I mind me of a great dark guest hall in a temple, which faces out upon a tiny sunny courtyard, where a peony terrace is built up of faded grey brick. Here every spring the great pink shoots push up, and when I go there in May, the sunlight is pouring down upon the deeply tinted peonies, glowing in reds and dusky pinks, and in the center creamy ones with golden hearts. The terrace is cleverly placed so that the guests must needs look upon it from the dimness of the interior. What words could be spoken, what thought shaped in such a place, save those of purest beauty!
There are old paintings, old embroideries, potteries and porcelains and brasses, hidden away preciously by families who owned them before America was thought of; indeed, perhaps they are of an age with Pharaoh’s treasures — who knows?
It is one of the sad things of the present change in China that either poverty or careless, ignorant youth is learning the money value of things which are really too valuable for any sale; things which because of their sheer beauty are too great to belong to any individual and which should be reverently possessed by the nation. But their time of understanding is not yet.
Indeed, not the least of the crimes committed against China by foreign countries has been the despoiling by eager curio seekers and globe trotters and business firms of her stores of beauty. It has really been the robbing of the ignorant, for she has not known that what she thought to sell for thirty pieces of silver could not truly be sold at all.
Moreover, one shudders at the crude stage through which so many of the modern young Chinese seem to be passing. It is inevitable, of course, that in their distrust and repudiation of the past, they should apparently cast off the matchless art of old China and should rush out to buy and hang upon their walls many of the cheap vulgarities of the West. Indeed, to those of us who see the passing of much that was characteristic of the country we have loved it has become a poignant question; who is to preserve the ancient beauties of China? For instance, with all the degradation that has unquestionably followed in the wake of idolatry, must we, along with all the discard, lose the exquisite curves of temple architecture?
Yet I am at times comforted. There must come out of all those beauty-loving ancestors a few to whom the pursuit of beauty is a master passion, and who will pass it on to calmer times.
I went the other day to the studio of a famous modern Chinese artist. My heart sank lower and lower as I passed the copies of posters, of old-fashioned Gibson girls, of lurid suns setting into the vilely colored ocean — dozens of perpetrations in oils. But away in one corner I found a little watercolor. It was only of a village street, misty blue in the sudden rain of a summer evening. Slanting lines of pale silver fell across it. Dim candle-light shone out of the windows of snug homes, and a lonely man’s figure under a paper umbrella walked along, casting a wavering shadow over the glinting wet stones.
I turned to the artist and said, “This is the best of all.”
His face lighted.
“Do you think so? I, too. It is a picture of my village street as I have seen it many times. But,” regretfully, “I painted it for pleasure. It will not sell.”
If I really have a fault to find with the beauty of China, however, it is that it is too secluded, too reserved. It does not permeate enough to the uttermost parts of the people to whom it belongs. It has been kept too much in isolated family or religious groups. The knowledge of the value of beauty has been withheld from many who have suffered from the lack. The poorer and more ignorant classes have been allowed for centuries to grow up and to die in utter indifference to all the subtle and necessary influences which flow from the essentially beautiful. The opportunity to pursue beauty has been too much the prerogative of the wealthy and leisured. Consequently the poor man thinks of it only as one of the pastimes of the rich and hence impossible for him.
What the average Chinese needs is an eye educated to see the beauty which lies waiting to be freed about him everywhere. When once he grasps the significance of beauty and realizes that it does not lie at all in the hideous lithograph for which he must pay the prohibitive price of forty cents; that it does not lie, solely, even, in the priceless possessions of the rich; but that it is in his dooryard, waiting to be released from careless filth and indolent untidiness, a new spirit will walk abroad in the land.
Anyway, I know that man cannot live by bread alone and that is what thousands of these folk have been trying to do here, submerged under unspeakably difficult economic conditions. To see the beauty in fresh air and natural loveliness, to know the joy of sunshine streaming on clear water and the graciousness of flowers, — these beauties free for all are what we need sorely.
I said this to my old Chinese teacher the other day, and he replied with a proverb which runs something like this: “When a man’s barns are filled and his appetite appeased, then may he take heart to think upon the things of the spirit.”
Which, I suppose, is true.
Yet I am sure the gardener has had a good supper last night when, as I sat musing under the bamboos, he was working cheerfully away on the lawn. Startled by an unaccustomed light, I glanced up and was smitten afresh with the sunset sky.
“Oh, look!” I called.
“Where — where?” he cried, seizing the hoe.
“There, at the wonderful color!”
“Oh, that!” he exclaimed in great disgust, stooping to the weeds again. “I thought when you called out so, that it must be a centipede crawling on you!”
To tell the truth, I don’t believe that a love of beauty is based altogether on a well-fed interior. Plenty of gourmands are only gourmands still. Besides, if the proverb were true altogether, how could I explain deaf old Mrs. Wang, poorest of poor little widows, who sews hard all day to make a bowl of rice, and yet who manages someway to have a flower the whole summer long in a broken bottle on her table and who wept with delight when I pressed upon her a little green vase?
Or the tiny tobacco shop, whose cheerful, toothless old proprietor is always coddling along a plant of some sort in an earthen pot? Or the farmer outside my compound who lets a mass of hollyhocks stand as they please about his house? Or the little “wild” children of the street who press their faces against my gate sometimes and beg for a posy?
No, the love of beauty waits to be born in the heart of every child, I think. Sometimes the hard exigencies of life kill it, and it is still forever. But sometimes it lives and grows strong in the silent, meditative soul of a man or a woman, who finds that it is not enough to live in a palace and to dine even with kings. Such know that after all they are eternally unsatisfied, until in some way they find beauty, where is hidden God.
I had no illusions about the importance of these two little essays, they were trifles, but their acceptance induced a mood of happiness and I began to write in earnest on what was to have been my first big novel.
It was natural to me to tell no one about the novel. This was not secretiveness, for if there had been any one to tell I would surely have told, but I had no friends on this level. Friends aplenty I had and have always had, but I learned long ago to meet them where they are. And I had no friends or relatives to whom I could speak about my writing, and it did not occur to me that this was strange or even a deprivation. I was long ago used to living in many mansions.