Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

To face p. 258.

The consequence of this utterly insane plan of education is that for a civilized country such as China claims to be, the people are grossly ignorant and uneducated. Taking the population at four hundred millions, and say half of these are women who may safely be said to have never been to any school when they were girls, that leaves two hundred millions of men to be considered. Sinologues who have been well qualified to deal with the subject, after serious calculations have come to the conclusion that not more than fifteen millions of readers exist throughout the length and breadth of the land. These include men who have a mere smattering of education, but who know enough to be book-keepers and accountants, and doctors who can write their own prescriptions, and shopkeepers who can make out their bills, but in such misshapen and uncouth hieroglyphics that they would make Confucius shudder with disgust were he allowed to visit the earth, and see what caricatures these men have made of the marvellous inventions of the darkest ages of China.

Fifteen millions is to my mind a most liberal estimate of the readers of this country. Why writers on China should have persistently represented the people of this land as being highly educated is a mystery to those who profess to be only moderately acquainted with the subject. The country is illiterate, grossly illiterate, and as a result is festering with pride and with contempt for every other nation outside of the Middle Kingdom. There is just now going on throughout the country, however, a tremendous awakening, and the rush after education on Western lines is one in which all classes of society are united. The old obsolete system is doomed, and the youth of the future will be no more subject to the pain and the weariness and the heartbreaking that countless generations of the young manhood of the country have had to endure in the past.

We now come to the school-books of the nation, for though there never has been an Educational Board in China, and none of the dynasties that have successively sat on the Dragon Throne of this Empire have ever legislated with regard to the teaching of the youth of the land, there has always existed but one set of books that are the text books in every school throughout the country, and which have been used in every scholastic institution that has ever existed in the long ages of the past. The Chinaman is thoroughgoing in his conservatism. He has never weakened on that subject. Even in his smells he is the rankest Tory that ever lived. The odours that reek through the streets, and send their aroma down the alleyways, and gently mingle in the atmosphere of the homes, have nothing modern in them, but are the lineal descendants of a long line of ancestors that vanish from sight in the mist and obscurity of a remote past.

As a result of this national instinct, no teacher has ever had the hardihood to propose that there should be any alteration in the books that should be used in the instruction either of the young or of the more advanced pupils who may be planning for literary honours. This is all the more remarkable considering the wide extent of territory of the Chinese Empire, and of the varieties of languages that are used by the people.

The Chinese are generally spoken of as one race, and so they are in the great outstanding features that constitute them one distinct nation, and yet they are divided off from one another in many large regions by dialects so different from each other, that the people occupying them cannot understand the languages that are spoken in those outside of their own.

It would have seemed that such radical differences as those produced by what is practically a foreign language would have led to different methods and different ideals as to the management of their schools, but they have not. You pass along the great plains where the fertility of the soil has given prosperity to the people, and you examine the schools and you find one set of text books in every one. You travel over mountain ranges where the people are having a severe struggle for existence and where a language is spoken that needs an interpreter before you can enter into conversation with them. You enter into their village schools and you find the same familiar books, but the names given to the strange weird-looking little pictures are so different from those they call them on the other side of the mountains that you cannot recognize them. You pass up the great Yang-tze, the “Son of the Ocean,” and you step out of your boats a few hundred miles apart from the last place you rested at, and you discover that every locality has its own dialect. You make your way to the nearest school, and still the same books meet your eye, with just the same dog-eared, uninviting appearance that they present in any latitude or longitude of the Empire in which you may meet them. You listen to see if you can catch the tones in which the lads scream out at the top of their voices the uncouth metallic tones in which they call out the names of the pictures that fill the pages of their books, but they change in every place you visit, and your mind is filled with a kind of wonder at the immense variety of tones and dialects in which the students of this vast country ring the changes on the books that for countless ages have been the only ones from which they have had to study.

With regard to these school-books it has to be stated that there has never been any attempt made to render them attractive to the children that use them. In England the very reverse of this is the case. They are printed as a rule on clean white paper, and in a type that is so distinct that the pupils have never to strain their eyes to make out the letterpress. In addition to this, most of the books are illustrated with beautiful pictures that give a fascination to the pages, whilst they help the scholars to grasp the meaning of the subjects that they have to study.

Now in China there is nothing done to ease the sorrows of the lads in their grappling with this huge language of cryptic pictures that refuse to have their meanings explored excepting after years of most painful study. The books are printed upon the very poorest paper in order to lessen the cost. The words, too, are often blurred and indistinct, for the wooden blocks from which they are printed are generally so worn by years of use, that the delicate strokes and minute touches with the pen, and the involved and complicated interweaving of straight and waving lines that go to the making up of the old-world-looking pictures, get frayed and broken in the printing, so that it requires a practised eye to distinguish some of them from others that have a natural likeness.

The pages of these books present a most dreary and uninviting appearance. They are never lightened by any pictures, and no artist has ever attempted to vary the dreariness of school life by any sketches from nature or any scene from human life. It is no wonder that the artistic faculty in the Chinaman has been developed in a grotesque and unrealistic fashion, or that nature seems to be made to be conformed to the stiff and formal characters upon which the eyes of the youth of China have to look during the early years when the artistic element is waiting to be moulded into those finer shapes that will produce the great pictures that are seen in the West. Art in China has never had any room in which to play her part in the development of the mind, or in training the fancies and the imagination of men. The artist in this land is a man that draws his scenes by rule and compass, and he would lose caste were he to violate certain canons that must be observed in the drawing of a landscape or in the pose or attitude of the human figure. He never dreams of going out into the fields or of sitting on a hillside and of trying to reproduce the scene that lies stretched before him. There is no freedom and no losing of oneself in the inspiration of the moment, when forgetful of rules and mastered by the subtle forces that have touched his dreams into action, he shall produce something that no man has ever done before him. The chill of the years is upon him, when he was compelled, at the very time when his soul was in the process of formation, to keep his gaze upon those square unartistic hieroglyphics, and crushing down all the poetry and all the romance that lay dormant in his nature, to take these as the highest ideals for all his conceptions of art in the future.