The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 18

Here let me note what seems to me a radical superiority in Chinese methods of thought. You may take the _Bhagavad-Gita,_ perhaps, as the highest expression of Aryan religio-philosophic thinking. There we have the Spirit, the One, shown as the self of the Universe, but speaking through, and as, Krishna, a human personality. Heaven forbid that I should suggest there is anthropomorphism in this. Still, I think our finest mystical and poetic perceptions of the Light beyond all lights do tend to crystallize themselves into the shape of a _Being;_ we do tend to symbolize and figure that Wonder as ..... an Individuality .....in some indefinable splendid sort. Often you find real mystics, men who have seen with their own eyes so to say, talking about _G.o.d, the Lord,_ the _Great King,_ and what not of the like; and though you know perfectly well what they mean, there was yet that necessity on them to use those figures of speech.

But in China, no. There, they begin from the opposite end.

Neither in Laotse nor in Confucius, nor in their schools, can you find a trace of personalism. G.o.ds many, yes; as reason and common sense declare; but nothing you can call a G.o.d is so ancient, constant, and eternal as Tao, "which would appear to have been before G.o.d." Go to their poets, and you find that the rage is all for Beauty as the light shining through things. The gra.s.s-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are lit from within and utterly adorable: not because G.o.d made them; not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being; but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no personality in them,--and so nothing to hinder the eternal wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.--As if _we_ came through our individuality to a conception of the Divine; but _they,_ through a perception of the divine, to a right understanding of their individuality. It amounts to _us_ to fall into gross hideous anthropomorphism; the worst of them into superst.i.tions of their own.--When one quotes Chw.a.n.gtse as speaking of "the delegated adaptability of _G.o.d,_" one must remember that one has to use some English word for his totally impersonal _Tao_ or _Tien,_ or even _Shangti,_ or whatever it may be.

This Tao, you say, something far off,--a principle in philosophy or a metaphysical idea,--may be very nice to discuss in a lecture or write poetry about; but dear me! between whiles we have a great deal to do, and really--But no! it is actually, as Mohammed said, "nearer to thee than thy jugular vein." It is a simple adjustment of oneself to the Universe,--of which, after all, one cannot escape being a part; it is the attainment of a true relationship to the whole. What obscures and hinders that, is simply our human brain-mind consciousness. "Consider the lilies of the field," that attain a perfection of beauty. The thing that moves us, or ought to move us, in flowers, trees, seas and mountains, is this: that lacking this fretting, gnawing sense of I-am-ness, their emanations are pure Tao, and may reach us along the channel we call beauty: may flood our being through "the gateway of the eyes." Beauty is Tao made visible. The rose and peony do not feel themselves 'I,' distinct from 'you' and the rest; they are in opposition to nothing; they do not fall in love, and have no aversions: they simply worship Heaven and are unanxious, and so beautiful. When we know this, we see what beauty means; and that it is not something we can afford to ignore and treat with stoic indifference or puritan dislike. It is Tao visible; I call every flower an avatar of G.o.d. Now you see how Taoism leads to poetry; is the philosophy of poetry; is indeed _Poetics,_ rather than _Metephysics._ Think of all the little jewels you know in Keats, in Sh.e.l.ley, or Wordsworth: the moments when the mists between those men and the divine "defecated to a thin transparency";--those were precisely the moments when the poets lost sight of their I-am-ness and entered into true relations with the Universe. A daffodil, every second of its life, holds within itself all the real things poets have ever said, or will ever say, about it; and can reach our souls directly with edicts from the Dragon Throne of the Eternal.--I watched the linarias yesterday, and their purple delicacy a.s.sured me that all the filth, all the falsehood and tragedy of the world, should pa.s.s and be blown away; that the garden was full of dancing fairies, joy moving them to their dancing; that it was my own fault if I could not see Apollo leaning down out of the Sun; and my own fatuity, and that alone, if I could not hear the Stars of Morning singing together, and all the sons of G.o.d shouting for you. And it was the truth they were telling; the plain, bald, naked truth;--they have never learned to lie, and do not know what it means. There is no sentimentalism in this; only science. We live in a Universe absolutely soaked through with G.o.d,--or with Poetry, which is perhaps a better name for It; a Universe peopled thick with G.o.ds. But it is all very far from our common thoughts and conceptions; that is why it sounds to most people like sentimental nonsense and 'poetry.' No wonder Plato hated that word;--since it is made a hand-grenade, in the popular mind, to fling at every truth. And yet Poetry 'gets in on us,' too, occasionally, and accomplishes for

"the woods and waters wild"

the work they cannot do for themselves;--the work they cannot do, cause we will not look at them, cannot see them, and have forgotten their ancient language, being too much immersed in a rubbishing gabble of our own.

What Toism, and especially Chw.a.n.gtse as I think, did for the Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient language; to make people understand how to take these grand protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought is close-packed, but I think you will follow it:--

"The true Sage rejects all distinction of this and that," that is to say, of subjective, or that which one perceives within one's own mind and consciousness, and objective, or that which is perceived as existing outside of them;--he does not look upon the mountain or the daffodil as things different or apart from his own conscious being. "He takes his refuge in Tao, and places himself in subjective relations with all things"; he keeps the mountain within him; the scent of the daffodil, and her yellow candle-flame of beauty, are within the sphere and circle of himself;

"...the little wave of Breffny goes stumbling through his soul."

"Hence it is said"--this is Chw.a.n.gtse again--"that there is nothing like the light of Nature.

"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the ident.i.ty of things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed."--And there, I may say, you have it: the last is the secret of the wonder-light in all Far Eastern Poetry and Art; more, it is the explanation of all poetry everywhere. It is the doctrine, the archeus, the _Open Sesame,_ the thyme- and lavender- and sweetwilliam-breathed Secret Garden of this old wizardly Science of Song;--who would go in there, and have the dark and bright blossoms for his companions, let him understand this. For Poetry is the revelation of the Great Life beyond the little life of this human personality; to tap it, you must evict yourself from the personal self; "transfer yourself into the position of the things viewed," and not see, but _be,_ the little stumbling wave or the spray of plum-blossom, thinking its thoughts.--"Viewing things thus," continues our Chw.a.n.gtse, "you are able to comprehend and master them. So it is that to place oneself in inner relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,--this is Tao. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the objectivity--the apartness--of things, not recognizing that they are all one--this is called _Three in the Morning._--'What do you mean by _Three in the Morning?'_ asked Tse Yu.--'A keeper of monkeys,' Tse Chi replied, 'said with regard to their daily ration of chestnuts that each monkey should have three in the morning and four at night. At this the monkeys were very angry; so he said that they might have four in the morning and three at night; whereat they were well pleased. The number of nuts was the same; but there was an adaptation to the feelings of those concerned.'"-- which, again, means simply that to follow Tao and dodge until it is altogether sloughed off the sense of separateness, is to follow the lines of least resistance.

All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but b.u.t.terfly Chw.a.n.g, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come.

XIV. THE MANVANTARA OPENS

Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he retired into the wilds, and was meditating at the tomb of Shun in Hupeh, in what was then the far south. There the Phoenix and the Dragon came to him, and bore him aloft, past the West Pole, past the Milky Way, past even the Source of the Hoangho, to the Gates of Heaven. Where, however, there was no admittance for him; and full of sorrow he returned to earth.

------ * _Chinese Literature,_ by Dr. H. A. Giles. What is said about the _Li Sao_ here comes from that work--except the suggestions as to its inner meaning.

