I started from the beginning, which was, indeed, no beginning at all. The Chinese sages did not write their scriptures as graded school text-books, but their descendants believed so, anyhow. Genesis was the genesis of successful mastery. And so I began with that great sentence in the “Book of Great Learning:”
“Learning is a gateway to virtue.”
I envy those boys who tore Chinese authors, and whose books, when taken to a second-hand bookstore, were not bought even for a penny. My books were, on the contrary, just as clean as ever, as if they had been too loath to impart anything to the owner. And this was not from any effort on my part to take care of them, but simply from the little use I made of them. Now this was the way I studied them. Teacher would read with me about four pages in advance, and see once how I could read. I stuck; he prompted me; I stuck again; he prompted me again; I stuck for the third time, and for the third time he prompted me, and so on, and indeed continually, if I had gone on till I had thoroughly mastered it. But one review seemed to him sufficient for such easy passages, and my boyish heart responded too gladly to be released after a short lesson. And I laid my book by till the next day. I did not know how the teacher regarded me, but he must have thought me a very bright fellow for whom such a slow process as review was totally unnecessary. And he immediately took up the next four pages and went on in the usual manner. The first book was finished; the teacher’s instinct asserted itself, and he wanted me to read a few pages by way of a test before I proceeded. What a shame! I only recognized a box here and a starfish there, and that was all. The teacher was angry at the result. He saw that I was not prepared yet to take up the classics. And with his admirable pedagogical insight, he sent me to a primer the very next day. It was a Japanese history, written in easy Chinese prose. How I enjoyed the change! The passages rolled off on my tongue as easily as you might say, “Mary had a little lamb.” The teacher smiled at my ease, and soon recovered his humor. But his eyes were so constructed as to see nothing but the top and the foot of a mountain, and his mind worked like a spring-board, which either stays low or jumps high up. And on the third day I was ordered to begin the second book of the classics, called the “Doctrine of Mean!”
And I plodded on. I went through the “Book of Divination,” and “Odes of Spring and Autumn,” and came out only with some phantoms of angular, mysterious hieroglyphics dancing before my eyes. But my Chinese education included something more than reading. It was versification. Just think of requiring a ten-year-old boy to write verse in Latin or Greek. But every Saturday I was required to do the same sort of thing for two years. Oh, how I struggled! I hunted for something sensible to write, but while all sorts of nonsense would come up, even common sense, that most useful guide in a prosaic field, fled from me. Outside, merry shouts of boys—a happy group who cared for balls and kites more than dry-as-dust “culture”—were heard, and I mused in a corner of a room, consulting such help as a phrase book and a rhyming dictionary. Nothing but doggerel could be born of such a forced labor. Here is a specimen:
“Shut from the blue of skies in spring,
I sit and fret for words to rhyme.
O bird, if you have songs to sing,
Drop one for me to save my time!”
The Chinese training did me at least one good turn. It drove Confucius out of my head!
I should have been a blighted boy if Sundays had not come to my rescue. The real use to which the day should be put had not dawned on me, nor was it in the mind of those who introduced the institution. But I am glad to say that it did me good in many ways. With this, however, my uncle is invariably associated.