The other day I stood on a mountain top in Kiangsi. I looked over a hundred miles of lovely Chinese country. Streams glittered in the sunshine; the Yangtse wound its leisurely way along, a huge yellow roadway to the sea; clusters of trees cuddled cosily about little thatched villages; the rice fields were clear jade green and laid as neatly as patterns in a puzzle. It seemed a scene of peace and beauty.
Yet I knew my country well enough to know that if I could have dropped into the midst of that fair land I should have found the streams polluted, the river’s edge crowded with little wretched, mat-covered boats, the only homes of millions of miserable, underfed waterfolk. The villages under the trees would be crowded and filthy with flies and garbage rotting in the sun, and the ubiquitous yellow curs would have snarled at my coming. There, with all that sweet air free for all, the homes would be small and windowless and as dark within as caverns. The children would be dirty and unkempt, and their noses would be unspeakable, for they always are! Not a flower anywhere, not a single spot of beauty made by man to relieve the dreariness of life. Even the bits of ground in front of the cottages would be beaten into threshing floors, hard and glaring in the sunlight. Poverty? Partly, of course, but often laziness and ignorance, too.
Where then, is the beauty of China? Not on the surface of things, anyway. But I bide my time. For it is here.
Some of the rarest bits of beauty in the world I have found in this old country, so reserved, so indolent for centuries, so careless of what the world thinks of her.
For China does not express herself in show places. Even in Peking, that bourne of all tourists to the Far East, the things that one sees are not show places. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple—these and a host of the others were built up slowly out of the life of the people, for the people themselves, with no thought originally of tourist eyes and dollars. Indeed, for decades, no amount of money could purchase a glimpse of them.
The Chinese have naturally little idea of exhibition and advertising. Go into any one of the great silk shops in Hangchow and you will find a decorous, dark, quiet interior, with shelves and shelves of neat packages folded away, each with its price tag symmetrically arranged. There are no pedestals with gorgeous satins folded cunningly to catch the light and entice the buyer. But a clerk comes forward, and when you have made known your wishes, he selects carelessly half a dozen packages from the shelves and tears off the paper wrappers. Suddenly before your eyes bursts the splendor of stuffs whereof kings’ robes are made. Brocaded satins and velvets, silk of marvellous brilliance and delicacy of shades are massed before you in a bewildering confusion. It is like a crowd of magnificently hued butterflies released from dull cocoons. You make your choice and the glory is all shut away again into the dark.
That is China.
Her beauties are those of old things, old places carefully fashioned with the loftiest thought and artistic endeavor of generations of aristocrats, and now like their owners, falling gently into decay.
Behind this high wall, which looms so grey and foreboding upon the streets, one may step, if one has the proper key, into a gracious courtyard, paved with great square old tiles, worn away by the feet of a hundred centuries. There is a gnarled pine tree, a pool of goldfish, a carven stone seat whereon is seated a white-haired grandfather, dignified and calm as an old Buddha in his gown of cream-colored silk. In his pale, withered hand he holds a long pipe of polished black wood, tipped with silver. If you are his friend, he will rise with deep bows and escort you with a most perfect courtesy into the guest hall. There in a high chair of a carved teak you may sip his famous tea and marvel at the old paintings hung in silken scrolls upon the walls, and meditate upon the handwrought beams of the ceiling, thirty feet above. Beauty, beauty everywhere, stately and reserved with age.
I mind me of a great dark guest hall in a temple, which faces out upon a tiny sunny courtyard, where a peony terrace is built up of faded grey brick. Here every spring the great pink shoots push up, and when I go there in May, the sunlight is pouring down upon the deeply tinted peonies, glowing in reds and dusky pinks, and in the center creamy ones with golden hearts. The terrace is cleverly placed so that the guests must needs look upon it from the dimness of the interior. What words could be spoken, what thought shaped in such a place, save those of purest beauty!
There are old paintings, old embroideries, potteries and porcelains and brasses, hidden away preciously by families who owned them before America was thought of; indeed, perhaps they are of an age with Pharaoh’s treasures—who knows?
