his theme, and leaving nothing for the spectator to
supply by his own imaginative powers. "Suggestion" is the key-note to
both the above arts; and in both, "Impressionism" has been also at the
command of the gifted, centuries before the term had passed into the
English language.
Literature and art are indeed very closely associated in China. Every
literary man is supposed to be more or less a painter, or a musician
of sorts; failing personal skill, it would go without saying that he
was a critic, or at the lowest a lover, of one or the other art, or of
both. All Chinese men, women and children seem to love flowers; and
the poetry which has gathered around the blossoms of plum and almond
alone would form a not inconsiderable library of itself. Yet a
European bouquet would appear to a man of culture as little short of a
monstrosity; for to enjoy flowers, a Chinaman must see only a single
spray at a time. The poorly paid clerk will bring with him to his
office in the morning some trifling bud, which he will stick into a
tiny vase of water, and place beside him on his desk. The owner of
what may be a whole gallery of pictures will invite you to tea,
followed by an inspection of his treasures; but on the same afternoon
he will only produce perhaps a single specimen, and scout the idea
that any one could call for more. If a long landscape, it will be
gradually unwound from its roller, and a portion at a time will be
submitted for the enjoyment and criticism of his visitors; if a
religious or historical picture, or a picture of birds or flowers, of
which the whole effort must be viewed in its completeness, it will be
studied in various senses, during the intervals between a chat and a
cup of tea. Such concentration is absolutely essential, in the eyes of
the Chinese critic, to a true interpretation of the artist's meaning,
and to a just appreciation of his success.
The marvellous old stories of grapes painted by Zeuxis of ancient
Greece, so naturally that birds came to peck at them; and of the
curtain painted by Parrhasius which Zeuxis himself tried to pull
aside; and of the horse by Apelles at which another horse neighed—all
these find their counterparts in the literature of Chinese art. One
painter, in quite early days, painted a perch and hung it over a river
bank, when there was immediately a rush of otters to secure it.
Another painted the creases on cotton clothes so exactly that the
clothes looked as if they had just come from the wash. Another
produced pictures of cats which would keep a place free from rats. All
these efforts were capped by those of another artist, whose picture of
the North Wind made people feel cold, while his picture of the South
Wind made people feel hot. Such exaggerations are not altogether
without their value; they suggest that Chinese art must have reached a
high level, and this has recently been shown to be nothing more than
the truth, by the splendid exhibition of Chinese pictures recently on
view in the British Museum.
The literary activities of the Chinese, and their output of
literature, have always been on a colossal scale; and of course it is
entirely due to the early invention of printing that, although a very
large number of works have disappeared, still an enormous bulk has
survived the ravages of war, rebellion and fire.
This art was rather developed than invented. There is no date, within
a margin even of half a century either way, at which we can say that
printing was invented. The germ is perhaps to be found in the
engraving of seals, which have been used by the Chinese as far back as
we can go with anything like historical certainty, and also of stone
tablets from which rubbings were taken, the most important of these
being the forty-six tablets on which five of the sacred books of
Confucianism were engraved about A.D. 170, and of which portions still
remain. However this may be, it was during the sixth century A.D. that
the idea of taking impressions on paper from wooden blocks seems to
have arisen, chiefly in connexion with religious pictures and tracts.
It was not widely applied to the production of books in general until
A.D. 932, when the Confucian Canon was so printed for the first time;
from which point onwards the extension of the art moved with rapid
strides.
It is very noticeable that the Chinese, who are extraordinarily averse
to novelties, and can hardly be induced to consider any innovations,
when once convinced of their real utility, waste no further time in
securing to themselves all the advantages which may accrue. This was
forcibly illustrated in regard to the introduction of the telegraph,
against which the Chinese had set their faces, partly because of the
disturbance of geomantic influences caused by the tall telegraph
poles, and partly because they sincerely doubted that the wires could
achieve the results claimed. But when it was discovered that some wily
Cantonese had learnt over the telegraph the names of the three highest
graduates at the Peking triennial examination, weeks before the names
could be known in Canton by the usual route, and had enriched himself
by buying up the tickets bearing those names in the great lotteries
which are always held in connexion with this event, Chinese opposition
went down like a house of cards; and the only question with many of
the literati was whether, at some remote date, the Chinese had not
invented telegraphy themselves.
Moveable types of baked clay were invented about A.D. 1043, and some
centuries later they were made of wood and of copper or lead; but they
have never gained the favour accorded to block-printing, by which most
of the great literary works have been produced. The newspapers of
modern days are all printed from moveable types, and also many
translations of foreign books, prepared to meet the increasing demand
for Western learning. The Chinese have always been a great reading
people, systematic education culminating in competitive examinations
for students going back to the second century A.D. This is perhaps a
suitable place for explaining that the famous Peking Gazette, often
said to be the oldest newspaper in the world, is not really a
newspaper at all, in that it contains no news in our sense of the
term. It is a record only of court movements, list of promoted
officials, with a few selected memorials and edicts. It is published
daily, but was not printed until the fifteenth century.
Every Chinese boy may be said to have his chance. The slightest sign
of a capacity for book-learning is watched for, even among the
poorest. Besides the opportunity of free schools, a clever boy will
soon find a patron; and in many cases, the funds for carrying on a
curriculum, and for entering the first of the great competitions, will
be subscribed in the district, on which the candidate will confer a
lasting honour by his success. A promising young graduate, who has won
his first degree with honours, is at once an object of importance to
wealthy fathers who desire to secure him as a son-in-law, and who will
see that money is not wanting to carry him triumphantly up the
official ladder. Boys without any gifts of the kind required, remain
to fill the humbler positions; those who advance to a certain point
are drafted into trade; while hosts of others who just fall short of
the highest, become tutors in private families, schoolmasters,
doctors, fortune-tellers, geomancers, and booksellers' hacks.
