But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare? No Dante or Homer? No epic--no great drama! Pooh! you say, where is the great creative energy? Where is the sheer brain force?--
It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is the highest possible type. Well; it may be: but the deeper you go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to become as to the absoluteness of standards. The time to award the prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of the differences. Warily let us go to work here!
Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be seen as _energies._ I think, through channels nearer this material plane: nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate.--No: there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in Pope or in Keats? In Pope most emphatically. But off with your head if you say he gave the greater gift.--Or I will leave Pope, and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he devised his philosophy: there was a much longer evolution behind the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the other"s t.i.tanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of brain energies is concerned, there is no question: Bacon was much the greater man.
So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West incomparably greater in brain energy. And I am not making such a foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the two races. You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the Han, the T"ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean, Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze. In the West, the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more forcefully with the human intellect: had a much more vigorous basis in that, I think, to work in and upon. It has reached lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully-- and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.
We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd. On the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection.
Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by religious emotion;--they don"t readily gush over a personal G.o.d.
It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality: have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on planes less material, nearer their spiritual source. It will seem so the more because until very recently China has been constantly misrepresented to us. And yet I think it is pretty much the truth.
In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but through the more subtle perceptions and emotions that lie behind.
It gives us, if we are at all gifted or educated to see, pure vistas of Itself. Compare Michelangelo"s Moses with the Dai Butsu at Kamakura:--as I think Dr. Siren does in one of his lectures.
The former is a thing of t.i.tanic, even majestic energies; but they are energies physical and mental: a grand triumph on what is called in Sanskrit philosophy the Rajasic plane. The second suggests, not energy and struggle, but repose and infinite calm.
In the Moses, we sense warfare, with victory, to attain and to hold its attainment; in the Dai Butsu, something that has pa.s.sed through all that aeons ago. In which is the greater sum of energies included? In the Dai Butsu certainly; wherein we see no sign of what we commonly call energies at all. The one is human struggling up towards G.o.dhood; the other, G.o.dhood looking down with calm limitless compa.s.sion upon man. Such need no engines and dynamics to remove the mountains: they bid them rise up, and be cast into the sea; and are obeyed.
Or take a great Chinese landscape and a great Western one: a Ma Yuan, say, and a--whom you please. To the uninstructed it seems ridiculous to compare them. This took a whole year to paint; it is large; there is an enormous amount of hard work in it; huge creative effort, force, exertion, went to make it. That--it was done perhaps in an hour. That mountain is but a flick of the brush; yonder lake but a wash and a ripple. It is painted on a little trumpery fan--a mere square foot of silk. Yes; but on that square foot, by the grace of the Everlasting Spirit, are "a thousand miles of s.p.a.ce": much more--there is Infinity itself.
Watch; and that faint gray or sepia shall become the boundless blue; and you shall see dim dragons wandering: you shall see Eternal Mystery brooding within her own limitless home. Far, far more than in the western work, there is an open window into the Infinite: that which shall remind us that we are not the poor clay and dying embers we seem, but a pat of the infinite Mystery. The Spirit is here; not involved in human flesh and intellection, but impersonal and universal. What do you want:--to be a great towering personality; or to remember that you are a flame of the Fire which is G.o.d? Oh, out upon these personal deities, and most unG.o.dly personalities of the West! I thank China for reminding me that they are cheap and nasty nothingnesses at the best!
We rather demand of our art, at its highest, that it shall be a stimulant, and call to our minds the warfare in which we are engaged: the hopeless-heroic gay and ever mournful warfare of the soul against the senses. Well; that battle has to be fought; there is nothing better than fighting it--until it is won. Let us by all means hear the snarling of the trumpets; let us heed the battle-cries of the Soul. But let us not forget that somewhere also the Spirit is at peace: let us remember that there is Peace, beyond the victory. In Chinese art and poetry we do not hear the war-shouts and the trumpets: broken, there, are the arrow and the bow; the shield, the sword, the sword and the battle.--But--_the Day-Spring from on high hath visited us._
What element from the Divine is in it, does not concern itself with this earth-life; tells you nothing in criticism of life.
