His two sons avenged Won Wang; they roused the people, recruited an army in their palatinate—perhaps enlisted Huns too—and swept away Chousin and his dynasty. They called their new royal house after their native land, Chow; Wu Wang, the elder of the two, becoming its first king, and his brother the Duke of Chow, his prime minister. I say king; for the title was now Wang merely; though there had been Hwangtis or Emperors of old. Won Wang and his two sons are the second Holy Trinity of China; Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu being the first. They figure enormously in the literature: are stars in the far past, to which all eyes, following the august example of Confucius, are turned. There is a little to be said about them: they are either too near the horizon, or too little of their history has been Englished, for us to see them in their habit as they lived; yet some luster of real greatness still seems to shine about them. It was the Duke of Chow, apparently, who devised or restored that whole Chinese religio-political system which Confucius revivified and impressed so strongly on the stuff of the ideal world—for he could get no ruler of his day to establish it in the actualities—that it lasted until the beginning of a new manvantara is shatter it now. That it was based on deep knowledge of the hidden laws of life there is this (among a host of other things) to prove: Music was an essential part of it. When, a few years ago, the tiny last of the Manchu emperors came to the throne, an edict was published decreeing that, to fit him to govern the empire, the greatest care should be taken with his education in music. A wisdom, truly, that the west has forgotten!
When William of Normandy conquered England, he rewarded his followers with fiefs: in England, while English land remained so to be parceled out; afterwards (he and his successors) with unconquered lands in Wales, and then in Ireland. they were to carve out baronies and earldoms for themselves; and the Celtic lands thus stolen became known as the Marches: their rulers, more or less independent, but doing homage to the king, as Lords Marchers. The kings of Chow adopted the same plan. Their old duchy palatinate became the model for scores of others. China itself—a very small country then—southern Shansi, northern Homan, western Shantung—was first divided up under the feudal system; the king retaining a domain, known as Chow, in Homan, for his own. Then princes and nobles—some of the blood royal, some of the old shang family, some risen from the ranks—were given warrant to conquer lands for themselves from the barbarians beyond the frontier: so you go rid of the ambitious, and provided Chow with comfortable buffers. They went out, taking a measure of Chinese civilization with them, and conquered or cajoled Huns, Turks, Tatars, Laos, shans, Annamese, and all that kind of people, into accepting them for their rulers. It was a work, as you may imagine, of centuries; with as much history going forward as during any centuries you might name. The states thus formed were young, compared to China; and as China grew old and weak, they grew into their vigorous prime. The infinity of human activities that has been! These Chow ages seem like the winking of an eye; but they were crowded with great men and small, great deeds and trivialities, like our own. The time will come when our 'Anglo-Saxon' history will be written thus: England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew stronger and more populous than England;—and it will be enough, without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important.
By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king at Honanfu. His own subjects had grown unwarlike, and he could hardly command even their allegiance; for each man's feudal duty was first to his own duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron;— strangely enough, there were those five degrees of nobility in ancient China as in modern England. Of these nobles, each with his court and feudal dominion, there were in what we may call China Proper some unascertainable number between thirteen and a hundred and fifty: mostly small and insignificant, but mostly, too, full of schemes and ambitions.
But it was the Lords Marchers that counted. One after another of them had wrested from the Chow the title of Wang or King; it was not enough for them to be dukes and marquises. Then came a time when a sort of Bretwalda-ship was established; to be wielded by whichever of them happened to be strongest—and generally to be fought for between whiles: a glorious and perpetual bone of contention. International law went by the board. The Chow domain, the duchies and marquisates, lay right in the path of the contestants—midmost of all, and most to be trampled. Was Tsin to march all round the world, when a mere scurry across neutral (and helpless) Chow would bring it at the desired throat of Ts'u?—A question not to be asked!—there at Honanfu sat the Chow king, head of the national religion, head of the state with its feudatories, receiving (when it suited them to pay it) the annual homage of all those loud and greedy potentates, who for the rest kicked him about as they pleased, and ordered each other to obey him,—for was he not still the son of Heaven, possessor of the Nine Tripods of sovereignty, the tripods of Ta Yu?—So the centuries passed, growing worse and worse ever, from the ninth to the sixth: an age of anarchy, bad government, disorder, crime and clash of ambitions: when there was a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world;—and we know what manner of incarnation, at such times, is likely to happen.
Conditions had outgrown the astral molds made for them in the last manvantara: the molds that had been made for a small homogeneous China. The world had expanded, and was no longer homogeneous: China herself was not homogeneous; and she found on all sides of her very heterogeneous Ts'ins, Tsins, Ts'is, Ts'us, Wus and Yuehs; each of whom, like so many Great Powers of our own times, had the best of intentions to partake of her sacramental body when God's will so should be.—Indeed, the situation was very much as we have seen it.
