My Several Worlds (30 page)

I smile, and bide my time. For I know the beauty of China.

Japan is exquisite. Not only in the lovely porcelains; the brilliant, graceful kimonos; the pattering, charming children. These are for every man to see. Not only in the tiny terraced fields climbing up the hillsides, the clean, fragile buildings, the microscopic fairyland of life as it appears to the casual eye.

The great beauty of Japan is in the spots that you and I, if we be mere passersby, never really glimpse.

It is the beauty which moves the veriest coolie, after a day of crushing labor, to throw aside his carrying pole, and after a bit of fish and rice, to dig and plant in his garden the size of a pocket handkerchief. There he works, absorbed, delighted; his whole being resting in the joy of creating beauty for himself and his family, who cluster about him to admire. No one is without a garden. If fate has denied a poor man a foot of ground, he buys a big plot for a penny and slowly, after hours of labor pleasant and painstaking, he constructs a miniature park, with a rockery, a tiny summerhouse, a pool, with bits of moss for lawns and grass heads for trees and toy ferns tucked into crevices for shrubbery.

It is the quality of beauty, too, which moves a Japanese host to place in his guestroom each day for the delight of his guest one single exquisite note. From his precious store he selects today a watercolor, in black and white, of a bird clinging to a reed, painted with charming reserve. Tomorrow it will be a dull blue vase with one spray of snowy pear bloom arranged in such a way as to be a living invitation to meditation. Sometimes it is a piece of old tapestry, with a quaint procession of lantern bearers marching across its faded length.

I hear a deal of talk about Japan these days. There are those who begrudge them the possession of even quite ordinary human qualities. As for me, after hearing such tales, I reserve judgment until someone can reconcile these two qualities for me: utter depravity and the gentle love of all beauty which is to be found almost universally in rich and poor alike in Japan. Where there is such a willingness to spend oneself for beauty, often without any thought of money value, must not a little truth be hid? If it be true at all that beauty is truth?

Now the dainty loveliness which is so apparent in Japan is certainly not to be seen spread about in China. I really cannot blame those friends of mine who at first glance proclaim her ugliness. Doubtless it has been the economic urge which has driven the poor to think first and last and always of their stomachs and the wherewithal to fill them completely. Certainly there is an appalling lack of beauty in the lives of the ordinary folk.

Said I to my coolie gardener one day as he was digging and delving upon my perennial flower border: “Now, wouldn’t you like some of these flower seeds to plant in the plot in front of your house?”

He eyed me distrustfully and hoed vigorously. “Poor people have no use for flowers,” he answered briefly. “These things are for the rich to play with.”

“Yes, but it won’t cost you anything,” I persisted. “See, I will give you several kinds, and if the land is poor, you may take fertilizer from the compost heap, and I will give you the time to take care of them for the good of your soul.”

He shook his head. He is a conservative creature. None of his ancestors had planted flowers for pleasure and he couldn’t imagine himself at it. Besides, what would he do with the flowers when he had them?

He stooped to throw out a stone. “I’ll plant cabbage,” he said briefly.

The poorer Chinese does without doubt place a financial value on all his possessions. In one interior spot where I had lived for a time, I asked a farmer’s wife how they spent or saved the money surplus of a good year’s crops.

She smiled at the recollection. “We eat more!” she exclaimed, ecstatically.

In lieu of a trustworthy savings bank, they deposited their bits of reserve fund in the safest place possible in a land of banditry and transformed it into extra flesh. At least no one could rob them of that! And heaven knows their bones were the better for it.

In wandering through Chinese cities one is struck with their ugliness—the lack of sanitation, the congestion, the foul streets, the filthy and diseased beggars showing their vile stock-in-trade and whining parasitically, the mangy dogs skulking about. A glance into the small shops and homes depresses one with the strictly utilitarian aspect of life. Bare tables, stools apparently designed for discomfort, boxes, beds, and rubbish, the primitive cooking apparatus—all are crowded into an unbelievably small space, and the result is one of utter lack of repose or of any attempt after spiritual values to be expressed in beauty.

