THE ENGLISH AT HOME.*
THESE two curious works may be read together, as mutually destructive views of much-vexed modern England as she appears to the Oriental. If Wo Chang be really a genuine personage, and a real Chinaman giving his unprejudiced views of our life and manners, as in his eyes they appear, he must be pardoned much for the necessary indignation which lie displays with our life and manners in retaliation for the burlesque aspects of the East with which the writers about China have made us familiar. The great mass of excellent people derive all that they know or want to know on such subjects from works like the Geisha or the Mikado. China and Japan are all one to them. The present writer once heard an indignant visitor to the Savoy say that he disliked the Mikado very much, because he bad just come back from Japan, and had seen nothing there at all like it. And if this was a travelled observer, what of the stay-at-homes ? If we accept Wo Chang with any hesitation, it is because his English is so very contemporary and vernacular, occasionally varied
• (L) England Through Mines. Spectacles: Leaves from ti. Note-Book of We Chang. London : Cotton Press.--(2.) England to an English Eye. By the Be,. T. B. Pandian, of Madras. London: Elliot Stock,
by expressions of rather strained metaphor. "The sight of simulated golden souls operates upon me like an emetic" as a paraphrase for "Humbug makes me sick," is more in a bombastic than an Oriental vein. And it has not been un- common for some long-suffering Englishman to vent his wrath with the national institutions under the guise of a foreign observer. It is an accepted form of literature, and as such may be taken as what it claims to be. The following indictment is very like the growl of a " law-abiding " Briton who has suffered bitterly for his civic virtue :—
" The poorer classes escape the lawyer's oppression compara- tively, because they are poor ; there is little to be made out of being a poor man's lawyer. Those in the middle and upper classes, and especially those engaged in commerce, meet the lawyer at every turn. They engage him to draw up contracts legally and safely, only to give work to more lawyers to attack or defend the contract whenever a dispute arises about it. There is more legal disputing to be made out of the most carefully drawn-up document than out of the interchange of the shortest notes.'
Now, there is greater truth and force in this brief charge than in whole volumes of contract-law. When "Wo Chang" describes England as " priest-ridden " he is rather weakly in the wrong ; when he describes her as " lawyer-ridden " he is emphatically in the right. If Lord Esher's noble and upright plea for "justice first, law afterwards," could but meet with more general acceptance, things might improve. But the whole system is very unsound; and that ours is a "lawyer- ridden country" is the most tangible truth in Wo Chang's book. His remarks about the snobbishness of Society, and the nobodies who want to figure in it., are of an older and less striking type. Our own satirists have worked that attractive theme over and over again ; and to be told that Smith and Shuffiebottom (a very old cogno- men) and Snooke blossom into De Smetti and Shale- bottom and Snef ton is but a watery reflection of our old friend Alured De Mogyns. Our critic forgets that he is dealing here more with a phase of human nature than with a national characteristic, and that the desire to rise socially in the world has been one of man's weak- nesses for time out of mind. They may no doubt order these things better in China, as, according to their repre- sentative, they do. In that happy land there are, he says, no snobs and no lawyers, while a more ideal system than theirs, of education and of rank, has never existed outside of Plato's Republic. "The literates" supply the place of an effete and beer-propped aristocracy, and the worship of know- ledge takes precedence of the race for wealth. All written matter is so sacred that after a certain period all discoverable scraps are collected and formally committed to the waters. So lofty and so universal are the precepts of Confucius, in whose faith Wo Chang was brought up (though he was solidly trained in the English language and literature by a wise and learned tutor at one of the treaty ports), that they at once anticipate and obscure the unfledged lessons of Christianity. We can but be thankful for his admission that "countless virtues adorn every department of English life," to atone for the defects which it is his purpose to expose, as going far to neutralise our nobler tendencies. But we cannot resist the conclusion that China ought to be in a very different position, from the best that she can be in fairness said to hold, if her system and her laws worked as by his showing they should. That the precepts of Confucius in a great sense anticipated the teaching of Christ, as in the command to "love your neighbour as yourself," is very true, as it is only too true that but a small proportion of Christians are capable of acting up to the precept to an appreciable degree. But the point always lost sight of in these discussions is the magnitude of the Christian claim, by which alone it asserts itself to be above all other creeds, leaving the teachings of Confucius with those of Plato and Marcus Aurelius upon another plane altogether. It is by a different standard from that of the mere moralist that it has elected to be tried:— " Une immense esperance a traverse la terre-
Malgre nous vers le ciel il taut lever les yens."
We may add, moreover, if from a lower point of view, that neither Wo Chang nor history give us much proof that Con- fucians act up to their principles any better than Christians. At least we know of no especial form in which the China- man's love for his fellow-creatures is forcibly manifested. But there is no need to question what the Chinese civilisation was ; what it is, or ought to be, is quite another thing, though the absence of lawyers may be much in its favour. We have said that the booklet of Mr. Pandian may be taken as an antidote to the uncomplimentary remarks of Wo Chang. We do not know that we quite approve the later Indian fashion of pouring out effusive compliments to all things English as the shining example to the East. For we are never able wholly to believe in their sincerity, while so many of the signs of the times continue to point to a state of veiled rebellion. There is small doubt that all classes of the natives are at heart profoundly Anti-Western, and look forward to a final emancipation from foreign rule; while the growing class of " literates " amongst them learn more and more to understand that the time is not yet, till Western ideas have permeated and filtered down. Meanwhile the English police, and the English houses, and the English arrangements are models in the Reverend Mr. Pandian's eyes. The English baker delights him to the extent of a whole page, while for the tailor and the bootmaker no words can be too high. The Indian cobbler we learn to be a "pitiable botcher" beside his English counterpart; and it is well that a class who do not perhaps get too much honour at our own hands should be thus much indemnified. To compare a British baker's shop to the Garden of Eden is bold and imaginative, but comforting after the bitter strictures of Wo Chang. Short pen-and-pencil pictures of our leading men, especially amongst the divines, lend interest to Mr. Pandian's pages, and in his mind, at all events, there is no doubt that it is in her militant Christianity that the whole strength and wealth of England lie. Her very diversity of forms of creed seems to him but a tribute to her earnestness. We can but hope that it may be so; but few observers at the present day seem to take sufficient note of the growing tone of contented and impartial indifference—not upon religious subjects before any other, but in every field of thought among the mass of us—which more and more pervades our life every- where. Nothing struck Daudet and Zola so much, when they came amongst us to inquire as to the real state of feeling in England towards France, as the conviction that there was, in point of fact, none at all either way.
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