It is one of the sad things of the present change in China that either poverty or careless, ignorant youth is learning the money value of things which are really too valuable for any sale; things which because of their sheer beauty are too great to belong to any individual and which should be reverently possessed by the nation. But their time of understanding is not yet.
Indeed, not the least of the crimes committed against China by foreign countries has been the despoiling by eager curio seekers and globe trotters and business firms of her stores of beauty. It has really been the robbing of the ignorant, for she has not known that what she thought to sell for thirty pieces of silver could not truly be sold at all.
Moreover, one shudders at the crude stage through which so many of the modern young Chinese seem to be passing. It is inevitable, of course, that in their distrust and repudiation of the past, they should apparently cast off the matchless art of old China and should rush out to buy and hang upon their walls many of the cheap vulgarities of the West. Indeed, to those of us who see the passing of much that was characteristic of the country we have loved it has become a poignant question; who is to preserve the ancient beauties of China? For instance, with all the degradation that has unquestionably followed in the wake of idolatry, must we, along with all the discard, lose the exquisite curves of temple architecture?
Yet I am at times comforted. There must come out of all those beauty-loving ancestors a few to whom the pursuit of beauty is a master passion, and who will pass it on to calmer times.
I went the other day to the studio of a famous modern Chinese artist. My heart sank lower and lower as I passed the copies of posters, of old-fashioned Gibson girls, of lurid suns setting into the vilely colored ocean—dozens of perpetrations in oils. But away in one corner I found a little watercolor. It was only of a village street, misty blue in the sudden rain of a summer evening. Slanting lines of pale silver fell across it. Dim candle-light shone out of the windows of snug homes, and a lonely man’s figure under a paper umbrella walked along, casting a wavering shadow over the glinting wet stones.
I turned to the artist and said, “This is the best of all.”
His face lighted.
“Do you think so? I, too. It is a picture of my village street as I have seen it many times. But,” regretfully, “I painted it for pleasure. It will not sell.”
If I really have a fault to find with the beauty of China, however, it is that it is too secluded, too reserved. It does not permeate enough to the uttermost parts of the people to whom it belongs. It has been kept too much in isolated family or religious groups. The knowledge of the value of beauty has been withheld from many who have suffered from the lack. The poorer and more ignorant classes have been allowed for centuries to grow up and to die in utter indifference to all the subtle and necessary influences which flow from the essentially beautiful. The opportunity to pursue beauty has been too much the prerogative of the wealthy and leisured. Consequently the poor man thinks of it only as one of the pastimes of the rich and hence impossible for him.
What the average Chinese needs is an eye educated to see the beauty which lies waiting to be freed about him everywhere. When once he grasps the significance of beauty and realizes that it does not lie at all in the hideous lithograph for which he must pay the prohibitive price of forty cents; that it does not lie, solely, even, in the priceless possessions of the rich; but that it is in his dooryard, waiting to be r
eleased from careless filth and indolent untidiness, a new spirit will walk abroad in the land.
Anyway, I know that man cannot live by bread alone and that is what thousands of these folk have been trying to do here, submerged under unspeakably difficult economic conditions. To see the beauty in fresh air and natural loveliness, to know the joy of sunshine streaming on clear water and the graciousness of flowers,—these beauties free for all are what we need sorely.
I said this to my old Chinese teacher the other day, and he replied with a proverb which runs something like this: “When a man’s barns are filled and his appetite appeased, then may he take heart to think upon the things of the spirit.”
Which, I suppose, is true.
Yet I am sure the gardener has had a good supper last night when, as I sat musing under the bamboos, he was working cheerfully away on the lawn. Startled by an unaccustomed light, I glanced up and was smitten afresh with the sunset sky.
“Oh, look!” I called.
“Where—where?” he cried, seizing the hoe.
“There, at the wonderful color!”
“Oh, that!” he exclaimed in great disgust, stooping to the weeds again. “I thought when you called out so, that it must be a centipede crawling on you!”