There is naught in it of the Soul as Thinker, nor of the Soul as Warrior. But surely it is something for us, immersed here in these turbid Rajasika regions, to be reminded sometimes that the Sattvic planes exist; it is something for us to be given glimpses of the pure quietudes of the Spirit in its own place. I am the better, if I have been shown for an instant the delicate imperishable beauty of the Eternal.
"We are tired who follow after Truth, a phantasy that flies; You with only look and laughter Stain our hearts with richest dyes."--
They do indeed; with look and laughter--or it may be tears.
Now, what does it all mean? Simply this, I think: that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and pa.s.sion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit. We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough Chinaman, "merely beautiful."
I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary instincts will rise with a brief for the West. But the truth is that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and does this through the one, that through the other. When I read _Hamlet,_ I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that ever lived. When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang. I forget the Voice that cried "Sleep no more!" and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid: she seems to me to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike detachment and wonder as this:
"The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since; but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle. He and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never grow weary of gazing";
--the "lonely cloud" being, of course, Li Po himself. He has shown me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him.
The mountains can speak for themselves.
He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the Hills of T"ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr.
Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in _feng_ and _ya,_--by which we may understand, for present purposes, much what Matthew Arnold meant by "criticism of life." But does it not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten: that we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we have lost? Li Po died a child at sixty: a magical child: always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts, especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay for our naughtiness,--exile from the wonder-world, and submersion in these intolerable personalities. You read Milton, and are cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the Spirit beating through. You read Li Po-type of hundreds of others his compatriots--and you are also cleaned of your personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried up out of it into the diamond ether. It seems to me that both affirmed the Divine Spirit. Milton waged grand warfare in his affirmation. Li Po merely said what he saw.
So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream, but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression. A great drama or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working in a human mind. A great lyric comes of the escape of the consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit. The West has produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in these forms. Very likely the West is right; but I shall not think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k"ung T"u--or Keats.
And I have seen small mild j.a.panese jujitsu men "put it all over," as they say, big burly English wrestlers without seeming to exert themselves in any way, or forgoing their gentle methods and manner; and if you think of jujitsu rightly, it is, to our wrestling and boxing, much what Wu Taotse and Ku Kai-chih are to Rembrandt and Michelangelo, or the Chinese poets to ours.
If we go into the field of philosophy, we find much the same thing. Take Confucianism. It is inappropriate, in some ways, to call Confucius a great thinker (but we shall see that he was something very much more than that). He taught no religion; illuminated in nowise the world of mind; though he enabled millions to illumine it for themselves. He made hardly a ripple in his own day; and yet, so far as I can see, only the Buddha and Mohammed, of the men whose names we know, have marshaled future ages as greatly as he did. _Flow his way!_ said he to history; and, in the main, it did. He created an astral mold for about a quarter of humanity, which for twenty-four centuries has endured. He did it by formulating a series of rules for the conduct of personal and national life; or rather, by showing what kind of rules they should be, and leaving others to formulate them;--and so infused his doctrine with his will and example, that century after century flowed into the matrix he had made for them. To create such a stable matrix, the Aryan mind, in India, worked through long spiritual-intellectual exploration of the world of metaphysics: an intensive culture of all the possibilities of thought. We in the West have boggled towards the same end through centuries of cra.s.s political experiment.
Confucius, following his ancient models, ignored metaphysics altogether: jumped the life to come, and made his be-all and his end-all here:--in what was necessary, in deeds and thought and speech, to make individual, social, and political life staid, sincere, orderly, quiet, decent, and happy. He died a broken- hearted failure; than whom perhaps no man except the Lord Buddha ever succeeded more highly.