On the banks of the Mi-lo a fisherman met him, and asked him the cause of his trouble.--"All the world is foul," answered Ch'u Yuan, "and I alone am clean."--"If that is so," said the fisherman, "why not plunge into the current, and make its foulness clean with the infection of your purity? The Man of Tao does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adjusts himself to them." Ch'u Yuan took the hint: leaped into the Mi-lo;--and yearly since then they have held the Dragon-boat Festival on the waters of Middle China to commemorate the search for his body.-- Just how much of this is in the _Li Sao,_--where the poem ends,-- I do not clearly gather from Professor Giles's account; but the whole story appears to me to be a magnificent Soul Symbol: of that Path which leads you indeed on dragon flights to the borders of the Infinite, but whose end, rightly considered, is in this world, and to be as it were drowned in the waters of this world, with your cleanness infecting them to be clean,--and lighting them for all future ages with beauty, as with little dragon-boats luminous with an inner flame. Ch'u Yuan had followers in that and the next century; but perhaps his greatness was hardly to be approached for a thousand years.

But we were still in Tiger-time, and with quite the worst of it to come. Here lay the Blue Pearl scintillating rainbows up through the heavy atmosphere; but despite its flashing and up-fountaining those strange dying-dolphin hues and glories, you could never have told, in Tiger-time, what it really was. The Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed that flight, when Chw.a.n.gtse wrote and Ch'u Yuan sung, was surprised with the far churr of startling wings under the stars.

Ears intent to listen were surprised; but only for a moment;-- there was that angry howling again from the northern hills and the southern forests: the two great Tigers of the world face to face, tails lashing;--and between them and in their path, Chow quite p.r.o.ne,--the helpless Black-haired People trembling or chattering frivolously. Not for such an age as that Chw.a.n.gtse and Ch'u Yuan wrote, but indeed you may say for all time. What light from the Blue Pearl could then shine forth and be seen, would, in the thick fog and smoke-gloom, take on wild fantastic guise; which, as we shall see, it did:--but what Chw.a.n.gtse had written remained, pure immortality, to kindle up better ages to come. When China should be ready, Chw.a.n.gtse and the Pearl would be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned; but we may hurry on now to its dawning.

The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged. Soon after Asoka came to the throne of Magadha, in 284 B.C., Su Tai, wise prime minister to the Lord of Chao, took occasion to speak-- seriously to his royal master as to the latter's perennial little wars with Yen.* "This morning as I crossed the river," said he, "I saw a mussel open its sh.e.l.l to the sun. Straight an oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel; which promptly snapped the sh.e.l.l to and held the bird fast.--'If it doesn't rain today or tomorrow,' said the oyster-catcher, 'there'll be a dead mussel here.'--'And if you don't get out of this by today or tomorrow,' said the mussel, 'there'll be a dead oyster-catcher.' Meanwhile up came a fisherman and carried them both off. I fear Ts'in will be our fisherman."

------ * The tale is taken from Dr. H.A. Gile's _Chinese Literature._ ------

Which duly came to pa.s.s. Even in Liehtse's time Ts'in characteristics were well understood: he tells a sly story of a neighboring state much infested by robbers. The king was proud of a great detective who kept them down; but they soon killed the Pinkerton, and got to work again. Then he reformed himself,--and the robbers found his kingdom no place for them. In a body they crossed the Hoangho into Ts'in;--and bequeathed to its policy their tendencies and apt.i.tudes.

Ts'in had come to be the strongest state in China. Next neighbor to the Huns, and half Hun herself, she had learned warfare in a school forever in session. But she had had wise rulers also, after their fashion of wisdom: who had been greatly at pains to educate her in all the learning of the Chinese. So now she stood, an armed camp of a nation, enamored of war, and completely civilized in all external things. Ts'u, her strongest rival, stretching southward to the Yangtse and beyond, had had to deal with barbarians less virile than the Huns; and besides, dwelling as Ts'u did among the mountains and forests of romance, she had some heart in her for poetry and mysticism, whereas Ts'in's was all for sheer fighting. Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man; and also Chw.a.n.gtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of poetry were blown. Still--he had immense territories and resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against the northern Tiger Ts'in. Soon after Su Tai told his master the parable of the mussel and the oyster-catcher the grand clash came, and the era of petty wars and raidings was over. Ts'u gathered to herself most of the rest of China for her allies, and there was a giant war that fills the whole horizon, nearly, of the first half of the third century B. C. New territories were involved: the world had expanded mightily since the days of Confucius. "First and last," says Ssema Tsien, "the allies hurled a million men against Ts'in." But to no purpose; one nation after another went down before those Hun-trained half-Huns from the north-west. In 257 Chau Tsiang king of Ts'in took the Chow capital, and relieved Nan w.a.n.g, the last of the Chows, of the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu, the symbols of his sacred sovereignty; --the mantle of the Caliphate pa.s.sed from the House of Wen w.a.n.g and the Duke of Chow.

The world had crumbled to pieces: there had been changes of dynasty before, but never (in known history) a change like this.

The Chows had been reigning nearly nine hundred years; but their system had been in the main the same as that of the Shangs and Hias, and of Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu: it was two millenniums, a century, and a decade old. A Chinaman, in Chau Tsiang's place, would merely have reshaped the old order and set up a new feudal-pontifical house instead of Chow; which could not have lasted, because old age had worn the old system out.

But these barbarians came in with new ideas. A new empire, a new race, a new nation was to be born.

Chau Tsiang died in 251; and even then one could not clearly foresee what should follow. In 253 he had performed the significant sacrifice to Heaven, a prerogative of the King-Pontiff: but he had not a.s.sumed the t.i.tle. Resistance was still in being.

His son and successor reigned three days only; and _his_ son, another nonent.i.ty, five years without claiming to be more than King of Ts'in. But when this man died in 246, he left the destinies of the world in the hands of a boy of thirteen; who very quickly showed the world in whose hands its destinies lay. Not now a King of Ts'in; not a King-Pontiff of Chow;--not, if you please, a mere _w.a.n.g_ or king at all;--but Hw.a.n.gti, like that great figure of mythological times, the Yellow Emperor, who had but to sit on his throne, and all the world was governed and at peace. The child began by a.s.suming that astounding t.i.tle: _Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti,_ the First August Emperor: peace to the ages that were past; let them lie in their tomb; time now should begin again!--Childish boyish sw.a.n.k and braggadocio, said the world; but very soon the world found itself mistaken.

_Hw.a.n.gti;_--but no sitting on his throne in meditation, no letting the world be governed by Tao, for him!

If you have read that delightful book _Through Hidden Shensi,_ by Mr. F. A. Nichols, the city of Hienfang, or Changan, or, by its modern name, Singanfu or Sian-fu in Shensi, will be much more than a name to you. Thither it was that the Dowager Empress fled with her court from Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion; there, long ago, Han Wuti's banners flew; there Tang Taitsong reigned in all his glory and might; there the Banished Angel sang in the palace gardens of Tang Hsuantsong the luckless: history has paid such tribute of splendor to few of the cities of the world. At Hienfang now this barbarian boy and Attila-Napoleon among kings built his capital;--built it right splendidly, after such ideas of splendor as a young half-Hun might cherish.

For indeed, he had but little and remote Chinese heredity in him; was of the race of Attila and Genghiz, of Mahmoud of Ghazna, Tamerlane, and all the world-shaking Turkish conquerors.

--Well, but these people, though by nature and function destroyers, have been great builders too: building hugely, monumentally, and to inspire awe, and not with the faery grace and ephemeral loveliness of the Chinese;--though they learned the trick of that, too,--as they learned in the west kindred qualities from the Saracens. Grand Pekin is of their architecture; which is Chinese with a s.p.a.ciousness and monumental solemnity added. Such a capital Ts'in She Hw.a.n.gti built him at Hien fang or Changan. In the Hall of audience of his palace within the walls he set up twelve statues, each (I like this barbarian touch) weighing twelve thousand pounds. Well; _we_ should say, each costing so many thousand dollars; you need not laugh; I am not sure but that the young Hun had the best of it. And without the walls he built him, too, a Palace of Delight with many halls and courtyards; in some of which (I like this too) he could drill ten thousand men.

