In eternity's stillness."
Thus, at but a little distance from each other, on the summit of the sacred mountain of Omi, in this land where more importance is attached to burial than in any other, two Chinamen await unburied the consummation of all things,—the one a disciple of Buddha; the other, of that even less known Laotze, Buddha's Chinese contemporary: the one covered over with gilding, raised upon an altar, and certainly apparently worshipped as a god; the other lying prone upon the mountain-side, his poor perishable garments growing threadbare in the snow and rain. But when the mists gather round the mountain-top, and the sun shines slanting from the west, it is above the ardent disciple of Laotze that the Glory of Buddha floats—the man who sought the grimmest possible retreat from the snares of this world, and, thus seeking, found, we trust, the joys of Paradise.
CHAPTER XX.
CHINESE SENTIMENT.
In Memory of a Dead Wife.—Of a Dear Friend.—Farewell Verses.—Æsthetic Feeling.—Drinking Song.—Music.—Justice to Rats.
It is so much our habit in China to think the Chinese have no sentiment, that I have thought it might be interesting to gather together what indications I have observed during eleven years' residence among them, leaving the reader, if of a judicial frame of mind, to sum up and formulate his own conclusions.
One of the most poetic events in history used to seem to me in childhood that crowning of his dead Queen by King Pedro, to which Mrs. Hemans consecrated some of her most pathetic verses. To this day I cannot think of the beautiful dead Inez de Castro in all the grandeur of her coronation robes, seated upon her throne, without feeling something of the faint, cold shuddering which the poetess imagines. Yet when I went for the first time to a grand Chinese house in the Arsenal at Shanghai, and found it all dressed out with signs of mourning, white cloths, and balls of twisted white cotton, people all in their best dresses, and preparations complete for three days of theatrical performance, though I was startled to find that all this was to commemorate the birthday of the wife of the master of the house, lying quiet in her grave already these twenty years, the twenty-years-in-China-and-not-know-a-word-of-the-language men all said it was quite usual, and seemed surprised and annoyed that I should find it affecting. Alas! to this day I have never learned whether he loved her very much, nor quite satisfied myself whether it was really her birthday or the day of her death they were thus celebrating. But, interpret it all after whatever fashion, there was surely in this some indication of sentiment.
Again, there are many suicides in China, and habit seems to make both Europeans and Chinese callous. Yet when a German who had returned to China happy in the belief a girl he knew would follow and marry him, and on hearing she had changed her mind, or for some other reason would not come, thought it better to leave a life that for him held no promise, the following poem appeared in a Shanghai paper:
"AVE ATQUE VALE!
In memory of the late ——.
'Es lebe,