EASTERN REVERENCE FOR ANTIQUITY. 23 Chinese, and when, moreover, these are hallowed by the history of at least four thousand it may easily be years, believed that the influence they exercise has become sacred, and is something quite beyond the experience of younger and occidental nations. Races may remain unchanged, or nearly so; the Copt and the Negro may present the same features which they had when their effigies were sculptured on the ancient tombs of Egypt; but of all the nations which surrounded the Chinese in the dim morning of history, not one other remains to tell the story of its birth. The Hebrew race alone preserves many of its ancient institutions, as well as its ancient features, but its chosen place of abode knows it no more, and its nationality was destroyed centuries ago, while the Chinese still hold by their own ways in their Great Flowery Land, as they did before the Hebrews issued from the loins of Abraham. Consequently, the old ideas on which their State was founded, their ancient institutions, and the history of their ancient emperors and sages, still exercise upon them a most vital influence. We require to go to the East in order to find races that regard their past in a manner which largely affects their present. What to the modern Greek is the tale of Troy? or to the Roman the story of Latium? Thor and Odin exercise no influence in Scandinavia, nor the Nibelungen heroes in Germanic Europe; and even the Pilgrim Fathers are forgotten in New England. But with the immobile races of the East, matters in this respect are entirely different. The mind of the Oriental Hebrew is still possessed by visions of his earliest forefathers wending in grey antiquity from the slopes of Ararat, holding special communion with Jehovah, forming a chosen people, led through the terrible wilderness by pillars of smoke and fire, destined to rule the earth, and receiving amid the thunders of Sinai a sacred, moral, and ceremonial law of which no clause must pass away. Even at the present hour the Indo-Aryan, as he watches the red flush of morning, or sits under the palm and banian, is really dwelling in an antique ideal world of the most extraordinary kind. Accepting for his practical life, with implicit submission, the laws of Manu, and the most rigid ancient caste arrangements, his ineffable yearning for eternity and for reabsorption into deity leads him to shut his eyes on the glories of nature in India, and on all this world of outward seeming, as merely evil illusions obscuring eternal light. Aided by mystic rites and ancient hymns, he looks entranced into a vague world, at first without sky above or firmament beneath, but filled with a shoreless dazzling light of power and love, which is soon darkened by the vast shadowy forms of Varuna, and Indra, and Agni, and all the mighty gods. Ushas, the beautiful dawn, passes over the horizon; Vishnu, the preserving light, strides thrice through the universe, and the Maruts or winds sweep over; but the evil form of Shiva the destroyer appears upon the scene. Gods play with milkmaids; Rama the divine hero makes war on minor evil spirits and hideous giants; and long lines of fabulous kings enter into the vision. In the confusion which follows, the natural and supernatural, the grotesque and the sublime, become inextricably blended. The ashy devotee sitting at the roadside may be a demon, or Vishnu himself, or the Lord of Devas; but, with all its modern touches, it is the world of ancient India in which the modern Hindu daily dwells, and for him, having turned away his wearied eyes "From earth's dull scene, Time's weary round, To realms eternal-heavenly ground THE CHINESE IDEAL OF LIFE. Blue Krishna frolics o'er the plain, 25 Even more, perhaps, than the Hindu, the Chinaman dwells in a peculiar ideal world of his own, but it is one much less fanciful, much more definite, much more credible, and much more historical. Still it is an ideal world beyond which he can rarely pass, which constantly occupies his thoughts, and conditions his actions. Every one who has dwelt much among the Chinese, as I have done, and especially in their villages, will bear me out in saying that there is common to them all a certain simple ideal of life which they regard as constituting the highest human happiness, which they claim as their right, which they hold usually existed from the earliest times, and which is intimately connected with the doctrines of their sages, and with their historical beliefs. Unlike the Hindu, the Chinaman lives in an ordered and somewhat prosaic ideal world. He beholds, indeed, against his Turanian historical dawn the gigantic figures of Yaou and Shun, and the great Yu overshadowing the long valley of centuries; and the great sages, such as Confucius and Mencius, correcting the errors of their times, and dropping words of invaluable wisdom; but though all these are grand to him, they are so not so much in themselves as in their useful relationship to the knowable and the attainable—to the great primary wants of his race. The determination of the seasons, the building embankments against devastating floods, or the harmonising of land and water, the overthrowing of unjust kings, wise, kind action in family relationships, and the expression of moral doctrines in an intelligible, impressive way-these are the claims to reverence of the heroes of the Chinese Pantheon. The (miscalled) Celestial is a narrow-minded, but exceedingly practical, sort of being. He wants an ordered world, but one ordered only in a certain kind of way. Before his rapt celestial vision lie the fruitful plains of the Great Flowery Land, lively and bright with the normal life of China, guarded on the north by snowy deserts, which are happily far away from him, and on the south by stormy seas, with great winds and waves, which he does not tempt. His ideal is a happy family life, with age benignant, youth reverential, three or four generations living contentedly under the same roof; the fish-pond in front well stocked; grain abundant; tea fragrant; the village harmonised; the school well taught; the young Confucius of the family preparing for competitive examinations; the ancestral tablets going far back, and recording honoured names; the ancestral hall well gilded, and a fit meeting-place for the wise elders; the spirits of deceased ancestors comforted with offerings and loving remembrances, not left to wander friendless in the air; the holidays cheerful, with bright silks and abundance of savoury dishes; the Emperor benevolent; the people obedient; Foreign Devils far away or reverential; evil appearing only in the forms of impossible demons, and hideous wicked emperors, painted on the walls of his house as a warning to foolish youth; no change in old customs to perplex the mind; the sacred books reverentially read and remembered; the present definitely arranged; the fruitage of the past stored; behind, sages and emperors; around, happy families; beyond, a darkness with which he little con CHINESE REBELLIONS. 27 cerns himself, but into which his spirit may occasionally float a short way on some Buddhist or Tauist idea. We may now understand the position in which a Chinaman finds himself when he has very serious reason to complain of the condition of his country. All the most revered literature of that country, all the ideas which have possessed his mind from childhood, and even the language of the Imperial rescripts of his day, point to the conclusion that the existing authorities rather than the people are to blame. I have looked through the Classics in vain for any indication of a belief that, where great calamities befall the country, the mass of the people may be considered as the guilty cause. The authorities undoubtedly are in the habit of throwing the blame off themselves, but they do so only by accusing certain sections of the populace of living in guilty opposition to the will of Heaven, and so cut off from the rest of the people. The history of China also has been of such a character as to sustain the notion that the responsibility of national disaster rests chiefly with the Government. While admitting the extraordinary longevity of the Chinese State regarded in its essentials, we must not leave out of view the fact that its life has been broken, but also preserved, by innumerable rebellions and changes of dynasty. Revolution is to the Chinaman something more even than it is to the modern Parisian. It is, so to speak, the constitutional means of getting rid of bad governments, and is associated in his mind with deeds of heroic daring, of noble self-sacrifice, and with some of the brightest periods of the national history. De Guignes, in his Tableau de l'Histoire Ancienne de la Chine,' correctly enumerates twenty-two imperial dynasties, commencing with the Hea, founded by the Great Yu, and ending with the Ta Tsing, the |