Chapter 34 chapter 34

CHINESE SCHOLARSHIP PART II Mr. Faber has made the remark that the Chinese do not understand any systematic method of scientific enquiry. Nevertheless in one of Chinese Classics, called " Higher Education * , " a work which is considered by most foreign scholars as a Book of Platitudes, a Concatenation is given of the order in which the systematic study of a scholar should be pursued. The student of Chinese cannot perhaps do better than follow the course laid down in that book specifically, to begin his study with the individual, to proceed from the individual to the family, and from the family to the Government.

First, then: it is necessary and indispensable that the student should endeavor to arrive at a just knowledge of the principles of individual conduct of the Chinese. Secondly, he will examine and see how these principles are applied and carried out in the complex social relations and family life of the people. Thirdly, he will be able then to give his attention, and direct his study, to the government and administrative institutions of the country. Such a program as we have indicated, can, of course, be followed out only in general outline; to carry it fully out would require the devotion and undivided energies of almost a whole lifetime. But we should certainly refuse to consider a man, a Chinese scholar or an attribute to him any high degree of scholarship, unless he had in some way made himself familiar with the principles above indicated. The German poet Goethe says: "In the* Known among foreigners as the "Great Learning .works of man, as in those of nature, what is really deserving ing of attention, above everything, is_the intention." Now in the study of national character, it is also of the first importance to pay attention, not only to the actions and practice of the people, but also to their notions and theories; to get a knowledge of what they consider as good and what as bad, what they regard as just and what as unjust, what they look upon as beautiful and what as not beautiful, and how they distinguish wisdom from foolishness. we say that the student of Chinese should study the principles of individual conduct. In other words, we mean to say that you must get at the national ideals . If it is asked how this is to be attained: we answer, by the study of the national literature, in which revelations of the best and highest as well as the worst side of the character of a people can be read. The one object, therefore, which should engage the attention of the foreign student of Chinese, is the standard national literature of the people : whatever preparatory studies it may by necessary for him to go through should serve only as means towards the attainment of that one object. Let us now see how the student is to study the Chinese literature.

"The civilizations of Europe," says a German writer, "rest upon those of Greece, Rome and Palestine; the Indians and Persians are of the same Aryan stock as the people of Europe, and are therefore related; and the influence of the intercourse With the Arabs during the Middle Ages, upon European culture has not even to this day, altogether disappeared. " But as for the Chinese, the origin and development of their civilization rest upon foundations altogether foreign to the culture of the people of Europe. foreign student of Chinese literature, therefore, has all the disadvantages to overcome which must result form the want of community of primary ideas and notions. It will be necessary for him, not only to equip himself with these foreign notions and ideas, but also, first of all, to find their equivalents in the European languages, and if these equivalents do not exist, to disintegrate them, and to see to which side of the universal nature of man these ideas and notions may be refer red. Take, for instance, those Chinese words of constant recurrence in the Classics, and generally translated into English as "benevolence, ""justice," and "propriety" (U). Now when we come to take these English words together with the context, we feel that they are not adequate: they do not connote all the ideas the Chinese words contain. Again, the word "humanity," is perhaps the most exact equivalent for the Chinese word translated "benevolence;" but then, " humanity" must be understood in a sense different from its idiomatic use in the English language. A venturesome translator would use the "love" and "righteousness" of the Bible, which are perhaps as exact as any other, having regard both for the sense of the words and the idiom of the language. Now, however, if we disintegrate and refer the primary notions which these words convey, to the universal nature of man, we get, at once, at their full significance: namely, "the good , ""the true, " and "the beautiful."

But, moreover, the literature of a nation, if it is to be studied at all, must be studied systematically and as one connected whole, and not fragmentarily and without plan or order, as it has hitherto been done by most foreign scholars." It is, " says Mr. Matthew Arnold, "it is through the apprehension, either of all literature, _the entire history of the human spirit, _or of a single great literary work, as a connected whole that the real power of literature makes itself felt. " Now how little, we have seen, do the foreign students conceive the Chinese literature as a whole! How little, therefore, do they get at its significance! How little, in fact, do they know it! How little does it become a power in their hands, towards the understanding of the character of the people! With the exception of the labors of Dr. Legge and of one or two other scholars, the people of Europe know of the Chinese literature principally through the translations of novels , and even these not

of the best, but of the most commonplace of their class. Just fancy, if a foreigner were to judge of the English literature from the works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, or that class of novels which form the reading stock of school-boys and nursery -maids! It was this class of Chinese literature which Sir Thomas Wade must have had in his mind, when in his wrath he reproached the Chinese with "tenuity of intellect."