All of this was but the trappings and the suits of his sovereignty: he let it be known he had the substance as well. No great strategist himself, he commanded the services of mighty generals: one Meng-tien in especial, a bright particular star in the War-G.o.d's firmament. An early step to disarm the nations, and have all weapons sent to Changan; then, with these, to furnish forth a great standing army, which he sent out under Meng-tien to conquer. The Middle Kingdom and the quondam Great Powers were quieted; then south of the Yangtse the great soldier swept, adding unknown regions to his master's domain. Then rorth and west, till the Huns and their like had grown very tame and wary;--and over all these realms the Emperor spread his network of fine roads and ca.n.a.ls, linking them with Changan: what the Romans did for Europe in road-building, he did for China.

He had, of course, a host of relatives; and precedent loomed large to tell him what to do with them: the precedent of the dynasty-founders of old. Nor were they themselves likely to have been backward in reminding him. Wu w.a.n.g had come into possession of many feudal dominions, and had made of the members of his family dukes and marquises to rule them. Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti's empire was many times the size of Wu w.a.n.g's; so he was in a much better position to reward the deserving. We must remember that he was no heir to a single sovereignty, but a Napoleon with a Europe at his feet. Ts'in and Ts'u and Tsin and the others were old-established kingdoms, with as long a history behind them as France or England has now; and that history had been filled with wars, mutual antagonisms and hatreds. Chow itself was like an Italy before Garibaldi;--with a papacy more inept, and holding vaguer sway:--it had been at one time the seat of empire, and it was the source of all culture. He had to deal, then, with a heterogeneity as p.r.o.nounced as that which confronted Napoleon; but he was not of the stuff for which you prepare Waterloos. No one dreamed that he would treat the world other than as such a heterogeneity. His relations expected to be made the Jeromes, Eugenes, and Murats of the Hollands, Spains, and Sicilies to hand. The world could have conceived of no other way of dealing with the situation. But Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti could, very well.

He abolished the feudal system. He abolished nationalities and national boundaries. There should be no more Ts'in and Tsin and Ts'u; no more ruling dukes and marquises. Instead, there should be an entirely new set of provinces, of which he would appoint the governors, not hereditary; and they should be responsible to him: promotable when good, dismissable and beheadable on the first sign of naughtiness. It was an idea of his own; he had no foreign history to go to for models and precedents, and there had been nothing like it in Chinese History. Napoleon hardly conceived such a tremendous idea, much less had he the force to carry it out. Even the achievement of Augustus was smaller; and Augustus had before him models in the history of many ancient empires.

Now what was the ferment behind this man's mind;--this barbarian --for so he was--of tremendous schemes and doings? The answer is astonishing, when one thinks of the crude ruthless human dynamo he was. It was simply _Taoism:_ it was Laotse's Blue Pearl;-- but shining, of course, as through the heart of a very London Particular of Hunnish-barbarian fogs. No subtleties of mysticism; no Chw.a.n.gtsean spiritual and poetry-breeding ideas, for him!--It has fallen, this magical Pearl, into turbid and tremendous waters, a natural potential Niagara; it has stirred, it has infected their vast bulk into active Niagarahood. He was on fire for the unknown and the marvelous; could conceive of no impossible--it should go hard, he thought, but that the subtler worlds that interpenetrate this one should be as wonderful as this world under Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti. Don't argue with him; it is dangerous!--certainly there was an Elixir of Life, decantable into goblets, from which Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti might drink and become immortal,--the First August Emperor, and the only one forever!

Certainly there were those Golden Islands eastward, where G.o.ds dispensed that nectar to the fortunate;--out in your ships, you there, and search the waves for them! And certainly, too, there were G.o.d knew what of fairylands and paradises beyond the western desert; out, you General Meng-tien, with your great armies and find them! He did tremendous things, and all the while was thus dreaming wildly. From the business of state he would seize hours at intervals to lecture to his courtiers on Tao;--I think _not_ in a way that would have been intelligible to Laotse or Chw.a.n.gtse.

Those who yawned were beheaded, I believe.