Laotse is his complement. Laotse"s aim is not the activity, but the quiescence of mind, self, intellect: "in the NO THING seeking the lonely Way." You forgo everything--especially selfhood;--you give up everything; you enter upon the heritage of No Thing;--and you find yourself heir to the Universe, to wonder, to magic. You do with all your complicated egoity as the camel did with his cameltiness before he could enter the needle"s eye; then--heigh presto!--it is the Elixir of Life you have drunk; it is freedom you have attained of the roaming-place of Dragons!--It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, _You see how easy it is!_ And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.
Then from j.a.pan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics or dogma. The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity. Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations, in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind. There have been, indeed, profound thinkers and metaphysicians both in j.a.pan and China; but their mental activities have been for the most part fruitage from the Aryan seed of Buddhism.
A word here as to that phrase "Altaic mind." What business has one to cla.s.s the Chinese and j.a.panese together, and to speak of them (as I shall) as "Altaic"--the _Altaic Race?_ In the first place this term, like "Latin" or "Anglo-Saxon," has the virtue of being quite meaningless. It is utterly silly and inappropriate from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from her, I shall beg leave to use it. Neither j.a.panese nor Corean belong to the billiard-ball group of languages. There is a syntactical likeness between these two, but none in vocabulary; where the j.a.panese vocabulary came from, Omniscience perhaps may know.--A syntax outlasts a vocabulary by many ages: you may hear Celts now talk English with a syntax that comes from the sub-race before our own: Iberian, and not Aryan. So we may guess here a race akin to the Coreans conquered at some time by a race whose vocables were j.a.panese--whence they came, G.o.d knows. Only one hears that in South America the j.a.panese pick up the Indian languages a deal more easily than white folk do, or than they do Spanish or English. But this is a divergence; we should be a little more forward, perhaps, if we knew who were the Coreans, or whence they came. But we do not. They are not Turanic--of the Finno-Turko-Mongol stock (by language); they are not speakers of billiard-b.a.l.l.s, allied to the Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetans.
But the fact is that neither blood-affinity nor speech-affinity is much to the purpose here; we have to do with affinities of culture. During the period 240 B. C.--1260 A. D. a great civilization rose, flowered, and waned in the Far East; it had its origin in China, and spread out to include in its scope j.a.pan, Corea, and Tibet; probably also Annam and Tonquin, though we hear less of them;--while Burma, a.s.sam, and Siam, and those southerly regions, though akin to China in language, seem to have been always more satellite to India. Mongols and Manchus, though they look rather like Chinese, and have lived rather near China, belong by language and traditionally by race to another group altogether--to that, in fact, which includes the very Caucasian-looking Turks and Hungarians; as to what culture they have had, they got it from China after the Chinese manvantara had pa.s.sed.
The Chinese themselves are only h.o.m.ogeneous in race in the sense that Europe might be if the Romans had conquered it all, and imposed their culture and language on the whole continent. The staid, grave, dignified, and rather stolid northern Chinaman differs from the restless and imaginative Cantonese not much less than the j.a.panese does from either. This much you can say: Chinese, j.a.panese, and Coreans have been molded into a kind of loose unity by a common culture; the peoples of China into a closer h.o.m.ogeneity by a common culture-language, written and spoken,--and by the fact that they have been, off and on during the last two thousand years, but most of the time, under the same government. As to Corea, though in the days of Confucius it was unknown to the Chinese, the legends of both countries ascribe the founding of its civilization and monarchy to a Chinese minister exiled there during the twelfth century B. C. j.a.panese legendary history goes back to 600 B. C.;--that is, to the closing of the Age of the Mysteries, and the opening of that of the Religions:-- I imagine that means that about that time a break with history occurred, and the past was abolished: a thing we shall see happen in ancient China presently. But I suppose we may call Shotoku Daishi the Father of historical j.a.pan;--he who, about the end of the sixth century A. D., brought in the culture impetus from the continent. About that time, too, Siam rose to power; and soon afterwards T"ang Taitsong imposed civilization on Tibet.--So there you have the "Altaic" Race; Altaic, as Mr. Dooley is Anglo-Saxon. To speak of them as "Mongolian" or "Mongoloid," as is often done, is about as sensible as to speak of Europeans and Americans as "Hunnoid," because the Huns once conquered part of Europe. It conveys derogation--which Altaic does not.
