Chapter 23 chapter 23

The day when you think of coming home . Ah then my heart -will already be broken. Roselind in Shakespeares "As You Like It" says to her cousin Celia: "coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou knowest how many fathom deep I am in love! But I cannot be sounded: my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal. " Now the love of a woman, _of a wife for her husband in China and also the love of the man_of the husband for his wife in China, one can truly say, is like Rosolinds love, many fathom deep and cannot be sounded; it has an unknown bottom like the bay of Portugal.

But, I will now speak of the difference which, I said, there is between the Chinese feminine ideal and the feminine ideal of the old Hebrew people. The Hebrew lover in the Songs of Solomon, thus addresses his lady-love: "Thou art beautiful, my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners " People who have seen beautiful dark-eyed Jewsesses even to day, will acknowledge the truth and graphicness of the picture which the old Hebrew lover here gives of the feminine ideal of his race. But in and about the Chinese feminine ideal, I want to say here, there is nothing terrible either in a physical or in a moral sense. Even the Helen of Chinese history, _the beauty, who with one glance brings down a city and with another glance destroys a kingdom she is terrible only mathematically. In an essay on "the Spirit of the Chinese People," I said that the one word which will sum up the total impression which the Chinese type of humanity makes upon you are the English word, "ge ntle. " If this is true of the real Chinaman, it is truer of the real Chinese woman. In fact this "gentleness" of the real Chinaman, in the Chinese woman, becomes sweet meekness. The meekness, the submissiveness of the woman in China is like that of Miltons Eve in the "Paradise Lost," who says to her husband,

God is thy law, thou, mine ; to know no more Is woman s happiest knowledge and her praise . Indeed this quality of perfect meekness in the Chinese feminine ideal you will find in the feminine ideal of no other people, _of no other civilization, Hebrew, Greek or Roman. This perfect, divine meekness in the Chinese feminine ideal you will find only in one civilization, _the Christian civilization, when that civilization in Europe reached its perfection, during the period of the Renaissance. Read the beautiful story of Griselda in Boccacios Decameron and see the true Christian feminine ideal shown there, you will then understand what this perfect submissiveness, this divine meekness, meekness to the point of absolute selflessness, _in the Chinese feminine ideal means. In this quality of divine meekness, the true Christian feminine ideal is the Chinese feminine ideal, with just a shade of difference. If you will carefully compare the picture of the Christian Madonna with, _not the Budhist Kuan Yin, _but with the pictures of women fairies and genii painted by famous Chinese artists, you will be able to see this difference, _the difference between the Christian feminine ideal, and the Chinese e feminine ideal. The Christian Madonna is meek and so is the Chinese feminine ideal. The Christian Madonna is etherial and so is the Chinese feminine ideal. But the Chinese feminine ideal is more than all that; a conception of what this charm and grace expressed by the word debonair mean, you will have to go to ancient Greece,

_o ubi campi Spercheosque et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta! In fact you will have to go to the fields of Thessaly and the streams of Spercheios, to the hills alive with the dances of the Laconi-an maidens, _the hills of Taygetus. Indeed I want to say here that even now in China since the period of the Sung Dynasty (AD ), when what may be called the Confucian Puritanism of the Sung philosophers has narrowed, petrified, and in a way, vulgarised the spirit of Confucianism, the spirit of the Chinese civilization_since then, the womanhood in China has lost much of the grace and charm, _expressed by the word debonair. Therefore if you want to see the grace and charm expressed by the word debonair in the true Chinese feminine ideal, you _will have to go to Japan where the women there at least, even to this day, have preserved the pure Chinese civilization of the Tang Dynasty. It is this grace and charm expressed by the word debonair combined with the divine meekness of the Chinese feminine ideal , which gives the air of distinction to the Japanese woman, _ even to the poorest Japanese woman to-day.

In connection with this quality of charm and grace expressed by the word debonair, allow me to quote to you here a few words from Matthew Arnold with which he contrasts the brick-and-mortar Protestant English feminine ideal with the delicate Catholic French feminine ideal. Comparing Eugenic de Guerin, the beloved sister of the French poet Maurice de Guerin, with an English woman who wrote poetry, Miss Emma Tatham,_Matthew Arnold says: "The French woman is a Catholic in Languedoc; the English woman is a Protestant at Margate , Margate the brick and mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness, _and let me add, all its salubrity. Between the external form and fashion of these two lives, between the Catholic Madlle de Guerin s nadalet at the Languedoc Christmas, her chapel of moss at Easter time, her daily reading of the life of a saint, _between all this and the bare, blank, narrowly English setting of Miss Tatham s Protestantism, her "unio n in Church fellowship with the worshippers at Hawley Square, Margate, " her singing with the soft, sweet voice, the animating lines: