LETTERS FROM JOHN CHINA.MAN.
Letters from John Chinaman. (R. Brimley Johnson. is.)— These letters purport to be written by a native of China who has lived long in the West. They contain a favourable sketch of Chinese civilisation and a satirical sketch of European civilisation. The literary excellence of the writer's style suggests that he is using his own language. On the other • hand, a Chinaman may know English perfectly, and in criticising a man's work it is perhaps only fair to accept his postulate. The author does not deal directly with the recent crisis in China, but writes in the hope that he may contribute to the clearing away of certain misunderstandings with regard to things social, political, and religious in the land of his birth. "What manner • of men are we ?" ho asks, and he proceeds to describe the life of a community of Chinese peasants. A country life is, he says, the typical life of China. Cities • are but an excrescence upon the body politic. "Far away in the East under sunshine such as you never saw on the shore of a broad river, stands the house where I was born. It is one among thousands, but every one stands in its own garden, simply painted in white or grey, modest, cheerful, clean. For many miles along the valley one after the other they lift their blue or red tiled roofs out of a .sea of green; while here and there glitters out over clumps of trees the gold enamel of some tall pagoda. The river, crossed by frequent bridges and crowded with barges and junks, bears on its clear stream the traffic of thriving village markets. For prosperous peasants people all the district, owning and tilling the fields their fathers owned and tilled before them!' SuCh men enjoy "a content born cf habit and undisturbed by chimerical ambitions." They live, he admits, under a corrupt Government, but "corruption of this kind is a far less evil in China than it is when it prevails amongst yourselves. The simple and natural character of our civilisation, the peaceable nature of our people (when they are not maddened by the aggression of foreigners), above all, the institution of the family, in itself a little state—a political, social, and economic unit—these and other facts have rendered us independent of Government control to an extent which to Europeans may seem incredible." Law, he declares, is not in China a rule imposed from above, "it is the formula of the national life, and its embodiment in practice precedes its description in a code." China, he maintains, will never change. "No force will ever suffice to stir that huge inertia." The tumults of which Europe makes so much are no signs of the break-up of Chinese civilisation. "You hear the breakers roaring on the shore, but far away beyond your ken, unsailed by ship of yours, stretch to the blue horizon the silent spaces of the sea." We have quoted enough to leave our readers in no doubt as to "John Chinaman's " power of writing, or of his admiration for the Flowery Land. We have not touched upon this writer's vitriolic description of English civilisation. Few Englishmen will read it without a certain feeling of in- dignation. We hope the writer of this brilliant little work is in truth Chinese; and we congratulate him on the passage on p. 33 relating to Chinese literature ; it is a better piece of literary English than we have ever yet seen ascribed to an Oriental.
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