Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/87



OOKMAKING is an old and honorable craft in China. Historians flourished there eight centuries before our era, whose remains still live in the pages of Confucius, who collected them three hundred years after they were written. These chronicles contain all that will ever be known of the sixty-six Emperors that had sat on the "Dragon Throne" before Romulus was born.

Of course, aristocracy is an idea quite consonant with that of an empire, but the Chinese hit upon a singular method of creating one. Passing over military prowess, birth and wealth, they began by declaring Confucius a grandee of the empire, and his descendants enabled by hereditary titles, forbidden to any other members of the nation. Then they decreed the narrow portal to office, fame and dignity alone open to the scholar and man of science.

This system seems perfectly satisfactory to this strange people, who are exceedingly puzzled at mention of our system of party politics and public honors. It must however be admitted, that, while the emoluments of office and the highest consideration of all classes is the just reward of the Chiriese litterateur, there the matter ends. The "classics "are firmly believed to contain absolutely every thing worth knowing; hence, the writer who should presume to wander from that beaten track has nothing to hope for in the way of pecuniary reward.

Copyright is an unheard of notion in China, the supposition being that the author would employ printers and publish his works himself should he deem such an enterprise profitable. In fact, wealthy men of letters sometimes do this, not for gain, but to secure accuracy, and the lowest possible cost to the reader.

It would be considered exceedingly bad taste for an author to put his name on the title page of his book. It would be, say the Chinese, "like the gardener setting up his name in the midst of his flower-beds; people stroll into gardens to be amused, not to busy themselves with the cultivator's name." Besides this, they like books with a flavor of age upon them. "What impertinence," say they, "for a writer to flourish his name about before the public has tested his merits!" It was among such a people that the romance entitled "The Dream of the Red Chamber" appeared, nearly two centuries ago.

As the style of the work is so exceedingly prolix and minute as to be unendurable to the desultory reader, only a few scenes from an introductory chapter will be given, and those, too, the most translatable into an English dress; for it must be confessed that Chinese literature still cuts an awkward figure in the language of Shakspeare and Milton; something like Chinese paintings, admirable in detail, but alas, shocking to the taste formed on science and the rules of perspective.

After whole chapters of what Sterne would call preliminary "digressions on purpose," the author gives a voluminous account of a certain wealthy and titled family resident in Pekin, the capital of China. He says that a subject of this kind is of such an intricate nature, that it brings to his mind the vexation of searching for the clue of a tangled mass of hemp. "Indeed," he continues, "it was fortunate for this story that certain poor relations of the high and mighty Young family were planning an attack upon their purses and good nature." The thing happened in this fashion: A certain Mr. Kaou was the son of a gentleman who had held office under a former sovereign many years before.