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 phase in the cycle of his destinies, the highest of moral efforts at the same time points to the summit of possibilities, and self-sacrifice is the supreme condition both of individual perfection and of the progress of the world. Such conceptions as these seem at once to enfold and to overshadow the moral life of the Indian drama. The affections and passions forming part of self it delineates with a fidelity to nature which no art can afford to neglect; on the other hand, the freedom of the picture is restricted by conditions which to us are unfamiliar and at times seem intolerable, but which it was impossible for the Indian poet’s imagination to ignore. The sheer self-absorption of ambition or love appears inconceivable by the minds of any of these poets; and their social philosophy is always based on the system of caste. On the other hand, they are masters of many of the truest forms of pathos, above all of that which blends with resignation. In humour of a delicate kind they are by no means deficient; to its lower forms they are generally strangers, even in productions of a professedly comic intention. Of wit, Indian dramatic literature—though a play on words is as the breath of its nostrils—furnishes hardly any examples intelligible to Western minds.

The distinctive excellence of the Indian drama is to be sought in the poetic robe which envelops it as flowers overspread the bosom of the earth in the season of spring. In its nobler productions, at least, it is never untrue to its half religious, half rural origin; it weaves the wreaths of idyllic fancies in an unbroken chain, adding to its favourite and familiar blossoms ever fresh beauties from an inexhaustible garden. Nor is it unequal to depicting the grander aspects of nature in her mighty forests and on the shores of the ocean. A close familiarity with its native literature can here alone follow its diction through a ceaseless flow of phrase and figure, listen with understanding to the hum of the bee as it hangs over the lotus, and contemplate with Sākuntalā’s pious sympathy the creeper as it winds round the mango tree. But the poetic beauty of the Indian drama reveals itself in the mysterious charm of its outline, if not in its full glow, even to the untrained; nor should the study of it—for which the materials seem continually on the increase—be left aside by any lover of literature.

 

Like the Indian drama, the Chinese arose from the union of the arts of dance and song. To the ballets and pantomimes out of which it developed itself, and which have continued to flourish by the side of its more advanced forms, the Chinese ascribe a primitive antiquity of origin; many of them originally had a symbolical reference to such subjects as the harvest, and war and peace. A very ancient pantomime is said to have symbolized the conquest of China by Wu-Wang; others were of a humbler, and often of a very obscure, character. To their music the Chinese likewise attribute a great antiquity of origin.

There are traditions which carry back the characters of the Chinese drama to the 18th century before the Christian era. Others declare the Emperor Wan-Te (fl. about 580) to have invented the drama; but this honour is more usually given to the emperor Yuen-Tsung ( 720), who is likewise remembered as a radical musical reformer. Pantomimes henceforth fell into disrepute; and the history of the Chinese drama from this date is divided, with an accuracy we cannot profess to control, into four distinct periods. Each of these periods, we are told, has a style, and each style a name of its own; but these names, such as “Diversions of the Woods in Flower,” have little or no meaning for us; and it would therefore be useless to cite them.

The first period is that of the dramas composed under the T’ang dynasty, from 720 to 907. These pieces, called Tchhouen-Khi, were limited to the representation of extraordinary events, and were therefore, in design at least, a species of heroic drama. The ensuing times of civil war interrupted the “pleasures of peace and prosperity” (a Chinese phrase for dramatic performances)—which, however, revived.

The second period is that of the Tsung Dynasty, from 960 to 1119. The plays of this period are called Hi-Khio, and presented what became a standing peculiarity of the Chinese drama, viz. that in them figures a principal personage who sings.

The third and best-known age of the Chinese drama was under the Kin and Yuen dynasties, from 1125 to 1367. The plays of this period are called Yuen-Pen and Tsa-Ki; the latter seem to have resembled the Hi-Khio, and to have treated very various subjects. The Yuen-Pen are the plays from which our literary knowledge of the Chinese drama is mainly derived; the short pieces called Yen-Kia were in the same style, but briefer. The list of dramatic authors under the Yuen dynasty, the most important period in Chinese literary annals, which covered the years 1260 to 1368, is tolerably extensive, comprising 85, among whom four are designated as courtesans; the number of plays composed by these and by anonymous authors is reckoned at not less than 564. In 1735 the Jesuit missionary Joseph Henry Prémare first revealed to Europe the existence of the tragedy Tchao-Chi-Cu-Eul (The Little Orphan of the House of Tchao), which was founded upon an earlier piece treating of the fortunes of an heir to the imperial throne, who was preserved in a mysterious box like another Cypselus or Moses. Voltaire seized the theme of the earlier play for a rhetorical tragedy, L’Orphelin de la Chine, in which he coolly professes it was his intention “to paint the manners of the Chinese and the Tartars.” The later play, which is something less elevated in the rank of its characters, and very decidedly less refined in treatment, was afterwards retranslated by Stanislas Julien; and to the labours of this scholar, of Sir J. F. Davis (1795–1890) and of Antoine Bazin (1799–1863), we owe a series of translated Chinese dramas, among which there can be no hesitation whatever in designating the master-piece.

The justly famous Pi-Pa-Ki (The Story of the Lute) belongs to a period rather later than that of the Yuen plays, having been composed towards the close of the 14th century by Kao-Tong-Kia, and reproduced in 1404, under the Ming dynasty, with the alterations of Mao-Tseu, a commentator of learning and taste. Pi-Pa-Ki, which as a domestic drama of sentiment possesses very high merit, long enjoyed a quite exceptional popularity in China; it was repeatedly republished with laudatory prefaces, and so late as the 18th century was regarded as a monument of morality, and as the master-piece of the Chinese theatre. It would seem to have remained without any worthy competitors; for, although it had been originally designed to produce a reaction against the immorality of the drama then in fashion, especially of Wang-Chi-Fou’s celebrated Si-Siang-Ki (The Story of the Western Pavilion), yet the fourth period of the Chinese drama, under the Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, exhibited no improvement. “What” (says the preface to the 1704 edition of Pi-Pa-Ki) “do you find there? Farcical dialogue, a mass of scenes in which one fancies one hears the hubbub of the streets or the ignoble language of the highways, the extravagances of demons and spirits, in addition to love-intrigues repugnant to delicacy of manners.” Nor would it appear that the Chinese theatre has ever recovered from its decay.

In theory, no drama could be more consistently elevated in purpose and in tone than the Chinese. Every play, we learn, should have both a moral and a meaning. A virtuous aim is imposed upon Chinese dramatists by an article of the penal code of the empire; and those who write immoral plays are to expect after death a purgatory which will last so long as these plays continue to be performed. In practice, however, the Chinese drama falls far short of its ideal; indeed, according to the native critic already cited, among ten thousand playwrights not one is to be found intent upon perfecting the education of mankind by means of precepts and examples.

The Chinese are, like the Hindus, unacquainted with the distinction between tragedy and comedy; they classify their plays according to subjects in twelve categories. It may be doubted whether what seems the highest of these is actually such; for the religious element in the Chinese drama is often sheer buffoonery. Moreover, Chinese religious