I have compared their achievement with that of the West: we have one whole manvantara and a pralaya of theirs to judge by, as against two fragments of western manvantaras with the pralaya intervening. It is not much; and we should remember that there are cycles and epicycles; and that j.a.pan, or old China herself, within our own lifetime, may give the lie to everything.
But from the evidence at hand one is inclined to draw this conclusion: That in the Far East you have a great section of humanity in reserve;--in a sense, in a backwater of evolution: nearer the Spirit, farther from the hot press and conflict of the material world;--even in its times of highest activity, not in the van of the down-rush of Spirit into matter, as the western races have been in theirs;--but held apart to perform a different function. As if the Crest-Wave of Evolution needed what we might call Devachanic cycles of incarnation, and found them there during the Altaic manvantaras of manifestation. Not that their history has been empty of tragedies; it has been very full of them; and wars--some eight or nine Napoleons in their day have sat on the Dragon Throne. But still, the worlds of poetry, delight, wonder, have been nearer and more accessible to the Chinaman, in his great ages, than to us in ours; as they have been, and probably are now, nearer to the j.a.panese. And I do not know how that should be, unless the Law had taken those Atlanteans away, kept them apart from the main stream--not fighting the main battle, but in reserve--for purposes that the long millenniums of the future are to declare.
IX. THE DRAGON AND THE BLUE PEARL
The horizon of Chinese history lies near the middle of the third millennium B. C. The first date sinologists dare swear to is 776; in which year an eclipse of the sun is recorded, that actually did happen: it is set down, not as a thing interesting in itself, but as ominous of the fall of wicked kings. Here, then, in the one place where there is any testing the annals, it appears they are sound enough; which might be thought to speak well for them. But our scholars are so d.a.m.nebly logical, as Mr.
Mantalini would say, that to them it only proves this: you are to accept no date earlier. One general solar indors.e.m.e.nt will not do; you must have an eclipse for everything you believe, and trust nothing unless the stars in their courses bear witness.
Well; we have fortunately Halley"s Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry for our familiar 1066; but beware! everything before that is to be taken as pure fudge!
The fact is there is no special reason for doubting either chronology or sequence of events up to about 2357 B. C., in which year the Patriarch Yao came to the throne. He was the first of those three, Yao, Shun, and Yu, who have been ever since the patterns for all Chinese rulers who have aspired to be Confucianly good. "Be like Yao, Shun, and Yu; do as they did";-- there you have the word of Confucius to all emperors and governors of states.
Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but one year short of it. This is perhaps the first improbability we come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a long time. None of his successors repeated the indiscretion.
Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic verisimilitude: they must be called faint memories of epochs, not actual men. The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an Adept King;--or say a line of Adept Kings. As for the dates given him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence. Before Fo- hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P"an K"u, who built the worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One. All this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at least that--the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago.
This much we may say: about the time when Yao is said to have come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B. C. It is a period we see only as through a gla.s.s darkly: what is told about it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man.
There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to say what they were. To its first centuries are accredited works of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national prejudice, of course.
And where should you look, back of 850 B. C., to find actual history--human motives, speech and pa.s.sions--or what to our eyes should appear such? As things near the time-horizon, they lose their keen outlines and grow blurred and dim. The Setis and Thothmeses are names to us, with no personality attaching; though we have discovered their mummies, and know the semblance of their features, our imagination cannot clothe them with life.
We can hear a near Napoleon joking, but not a far-off Rameses. We can call Justinian from his grave, and traverse the desert with Mohammed; but can bold no converse with Manu or Hammurabi;-- because these two dwell well this side of the time-horizon, but the epochs of those are far beyond it. The stars set: the summer evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of Fomalhaut: though there is a long slope between the zenith _Now_ and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time we cannot recall or refashion. So that old Chinese manvantara is gone after the Dragon Fo-hi and the Yellow Emperor, after the Man-Kings and the Earth-Kings and the Heaven-Kings; and Yao, Shun, and Yu the Great, and the kings of Hia, and Shang, and even Chow, are but names and shadows,
_Quo pater, Aeneas, quo dires Tullus et Ancus,_
--we cannot make them interestingly alive. But it does not follow that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or do the things attributed to them. Their architecture was ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture, an idea, that still endures.
Then, too, we shall see that at the beginning of the last Chinese manvantara a conscious attempt was made to break wholly with the past,--to wipe it from human memory, and begin all anew. Such a thing happened in Babylon once; there had been a Sargon in remote antiquity with great deeds to his credit; thousands of years after, another Sargon arose, who envied his fame; and, being a kind, and absolute, decreed that all the years intervening should never have existed--merged his own in the personality of his remote predecessor, and so provided a good deal of muddlement for archaeologists to come. Indeed, such a thing almost happened in France at the Revolution. It is said that in some French schools now you find children with a vague idea that things more or less began with the taking of the Bastille: that there was a misty indefinable period between the 12th of October (or on whatever day it was Eve"s apple ripened) and the glorious 14th of July:--an age of prehistory, wandered through by unimportant legendary figures such as Jeanne Darc, Henri Quatre, Louis Quatorze, which we may leave to the superst.i.tious--and come quickly to the real flesh and blood of M.
de Mirabeau and Citizen Danton.--Even so, in our own time, China herself, wearied with the astral molds and inner burdens of two millenniums, has been writhing in a fever of destruction: has burnt down the Hanlin College, symbol and center of a thousand years of culture; destroyed old and famous cities; sent up priceless encyclopaedias in smoke; replaced the Empire with a republic, and the Dragon of wisdom with five meaningless stripes;--breaking with all she was in her brilliant greatness, and all she has been since in her weakness and squalid decline.-- We ask why history is not continuous; why there are these strange hiatuses and droppings out?--the answer is simple enough.
It is because Karma, long piled up, must sometime break out upon the world. The inner realms become clogged with the detritus of ages and activity, till all power to think and do is gone: there is no room nor scope left for it. The weight of what has been thought and done, of old habit, presses down on men, obstructs and torments them, till they go mad and riot and destroy. The manvantara opens: the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes in. It finds the world of mind cluttered up and enc.u.mbered; there is an acute disparity between the future and the past, which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom. Blessed is that nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide things, so that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the useless! The very facts that Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti, when the manvantara opened at the beginning of the third century B.C., was driven (you may say) to do what ruthless drastic things he did.-- and that his action was followed by such wonderful results--are proof enough that a long manvantara crowded with cultureal and national activities had run it course in the past, and clogged the astral, and made progress impossible. But what he did do, throws the whole of that past manvantara, and to some extent the pralaya that followed it, into the realm of shadows.--He burnt the literature.
In a few paragraphs let me summarize the history of that past age whose remnants Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti thus sought to sweep away.--Yao adopted Shun for his successor; in whose reign for nine years China"s Sorrow, that mad bull of waters, the Hoangho, raged incessantly, carrying the world down towards the sea. Then Ta Yu, who succeeded Shun on the throne presently, devised and carried through those great engineering works referred to above: --cut through mountains, yoked the mad bull, and saved the world from drowning. He was, says H. P. Blavatsky, an Adept; and had learnt his wisdom from the Teachers in the snowy Range of SiDzang or Tibet. His dynasty, called the Hia, kept the throne until 1766; ending with the downfall of a cruel weakling. Followed then the House of Shang until 1122; set up by a wise and merciful Tang the Completer, brought to ruin by a vicious tyrant Chousin. It was Ki-tse, a minister of this last, and a great sage himself, who, fleeing from the persecutions of his royal master, established monarchy, civilization, and social order in Corea.
