Most of last week and this I have spent in making lessons and planning a much larger number than I have made. Mr. Mills urged me to work at them for Dr. ⸺’s benefit, as he did not seem to take hold of Wade. I did not think of what a job I was sliding into when I made three lessons for Maggie a few years ago. I have now laid out quite an extensive plan, and if I am spared I trust I shall be able to finish it, though it will take a deal of work. I believe that I can produce a far better book than any that has yet been brought forth. I was not intending to do this work now, and cannot work much more at it, as other matters imperatively demand attention.
Guided by the hint in this quotation, we are able to trace the book still farther back to its very beginning. June 20, 1867, he said in his Journal: “Maggie Brown [Julia’s sister] has been pushing on pretty lively with the Chinese. I made her lessons for a good while, which she studies, and now she is reading ‘The Peep of Day.’ I tried to make her lessons with a view to bringing out the peculiarities of Chinese idiom. It led me to a good deal of thinking and investigating. I have a mind to review and complete the work, and may some day give it to the world. My great difficulty is in classifying the results attained.”
As the years went by his ideas of the plan for the work took definite shape. In one of his letters concerning it he wrote:
Each lesson illustrates an idiom, the word idiom being taken with some latitude. The sentences, as you will see, are gathered from all quarters, and introduce every variety of subjects. I have also introduced every variety of style that can be called Mandarin, the higher style being found chiefly in the second hundred lessons. The prevailing object, however, is to help people to learn Mandarin as it is spoken. I have tried to avoid distinct localisms, but not colloquialisms. A large acquaintance with these is important, not to say essential, to every really good speaker of Mandarin. It is, of course, possible to avoid the most of them, and to learn to use a narrow range of general Mandarin which never leaves the dead level of commonplace expressions, except to introduce some stilted book phrase. This, however, is not what the Chinese themselves do, nor is it what foreigners should seek to acquire. Many colloquialisms are very widely used, and they serve to give force and variety to the language, expressing in many instances what cannot be expressed in any other way. I have tried to represent all quarters, and in order to do so I have in many cases given two or more forms.
In the pursuit of his plan he sought the aid of competent scholars in the north and in central China, so as to learn the colloquialisms and the usage of words; also in the preparation of a syllabary of the sounds of characters as heard in each of the large centers where foreigners are resident. To accomplish this he also traveled widely. Late in 1889, after a summer spent in studying the dialects of China, he, in company with Julia, made a three months’ trip to the region of the Yangtse, going down on the Grand Canal, spending a month on the great river, and remaining a month at Nanking; always with the main purpose of informing himself as to the current Mandarin, so as to perfect his book. This tour enabled him to give it the final revision; and in his opinion it “more than doubled the value” of the “Lessons.” As finished, they were a huge quarto of six hundred pages, which with the help of Mrs. Julia Mateer he saw through the press down at Shanghai. In 1901, assisted by Mrs. Ada Mateer, he issued a more elementary work of the same general nature.
The protracted study and care which he put upon the “Lessons” were characteristic of him in all his literary productions. Upon this subject no one is better qualified to bear testimony than is Dr. George F. Fitch, Superintendent of the Presbyterian Mission Press, at Shanghai, who speaks from direct personal observation. He says:
One very marked characteristic of Dr. Mateer was the almost extreme painstaking with which he went over any work which he was getting ready for publication; revising and re-revising, seeking the judgment of others, and then waiting to see if possibly new light might dawn upon the subject. I remember reading shortly after I came to China the manuscript of a paper which he had prepared with great labor, upon the much-mooted “term question”; and in which he had collected, with infinite pains, seemingly a great number of quotations from the Chinese classics and other native works, bearing on the use of Shen as the proper word for God in Chinese. I urged him to publish at once, as I thought it might be useful in helping settle that question. But he stoutly refused, saying that it was not yet complete. Nor did it finally see the light, in print, until nearly twenty years afterward.
None of his books at all reveal the protracted and toilsome process of the preparation. We see only the result of years of research. For instance, in his library there was a long row of Chinese books each one of which showed a large number of little white slips at the top. Each one of this multitude of marks had been placed there by some student whom he had employed respectively to read works in Chinese likely to use the word Shen, in order to indicate the passages at which he needed to look. All these were canvassed, and the different shades of meaning were classified.
From the “Mandarin Lessons,” and recently from the arithmetic, he received substantial pecuniary returns, though not at all sufficient to entitle him to be regarded as wealthy. In his manner of living he would have been untrue to his training and impulses if he had not practiced frugality, economy, and simplicity. As the means came into his possession he used them generously both for personal friends and for the promotion of the cause to which he had consecrated his life. Of his outlays for the school and college we shall presently need to speak. The expenses of the Yangtse trip came out of his own pocket. March 9, 1895, he wrote to one of the secretaries of the Board: