"Do your best, but avoid supercilious pride,
For you never can tell what you'll do till you're tried."
We can not say much for the translation of these comic works. Mr. Stent is a high authority in the Chinese language and literature, but is not at home in English prosody. It is plain, however, from his translations, rough as they may be, that there is a comic vein in the Chinese character which finds expression in Chinese literature.
A Deaf Mandarin. (From a Figure in the British Museum.)[32]
Caricature, as we might suppose, is a universal practice among them; but, owing to their crude and primitive taste in such things, their efforts are seldom interesting to any but themselves. In Chinese collections, we see numberless grotesque exaggerations of the human form and face, some of which are not devoid of humor and artistic merit; but the specimens given on this and the next page suffice for the present purpose.
The Chinese, it appears, are fond of exhibiting their English visitors in a ridiculous light. The caricature of an English foraging party, given in the first part of this chapter, was brought home thirty years ago by a printer attached to an American mission in China. Recently a new illustration of this propensity has gone abroad. In 1874 an account appeared in the English papers of the audience granted to the foreign ministers by the Emperor of China, in which Mr. Wade, the English embassador, was represented as having been overwhelmed with awe and alarm in the presence of the august potentate, the Son of Heaven. The origin of the paragraph was explained by the Athenœum:
"The account was absurd in the extreme, and was universally recognized as a squib, except by a writer in the columns of a weekly contemporary, who gravely undertook the task of showing, by reference to the whole of his previous career, how very unlikely it was that Mr. Wade should give way to the weakness imputed to him. It now turns out that the imaginary narrative first appeared in the columns of Puck, a comic paper (in English), published at Shanghai; that it was translated into Chinese by some native wag, who palmed it off on his countrymen as a truthful account of the behavior of the English barbarian on this occasion; and that some inquiring foreigner, ignorant of the source from whence it came, retranslated it into English, and held it up as another instance of the way in which the Chinese pamphleteers were attempting to undermine our influence in China by covering our minister with contempt!"
