Chinese Holiday
Lady Precious Stream. By S. I. Hsiung. With a preface by Laseelles Abercrombie. (Methuen. 8s. 6d.)
THE sub-title is " An Old Chinese Play done into English," but Mr. Hsiung is'much more than a translator of a text. He 'has noticed (as he remarks in an introduction of the kindliest vein) that our general knowledge of his national theatre is not large, though our fallacies about it are. Accordingly, he does his best to convey us in imagination into the Chinese playhouse, and to make us at home with the conventions of that stage and the spirit of that audience. Perhaps he would have found the Elizabethans a little closer to the stage of which he writes : " Apart from its lack of scenery, the indispensable property man is the greatest obstacle to realism.
He is generally attired in his everyday habit and walks to and fro among fantastically costumed players. . . . In hot weather, when the costume is rather thick, he fans the wearer incessantly." Through his introduction and some of his stage directions, Mr. Hsiung contrives to produce in us an illusion of familiarity with the ways of his Oriental entertainment.
The property man, or rather two of him—in the innocent manner of the Far East—comes on at once, bringing a table (rocks) and a pole with leaves fixed to a chair (trees), so that we are looking upon an ancestral garden. This garden belongs to the Prime Minister, Wang Yun, who appears " wearing a long black beard which indicates that lie is not the villain." The property man arranges his chair and cushions and Wang begins ; no beating about the bush for him—he wants us to know who's who. " I am your humble servant, Wang Yun, the Prime Minister of the Emperor's Court. My consort's name is Chen. Although we have been happily married for twenty years, we are still childless . . . And'in the same style the other characters unfold themselves, as Shakespeare says, when they arrive.
Of Precious Stream, youngest daughter of Wang and Chen, our interpreter describes the stage effect thus : " She is one who would make you put the halter willingly around your neck if she chose to lead you along with her." But she chooses the gardener, Hsieh Ping-Kuei, and by the end of Act 1 has become something of a Cordelia in comedy. Before she departs with him, she has to hold her own in an affecting dialogue :
" Pazcious S.: My dear father, your humble daughter, Precious Stream, pays her respects.
" WAN° (gruffly) : No, you needn't consider me as your father ! " PRECIOUS S. (charmingly): Then I must, at least, thank you for your share in my birth ! (She kneels and kotowe.) " Werra : It was a mere accident."
The second act, Mr: Hsiung says, has been usually performed separately, and has " moved thousands to tears:' It is a sketch of Love in a Cottage, at least, in a 1Nve. Hsieh is going to the wars. • He is away nine months, and no news reaches Precious Stream, but her mother hears that Hsieh has been killed. She visits her daughter, but does not discuss what she has heard of Hsieh ; and the act ends with the refusal of Precious Stream to return to Wang's residence. In the third act, we arc shown Hsieh in a very different dilemma. He is now King of the Western Regions, a fabled country where the people have red hair and green eyes: he has been advanced to his new eminence by the aid of the local Princess. " She wished to marry me, an unusual proposal which I could not possibly refuse. Postponing it again and again, I have at last been obliged to promise to marry her after my coronation. . . . I have been vainly trying to explain to her that I am already married, but I can't bear to break her heart. What shall I do ? "
This little book has drawn from Mr. Laseelles Abercrombie the tribute of a poet's responsiveness, and it deserves the honour. The play, Mr. Hsiung notes, is a stock theatre-piece, and is not considered literature in China. But it has the marks of a fine culture. " How much we owe to Mr. Hsiung's talent, and Mr. Hsiung's English, I do not know," writes Mr. Abercrombie ; certainly Mr. Hsiung has us in his debt. The play's atmosphere is made still more pleasing to us by his illustrators ; the coloured pictures are by Mr. Hsu Peihung, working in a very pretty tradition. EDMUND BLUNDER.
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