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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
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IX

In the early nineteenth century the reaction against
China as a model state led to a more positive interest
in the Chinese as human beings. The sources for this
new interest were found in the translations of popular
literature, especially poetry, which had become in-
creasingly available. A precursor of this trend was
Ludwig Unzer, the German poet, who published in
1773 an elegy entitled Vou-ti bey Tsin-nas Grabe, eine
Elegie im chinesischen Geschmack.
In this poem, which
the young Goethe criticized as contrived, Unzer sought
to depict the feelings of a Chinese who is bereaved
at the death of his beloved. Unzer's allusions to Taoist
beliefs and other Chinese attitudes are naive, but his
poem is important as the first European effort to show
that the individual Chinese is subject to the same
emotions as others when facing death.

Goethe, who had satirized the Chinese in his youth,
was in the final decade of his life to express open
admiration for the Chinese attitude towards nature, the
self-discipline and refinement of the people, and the
aesthetic qualities of Chinese literature. He was par-
ticularly moved by the Chinese poems which were
published in English translation in Peter Perring
Thoms' Chinese Courtship (1824). He rendered a few
of Thoms' translations into his own poetic language
and epitomized others in his set of lyrical poems called
Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (1827).
Friedrich Rückert published in 1833 his imitation in
freely paraphrased odes of the Shih-ching (“Book of
Poetry”). The German romantic poets thus deepened,
personalized, and beautified Europe's conception of the
Chinese. In their vision of Chinese imaginative life they
fused an admiration for the intellectual resources of
the Chinese with a sensitivity to Chinese creativity that
was not appreciated in the eighteenth century.

But not all of the German poets shared Goethe's
enthusiasm. Heinrich Heine, at the beginning of the
third book of his Romantische Schule (1833), used one
of the stories of Chinese beauties, translated by Thomas,
to lend color to his own attack upon the grotesque
character of German romanticism. Others in the ro-
mantic and Young German movements saw in China
nothing but dry pedantry and tiresome automatism in
government. The Liberals of the 1830's regarded China
as a model of the police state that they so heartily
despised (see Rose, p. 314). The American Transcen-
dentalists, like the British romantic poets, were con-
cerned more with Indian than with Chinese thought.


369

But the ethical teachings of Confucius appealed to
Emerson, particularly the emphasis on the duty of the
individual to assume social responsibility. Tennyson
expressed the Victorian exasperation with a static and
unprogressive China by proclaiming: “Better fifty years
of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” (“Locksley Hall,”
line 184).

In France, Théophile Gautier, influenced by the
China specialist G. Pauthier and the novelist René
Bazin, became at mid-century a propagandist for
Chinese literature and art. He wrote stories and verses
on Chinese themes, collected Chinese art, and talked
about Oriental subjects with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and
Victor Hugo. His daughter, Judith Gautier, who studied
Chinese with a tutor, translated Chinese poems into
French verse in the Livre de jade (1867). Her intention
was to transmit poetic quality rather than linguistic
accuracy, a goal which has been retained by most
Western translators of Chinese poetry ever since. She
also wrote several novels about China and collaborated
with Pierre Loti in preparing a Chinese play entitled
La Fille du Ciel. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who
were more interested in Japan than in China, were
among the first to point out the debt of Japanese litera-
ture and art to China. Among those who fell under
the spell of the Goncourts was Émile Guimet, an in-
dustrialist and founder of the Paris museum of Oriental
art that still bears his name. Georges Clemenceau,
while not active in politics, prepared just at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century a play about China that
was inspired by his study of the Chinese classics and
his reactions to the Boxer Rebellion.

Collection of Chinese art became popular in Europe
after 1860, the date of the sacking of the summer
palace in Peking. The Boxer expedition of 1900 also
brought a windfall of Chinese art into the West. But
while individual connoisseurs and museums built up
impressive collections of all forms of Chinese art,
Western artists have so far not been inspired to imitate
Chinese painting and sculpture. The influence of
Chinese art in the West has been limited to a continu-
ation of the popular vogue for chinoiseries and the
decorative arts. This is particularly surprising in the
light of the attraction that Japanese color prints, archi-
tecture, and furnishings have had for Western artists.
The visual arts have also had but a small interest as
sources for China's social and intellectual history. Only
in recent years, and especially in the works of C. W.
Bishop and H. G. Creel, have the findings of archae-
ology been used in the West as aids in the reconstruc-
tion of China's ancient past.

The dispatch of Chinese students to the West on
Boxer fellowships and other grants helped at the be-
ginning of the twentieth century to stimulate a new
interest in Chinese thought. Irving Babbitt at Harvard
early evinced an interest in the humane and moderate
qualities in Buddhism and other faiths as they were
practiced in China. The Imagist poets, particularly
Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, were attracted to
Chinese poetry for its compact portrayal of universal
wisdom. In Germany, O. J. Bierbaum, one of the lead-
ers of impressionist art and culture, wrote novels and
poems on the basis of his own renditions of Chinese
themes. He stressed the erotic elements and burlesqued
the pompous characters of his Chinese literary sources.
More accurate translations of the meaning and spirit
of Chinese poetry were provided in Germany by
Richard Wilhelm, in America by Florence Ayscough,
and in England by Arthur Waley. Through the efforts
of both poets and translators, Chinese poetry, mythol-
ogy, and history became a source of inspiration for
creative writers in the contemporary West.