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The Soul of the Far East-Part4_Percival Lowell(1855-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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and its subsequentcareer of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful

nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present



precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her

sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little



head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most

distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of the



proceedings.

As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered



to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home

life consists of attentive subordination. The relation his



obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps

sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on



the subject in the respective moral codes. The commandment "honor

thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same



injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts.

To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply law to



the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he

is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his



only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping

from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of



domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be remembered, was

for his father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife.



He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial piety is the

greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is a



monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly be

otherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree



of patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically

divine. This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the



individual, as it has never been outgrown by the race.

Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly



be specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping

with the family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic"



to start on, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up

incidentally what ideas he may. This book is followed by the



"Century of Surnames," a catalogue of all the clan names in China,

studied like the last for the sake of the characters, although the



suggestion of the importance of the family contained in it is

probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next comes the "Thousand



Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of skill, for of the

thousand characters which it contains not a single one is repeated,



an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the enforced

reader. Reminiscences of our own school days vividlydepict the



consequentdisgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more

books succeed these first volumes, differing from one another in



form, but in substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do,

of history and ethics combined. For tales and morals are



inseparably associated by pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would

seem to have lived with special reference to the edification of the



future. Chinamen were abnormallyvirtuous in those golden days,

barring the few unfortunates whom fate needed as warning examples of



depravity for succeeding ages. Except for the fact that instruction

as to a future life forms no part of the curriculum, a far-eastern



education may be said to consist of Sunday-school every day in the

week. For no occasion is lost by the erudite authors, even in the



most worldly portions of their work, for preaching a slight homily

on the subject in hand. The dictum of Dionysius of Halicarnassus



that "history is philosophy teaching by example" would seem there to




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