Their great man, Confucius, expresses this social genius in its most perfect state and highest form. His golden wisdom is the quintescence of social justice. He never forgets conditions and limits; he is admirably wise, pure, and religious, but never towers above humanity--never soars into solitude. There is no token of the forest or cave in Confucius. Few men could understand him, because his nature was so thoroughly balanced, and his rectitude so pure; not because his thoughts were too deep, or too high for them. In him should be sought the best genius of the Chinese, with that perfect practical good sense whose uses are universal.
At one time I used to change from reading Confucius to one of the great religious books of another Eastern nation; and it was always like leaving the street and the palace for the blossoming forest of the East, where in earlier times we are told the angels walked with men and talked, not of earth, but of heaven.
As we looked at the forms moving about in the Museum, we could not wonder that the Chinese consider us, who call ourselves the civilized world, barbarians, so deficient were those forms in the sort of refinement that the Chinese prize above all. And our people deserve it for their senselessness in viewing _them_ as barbarians, instead of seeing how perfectly they represent their own idea. They are inferior to us in important developments, but, on the whole, approach far nearer their own standard than we do ours. And it is wonderful that an enlightened European can fail to prize the sort of beauty they do develop. Sets of engravings we have seen representing the culture of the tea plant, have brought to us images of an entirely original idyllic loveliness. One long resident in China has observed that nothing can be more enchanting than the smile of love on the regular, but otherwise expressionless face of a Chinese woman. It has the simplicity and abandonment of infantine, with the fulness of mature feeling. It never varies, but it does not tire.
The same sweetness and elegance stereotyped now, but having originally a deep root in their life as a race, may be seen in their poetry and music. The last we have heard, both from the voice and several instruments, at this Museum, for the first time, and were at first tempted to laugh, when something deeper forbade. Like their poetry, the music is of the narrowest monotony, a kind of rosary, a repetition of phrases, and, in its enthusiasm and conventional excitement, like nothing else in the heavens and on the earth. Yet both the poetry and music have in them an expression of birds, roses, and moonlight; indeed, they suggest that state where "moonlight, and music, and feeling are one," though the soul seems to twitter, rather than sing of it.