Of high-class Chinese literature, it is not possible to give even the
faintest idea in the space at disposal. It must suffice to say that
all branches are adequately represented, histories, biographies,
philosophy, poetry and essays on all manner of subjects, offering a
wide field even to the most insatiate reader.
And here a remark may be interjected, which is very necessary for the
information of those who wish to form a true estimate of the Chinese
people. Throughout the Confucian Canon, a collection of ancient works
on which the moral code of the Chinese is based, there is not a single
word which could give offence, even to the most sensitive, on
questions of delicacy and decency. That is surely saying a good deal,
but it is not all; precisely the same may be affirmed of what is
mentioned above as high-class Chinese literature, which is pure enough
to satisfy the most strait-laced. Chinese poetry, of which there is in
existence a huge mass, will be searched in vain for suggestions of
impropriety, for sly innuendo, and for the other tricks of the
unclean. This extraordinary purity of language is all the more
remarkable from the fact that, until recent years, the education of
women has not been at all general, though many particular instances
are recorded of women who have themselves achieved success in literary
pursuits. It is only when we come to the novel, to the short story, or
to the anecdote, which are not usually written in high-class style,
and are therefore not recognized as literature proper, that this
exalted standard is no longer always maintained.
There are, indeed, a great number of novels, chiefly historical and
religious, in which the aims of the writers are on a sufficiently high
level to keep them clear of what is popularly known as pornography or
pig-writing; still, when all is said and done, there remains a balance
of writing curiously in contrast with the great bulk of Chinese
literature proper. As to the novel, the long story with a worked-out
plot, this is not really a local product. It seems to have come along
with the Mongols from Central Asia, when they conquered China in the
thirteenth century, and established their short-lived dynasty. Some
novels, in spite of their low moral tone, are exceedingly well written
and clever, graphic in description, and dramatic in episode; but it is
curious that no writer of the first rank has ever attached his name to
a novel, and that the authorship of all the cleverest is a matter of
entire uncertainty.
The low-class novel is purposely pitched in a style that will be
easily understood; but even so, there is a great deal of word- and
phrase-skipping to be done by many illiterate readers, who are quite
satisfied if they can extract the general sense as they go along. The
book-language, as cultivated by the best writers, is to be freely
understood only by those who have stocked their minds well with the
extensive phraseology which has been gradually created by eminent men
during the past twenty-five centuries, and with historical and
biographical allusions and references of all sorts and things. A word
or two, suggesting some apposite allusion, will often greatly enhance
the beauty of a composition for the connoisseur, but will fall flat on
the ears of those to whom the quotation is unknown. Simple objects in
everyday life often receive quaint names, as handed down in
literature, with which it is necessary to be familiar. For instance, a
"fairy umbrella" means a mushroom; a "gentleman of the beam" is a
burglar, because a burglar was once caught sitting on one of the open
beams inside a Chinese roof; a "slender waist" is a wasp; the "throat
olive" is the "Adam's apple"—which, by the way, is an excellent
illustration from the opposite point of view; "eyebrow notes" means
notes at the top of a page; "cap words" is sometimes used for
"preface;" the "sweeper-away of care" is wine; "golden balls" are
oranges; the "golden tray" is the moon; a "two-haired man" is a grey-
beard; the "hundred holes" is a beehive; "instead of the moon" is a
lantern; "instead of steps" is a horse; "the man with the wooden
skirt" is a shopman; to "scatter sleep" means to give hush-money; and
so on, almost ad infinitum.
Chinese medical literature is on a very voluminous scale, medicine
having always occupied a high place in the estimation of the people,
in spite of the fact that its practice has always been left to any one
who might choose to take it up. Surgery, even of an elementary kind,
has never had a chance; for the Chinese are extremely loath to suffer
any interference with their bodies, believing, in accordance with
Confucian dogma, that as they received them from their parents, so
they should carry them into the presence of their ancestors in the
next world. Medicine, as still practised in China, may be compared
with the European art of a couple of centuries ago, and its
exceedingly doubtful results are fully appreciated by patients at
large. "No medicine," says one proverb, "is better than a middling
doctor;" while another points out that "Many sons of clever doctors
die of disease."
Legend, however, tells us of an extraordinary physician of the fifth
century B.C. who was able to see into the viscera of his patients—an
apparent anticipation of the X-rays—and who, by his intimate
knowledge of the human pulse, effected many astounding cures. We also
read of an eminent physician of the second and third centuries A.D.
who did add surgery to this other qualifications. He was skilled in
the use of acupuncture and cautery; but if these failed he would
render his patient unconscious by a dose of hashish, and then operate
surgically. He is said to have diagnosed a case of diseased bowels by
the pulse alone, and then to have cured it by operation. He offered to
cure the headaches of a famous military commander of the day by
opening his skull under hashish; but the offer was rudely declined.
This story serves to show, in spite of its marvellous setting, that
the idea of administering an anaesthetic to carry out a surgical
operation must be credited, so far as priority goes, to the Chinese,
since the book in which the above account is given cannot have been
composed later than the twelfth century A.D.
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