The other day I stood on a mountain top in Kiangsi. I looked over a hundred miles of lovely Chinese country. Streams glittered in the sunshine; the Yangtse wound its leisurely way along, a huge yellow roadway to the sea; clusters of trees cuddled cosily about little thatched villages; the rice fields were clear jade green and laid as neatly as patterns in a puzzle. It seemed a scene of peace and beauty.

Yet I knew my country well enough to know that if I could have dropped into the midst of that fair land I should have found the streams polluted, the river’s edge crowded with little wretched, mat-covered boats, the only homes of millions of miserable, underfed waterfolk. The villages under the trees would be crowded and filthy with flies and garbage rotting in the sun, and the ubiquitous yellow curs would have snarled at my coming. There, with all that sweet air free for all, the homes would be small and windowless and as dark within as caverns. The children would be dirty and unkempt, and their noses would be unspeakable, for they always are! Not a flower anywhere, not a single spot of beauty made by man to relieve the dreariness of life. Even the bits of ground in front of the cottages would be beaten into threshing floors, hard and glaring in the sunlight. Poverty? Partly, of course, but often laziness and ignorance, too.

Where then, is the beauty of China? Not on the surface of things, anyway. But I bide my time. For it is here.

Some of the rarest bits of beauty in the world I have found in this old country, so reserved, so indolent for centuries, so careless of what the world thinks of her.

For China does not express herself in show places. Even in Peking, that bourne of all tourists to the Far East, the things that one sees are not show places. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple—these and a host of the others were built up slowly out of the life of the people, for the people themselves, with no thought originally of tourist eyes and dollars. Indeed, for decades, no amount of money could purchase a glimpse of them.

The Chinese have naturally little idea of exhibition and advertising. Go into any one of the great silk shops in Hangchow and you will find a decorous, dark, quiet interior, with shelves and shelves of neat packages folded away, each with its price tag symmetrically arranged. There are no pedestals with gorgeous satins folded cunningly to catch the light and entice the buyer. But a clerk comes forward, and when you have made known your wishes, he selects carelessly half a dozen packages from the shelves and tears off the paper wrappers. Suddenly before your eyes bursts the splendor of stuffs whereof kings’ robes are made. Brocaded satins and velvets, silk of marvellous brilliance and delicacy of shades are massed before you in a bewildering confusion. It is like a crowd of magnificently hued butterflies released from dull cocoons. You make your choice and the glory is all shut away again into the dark.

That is China.

Her beauties are those of old things, old places carefully fashioned with the loftiest thought and artistic endeavor of generations of aristocrats, and now like their owners, falling gently into decay.

Behind this high wall, which looms so grey and foreboding upon the streets, one may step, if one has the proper key, into a gracious courtyard, paved with great square old tiles, worn away by the feet of a hundred centuries. There is a gnarled pine tree, a pool of goldfish, a carven stone seat whereon is seated a white-haired grandfather, dignified and calm as an old Buddha in his gown of cream-colored silk. In his pale, withered hand he holds a long pipe of polished black wood, tipped with silver. If you are his friend, he will rise with deep bows and escort you with a most perfect courtesy into the guest hall. There in a high chair of a carved teak you may sip his famous tea and marvel at the old paintings hung in silken scrolls upon the walls, and meditate upon the handwrought beams of the ceiling, thirty feet above. Beauty, beauty everywhere, stately and reserved with age.

I mind me of a great dark guest hall in a temple, which faces out upon a tiny sunny courtyard, where a peony terrace is built up of faded grey brick. Here every spring the great pink shoots push up, and when I go there in May, the sunlight is pouring down upon the deeply tinted peonies, glowing in reds and dusky pinks, and in the center creamy ones with golden hearts. The terrace is cleverly placed so that the guests must needs look upon it from the dimness of the interior. What words could be spoken, what thought shaped in such a place, save those of purest beauty!

There are old paintings, old embroideries, potteries and porcelains and brasses, hidden away preciously by families who owned them before America was thought of; indeed, perhaps they are of an age with Pharaoh’s treasures—who knows?

