The learned and semi-intelligent vacuity of the village scholar is more than matched by the ignorant vacuity of his illiterate neighbours. If he happens to have travelled, the latter has indubitably the better education of the two, for the reason that it is based (as far as it goes) upon facts. But if he is a typical villager he has never been anywhere to speak of, and knows nothing in particular. His conversation is filled with unutterable inanities till he is gathered to his fathers. In every Chinese village one sees, except at the busiest times, groups of men sitting in the sunshine in winter, in the shade in summer, on some friendly stick of timber, and clustered in the little temples which constitute the village exchange. Even in the depth of winter they continue to huddle together in a vain effort to be comfortable as well as sociable, and chatter, chatter all the day, or until it is time to go to their meals. The past, present, and future state of the weather, the market prices, local gossip, and especially the details of the latest lawsuit form the warp and woof of this unending talk. What the Magistrate asked of Chang when he was examined, what Chang replied, what Wang retaliated, as well as what the Official had to say to that, with interminable iterations and profuse commentary furnish the most interesting and the most inexhaustible themes for discourse.
For any official changes unless it be that of his own District Magistrate the villager cares very little. At a time when it was supposed that His Majesty Kuang Hsü had been made way with, the writer remarked to a Chinese friend that there was reason to fear that here was an empire without an Emperor. A villager of the sluggish type just mentioned, who had heard nothing of the news from Peking, inquired of what country the observation had been made, and when the answer had been given that it was the Central Empire, he reflected for a moment, and merely replied, “Oh”, with the air of one who had feared it might be worse! Yet the rustic of this class is shrewd in his own affairs, and by no means deficient in practical intelligence. He is passionately fond of hearing story-tellers and of witnessing plays having for their heroes the great men of the Three Kingdoms seventeen hundred years ago, and on occasion he might be able to tell us much about these characters and their deeds. But modern and contemporaneous history is out of his line, and lacks flavour. It is most literally none of his business, and he knows nor cares nothing about it. The whole map of Asia might be reconstructed, and it would have for him no interest whatever, provided it did not increase his taxes nor raise the price of grain.
We have already mentioned that the villager who has been far from home is a conspicuous exception to the general vacuity of mind so often to be met. He has a rich and a varied experience which he is willing although not forward to relate. But it is a striking fact that the man of this sort when he returns to go abroad no more, tends speedily to relapse into the prevailing type. He may have been in every one of the Eighteen Provinces, or possibly in foreign lands, yet on his settling down to his old ways he has no more curiosity to know what is going on elsewhere, than a man who had at some time in his life been shipwrecked would have to know what had become of the schools of fish with which for a time he was in fortuitous proximity. When it is considered how vast a proportion of the whole population live in villages, and when we contemplate in detail the meagreness and poverty of the mental output, an impressive conception is gained of the intellectual barrenness of the Flowery Empire. The phenomena which we everywhere see are the outward expression of inner forces which have been at work for more than two thousand years. The longer they are considered and the more thoroughly they are understood the more profoundly will it be seen and felt that the “answer to Confucianism is China.”
XXV
UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM OF THE CHINESE FAMILY
The family is the unit of Chinese social life and, as we have often had occasion to observe, the Chinese Family is a highly complex organization, with many aspects which sometimes appear mutually contradictory. To the consideration of one of these polyhedral faces we now turn, asking the reader to bear well in mind that while what we have to say contains important truth, this is but one out of many points of view.
The instability of the equilibrium of the Chinese family arises from its constitution, from its environment, and from the relation between the two. Let us first glance at some of the exterior causes. In a large portion of the empire the rain-fall is more or less uncertain, rendering famine a perpetual possibility. Within the past quarter of a century foreigners in China have had superabundant opportunities to study the phenomena of famine upon a great scale. The misery thus occasioned is inconceivable, but we wish to refer only to the resultant disruption of families. Nothing is more common than to find that the father has gone to some distant region hoping to secure a bare sustenance leaving the wife and children to shift for themselves. This is not because he does not care for them, nor because he desires the separation, but because there is literally “no help for it.”
Large portions of the empire are liable to inundation, often with little or no warning. Those who contrive to save themselves wander off whither they can, generally in family groups, but not infrequently one by one.[7] Children are born and children die on these haphazard journeys nowhither. The elders die too, and sometimes a marriageable girl is disposed of for life to some husband who could not afford the expense of an ordinary wedding. It is proverbial that there are no ceremonies for a second marriage, and whenever a family is broken up, it is highly probable that all the widows will soon find partners, the union liable to be discontinued whenever there is again a scarcity of food.