Thus the conversation goes on about pretty well every missionary any one knows anything about; and yet it winds up as it began: "But the missionaries generally are quite different,—hang about and make believe—and save money—and go home!" These typical missionaries no one seems to have ever met; yet every one who has been to China must agree one hears plenty about them. It begins on the voyage out, when you are told about the poor girls—the enthusiastic, misguided young girls they lure out to wretchedness, nobody knows where. "Clap them into Chinese dress the moment they arrive, and send them off up-country, where there is not a single European, in carts and all sorts of miserable conveyances. That's what they do. Why, the poor girls don't know themselves where they are going to."
This is the oft-repeated tale. And it is certainly highly probable that newly arrived missionaries, whether men or women, cannot pronounce the name of the place they are going to, nor even at first remember it. But there seemed some sound common sense in what an elder missionary said the other day: "Youth enables women to bear many hardships, under which they would break down in later life. And youthful enthusiasm carries many a young missionary over the first two years of Chinese life, where a woman of forty could not bear the change of climate and food. Besides, if, as is most likely, they become the wives of missionaries, there is a far more reasonable hope of a happy married life when the wife is already well accustomed to China and its ways before undertaking the cares and duties of a wife, than when she is brought out fresh from England and has to face all together."
However, Shanghai so far keeps up its old character for gallantry, that it never has a word to say against the lady missionaries, unless sometimes in a grumbling tone: "Did you ever really see a pretty one?" But, then, every one has. Captains speak rather sorrowfully of this, that, and the other who came out with them. And young men who go to church (young Shanghai does go to church a little; it is the men past their prime who only "have seats"),—young Shanghai speaks sentimentally of some fair apparition who looked so lovely in loose-fitting white and blue, and begins to question whether Chinese dress is not, after all, the most becoming. Certainly, fair hair looks all the fairer and softer above the loose-fitting clothes more generally associated with coarsest black.
And all the while the missionaries come in increasing numbers. With each freshly arriving steamer the cry is, "Still they come!" till China promises fair to be the best spiritually seen after country outside Christendom. Yet no missionary ever comes to the Europeans, whose spirituality seems to have so withered for want of exercise, that they resent nothing more than the idea that they could want a missioner to minister to their spiritual necessities or perchance have no spiritual wants.
Yet no account of Shanghai would be other than most incomplete which did not treat of the missionaries. They are a set apart, well known to one another, unknown for the most part to other Europeans, full of information about the China towns and Chinese generally, and abounding in racy anecdotes. How much good they do, who can estimate? They are certainly most refreshing to meet with, having a purpose in life, and reminding us sometimes that, as Faber says, "There are souls in this world that have the gift of finding joy everywhere."
But not all. The climate is trying; Chinese society is not of the liveliest; and there are—of course there always must be—a certain number of missionaries who do not seem quite the right kind of persons to have come out. How should it be otherwise? But it is a question whether that is more the fault of those of the inferior sort who come, or of those superior people who stay behind. But, setting aside this vexed question, the Roman Catholic missionaries do not appear nearly as cheerful and pleased with their surroundings as the Protestants. Nor, indeed, does one quite see what they have to make them happy—except, of course, always the love of God.
One time going up-river, after Chinkiang the saloon presented a picture of pigtailed Frenchmen—Jesuit Fathers in white Chinese clothes. As Jesuits are not allowed to go up-country till after a long preliminary training, and do not become full Jesuit Fathers till after at the least eight and not uncommonly fifteen years of preparation, if they are not far more skilled missionaries than those of the various denominations of Protestants, it would seem to show that in spiritual, unlike carnal, warfare training and discipline avail nothing. They reckon some one hundred thousand converts in Kiangnan. In some instances they have whole villages of Christians; but although Christians, they say it must be remembered these villages are Chinese still.
How merrily the French Fathers chatted over their coffee! But at the one word "France" every man waxed sorrowful! They say, however, they do not suffer from mal du pays, as do the Italians, many of whom have to go home, in consequence, sick with sorrowing. Not to be forgotten, however, is that French priest at Peking who, just returned from a long sojourn up-country, at the one word "France" broke down completely, and could not recover himself. And once more I felt a tightening at the heart, thinking of that large house building at Ichang to receive Italian Sisters—simple, loving-hearted women, who for others' sins, not their own, will live and die so far away from that loved Italy for which Filicaja wished: "Ah! wert thou but more strong; or if not that, less fair!" The life of Italian Sisters in China seems altogether too sad. They all get sick; they cannot love the people; they long for Italy; and till now they have been obliged to bind the feet of the little girls confided to them, yet unable to bear the pain for them. But the French priests, too, seem to have nothing to look forward to, and their lives are more comfortless than certainly English people at home have any idea of. I recollect one French priest in a most remote village showing me—half excusing himself, half proudly—his one great luxury, a little window with glass panes he had put in near his writing-desk, so as to see to read and write till later in the evening. There was barely a chair of any kind to sit down on in his large barracklike room. He showed me a set of photographs of his native village in France; but I noticed he never dared glance at it himself while we were there. We were the first Europeans to visit the place during the three years he had been there, with the exception of an old priest, who once a year came three days' journey across the mountains to see how he was going on. By comparison, the life of Protestant missionaries seems so joyous; indeed, I have never been able to see why it should not be an exceptionally pleasant one—barring illnesses always.
The coming New Year was casting its shadow before it in Chungking in the shape of gaudy pictures festooned about the streets, crackers of rejoicing by night and by day, and sad-faced young men wanting to realise on the family gold ornaments or picture-books by old masters offered at impossible prices. It cast its shadow also in other ways. The mission schools were breaking up, and the missionaries themselves going out to schwa, i.e. enjoy themselves in the country. Having been kindly invited to be present at the breaking up of the Friends' Girls' School, I noticed one or two things that appear worth recording.
Of course, I know missionary labours are popularly supposed to be the one kind of work on which we all of "the world outside" are qualified to pass discriminating judgment without ourselves requiring any preparation for so doing. A man may race across China as fast as he is able, and it is he who knows whether the missionaries are wasting their efforts on ungrateful soil, or whether opium does or does not disagree with the Chinese constitution, although he would hesitate to express an opinion on any such difficult question as whether a certain soil were suited for growing opium, or whether a merchant would be well advised to ship hides for the Shanghai market. Questions like these require specific knowledge. Not so the question whether missionaries in China are doing good. Notwithstanding which I must further premise that, just as when the new railways begin I individually should not feel in a position to say the navvies' work was being wasted because I saw no rails, so I do not feel in a position to say whether even the missionaries I know best are spending ineffectual toil because I do not see many Christians.