"With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition;"
—the Eastern Empire weakish, but fairly quiet and advancing towards prosperity: in pralaya certainly, and so to remain for thirteen decades (395 to 527) from the death of Theodosius to the accession of Justinian;—Persia, under an energetic and intelligent Yazdegird II (399 to 420), a strongish military power: Yazdegird held his barons well in hand, and even made a brave effort to broaden the religious outlook; he tried to stop the persecution of the Christians, and allowed them to organize a national church, the Nestorian;—India, still and until 456, at the height of her glory:—there is a continual rise as you go eastward, with the climax in India. The next step is China; to which now after all these centuries we return.
As we have seen, since the Hans fell there had been a confusion of ephemeral kingdoms jostling and hustling each other across the stage of time: there had been too much history altogether; too many wars, heroes, adventures and wild escapades. Life was too riotous and whirling an affair: China seemed to have sunk into a mere Europe, a kind of Kilkenny Christendom. Not that culture ever became extinct; indeed, through this whole period the super-refinement that had grown up under the Hans persisted side by side with the barbarian excursions and alarms. It was not, as in Rome, a case of major pralaya: men did not resort to savagery; literary production seems never to have run quite so sterile. But things were in the melting-pot, centripetalism had gone; little dynasties flared up quickly and expired; and amidst all those lightning changes there was no time for progress, or deep concerns, or for the Soul of the Black-haired People to be stirring to manifestation.
You will, I dare say, have learned to look for a rise in China at any falling-time in Europe; so would consider something should have happened there in 365, the year of the great earthquake and tidal wave, when the fifty thousand Alexandrians were drowned,— the second year after Julian's death. Well; in that 365 Tao Yuan-ming was born, who later became known as Tao Chien: in Japanese, Toemmei. There had been poets all along. During the last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period: among them that jolly K'ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse. Ts'ao Ts'ao himself wrote songs: he was that bold bad adventurer and highly successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his brother Ts'ao Chih. Of Ts'ao Chih a contemporary said: "If all the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts'ao Chih would have eight of them."—"Who, then, would have the other two?" asked somebody.—"I should have one of them myself," was the answer, "and the rest of the world the other." Ts'ao Chih enriched the language with one of its most familiar and delicious quotations:
"The Superior Man takes precautions,
And avoids giving rise to suspicion:
He does not pull up his shoes in a melon patch,
Nor adjust his cap while passing through an orchard of plums."
It is indicative of his own position at court.
Later in the third century came the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a "club of rather bibulous singers"; and there are names of many scholars besides to say that the time was not too barren; yet on the whole it was, I suppose, a period of slump in literary production, as it was of confusion in politics. But when Julian had been dead two years in the west of the world, Tao Yuan-ming was born in the east: I do not say the creator of a new time; but certainly a sign of its coming.
A large amount of his poetry survives; and it is filled with a new spirit. Like Wordsworth, he went back to nature. Ambition, of course, had been a great mark of the age: men raced after office, and scrambled for the spoils. Tao Yuan-ming was called to fill an official post, and went up reluctantly to the capital; but very soon escaped back to the things he loved: the mountains, and his chrysanthemum garden, and the country, where he could hear the dogs barking in the far farms, and see the chickens scratching in the lanes. We do not find in him, perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky: he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength, which is Nature-worship. While he pottered about in the front garden, he tells us, his wife pottered about in the back garden; they made an idol of their chrysanthemums, and started or nourished the cult which has flourished so strongly since in Japan. He was I suppose the greatest poet since Ch'u Yuan, who came some seven centuries earlier; it is from him we get the story some of you may know under the title Red Peach-Blossom Inlet.
For about half a cycle (sixty-five years) barbarian dynasties had been holding the north; with the result that the center of gravity of the real Black-haired People had been shifted from the puritan landscapes of North China to the pagan landscapes of the Yangtse Valley,—a region of mountains and forests and lakes and wild waters: Tsu the land of Laotse and Ch'u Yuan, and I think Chwangtse too. It is here are the Hills of T'ang, the metropolis of Natural Magic perhaps for all the world; and the mind and imagination of China, centered here, were receiving a new polarization; something richer and more luminous was being born. Contemporary with Tao Yuan-ming was Ku Kaichih, the first supreme name in painting. Fenollosa speaks of a "White Lotus Club," organized by Hui Yuan, A Buddhist priest, and consisteing of "mountain-climbers and thinkers,"—Tao Yuan-ming being a member.
One would like to get at the heart of what happened in that last quarter of the fourth century. This is what we see on our side: Canton and Yangtse ports were being visited more and more by Hindu, Arab, and Sassanian traders, bringing in new things and ideas: the Hindus, especially, an impetus towards culture from the splendor of the gupta period, then at its topmost height. Also ther were new inventions, such as that of paper, which was an incentive to literary output. The Chinese mind, in the south especially, was quickened on the one hand by the magical wind from the mountains, and on the other by a wind from the great world over-seas: the necessary nationalistic and international quickenings. But deeper quickenings also were taking place. India was fast becoming, under the Gupta reaction towards Brahmanism, no place for the Buddhists; and the Hindu ships that put in at Canton and the Yangtse were bringing much to China besides merchandise. A great propaganda of Buddhism was in process; by Indian monks, and now too for the first time by native Chinese. We read of a missionary who went about preaching to an indifferent world; then in sorrow took to the mountains, and proclaimed the Good Law to the mountain boulders; and they "nodded as it were their heads in assent." * But there is evidence that China was fast becoming the spiritual metropolis of the world: Buddhism was drifting in, and mingling among the mountains with mountain Taoism, that dear and hoary magic of the Eastern World; and the result was an atmosphere in which astounding events were to happen.