Part 17 (2/2)
Such are the men that a.s.sume the sacred office of being so inspired by the G.o.ds that they shall be qualified to carry messages from the invisible world to those who are in sorrow and distress, and who can find comfort only in the thought that the unseen powers are working on their behalf.
That their new position does not affect in the slightest degree their moral character is seen by the lives they lead after they have undergone the process of being specially inspired by the idols to qualify for the delicate office of interpreting their very thoughts to their wors.h.i.+ppers.
They are lazy and idle and profligate. Their leisure time, which is extensive, is spent in gambling and in occupations entirely unsuited to their sacred character. They have been known to make excursions during the darkness of the night when honest men are in their beds and dig up people's potatoes, or, if no obstacles occur, to despoil a farmer's henroost of all the birds in it. There certainly is a Nemesis that attends the irregular lives of these regular clergy of the idols, for they have not only an evil reputation, but according to popular report death invades their families until one after another is taken away and the home becomes extinct. That this happens often enough to warrant the tradition is quite evident to those who have studied the question. It is also a remarkable fact, that whilst these men who are the ministers of the idols are looked down upon with contempt, the G.o.ds who select and employ them are never censured by the public or considered to be involved in the evils of their servants.
It is a strange system that allows men of a low and depraved character to be the chief actors in the spiritual movements of a nation, but it is on a par with the fact that in the wors.h.i.+p of the idols, goodness or reformation in heart or life is never required from a single wors.h.i.+pper.
The bad man brings his offering without any promise that there will be a change in his life, and it is apparently accepted just as freely as that of another whose reputation stands high amongst all cla.s.ses of the community. This latter fact is a sufficient explanation of how it is possible for such men as now act as interpreters of the G.o.ds to be tolerated in the service of the temples at all.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A TYPICAL VILLAGE.]
CHAPTER XII
SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-MASTERS, AND SCHOOL-BOOKS
Chinese pa.s.sionately fond of education--Reverence for printed or written words--State makes no laws for the education of the people--The school-house and the school-master--System of teaching--Boys first learn sound of words--After years of study learn the meaning of each character--Small percentage of readers in China--One set of school-books in every school in the Empire--The _Three Word Cla.s.sic_--The ”Four Books” and the ”Five Cla.s.sics,” with a.n.a.lyses.
There is no nation in the world that has a more pa.s.sionate and earnest desire for education than the Chinese. In the four great divisions into which all society has been roughly divided, the scholar is placed at the head of the list, as the one that is considered most worthy of honour.
Outside of official rank, the highest t.i.tle that the Chinese have in the whole of their language is bestowed upon the school-master. He may be a man so poor that he has hardly enough money to buy food for himself and his family, and his clothes may be of the plainest and the meanest description, and yet he has a t.i.tle given him that is never bestowed upon any of the three other cla.s.ses. A man might be a millionaire and rolling in wealth, but if he were simply a merchant or a tradesman, the coveted t.i.tle that the poorest scholar gets would never be given to him, even by the most loyal of his friends or by the meanest servant in his employ.
The reverence that the nation has for learning has induced a sentimental and what might seem to be a superst.i.tious regard for the mere written or printed word. Even that dead form is held to be so sacred that it may not be misused or treated with contempt or indifference. A very common sight in a Chinese street is to see a man with a basket slung over his shoulder on which is inscribed two large characters which mean ”Have pity on the writing.” His eyes are kept steadily on the roadway, and on any nook or cranny by the side, and he eagerly pounces on any sc.r.a.ps of paper, no matter how frayed or dirty, and places them in his basket. Occasionally he catches sight of a broken piece of pottery or a fragment of a rice bowl on which are some of the precious characters that were burnt into them when they were being manufactured. These also are picked up and reverently laid aside with the pieces of paper that have been rescued from the feet of the pa.s.sers-by.
You stop the man and you ask him what he means by picking up this rubbish on the street, and he tells you that he is employed by benevolent persons who cannot bear the thought of seeing the sacred characters that were invented by the sages and that had been the cause of China's greatness trodden under foot of men. And so he is gathering all that he can find on the streets, and at a certain time with due ceremony the whole will be burnt, and be thus saved from the dishonour that had been put upon them.
The devotion to education is not a mere sentimental one, but one that has covered this great Empire with schoolhouses, for in all the towns and cities and in all the larger villages even the people have established the common schools in which the children of the locality may receive an education. There are no such things as Government schools, neither are there private ones. It is true that rich men sometimes engage teachers for their sons and have the tuition carried on in their own homes, but what may be called the common schools of the country are managed and supported entirely by the elders or leading men in the various localities in which they exist.
The State takes no cognizance whatever of the educational efforts of the people, neither is it called upon to spend a cash in upholding the inst.i.tutions that are in existence for the teaching of the youth of the country. The people have from time immemorial taken these duties upon themselves, and they have willingly borne the responsibility of raising the funds that have been necessary for the successful carrying on of the schools.
The usual practice is at the close of the year for the leaders, say, of a village to meet together and discuss the question of the next year's school. They have already canva.s.sed the parents who have sons, and ascertained how many of them will attend and how much they are willing to contribute towards the teacher's salary. They are thus in a position to know whether they have sufficient funds to invite a first-cla.s.s man to take charge of the school, or whether they will have to be content with an inferior scholar instead.