To tell the truth, I don’t believe that a love of beauty is based altogether on a well-fed interior. Plenty of gourmands are only gourmands still. Besides, if the proverb were true altogether, how could I explain deaf old Mrs. Wang, poorest of poor little widows, who sews hard all day to make a bowl of rice, and yet who manages someway to have a flower the whole summer long in a broken bottle on her table and who wept with delight when I pressed upon her a little green vase?
Or the tiny tobacco shop, whose cheerful, toothless old proprietor is always coddling along a plant of some sort in an earthen pot? Or the farmer outside my compound who lets a mass of hollyhocks stand as they please about his house? Or the little “wild” children of the street who press their faces against my gate sometimes and beg for a posy?
No, the love of beauty waits to be born in the heart of every child, I think. Sometimes the hard exigencies of life kill it, and it is still forever. But sometimes it lives and grows strong in the silent, meditative soul of a man or a woman, who finds that it is not enough to live in a palace and to dine even with kings. Such know that after all they are eternally unsatisfied, until in some way they find beauty, where is hidden God.
I had no illusions about the importance of these two little essays, they were trifles, but their acceptance induced a mood of happiness and I began to write in earnest on what was to have been my first big novel.
It was natural to me to tell no one about the novel. This was not secretiveness, for if there had been any one to tell I would surely have told, but I had no friends on this level. Friends aplenty I had and have always had, but I learned long ago to meet them where they are. And I had no friends or relatives to whom I could speak about my writing, and it did not occur to me that this was strange or even a deprivation. I was long ago used to living in many mansions.
Meanwhile I was also enjoying quite a different sort of life. First of all were my house and garden. Though I can live anywhere, be either rich or poor with equal acceptance, I have to have a setting, and if there is not one, I make it. I subdued, therefore, the too large and somewhat graceless grey brick house where I lived, and within the limits of a small amount of money, I did as my mother had taught me to do and created as much beauty as I could. The garden furnished plenty of flowers, and well-designed furniture of cheap materials could be cushioned with the inexpensive but beautiful Chinese stuffs. Wicker and rattan I had wearied of, but the Chinese about that time were weaving cash string, a thin robe made of grass, upon strong bamboo frames, and such chairs were comfortable and substantial. Old Chinese blackwood tables could be bought cheaply, and there were always delicate and beautiful bowls and vases in the chinashops. One day in a silkshop I found yards of faded silk going at a bargain price and I bought it for curtains and dyed it in different colors. Matting rugs upon the floor gave good effect and sunshine and flowers did the rest. I enjoyed the whole process and have often thought to myself that if I had not wanted to write books I would have liked to build houses and decorate them. But then I like to cook, too, and my children know that if I did not want to write books above all else, I would be a cook in a big family, perhaps in an orphanage, and make delicious dishes for everybody. But there are many persons I would like to have been—for example, again, a sculptor—had I not wanted to write books. I am fortunate that I had not to make the decision. At that I once wrote a novel about a woman sculptor, entitled This Proud Heart, and there, I suppose, in the curious way writers have, I fulfilled a dream.
My life in my northern town had been simple indeed compared to the one I now led. I taught classes not only in the Christian university but also in the provincial one, and had therefore two entirely different groups of students. The young men in the Christian university were the sons of Christians and had scholarships or they were the sons of the rich who could afford to pay substantial tuition fees. All of them understood English at least fairly well and usually they came from port cities and were somewhat cosmopolitan and certainly conservative in their family backgrounds. The students in the National University, on the other hand, were nearly all poor and they knew little English and they paid no tuition. Most of them had not much to eat and they wore a sort of blue cotton garb later known as the Sun Yat-sen uniform. In winter they were bitterly cold, and so was I, for we had no heat in the buildings and when window panes were broken they were not replaced, whereas in the Christian university everything was in good order and we had central heat and much comfort. Yet I enjoyed my work in the provincial university far more, because there my students were desperate for learning and they waited eagerly for my arrival and tried to keep me from leaving at the end of our classes. Their English was almost unintelligible and had I not spoken Chinese I could not have taught them. Yet they yearned to speak English, and so we struggled along. They were young men and women, thinking and questioning and alive, and I learned far more from them than from the suave and acquiescent men students in the Christian university. I came away frozen with cold in my body but warm in my heart and stimulated in mind because between me and those eager young students, so thinly clad and badly fed, there were no barriers. They wanted to talk about everything in the world, and we talked. Even now I get letters from some who have escaped Communism, though most of them are dead in the wars and revolutions that have swept over us all.
