“The Grecian. You see, I have startled you.”
“Well, I'm still sort of bewildered.”
“Naturally. But try to think with me. The Chinese worked out their social philosophy long ago. They have lived through a great deal that we have only begun, from tribal struggles through conquest and imperialism and civil war to a sort of republicanism and a fine feeling for peace and justice. And then, when they had given up primitive desire for fighting they were conquered by more primitive Northern tribes—first the Mongols, and later the Manchus. The Manchus have been absorbed, have become more or less Chinese.
“And now a few more blunt facts that will further startle you. The Chinese are the most democratic people in the world. No ruler can long resist the quiet force of the scores of thousands of villages and neighborhoods of the empire.
“They are the most reasonable people in the world. You can no more judge them from the so-called Tongs in New York and San Francisco, made up of a few Cantonese expatriates, than you can judge the culture of England by the beachcombers of the South Seas.
“They developed, centuries before Europe, one of the finest schools of painting the world has so far known. There is no school of reflective, philosophical poetry so ripe and so fine as the Chinese. They have had fifty Wordsworths, if no Shakespeare.
“You will find Americans confusing them with the Japanese, whom they resemble only remotely. All that is finest in Japan—in art and literature—came originally from China.”
“You take my breath away,” said Rocky slowly. But he was humble about it; and that was good.
“But listen, please. What I am trying to make clear to you is that in old Central China—in Hang Chow, and along this fertile Yangtze Valley, and northwest through the Great Plain to Kai Feng-fu and Sian-fu in Shensi—where the older people flourished—germinated the thought and the art, the humanity and the faith, that have been a source of culture to half the world during thousands of years.
“But you can not hope to understand this culture through Western eyes. For you will be looking out of a Western background. You must actually surrender your background. It is no good looking at a Chinese landscape or a portrait with eyes that have known only European painting. Can you see why? Because all through European painting runs the idea of copying nature—somehow, however subtly, however influenced by the nuances of color and light, copying. But the Chinese master never copied a landscape He studied it, felt it, surrendered his soul to it, and then painted the fine emotion that resulted. And, remember this, he painted with a conscious technical skill as fine as that of Velasquez or Whistler or Monet.”