Then, as now (or recently), China was old, inert, tired, and unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their divisions, for what protection she might get against the rapacious and strong. She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative, and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, with ambitious politicians, each with his sly wires to pull. Her culture, ancient and decrepit, was removed by aeons from all glamor of beginnings.—For a good European parallel, in this respect, you might go to Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all fountains and inspirations run dry.—In ancient Grecce, it was no such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's. In India, the faery light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the fountains of time. Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases, stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs and Sibyls: a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for Rome. Even modern Europe is much less modern than Medieval Constantinople or Chow China. We can breathe still the mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very near to Poetry. But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries, was desperately prosaic: not so much modern, as pertaining to an ugly not impossible future. Antiquity was far, far away. The dawn with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down. If you can imagine an American several hundred years from now—one in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone; with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union; advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that China. A material civilization, with (except in war areas) reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her. Her people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and tables, chopsticks, plates and dishes of pottery; had for transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and "cany wagons light." They had a system of writing, the origin of which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which fragments remain. They were home-loving, war-hating, quiet, stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the east. They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race: belief in the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia— All the Chinas;—no dream of a possible national union and greatness. Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be. They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination; there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in war; there is no glory in anything;—but only an intense desirability in home,—in staying at home with your family, and doing your I work in the fields. And nothing of what we should call romance, even in this home-love: the chief tie is that between parents and children, not that between husband and wife, and still less that between lovers. There is much moralizing and wistful sadness.—Such was the life of the peasants; at the other pole was the life of the courts: intrigue and cunning, and what always goes with cunning—ineptitude; a good measure of debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for self and party, and none for Gods and Men. We have to do, not with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the grayness of its extreme old age. Those who will may argue that you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood behind it. Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or seventy, or eighty-two years old—a few decades more or less are not worth bothering about—whence his name lao tse, the old son (but tse may also mean Teacher or Philosopher). But I misdoubt the accuracy of such accounts, myself. I think it likely he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us. And I imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;—as young as America, and as vigorous.
——— * Chinese Literature: Giles;—whence also much else in these articles. ———
Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the Sacred Mysteries?—There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system of the Duke of Chow, more dishonored in the breach than honored in the observance…. For the rest, you might as well look for the Eleusinia in Chicago. Who could believe in religion, those days?—Well; it was the pride of some of the little duchies and marquisates to keep up a reputa-tion for orthodoxy: there was Lu in Shantung, for example,-very strict.* (As strictness went, we may say.) And if you wished to study ritual, you went up to Honanfu to do so; where, too, was the National or Royal Library, where profitable years might be spent. But who, except enthusiasts, was to treat religion seriously? —when one saw the doddering Head of Religion yearly flouted, kicked about and hustled in his own capital by his Barbarian Highness the 'King'—so he must now style himself and be styled, where in better days 'Count Palatine' or 'Lord Marcher' would have served his turn well enough—of Ts'in or Tsin or Ts'i or Ts'u, who would come thundering down with his chariots when he pleased, and without with-your-leave or by-your-leave, march past the very gates of Honanfu;—and lucky if he did march past, and not come in and stay awhile; —on his way to attacking his Barbarian Highness the 'King' of somewhere else. The God that is to be sincerely worshiped must, as this world goes, be able now and then to do some little thing for his vicegerent on earth; and Heaven did precious little in those days for the weakling King-pontiff puppets at Honanfu. A mad world, my masters!
——— * Ancient China Simplified: E. Harper Parker;—also much drawn on. ———
Wherein, too, we had our symbols:—the Dragon, the Sky-wanderer, with something heavenly to say; but alas! the Dragon had been little visible in our skies of Chu Hia these many years or centuries;—the Tiger, brute muscularity, lithe terrible limbs, fearful claws and teeth,—we knew him much better! This, heaven knew, was the day of the Tiger of earthly strength and passions; were there not those three great tigers up north, Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i; and as many more southward; and all hungry and strong?—And also, some little less thought of perhaps, the Phoenix, Secular Bird, that bums itself at the end of each cycle, and arises from its ashes young and dazzling again: the Phoenix —but little thought of, these days; for was not the world old and outworn, and toppling down towards a final crash? The days of Chu Hia were gone, its future all in the long past; no one dared dream of a time when there should be something better than Yen diddling Lu, or Ts'u beating Ts'i at a good set-to with these new sixty-warrior-holding chariots. Who should think of the Phoenix—and of a new age to come when there should be no more Yen and Lu and Chow and Tsin and Ts'in, but one broad and mighty realm, a Middle, a Celestial Kingdom,—such a Chu Hia as time had no memory of;—to whose throne the Hun himself should bow, or whose hosts should drive him out of Asia;—a Chu Hia to whom tribute should come from the uttermost ends of the earth? Who should dream of the Secular Bird now,— as improbable a creature, in these dark days of the Tiger, as that old long-lost Sky-wanderer the Dragon himself?