In those days Sun Yat-sen was still alive and still working to bring unity to the country, but he was in retreat in the South. In Nanking we lived under the war lord, Sun Chuan-fang, a temperamental man younger than most of the war lords who divided the country into fragments, and in some ways less oppressive, but still he was a war lord. We were not disturbed, however, unless our war lord undertook a battle with some neighboring war lord, and the period of what is called, historically, fragmentation, seemed natural enough to the Chinese and to me. China, as I have said, always went into fragmentation under war lords in the periods between dynasties, and the people were patient as usual and waited for things to work themselves out. Without being religious, the ordinary Chinese had a vague faith in Heaven and believed that nothing could succeed without its will. This meant that whoever finally assumed the leadership of the nation would be the best one under Heaven’s design. Meanwhile family life went on, the center and the core of the nation as it had always been, and our war lord did not interfere with our affairs.
My own interest has never been in politics but in the thoughts of men and women and so I continued to be deeply concerned with the literary revolution. By 1920 the spoken language had become the accepted written language of the new times. The question was, could real works of literature be written in the vernacular? Older scholars still insisted that it could never express allusive meanings as did the wen-li, or classical style of writing. T
he young scholars, Western-trained, had to prove that it could. Hitherto it had been used only for magazine and newspaper writing. Here again Hu Shih was the leader of the new school, for he now began to write his monumental work, Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy. It was never finished, alas, but the first volume proved again that the Chinese spoken language could also be a beautifully clear and graceful written language, flexible and alive, expressing the most profound meaning and thought.
Once Hu Shih had shown the value of the new written language, young Chinese writers rushed to follow his example, and a mass of experimental material got into print. Most of it was bad, I must confess, and there were reasons enough for this dismal fact. The young Chinese who called themselves modern were burning with unclarified emotions, rebellious and ambitious, but actually they still had nothing to say. They had cut themselves off too abruptly from their traditional roots and had been trained too quickly and superficially in Western cultures. It was inevitable that when they began to write they wrote imitatively, and since they refused to imitate their own literary figures of the great Chinese past, they imitated the Western writers, who were foreign to them in spite of their determination to be modern, or Western. There were no modern Chinese in fact, there were only Westernized Chinese. How wearisome it was in those days to open one much-praised Chinese novel after another only to discover that it was all but plagiarized from a Western one! What a disappointment to go to the new modern theater to see an eagerly anticipated play by a famous young Chinese playwright and discover that it was a Eugene O’Neill play, scarcely disguised by Chinese names!
Since there was little original work, it was inevitable that much of the outpouring of the new writers soon became literary criticism of each other and of Western books, and shallow stuff that was, too. Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther was the novel which seemed to suit the mood of most of the young Chinese and in my effort to understand them I read hundreds of Chinese “Sorrows.” It became ridiculous, and yet so serious were these young men and women that one dared not laugh. It even became the fashion to ape the Western poets in person and one handsome and rather distinguished and certainly much beloved young poet was proud to be called “The Chinese Shelley.” He used to sit in my living room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures until now when I think of him, I see first his hands. He was a northern Chinese, tall and classically beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands, and guiltless, I am sure, of any real manual labor. For our young Chinese scholars maintained the old traditions in one respect at least. They did no physical work whatever. Our Chinese Shelley died young, I am sad to say, for he had a sort of power of his own, and could he have outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself. But in his desire to have wings he was among the first to take to airplanes and he died in an accident.