This question being settled, the next point is to secure the school-master. If there happens to be one belonging to the village, or one connected in any way with the leading men, the difficulty is then very much simplified, but if an unknown man is to be engaged, then it may mean endless complications for a whole year. He may turn out to be an opium-smoker, or he may be a vagabond and rarely be seen within the walls of the school-house; for when once he is engaged the people have no redress whatever, but must tolerate all his misdeeds and pay him the salary agreed upon without a murmur or a complaint to him personally. Any attempt on the part of the villagers to compel him to carry out his contract faithfully would simply end in their being censured and fined by the mandarin for daring to a.s.sert themselves against one of the highly-privileged cla.s.ses in China. We will suppose, however, that a fairly respectable man has been obtained, and that all the arrangements for opening the school have been satisfactorily made. The usual time for the commencement of the school year is three or four days after the ”Feast of Lanterns,” which takes place about the middle of February.
The school-house is usually situated in a central part of the village, and consists of a school-room capable of accommodating twenty or thirty scholars, a small bedroom for the teacher, and a diminutive kitchen also for his special use. The managers provide him with a four-poster, a high oblong table and a few chairs, and also a mosquito-net to be used during the warm weather when those plagues of the East carry on their campaign with such unceasing vigour against all animal life. They also place a table and chair in the school-room, which are to be for his own exclusive use, but beyond these they leave the furnis.h.i.+ng of the place to the individual scholars, who bring their own stools and tables with them on the day that the studies begin. On the table are an inkstone, a diminutive water-bottle, two or three camel's-hair pens or brushes, a stick of Indian ink, and last, though not least, a good solid piece of bamboo with which the refractory and the indolent will frequently make acquaintance during the coming months of the session. There are also a miniature teapot and Lilliputian teacups, all deftly placed on a lacquer tray, ready for use whenever the master feels that he would like to refresh himself with a few sips of the popular beverage that ”cheers but not inebriates.”
The school life of a boy in China would seem to one who has not been brought up in Western methods as a dreary and intolerable one, and such as would take the heart out of any English lad and make him hate the very sight of books as long as he lived. The duties of the day begin at a very early hour, and with certain intermissions for meals last until the evening shades have entered the school-room and blurred the faces of the books so that the strange, weird-looking words cannot be recognized one from the other.
The little fellows have to rise as the dawn begins to fling its grey and trembling light across the darkness that clouds the earth, and to send its kindly messages into the homes of rich and poor. Feeling the terror of the master upon them, they quickly jump out of bed, and with no time to wash their faces or to brush their hair, they hurry along the various paths that lead to the school, where they find the teacher waiting for them, and with a frown upon his face if they should happen to be a few minutes late.
The lads never enter the school-room without a feeling of restraint. It is considered that a cold and haughty kind of bearing on the part of the master is essential in order to maintain the discipline of the school.
There is, therefore, very seldom if ever any feeling of affection or devotion between the scholars and him. To them he appears to have no kindliness of heart and no human sympathies, nor any lovable thought for any one of them. He is simply there as a kind of living machine to teach these youngsters this huge Chinese language, but as for sentiment or any tender feeling for them, that is utterly out of the question.
The method in which the studies are carried on is the very reverse of what is demanded and insisted upon in the home schools. There the great aim is to secure not only perfect order but as complete silence as possible. When there is anything like noise in the school-room it means that the lads are talking with each other and not studying their lessons. An English lad can best master these by thinking over them, and in silence committing to memory the various thoughts or problems that may be contained in the book he is called upon to study.
Now it seems impossible for any Chinese boy to impress upon his mind's eye the intricate and apparently meaningless strokes that make up the ordinary Chinese word. He seems to be able to do this only by bawling them at the very top of his voice. Efforts have been made to get the scholars in a school to learn them without raising their voices, but failure has always been the result. The consequence is, that silence amongst the lads is most displeasing to a Chinese school-master, and a stern, severe look from him will set them all off into shouts so deafening that only one great uproar can be heard resounding through the building, each lad seeming only to be contending with all the rest to see if he cannot outshout them all. The drudgery of learning to recognize the Chinese words is something that cannot be appreciated by a Western student. With English words, for example, each one is composed of so many letters, has a definite sound and definite meanings, and after a time, if a boy fails to remember any particular one, he simply spells it, and at once sound comes tripping back to his recollection. There is no such easy process to the grasping of the Chinese characters. Each one is a solemn, hard-featured picture that stands apart by itself and has no connecting link with any other one in the language. You cannot reason out what shall be the sound or meaning of any one word by a.n.a.logy, for each one is complete in itself and has a solitary ent.i.ty of its own. A page of Chinese print gives one the impression that one has lighted upon a series of cryptic puzzles that the inventor has made as intricate and involved as the complex and oblique mind of the Chinese could make them.
The Chinese school-masters throughout the country having realized that to grasp the sounds of these weird and unromantic figures and the meaning that lies concealed behind them would be an absolute impossibility for the youth of the country, have divided up the great attempt into two distinct efforts. The first thing, therefore, that a lad has to do when he goes to school is to shout out in all the various tones of the gamut the names of these ancient, h.o.a.ry-headed symbols, and at the same time to impress upon his memory the picture of each one, with its dots and curves and minute up and down strokes, that it shall be a living picture that his mind can call up at any moment that he hears its name p.r.o.nounced.
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