The Soul of the Far East

by Percival Lowell

To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event—for the household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer. He cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his sex. If the baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl, there is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic evidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery the family is considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engendered proves how little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its object. The reason for the invidious distinction in the matter of sex lies of course in an inordinate desire for the perpetuation of the family line. The unfortunate infant is regarded merely in the light of a possible progenitor. A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a girl, if she marry at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into another, and is relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is, however, to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of adoption. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.

From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into public life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the shoulders of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the tender mercies of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself. The diminutiveness of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising part of the performance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus toddling round with burdens half their own size. Like the dot upon the little i, the baby's head seems a natural part of their childish ego.

An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive. That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another proves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation, the consequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow up to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be questioned whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the same principle that a runner who has less distance to travel not only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves with relatively greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply sooner, but comparatively faster than a larger one. Jupiter is still in his fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet his separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race, and its subsequent career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of the proceedings.

As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home life consists of attentive subordination. The relation his obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on the subject in the respective moral codes. The commandment "honor thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts. To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply law to the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of domestic precedence,—whose first care, it will be remembered, was for his father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife. He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial piety is the greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is a monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly be otherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree of patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically divine. This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the individual, as it has never been outgrown by the race.

Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly be specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping with the family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic" to start on, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up incidentally what ideas he may. This book is followed by the "Century of Surnames," a catalogue of all the clan names in China, studied like the last for the sake of the characters, although the suggestion of the importance of the family contained in it is probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next comes the "Thousand Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of skill, for of the thousand characters which it contains not a single one is repeated, an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the enforced reader. Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the consequent disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more books succeed these first volumes, differing from one another in form, but in substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do, of history and ethics combined. For tales and morals are inseparably associated by pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would seem to have lived with special reference to the edification of the future. Chinamen were abnormally virtuous in those golden days, barring the few unfortunates whom fate needed as warning examples of depravity for succeeding ages. Except for the fact that instruction as to a future life forms no part of the curriculum, a far-eastern education may be said to consist of Sunday-school every day in the week. For no occasion is lost by the erudite authors, even in the most worldly portions of their work, for preaching a slight homily on the subject in hand. The dictum of Dionysius of Halicarnassus that "history is philosophy teaching by example" would seem there to have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son. To the practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn of the leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds. Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present that estimable trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people they would simply deter competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will amply suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of providing food enough for his aged father. In another he unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation. Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living. Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to redeem the general immorality of the plot.

Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run. A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the two consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's.

If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling is over he is set to learn his father's trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his father's would strike the family as simply preposterous. Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill? Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his individual predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed to custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance, because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it. But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast deal of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds in all branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost infinite superiority of Japanese artisans over their European fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of the occupation in the abstract to swallow up the individual in the concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent in practice. Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of trades express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example, means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as well as practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction to the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic opera, the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.

If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth be born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as if he were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to discover in the school-room the futility of his country's self-vaunted learning, he proceeds to devote his life to its pursuit. With an application which is eminently praiseworthy, even if its object be not, he sets to work to steep himself in the classics till he can perceive no merit in anything else. As might be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings of the past more meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting there. He becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate for the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for he might disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.

Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however, is not dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully flourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government abets the practice to its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction, for its posts are the prizes of proficiency. Through the study of the classics lies the only entrance to political power. To become a mandarin one must have passed a series of competitive examinations on these very subjects, and competition in this impersonal field is most keen. For while popular enthusiasm for philosophy for philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show symptoms of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the outcome of it is so substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly emoluments in its train. For the man who can write the most scholastic essay on the classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and more wealth by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens. China is a student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantly convertible into unlimited pelf.

In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally. It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students, until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectacles necessitated by the too diligent study of German text, and arrest chance disturbers of the public peace for a miserably small salary per month.