How would such a prodigy in time appear to his own age? Such cataclysmic wars as Ts'in had been waging for the conquest of China take society first, so to say, upon its circ.u.mference, smash that to atoms, and then go working inwards. The most conservative and stable elements are the last and least affected.

The peasant is killed, knocked about, transported, enclaved; but when the storm is over, and he gets back to his plough and hoe and rice-field again, sun and wind and rain and the earth-breath soothe him back to and confirm in what he was of old: only some new definite spiritual impulse or the sweep of the major cycles can change him much,--and then the change is only modification.

At the other end of society you have the Intellectuals. In England, Oxford is the home and last refuge of lost causes. A literary culture three times as old as modern Oxford's, as China's was then, will be, you may imagine, fixed and conservative.

It is a mental mold petrified with age; the minds partic.i.p.ating must conform to it, solidify, and grow harder in the matrix it provides than granite or adamant. We have seen how in recent times the Confucian literati resisted the onset of westernism. All these steam-engines and telegraphs seemed to them fearfully crude and vulgar in comparison with the niceties of literary style, the finesses of time-taking ceremonious courtesies, that had been to them and to their ancestors time out of mind the true refinements of life, and even the realities.

China rigid against the West was not a semi-barbarism resisting civilization, but an excessively perfected culture resisting the raw energies of one still young and, in its eyes, still with the taint of savagery: brusque manners, materialistic valuations.

Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti in his day had to meet a like opposition. The wars had broken up the structure of society, but not the long tradition of refined learning. That had always seemed the quarter from which light and leading must come; but it had long ceased to be a quarter from which light or leading could come.

Mencius had been used to rate and ridicule the ruling princes; and scholars now could not understand that Mencius and his ruling princes and all their order were dead. They could not understand that they were not Menciuses, nor Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti a kinglet such as he had dealt with. Now Mencius had been a great man,--a Man's son, as they say;--and very likely he and Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti might have hit it off well enough. But there was no Mencius, no Man's son, among the literati now. The whole cla.s.s was wily, polite, sarcastic, subtle, unimaginative, refined to a degree, immovable in conservatism. The Taoist teachers had breathed in a new spirit, but it had not reached them. How would Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti, barbarian, wild Taoist, and man of swift great action, appear to them?

Of course they could not abide him; and had not the sense to fear. They were at their old game of wire-pulling: would have the feudal system back, with all the old inefficiency; in the name of Ta Yu and the Duke of Chow they would do what they might to undo the strivings of this Ts'in upstart. So all the subtleties of the old order were arrayed against him,--pull devil, pull baker.

He knew it; and knew the extreme difficulty of striking any ordinary blow to quiet them. He had challenged Time Past to the conflict, and meant to win. Time Future was knocking at the doors of the empire, and he intended it should come in and find a home. His armies had crossed the Gobi, and smelt out unending possibilities in the fabulous west; they had opened up the fabulous south, the abode of Romance and genii and dragons. It was like the discovery of the Americas: a new world brought over the horizon. His great minister, Li Ssu had invented a new script, the Lesser Seal, easier and simpler than the old one; Meng-tien, conqueror of the Gobi, had invented the camel's-hair brush wherewith to write gracefully on silk or cloth, instead of difficultly with stylus on bamboo-strips as of old. It was the morning stir of the new manvantara; and little as the emperor might care for culture, he heard the Future crying to him. He heard, too, the opposing murmur of the still unconquered Past.

The literati stood against him as the Papacy against Frederick II of Sicily: a less open opposition, and one harder to meet.

He did not solve the problem till near the end of his reign. In 213 he called a great meeting in the Hall of Audience at Changan.

