Our concluding notes on Chinese life must be few and short.
According to their own ideas, they are as much adepts in music as in the other arts and sciences, which, as they believe, have placed them at the very summit of humanity. They have a tolerable variety of musical instruments, the most common of which is the San-hien, a sort of three-stringed guitar, with a very long neck and a very little cylindrical body. The strings are of silk, and are struck with a thin slip of bamboo at the end of the finger. Then, as a type of stringed instruments played with a bow, may be mentioned the Urh-heen, or two-stringed fiddles, the sounds of which are generally very disagreeable,—that is, when produced for Chinese ears; but when the player desires to imitate the characteristics of European music, he can do so very perfectly, as is shown by Mr. Fleming:—
“In one of the most thronged streets I was, on one afternoon, elbowing my way along, exploring the ‘Heavenly Ford,’ when the sound of a violin playing a well-known waltz fixed my attention in a bylane; and there, instead of a hairy Briton flourishing a bow over a Cremona, was a blind beggar eliciting those pleasant notes with as great precision and tone from the rude and weighty mallet-shaped urh-heen, as if he had been all his public life first violin at the opera.”
MOUTH ORGAN.
The same traveller remarks of the vocal music of the Chinese, that “a Chinaman rehearsing a song looks and gives utterance to such goat-like bleats, that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he is laboring under a violent attack of chronic whooping-cough, combined with intermittent seizures of hiccough,—the ‘dying falls’ of the inhuman falsetto at the end of each verse finishing in the most confounding hysterical perturbations of the vocal chords.”
There are several Chinese wind instruments. For instance, there is a clarionet, called Shu-teh, an instrument with a very loud and piercing note, and a peculiar “mouth-organ,” in which are a number of pipes. One of these instruments, drawn from a specimen in my collection, is [shown] on page 1445. It contains sixteen pipes, of different lengths, arranged in pairs. Some of the pipes, however, are “dummies,” and are only inserted to give the instrument an appearance of regularity. The length of the pipes has nothing to do with the pitch of the note, as they speak by means of brass vibrators inserted into the lower end, exactly like those of harmoniums. The pipes are bound together by means of a horn band that passes around them. When it is used, the player blows into the projecting mouthpiece, and with his fingers stops or opens the apertures in the pipes. The tone of this instrument is not pleasing to European ears.
Strange as Chinese music seems to us, and unpleasant as are the odd and unexpected intervals of their melodies, the art is evidently cultivated among the people, and there is scarcely a house without its musical instrument of some kind. In the evening, according to Mr. Fleming, “in passing through the narrow streets, one is sure to hear from the dimly lighted houses the squealing, incoherent, and distorted vibrations tumbling out on the night air with a spasmodic reality and a foreignness of style that at once remind the listener of the outlandish country he is in.” The preference of the Chinese for the strange, wild, abrupt intervals of their own music is not, as the reader may see, merely occasioned by ignorance of a more perfect scale, but is the result of deliberate choice on their part. They have no objection to European music. On the contrary, they are pleased to express their approbation of it, but with the proviso that it is decidedly inferior to their own.
From Music we turn to Art. In their own line of art the Chinese are unsurpassed, not to say inimitable. Ignorant of perspective as they may be, there is a quaint force and vigor about their lines that is worthy of all praise, while their rich softness of color can scarcely be equalled. From time immemorial they have been acquainted with the art of color printing from wooden blocks, and some of their oldest examples of color printing are so full of life and spirit, despite their exaggeration of gesture, and their almost ludicrous perspective, that the best English artists have admired them sincerely.
Of their porcelain, in which they simply stand alone, it is impossible to treat fully in such a work as this, as the subject would demand a volume to itself. Their carved work in ivory is familiarly known throughout the greater part of the civilized world. In many of these carvings the object of the artist seems to have been, not to develop any beauties of form, but to show his power of achieving seeming impossibilities. Among the best-known forms of Chinese carving may be reckoned the sets of concentric balls, which are cut out of solid ivory, or at least are said to be so made.