11th Mar.
Ir is said: that human nature is the same everywhere; and. to the extent that most people, wherever found, will cry when' they are hurt, steal rather than go"hnngry, and strike back when they ate struck, the generalization may be accepted as fairly trae, But just as the human face, though the same all the world over in its general features, yet varies greatly in every clime, so, whatever human nature-once was, there now a great gulf fixed between the natures that have been developed under different civilisations; and the bile-eyed Dane does not differ more in appear nice from the negro, or the bourded Briton from the Chinese, than inman nature in the Enst differs from haman nature in the West.
It is a mero truism that we really know very little even of our most intimate friends; every man is more or less of a puzzle to those who know him' best, and, of course, inch more soto: others. Said Fantasie: "That gentleman passing is delightful. Look what fine silk breeches: what red flowers on his vest! I am sure that "man has a thousand ideas in his hend that are perfectly sti me.' Alas! what men say to other is all so alike in the interior of those isolated machines what folds there are, what secret compartments But if the gentleman. passing with his silk breeches had been " Chinese how emphatically true the remark. would have been, Every Chinese is " mystery to us, and no doubt we ure mysteries to him.
Literature is the great mirror of human nature; but how different from ours is the human nature reflected in Chinese literature. Just as men with good cellars at home, yet if they cross the desert, weary and thirsty, come to an oasis, drink the precious water, and any: "After all, y' know, there's no drink really like water 80 men plodding through' arid wastes of Chinese politics and philosophy suddenly come upon @ trivial, but human sentiment, and are filled with joy and say: "Human nature is just the sume all the world over!"
But if the Western cannot regard Chinese literature as an adequate representation of human nature, as he knows it, the Chinese would reject our representations as extravagances and. untratha;'" All the world's a stage," and so the stage is a world in little where we may have human nature represented for more convenient observation than in the world at large. But will Shakespeare ever delight the Chinese? Stripped of what is merely local. and temporal, he shows us human nature at its best; at-its worst; in-many aspects under- many. conditions—would the Chinese ever regard it asa true and adequate picture: of life? Human nature is not the same all the world over, or Hamlet: would be possible: queue; but the mental distress of {THE DESIRABILITY OF ANGLO-
"'Po be or not to be" is as foreign to the Chinese mind as the language is to his tongue. Falstaff, one would think, must at least in some of his moods be well-known in China; but in polite literature such a reprobate is ignored, and the fact of Elizabeth delighting in him and requiring him to be revived in a farther play after he had already died, cuts her off from the Chinese state of mind and makes her as foreign to them as does the double anomaly of being a Virgin Queen.
In lifo, and in literature too, from the Vita Nueva to the Intest French novel, love is the staple. True, us Thackeray says, "there are other things in life besides love;" there is ambition, and taxes, and so on; yet it may be said that books and men live by love. Yet could a Chinese ever be charmed by the Beatrices, the Margarets, the Mirandas of our, world? or weep for Desdemona's woes, or swear at Clarissa's wrongs All of us who were born in the forties have loved; and though the snow that begins to rest on our heads has now.so tamed our.youthfol fire that we cannot make the impression we once did, yet we have frequently found pleasure in recalling our ently loves. Al! they were days! When we needed no Romeo to teach passion and despair; when we were poets; when we reached our highest levels nnd our lowest depths, sometimes in the same day; and did the things and dreamed the dreams that keep our lives until to-day from being quite colourless and cold; when we learned the names that may deeply puzzle our respected wives if they bronk from de-linous lips as we lie dying!—Ah those old days when love was eternal "How sad, how bad, how mad it was, But O, how it was sweet!"
Amavimus But we have never confided these things even to our dearest Chinese friend, having a distinct feeling that he would not quite uuderstand. There is n gulf Gxed, and pitman nature varies considerably all the world over.
Yet it is wonderful to think that while he lacks much that we have, he may have a great deal that he cannot make us understand, 'I'he mystery is not all on one side. Whether we shall ever be able to enter fully into one another's feelings is an open question. There are orders which teach universal brotherhood; and there is one passage which would reconsidered asaudaciously sublime if it occurred in some other book, which speaks of all that separates man from man, all that is accidental, being done away, so that there is no longer Greek nor Scythian, slave nor free, male nor female. But the time is not yet, and meanwhile we remain most into essling studies, the one to the other.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.