See the squat burly figure enthroned in grand splendor; the twelve weighty statues arranged around; the chief civil and military officers of the empire, thorough Taoists like himself, gathered on one side; the Academies and Censorates, all the leaders of the literati, on the other. The place was big enough for a largish meeting. Minister Li Ssu rises to describe the work of the Emperor; whereafter the latter calls for expressions of opinion. A member of his household opines that he "surpa.s.ses the very greatest of his predecessors": which causes a subdued sneer to run through the ranks of scholars. One of them takes the floor and begins to speak. Deprecates flattery guardedly, as bad for any sovereign; considers who the greatest of these predecessors were:--Yao, Shun, and Yu, 'Tang the Completer, Wu w.a.n.g; and--implies a good deal. Warms to his work at last, and grows bitter; almost openly pooh poohs all modern achievements; respectfully--or perhaps not too respectfully--advocates a return to the feudal--

"Silence!" roars Attila-Napoleon from his throne; and motions Li Ssu to make answer. The answer was predetermined, one imagines.

It was an order that five hundred of the chief literati present should retire and be beheaded, and that thousands more should be banished. And that all books should be burned. Attila-Napoleon's orders had a way of being carried out. This was one.

He had meanwhile been busy with the great material monument of his reign: the Wall of China; and with cautious campaigns yearly to the north of it; and with personal supervision of the Commissariat Department of all his armies everywhere; and with daily long _hikes_ to keep himself in trim. Now the Wall came in useful. To stretch its fifteen hundred miles of length over wild mountains and valleys in that bleak north of the world, some little labor was needed; and scholars and academicians were many and, for most purposes, useless; and they needed to be brought into touch with physical realities to round out their characters;--then let them go and build the wall. He buried enough of them--alive, it is to be feared: an ugly Ts'in custom, not a Chinese,--to make melons ripen in mid-winter over their common grave; the rest he sentenced to four years of wall-building,--which meant death. That, too, was the penalty for concealing books. He was now in dead earnest that the Past should go, and history begin again; to be read forever afterwards in this order,--the Creation, the Reign of Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti.

But he spared books on useful subjects: that is to say, on Medicine, Agriculture, and Magic.

So ancient China is to be seen now only as through a gla.s.s darkly; if his great attempt had been quite successful, it would not be to be seen at all. His crimes made no karma for China; they are not a blot on her record;--since they were done by an outside barbarian,--a mere publican and Ts'inner. From our standpoint as students of history, he was a malefactor of the first order; even when you take no account of his ruthless cruelty to men;--and so China has considered him ever since. Yet Karma finds ruthless agents for striking its horrible and beneficial blows; (and woe unto them that it finds!). It seems that Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti did draw the bowstring back--by this very wickedness,--far back--that sent the arrow China tearing and blazing out through the centuries to come. The fires in which the books were burned were the pyre of the Phoenix,--the burning of the astral molds,--the ignition and annihilation of the weight and the karma of two millenniums. The Secular Bird was to burn and be consumed to the last feather, and be turned to ashes utterly, before she might spring up into the ether for her new flight of ages.

One wonders what would happen if a Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti were to arise and do by modern Christendom what this one did by ancient China. I say nothing about the literati, but only about the literature. Would burning it be altogether an evil? Nearly all that is supremely worth keeping would live through; and its value would be immensely enhanced. First the newspapers would go, that sow lies broadcast, and the seeds of national hatreds.

The light literature would go, that stands between men and thought. The books of theology would go, and the dust of creedalism that lies so thick on men's minds. A thousand bad precedents that keep us bound to medievalism would go with the law-books: there would be a chance to p.r.o.nounce, here and now as human beings, on such things as capital punishment;--which remains, though we do not recognise the fact, solely because it has been in vogue all these centuries, and is a habit hard to break with. History would go; yes;--but a mort of pernicious lies would go with it. Well, well; one speaks of course in jest (partly). But when all is said, China was not unfortunate in having a strong giant of a man, a foreigner withal, at her head during those crucial decades. Ts'in Shi Hw.a.n.gti guarded China through most of that perilous intermission between the cycles.

It was the good that he did that mostly lived after him.

In 210 he fell ill, took no precautions, and died,--in his fiftieth year. A marvelous mausoleum was built for him: a palace, with a mountain heaped on top, and the floor of it a map of China, with the waters done in quicksilver. Whether his evil deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?--certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the _Book of Odes,_ Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with their dead king.