Te friends, nay even the admirers, of the Chinaman would not grow over indignant at hearing him described as unlovely, There's no denying it: he es unlovely. The neighbouring Japanese have inspired successive visitors with enthusiasm, from Commodore Perry down to the latest. explorer, Lord Eustace Cecil. In Japanese ims a smiling hostess and winsome maidservants make the traveller welcome in those of China you are met, if you are met at all, by some squalid boor, whose wife hastens as fast as her goat's-feet will allow her to carry her chalked and bedaubed face out of reach of bar-parian admiration. Reputable womankind in China is secluded, if not as sedulously as in Mahommedan countries, still sufficiently so to ensure no contact with the male westerner, or indeed with any countryman outside her family. Consequently such limited social intercourse as exists between foreigners and Chinese lacks the refining element which the presence of ladies among us necessarily gives to western society. And so the impression brought away by almost every foreign guest in China is, that despite his suaveness, urbanity and (the pigtail alway excepted) generally becoming costume, his Chinese host is a man of distinctly ° objectionable habits, who overeats himself in a very unpleasant manner and who, in short, shows himself altogether destitute of any sort of spirituality. Ask such a guest if he could imagine his host in Tave', and he' would burst out into irreverent laughter. As well, he would say, imagine a frog or a porpoise. This, of course would be superficial and unfair, but if the question is put squarely to a sinologue, is a Chinaman capable a grande passion? he would find a difficulty in answering it. A prion, he would say, he is not, because he lacks the necessary opportunity, and has lacked it, apparently, ever since Confucius bowdlerised the Odes. A respect~ able young Chinaman usually sees his wife for the first time after he has wedded her, and the first care of a Chinese father who has any sense of duty to himself and his offspring is to get his children safely married. If we abandon the @ prion method and try to collect facts, we are checked by this want of familiar intercourse. If we go to books, we are met by a douche of chaste platitudes from the Book of Etiquette, to the effect that when a man gives a thing to 2 woman " care must be taken that their hands do not meet," and so forth, conceived throughout in the spirit, which, they say, induced New England matrons to clothe their piano legs in pantaloons. Chinese novels do not help us much. Each of them contains a heroine it is true, but if not quite too improper she is so pedantically prudish as to be not only insufferable, but, ince human nature is human nature even in China) altogether incredible. The only novel so far exploited by foreigners which depicts the growth of an honourable and genuine affection between a youth and maid is the wonderful Hung Lou Meng. But it is disappointing to find that the late Mr. Mayers could not believe it true to life. Referring to the unhappy loves of Pao-vii and Tai-vii he wrote, " this portion of the plot' may be looked on as a license assumed by the author for the purpose of giving play to such a development of conflicting passions as could not exist compatibly with the rigorous seclusion to which Chinese youths and maidens are ordinarily condemned. That the writer should have possessed the imagination to conceive and the power to depict an every day and unrestricted intercourse between young men and young women of mar-Tiageable age and circumstances is itself a proof of the superiority of his genius to that of the rest of his countrymen but the incidents themselves may be as unreal, notwithstanding their truth to nature, as the descriptions of the lavish magnificence with which the scene of his story is inlaid."
In this, Mayers was for once per hay a trifle hypercritical. The Chinese table of prohibited degrees is even more unreasonable than our own, since though it forbids the marriage of first cousins on the father's side it permits it on the mother's, here is no reason why a Chinese youth should not become enamoured of his mother's sister's or mother's brother's daughter; in fact there seems every reason why he should, since she is the only girl of his own station in life whom he will be allowed to meet and speak with on familiar terms, and though the intercourse between them is doubtless carefully guarded, still the fact remains that marriages of affection between first cousins (not of the same surname) are far from uncommon in China. Outside this relationship it is as impossible for a young Chinaman to choose for himself a wife from his own class as it was for the aristocracy of old Athens. But just as the Athenian who longed for a Warmer affection and a closer companion ship than an aristocratic maiden of his parents' choice was likely to afford him, sought and found it among the Hetairai whose society was not denied him, so it is in modern China. Many a wife is drawn from among surroundings not of the purest, and if we may judge by the stories of the native press, many a firm and honest affection formed. It is not lack of fastidiousness but the natural reaction from the unnatural constraint of custom. The woman may be as far below Aspasia as the man below Pericles, but that such attachments can and dorise to the dignity of passion and tragedy there is ample evidence to prove. Again and again in the Ju-pao or Kuang-pao is the suicide recorded of two lovers whom circumstances will not permit to become mated. The Hwa-pao some little time since depicted the death of two such couples. They had met in the unfortunate conditions under which alone they could have met, and had learnt to love one another honestly and well. But the youths were too poor to redeem their would-be wives, and so rather than endure separation the lovers took poison together.
In the face of such evidence it would be idle to deny that a Chinaman is caetle of falling in love in a downright, fashion not unworthy the hero of a western novel; but at the same time it is permissible to doubt whether he often does so. He is too cold-blooded and phlegmatic, and much too inclined to respect old custom' and the judgment of his seniors to break out often in this way.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.