Dozs China afford a good scene for fiction? Not Chinese fiction in a hundred and twenty volumes, but such fiction as will be asked for at Mudie's, and_in other ways prove profitable to its European author? We cannot remember many novels in which the scene is laid, wholly or partly, in China, but three at any rate have appeared within the last ten or twelve years, and even from three, a conclusion, however lame and impotent, can be drawn. he three which we have uow before us are James Payn's By Proxy Jules Verne's Tribul tions of a Chinaman, and A Swallow's Wing by a Mr. Charles Hannan. This last betrays a prentice hand, despite the author's pompous complaint of the "life of persecution" which as a fiction writer he has "been obliged to accept as his own." The scene is laid in Peking and Tientsin, and the time is anything between 1861 and 1888. A lovelorn globe-trotter named Norris is supposed to have got himself imprisoned in the "Temple of Confucius at Peking " where he is tortured and held to ransom. He has, however, contrived to tie a written message to a swallow's wing, which in a very frayed and almost ihe ible condition is carried by the bird to russels. The finder (who is really a peer, but whom the author "takes a malicious pleasure in making a commoner ") hurries to the rescue and after a series of adventures finally effects it. A promising plot, it may be said, if the situation can be shown to be probable, or even not innpossitle, and if the author has sufficient local knowledge to carry it out. All he has, it is evident from a survey of the book, is his own brief experiences in a journey vi@ Shanghai and tientsin to Nankow, the Ming 'Tombs, and Peking, where he visited a curio-dealer and the Confucian Temple. He had read besides, or been told, of Sir Harry Parkes' treatment while in the hands of the Chinese in 1860, Now this material was very far from sufficient and his blunders in consequence are many and appalling. His primary error is the laying of his scene of priestly malevolence in the Temple of Confucius, which, it is needless to say, has no priests. A very little more knowledge of things in Peking would have led him to place his victim in the neighbouring Lama Temple where Mr. Henry Norman tell us he so nearly came to grief. There the priests are extortionate and, to put it mildly, unpleasant,—though even so Mr. Norman and his companion had only themselves to blame for their somewhat exaggerate ed alarms, 'Then his secondary hero Chin-chin-wa, the welcome one' (from the verb chin-chin to welcome'), and his villain Shan-min-yuan (from Wan-shou Shan and Yuan-ming Yuan) are altogether impossible. And his closing scene, the free fight at HerrBonsel'shouse in Tientsin, is ridiculous. Even high Chinese officials closely connected with the "Supreme Power" can't go about poinarding Germans in a British Concession without some remarks being made.
Jules Verne's book is still more grotesque, and it would really be waste of time to treat it seriously. One extract will be sufficient to show its truth to nature. The time is 1878, the scene ung Chow, near Peking. grace and... bought the recently in-"Craig and Fry begged for an hour's
lyented floating costume of Captain Boyton... They all went on board the Peitang one of the little river steamers that ply along the Peiho. The swift little craft glided between the buoys that marked out the channel. Ere long Tientsin came in sight. Unable to cross the bar of the river the Peitang had to land her passengers at Take." Boyton suits in dirty decaying conservative T'ung Chow, and a steamer of too deep draught to cross the Taku bar, plying where there isn't water enough for the light launch It is quite refreshing to turn to By Proxy. "the story is of course too well known to need repeating here, and our present purpose has to do with only that part of it which deals with China,—the theft of the Shay-lo by Penni-quick and his consequent condemnation \to ling chit. The genial author to whom we owe many a pleasant hour, for what novelist goes better with a }long chair and an iced drink than James Payu? might fairly object that his story being a story and not a treatise on Chinese criminal law, does not require accuracy or even probability in its Chinese chapters. But James Payn rather prides himself on his accuracy, or at least on his local colouring. "It is not to be supposed," he says in his essay on story-telling, "that a story with very accurate local colouring can not be written, the scenes of which are ae in a country which the writer as never beheld. This requires, of course, both study and judgment, but it can be done so as to deceive if not the native, at least the Englishman who has himself resided there. I never yet knew an Australian who could be persuaded that the author of Necer too late to mend had not visited the under- di world, or a sailor that he who wrote Hard Cash had never been to sea." (Would a mermaid or a blackfellow, natives both, have been less credulous by the way?) Now we all know how Charles Reade managed his local colouring; he told us himself, and defended his process against the pseudonymuncules' who objected to it in The Wandering Heir, t was to take some book dealing with his subject and (provided it wasn't a novel) to rather adopt it bodily than to adapt it. James Payn has followed his leader more than once, ticularly in one of his latest novels, he Talk of the Town, and the Chinese seenes in By Proxy are for the most part constructed on this plan. If any one will take up Fortune's Residence among the Chinese, and will place chapter 11 alongside the first 40 pages or so of By Proxy he will find that the novel resembles tite book of travels as closely jas one schoolboy's essay does that of his right hand neighbour. Fortune and Pennicuick are both awakened by a crowd of pilgrims, both notice the small feet of the ladies and their blue dresses, both visit shrines, both see the Shay-lo (which they both misspell). James Payn's hankering after local colour sometimes comes into conflict with his inveterate (and_deliglitful) habit of joking, On page 27 of Fortune he found the sentence ""Loya, Loya!' a voice cried, the Ta Hosan (high priest) wants to go to bed'." 'Though in this instance Fortune was the loyal' [lao-yek} and had added a note to the effect that it is 'a mode of addressing mandarins, James Payn inverts the designations (p. 37). "Lawya, law ya, commenced Conway, not of course that this individual was a lawyer, but because this is the mode of address used to a high priest." Now though as a pun this is passable enough, as local colouring' it is fatal. But we have no time to dwell on trifling slips of this kind, the question before us is, has James Payn, despite his free use of Fortune, succeeded so as to "deceive an Eng mau who has himself resided" in China. We must say, reluctantly, that he has not. His whole story tinges on two suppositions, that the theft of a She-lé or relic of Buddha, is punishable with the worst form of death, ting ch'id, and that an Englishman could between the years 1843 and 1858 be condemned to ling chih by a Chinese court. Now both of these suppositions are so {false as to be ridiculous, and ridicule would be fatal to our enjoyment of this charming novel. The Chinese Government (and of this our home writers will not persuade themselves) attaches no idea of sacrilege to a theft from a Bud-diiist temple, and if a Chinaman stole a his punishment would be merely a certain number of blows dependent on its market value. Then since last century the local authorities have never attempted to exercise jurisdiction over a foreigner, and it is utterly unimaginable that they would have venter so in open court at a point only five days' journey from Shanghai. Penni-quick might have been murdered with their connivance, but judicially condemned, never. It is strange that be~ fore commencing to clothe the skeleton of his ingenious plot, James Payn did not consult some of the English residents he hoped to deceive, It was easy for him to do so, for the book is illustrated by the brother of a member of the China Consular Service.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.