It is one of the sad things of the present change in China that either poverty or careless, ignorant youth is learning the money value of things which are really too valuable for any sale; things which because of their sheer beauty are too great to belong to any individual and which should be reverently possessed by the nation. But their time of understanding is not yet.

Indeed, not the least of the crimes committed against China by foreign countries has been the despoiling by eager curio seekers and globe trotters and business firms of her stores of beauty. It has really been the robbing of the ignorant, for she has not known that what she thought to sell for thirty pieces of silver could not truly be sold at all.

Moreover, one shudders at the crude stage through which so many of the modern young Chinese seem to be passing. It is inevitable, of course, that in their distrust and repudiation of the past, they should apparently cast off the matchless art of old China and should rush out to buy and hang upon their walls many of the cheap vulgarities of the West. Indeed, to those of us who see the passing of much that was characteristic of the country we have loved it has become a poignant question; who is to preserve the ancient beauties of China? For instance, with all the degradation that has unquestionably followed in the wake of idolatry, must we, along with all the discard, lose the exquisite curves of temple architecture?

Yet I am at times comforted. There must come out of all those beauty-loving ancestors a few to whom the pursuit of beauty is a master passion, and who will pass it on to calmer times.

I went the other day to the studio of a famous modern Chinese artist. My heart sank lower and lower as I passed the copies of posters, of old-fashioned Gibson girls, of lurid suns setting into the vilely colored ocean—dozens of perpetrations in oils. But away in one corner I found a little watercolor. It was only of a village street, misty blue in the sudden rain of a summer evening. Slanting lines of pale silver fell across it. Dim candle-light shone out of the windows of snug homes, and a lonely man’s figure under a paper umbrella walked along, casting a wavering shadow over the glinting wet stones.

I turned to the artist and said, “This is the best of all.”

His face lighted.

“Do you think so? I, too. It is a picture of my village street as I have seen it many times. But,” regretfully, “I painted it for pleasure. It will not sell.”

If I really have a fault to find with the beauty of China, however, it is that it is too secluded, too reserved. It does not permeate enough to the uttermost parts of the people to whom it belongs. It has been kept too much in isolated family or religious groups. The knowledge of the value of beauty has been withheld from many who have suffered from the lack. The poorer and more ignorant classes have been allowed for centuries to grow up and to die in utter indifference to all the subtle and necessary influences which flow from the essentially beautiful. The opportunity to pursue beauty has been too much the prerogative of the wealthy and leisured. Consequently the poor man thinks of it only as one of the pastimes of the rich and hence impossible for him.

What the average Chinese needs is an eye educated to see the beauty which lies waiting to be freed about him everywhere. When once he grasps the significance of beauty and realizes that it does not lie at all in the hideous lithograph for which he must pay the prohibitive price of forty cents; that it does not lie, solely, even, in the priceless possessions of the rich; but that it is in his dooryard, waiting to be released from careless filth and indolent untidiness, a new spirit will walk abroad in the land.

Anyway, I know that man cannot live by bread alone and that is what thousands of these folk have been trying to do here, submerged under unspeakably difficult economic conditions. To see the beauty in fresh air and natural loveliness, to know the joy of sunshine streaming on clear water and the graciousness of flowers,—these beauties free for all are what we need sorely.

I said this to my old Chinese teacher the other day, and he replied with a proverb which runs something like this: “When a man’s barns are filled and his appetite appeased, then may he take heart to think upon the things of the spirit.”

Which, I suppose, is true.

Yet I am sure the gardener has had a good supper last night when, as I sat musing under the bamboos, he was working cheerfully away on the lawn. Startled by an unaccustomed light, I glanced up and was smitten afresh with the sunset sky.

“Oh, look!” I called.

“Where—where?” he cried, seizing the hoe.

“There, at the wonderful color!”

“Oh, that!” he exclaimed in great disgust, stooping to the weeds again. “I thought when you called out so, that it must be a centipede crawling on you!”