1705035207

1705035208 To such beauty the Chinese are peculiarly sensitve. All the way up, the rocks are carved with inscriptions recording the charm and the sanctity of the place. Some of them were written by emperors; many, especially, by Chien Lung, the great patron of art in the eighteenth century. They are models, one is told, of calligraphy as well as of literary composition. Indeed, according to Chinese standards, they could not be the one without the other. The very names of the favorite spots are poems in themselves. One is “the pavilion of the phœnixes”; another “the fountain of the white cranes.” A rock is called “the tower of the quickening spirit”; the gate on the summit is “the portal of the clouds.” More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a rock in the plain, “the place of the three smiles,” because there some mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. And so peculiarly Chinese!

1705035209

1705035210 It was dark before we reached the summit. We put up in the temple that crowns it, dedicated to Yü Huang, the “Jade Emperor” of the Taoists; and his image and those of his attendant deities watched our slumbers. But we did not sleep till we had seen the moon rise, a great orange disk, straight from the plain, and swiftly mount till she made the river, five thousand feet below, a silver streak in the dim gray levels.

1705035211

1705035212 Next morning, at sunrise, we saw that, north and east, range after range of lower hills stretched to the horizon, while south lay the plain, with half a hundred streams gleaming down to the river from the valleys. Full in view was the hill where, more than a thousand years ago, the great T‘ang poet Li Tai-p‘o retired with five companions to drink and make verses. They are still known to tradition as the “six idlers of the bamboo grove”; and the morning sun, I half thought, still shines upon their symposium. We spent the day on the mountain; and as the hours passed by, more and more it showed itself to be a sacred place. Sacred to what god? No question is harder to answer of any sacred place, for there are as many ideas of the god as there are worshipers. There are temples here to various gods: to the mountain himself; to the Lady of the mountain, Pi Hsia-yüen, who is at once the Venus of Lucretius—“goddess of procreation, gold as the clouds, blue as the sky,” one inscription calls her—and the kindly mother who gives children to women and heals the little ones of their ailments; to the Great Bear; to the Green Emperor, who clothes the trees with leaves; to the Cloud-compeller; to many others. And in all this, is there no room for God? It is a poor imagination that would think so. When men worship the mountain, do they worship a rock, or the spirit of the place, or the spirit that has no place? It is the latter, we may be sure, that some men adored, standing at sunrise on this spot. And the Jade Emperor—is he a mere idol? In the temple where we slept were three inscriptions set up by the Emperor Chien Lung. They run as follows:

1705035213

1705035214 “Without labor, O Lord, Thou bringest forth the greatest things.”

1705035215

1705035216 “Thou leadest Thy company of spirits to guard the whole world.”

1705035217

1705035218 “In the company of Thy spirits Thou art wise as a mighty Lord to achieve great works.”

1705035219

1705035220 These might be sentences from the Psalms; they are as religious as anything Hebraic. And if it be retorted that the mass of the worshipers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of worshipers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and what lies behind it—for the religion of a Wordsworth—they seem to be preëminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is loveliest—all go to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in all the country, the charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature?

1705035221

1705035222 “Great God, I’d rather be

1705035223

1705035224 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

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1705035226 So might I, Standing on this pleasant lea,

1705035227

1705035228 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”

1705035229

1705035230 That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have been wrung from him had he been born in China.

1705035231

1705035232 And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of China—“pro-Chinese,” as they are contemptuously called in the East—assert that China is more civilized than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganized, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true—and it is far from being true in any unqualified sense—would be irrelevant to this issue. On a foundation of inadequate material prosperity they reared, centuries ago, the superstructure of a great culture. The West, in rebuilding its foundations, has gone far to destroy the superstructure. Western civilization, wherever it penetrates, brings with it water-taps, sewers, and police;but it brings also an ugliness, an insincerity, a vulgarity never before known to history, unless it be under the Roman Empire. It is terrible to see in China the first wave of this Western flood flinging along the coasts and rivers and railway lines its scrofulous foam of advertisements, of corrugated iron roofs, of vulgar, meaningless architectural form. In China, as in all old civilizations I have seen, all the building harmonizes with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent æsthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of disease of the soul. It implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the opposite is the case. The end is clear, though the means be inadequate. Consider what the Chinese have done to Tai Shan, and what the West will shortly do, once the stream of Western tourists begins to flow strongly. Where the Chinese have constructed a winding stairway of stone, beautiful from all points of view, Europeans or Americans will run up a funicular railway, a staring scar that will never heal. Where the Chinese have written poems in exquisite calligraphy, they will cover the rocks with advertisements. Where the Chinese have built a series of temples, each so designed and placed so as to be a new beauty in the landscape, they will run up restaurants and hotels like so many scabs on the face of nature. I say with confidence that they will, because they have done it wherever there is any chance of a paying investment. Well, the Chinese need, I agree, our science, our organization, our medicine. But is it affectation to think they may have to pay too high a price for it, and to suggest that in acquiring our material advantages they may lose what we have gone near to lose, that fine and sensitive culture which is one of the forms of spiritual life? The West talks of civilizing China. Would that China could civilize the West!

1705035233

1705035234 Notes

1705035235

1705035236 Taianfu， 泰安府，山东省，a city in Shantung Province, at the foot of Tai Shan（泰山）, the sacred mountain.

1705035237

1705035238 alleys, very narrow streets.

1705035239

1705035240 shimmering, trembling, quivering, or faint, diffused light.

1705035241

1705035242 court, or courtyard, a space inclosed by walls or buildings; quadrangle.

1705035243

1705035244 cypresses， 柏树，straight, coniferous tree with shuttle-shaped mass of dark foliage. In the West, cypresses are usually associated with graves;in our country they grow in temples or around graves.

1705035245

1705035246 veranda, open portico or colonnade along the side of a house with roof supported on pillars.

1705035247

1705035248 T‘ang age， 唐朝，the golden age of Chinese literature and art, under the rule of the T‘ang dynasty （618-907）.

1705035249

1705035250 the Sungs， 宋朝，a later dynasty （960-1126）, note for its philosophers.

1705035251

1705035252 before the Christian era, before the birth of Jesus Christ; any time before Christ, B.C.

1705035253

1705035254 Chien Lung， 乾隆（1736-1796）, perhaps the most illustrious of the emperors of the Ching dynasty （清朝，1644-1911）. Chien Lung was a great patron of the arts; he himself wrote a vigorous calligraphy.

1705035255

1705035256 legendary emperors, emperors who are famous or exist only in legends.

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