Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/187

Rh exact as any other, having regard both for the sense of the words and the idiom of the language. Now, however, if we disintegrate and refer the primary notions which these words convey, to the universal nature of of [sic] man, we gotget [sic], at once, at their fallfull [sic] significance: namely, "the good," "the true," and "the beautiful."

But, moreover, the literature of a nation, if it is to be studied at all, must be studied systematically and as one connected whole, and not fragmentarily and without plan or order, as it has hitherto been done by most foreign scholars. "It is," says Mr. Matthew Arnold, "it is through the apprehension, either of all literature,—the entire history of the human spirit,—or of a single great literary work, as a commectedconnected [sic] whole that the real power of literature makes itself felt." Now how little, we have seen, do the foreign students conceive the Chinese literature as a whole! How little, therefore, do they get at its significance! How little, in fact, do they know it! How little does it become a power in their hands, towards the understanding of the character of the people! With the exception of the labours of Dr. Legge and of one or two other scholars, the people of EuropaEurope [sic] know of the Chinese literature principally through the translations of novels, and even these not of the best, but of the most commonplace of their class. Just fancy, if a foreigner were to juggejudge [sic] of the English literature from the works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, or that class of novels which form the reading stock of school-boys and nursery-maids! It was this class of Chinese