The sickening romanticism purified itself gradually, however, and the strongest minds began to return to their own people. Chou Shu-jen, or “Lu Hsün,” as he called himself, was perhaps the first to perceive that although his inspiration might come through Western literature, yet he could escape imitativeness only if he applied his newly found emotions to his own people. Thus he began to write sketches and stories and finally novels about the simple everyday people. Kuo Mo-jou became my own favorite and in spite of a cynicism that was sometimes only destructive. I think of that brilliant mind, whose habit was the utmost candor and whose passion was truth, and I wonder how he can live as he does nowadays under the Communist government in his country. Is he silenced, I wonder, or has he succumbed, as others have, to writing the extravaganzas of convulsive and surely compelled adoration of the new Magi? And I can scarcely believe that Ting Ling and Ping Hsin are changed, those two intrepid and fearless women writers, who used to make me so proud. But who can tell me? It is another world and one that I do not know. It is useless now to put down the names of all the brave young Chinese men and women who led the awakening minds of their compatriots, and who are either dead or in a living death, cut off from our knowledge by the present division of the globe. What I remember is that they provided for me the clearest mirror of the world we then shared, and through them and their books I understood what otherwise might have been inexplicable.
It was revealing that their books were short. Even their novels were short as though they had no time to make long books. Each fresh rush of emotion, each new perception, was hurried into a book, and there was scarcely time to write one before another pressed. Publishing houses sprang up and the bookstalls in my city were crowded with the cheap little paper-backed volumes. I could buy a basketful for a dollar or so and read for days, and this generous fare has made me impatient ever since of expensive books. I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy.
There was one interesting aspect of the literary revolution which has had lasting effect upon the Chinese modern mind. In the effort to repudiate all Confucian tradition, these young modern writers became rigorously candid, and they repudiated utterly the old moralistic essays of the past. I suppose that the revolt against Confucius which became part of the first trend toward Communism, began in this invincible determination of the young to refuse all pretense of being moral because their elders seemed to them such hypocrites. They began to reveal themselves in the most intimate moods of their minds, and they reveled in descriptions and declarations of themselves, their feelings and their actions, which shocked to the soul their parents and older relatives. Yet it was a therapeutic process. So long had they been taught and trained in the moralistic patterns of the past, that it was almost as though they now felt compelled to tear off their clothes and walk the streets naked. It is interesting to compare their violent denial of Confucius with the Communist rejection of religion, for indeed Confucius, though he was a philosopher and no priest, had shaped Chinese society and posterity in an ethic religious and moral in its effect. It will be a long time, I fear, before the balance is restored, and Chinese will again realize how much they owe to Confucius, their greatest figure. Yet it must not be supposed that this revolt was against ethics or morals, as such — quite the reverse. Confucianism had become almost entirely superficial after many centuries, its morals too often mere pretense, and the angry young revolted against these qualities in their elders and in their revolt they threw Confucius out the window, too. The corruption and hypocrisy of the orthodox church in Russia were similarly the understandable reasons for the violence of that revolt against religion. For the soul of man is born fresh in every child, and there is an age in every creature, unless he is debased too young, when for a time he sees clearly the difference between truth and falsehood, and hypocrisy infuriates him. He cannot forgive those who should be true and instead are liars. This fury, I believe, is the first cause for revolutions throughout history.
I must speak here of the extraordinary place of newspapers in the literary revolution. When I was a child, we had only English newspapers to read, printed in Shanghai. My father read The Chinese Imperial Gazette when he could get it, but it contained little except court news. Beyond that he read the wall newspapers, which were simply bulletins pasted on the walls near the city gates. Now, however, newspapers modeled on Western ones sprang up in every large city, and since the spoken language was also the recognized written language, they were easy to read. The effect of this was that literate men began to read newspapers, and would talk about the news to others who could not read. It became quite usual in a crowded teashop for one man to read a newspaper aloud to a score or more of men who had never learned how to read. Indeed, until the literary revolution made it worth while, reading was a luxury pastime and a practical man had no need for such an esoteric skill. Now that newspapers were printed in the vernacular, however, so that what was read could also be understood, every man wanted to be able to read, and the desire for this means to knowledge spread even to women. I was moved to the heart in those days to see old women as well as young striving to learn a few characters in order to feel, and to say, that they could read. The newspapers often were unreliable and biased, but at least one could get a Chinese point of view on events and interests. Some of these newspapers were put out by the writers themselves, just as many of the young publishing companies were merely groups of writers, but they were none the less valuable for that. The writers were, I remember, forever organizing themselves into societies and clubs and it seemed to me they wasted their energies in disagreement in their newspapers and magazines. Yet I could feel a rising feeling of larger unity among them, in spite of their dissensions, and I was afraid. Total revolution was more clearly ahead than ever and I could not discern its form. Indeed the disturbance in young Chinese minds, articulate in the new publications, was sure to rush headlong into some sort of violence and older people were becoming more and more bewildered as they watched their sons and daughters whom they could no longer control. If a father could not quote Confucius without seeing his son flare into contempt, then where could he turn for help?
The public scorn of the young was not only for their own traditions. The first blind and romantic attachment to Western literary figures died away after the end of the First World War and a general disillusionment arose. Of what value were even the Western cultures, young Chinese asked in newspaper editorials and arguments, if Western peoples clashed in murderous and devastating wars as cruel and uncivilized as the battles of savages? Not in Europe, they now declared, were to be found the ideals the Chinese people sought, but if not in Europe then where?
As if in reply, the Russian revolution burst at the end of the First World War upon a wave of crude and dangerous idealism. In Russia, as the young Chinese watched, young intellectuals, like themselves, declared the peasants their allies, and with the force of combined revolt, they overthrew the traditional government in the hope of shaping a new culture and life. “Feudalism,” the pet devil, too, of the Chinese modern writers and thinkers, had been ended, and with it, the Russian Communists declared, “capitalistic imperialism.” How weary did I grow of those words, shouted by children on the streets as they used to shout “foreign devil” when a white man or woman passed! “Ta Tao Ti Kuo Chu I,” “Down With Imperialism!” The children thought it was a curse, and the young people inflamed themselves with the hatred it contained. What it meant I daresay few of them knew, but they had a vague idea that all the poor in Russia were now rich and that the rich were doing the dirty work in city streets and country fields.