Another great man of the time was Won w.a.n.g, Duke of the Palatinate of Chow, a state on the western frontier whose business was to protect China from the Huns. Really, those Huns were a thing to marvel at: we first hear of them in the reign of the Yellow emperor, two or three centuries before Yao; they were giving trouble then, a good three millenniums before Attila. Won w.a.n.g, fighting on the frontier, withstood these kindly souls; and all China looked to him with a love he deserved. Which of course roused King Chousin"s jealousy; and when a protest came from the great soldier against the debaucheries and misgovernment at the capital, the king roused himself and did what he could; imprisoned the protestant, as he dared not kill him. During the three years of his imprisonment Won w.a.n.g compiled the mysterious I-King, of Book of Changes; of which Confucius said, that were another half century added to his life, he would spend them all in studying it. No western scholar, one may safely say, has ever found a glimmer of meaning in it; but all the ages of China have held it profounder than the profound.
His two sons avenged Won w.a.n.g; they roused the people, recruited an army in their palatinate--perhaps enlisted Huns too--and swept away Chousin and his dynasty. They called their new royal house after their native land, Chow; Wu w.a.n.g, the elder of the two, becoming its first king, and his brother the Duke of Chow, his prime minister. I say _king;_ for the t.i.tle was now _w.a.n.g_ merely; though there had been _Hw.a.n.gtis_ or Emperors of old.
Won w.a.n.g and his two sons are the second Holy Trinity of China; Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu being the first. They figure enormously in the literature: are stars in the far past, to which all eyes, following the august example of Confucius, are turned. There is a little to be said about them: they are either too near the horizon, or too little of their history has been Englished, for us to see them in their habit as they lived; yet some l.u.s.ter of real greatness still seems to shine about them. It was the Duke of Chow, apparently, who devised or restored that whole Chinese religio-political system which Confucius revivified and impressed so strongly on the stuff of the ideal world--for he could get no ruler of his day to establish it in the actualities--that it lasted until the beginning of a new manvantara is shatter it now.
That it was based on deep knowledge of the hidden laws of life there is this (among a host of other things) to prove: Music was an essential part of it. When, a few years ago, the tiny last of the Manchu emperors came to the throne, an edict was published decreeing that, to fit him to govern the empire, the greatest care should be taken with his education in music. A wisdom, truly, that the west has forgotten!
When William of Normandy conquered England, he rewarded his followers with fiefs: in England, while English land remained so to be parceled out; afterwards (he and his successors) with unconquered lands in Wales, and then in Ireland. they were to carve out baronies and earldoms for themselves; and the Celtic lands thus stolen became known as the Marches: their rulers, more or less independent, but doing homage to the king, as Lords Marchers. The kings of Chow adopted the same plan. Their old duchy palatinate became the model for scores of others. China itself--a very small country then--southern Shansi, northern Homan, western Shantung--was first divided up under the feudal system; the king retaining a domain, known as Chow, in Homan, for his own. Then princes and n.o.bles--some of the blood royal, some of the old shang family, some risen from the ranks--were given warrant to conquer lands for themselves from the barbarians beyond the frontier: so you go rid of the ambitious, and provided Chow with comfortable buffers. They went out, taking a measure of Chinese civilization with them, and conquered or cajoled Huns, Turks, Tatars, Laos, shans, Annamese, and all that kind of people, into accepting them for their rulers. It was a work, as you may imagine, of centuries; with as much history going forward as during any centuries you might name. The states thus formed were young, compared to China; and as China grew old and weak, they grew into their vigorous prime. The infinity of human activities that has been! These Chow ages seem like the winking of an eye; but they were crowded with great men and small, great deeds and trivialities, like our own. The time will come when our "Anglo-Saxon" history will be written thus: England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew stronger and more populous than England;--and it will be enough, without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important.