I am rather breathless over it all, having had my main outlook on life the last quarter of a century from this quiet corner of my veranda in a little interior city of China. We are really very conservative here yet, the rare visitors from an outside world tell us. Vague rumors of coeducation, of men and women dining together in restaurants, of moving pictures, and even imported dances, float in from the port cities. I know that I sometimes see the inhabitants of such places pass through the abominably ugly railway-station, which has just been foisted upon our old-fashioned little old town; and they look scandalous women to me, with their wide, short trousers and short sleeves and tight coats; but I suppose I am behind the times. I confess that I like my old Chinese friends better, with their courteous speech and gracious manners. I dislike the acquired abruptness of these young creatures. I dislike the eternal cigarettes, and the blasé, self-sufficient expression on young faces, which I am accustomed to seeing timid and reverential.
But — and but again — how much of my displeasure is dislike of the irreverence of my own pedantic old self, and discomfort at having my opinions, fixed by years, questioned and even flouted? How much of it, I wonder, is middle-aged stiff-neckedness? What if, after all, these young upstarts are the beginnings of a new growth out of the decadent soil of an old civilization insufficient for this day and time? The universe of space and time is not comprised within this old street, with its secluded, shaded courtyards, and spirit walls guarding dragon-carved gateways.
If these young things let the sunlight into the courtyards, and tear down the spirit walls in unbelief, and even desecrate these marvelously wrought dragons with modern paint and plaster — if, I say, it is done in the name of a new era of general enlightenment and clear thinking, and of a struggle for better things and conditions in this sleepy, unhygienic, ignorant old town and country, to the winds, then, with my slow, conservative soul and love of old-time reverence and manners!
For the world is marching on!
And my second article, in the Forum, follows below:
BEAUTY IN CHINA
It is only an American, born and reared in an alien country, who can appreciate fully the amazing beauty of the American woods in autumn. Inexplicably, no one had prepared me for it. I had lived all my days in a calm Chinese landscape, lovely in its way with delicate, swaying bamboos, curved temple roofs mirrored in lotus pools. It was gently colorful, too, in blues and greens, with a semi-tropic effulgence of sunshine, and a piercing starriness of night. But when summer was gone, and chrysanthemums had glowed and faded, the colors were put away for the most part, until the next spring. The trees dropped their leaves softly, turning the while to a quiet, neutral brown, without any great ado about it, and almost overnight we were in decent and sober winter garb. The earth took on a dull monotony of hue, which the little thatched farmhouses of adobe did not relieve. Even the people retired into enormous padded garments of dark blue and black. Thus, when after a loitering journey eastward, I stepped into sweet English country, I was entranced with its mauve and tawny shades of late summer. Could its hedgerows be lovelier, even in primrose time! There was a dreamy stillness about it which lifted cares away and left one quite content with quiet, well-tilled fields and ancient grey stone cottages, with their slow smoke drifting imperceptibly upwards in the motionless air. An exquisite rest lay over the earth in England as of one lying down to well-earned sleep.
In such a mood as this I crossed the Atlantic, and was thrown straight into New York. Who except one accustomed to the leisurely traffic of trams and rikshaws and wheelbarrows can realize the astounding activity of New York! Where one dodged one vehicle, a thousand sprang up to take its place, and crossing the street was a wild adventure, compared to which bandits in China are a mild affair. There was the bewildering clatter of elevated railways to dizzy one’s mind, and subterranean roars from the bowels of the universe, apparently. I was fascinated with the yawning earth, which swallowed up people by the hundreds in one spot, only to vomit them up, restless as ever, miles away. Personally, I could not commit myself to the subway, and clinging to a trolley strap, thought regretfully at times of jogging peacefully along on a wheelbarrow, watching the lazy ducks swimming in the ponds by the roadside and stooping to pluck a wild flower for babies tumbling brown and naked in the dust.
But if New York shook me out of my quiescent dreaming, even New York did not prepare me for the shock of the American woods.
A week later I found myself walking through a wood in Virginia. How can I put the excitement of it into words! No one had told me how paganly gorgeous it would be. Oh, of course they had said, “the leaves turn in the fall, you know,” but how does that prepare one? I had thought of pale yellows and tans and faint rose reds. Instead, I found myself in a living blaze of color — robust, violent, vivid beyond belief. I shall never forget one tall tree trunk wrapped about with a vine of flaming scarlet, standing outlined, a fiery sentinel, against a dark rocky cliff.
There was a maple walk which might have been the pathway to the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. Wandering anywhere, above one’s head were interlaced boughs, bursting with orange and red, crimson and seal brown, and yellow of purest quality. One walked on a carpet of hues which an emperor’s wealth could not buy in a Peking rug. Even the quite tiny things, small vines and plantlets that must have been meek little things in summer, expressed themselves in the most outrageous and unrestrained colors.
Well! There can be nothing like it on this earth. Do the Americans realize it every year, I wonder? I shall not soon be astounded at anything now, I believe. Not at Aurora Borealis, which I have yet to see confirmed, not at Vesuvius, and I have my doubts even about that day when the skies shall roll away to the tune of Gabriel’s trump. I don’t believe there can come to a human being a more intoxicating revelation of beauty than that which fell upon me, straight from quiet, sombre things, when I walked for the first time in my life in American woods in autumn.
Thus it was that I fell to thinking again about beauty. It has long been my pleasure to note particularly bits of loveliness about the world, and to see how differently the peoples of the earth have expressed themselves in ways of unconscious beauty. I do not mean by that the great sights which tourists run to see. Seldom are the people of a country really to be found there.
I found France not in the Louvre, but in an old woman in a blue gown and white kerchief, kneeling to beat clothes beside a tinkling stream. Such a patient, enduring, loyal figure, I thought; suddenly she lifted her head and bewitched me with the eternal spirit of humor and coquetry in laughing, restless eyes, forever young and vivid with life in a wrinkled old face.
The Swiss is not truly expressed in the majestic pageant of the Alps, white and remote against blue skies. I found him, painstaking and slow, in his frugal plot of ground, carefully nailing his pear tree against the wall and counting the clusters of grapes on a vine trained to run as little to leaves as possible. Everything about him was neat and compact, and in its way, pretty. I doubt he looked twice a year at the Jungfrau, towering eternal above his minute possessions.
Strange how I never thus think of the peoples of the earth without my thoughts leaving me and twisting about the world until they come to my adopted country, China!
How many folk have greeted me as they stepped from the first brief train journey from Shanghai, “Ah, China is not beautiful like Japan, is it!”
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.