Chapter 10 - Page 2

particularly well covered, while our legends run back for thousands of years." But my companion had never heard of the Shoo-King. It was so with the Chun Tsew[4] of Confucius and the Four Books--Ta-h[ue]-[uo],[5] Chung-yung,[6] Lun-yu,[7] M[ua]ng-tsze.[8] She had never heard of them. I told her of the invention of paper by the Marquis Tsae several centuries before Christ, and she laughingly replied that she supposed that I would claim next that the Chinese had libraries like those Mr. Carnegie is founding. I was delighted to assure her that her assumption was correct, and drew a little picture of a well-known Chinese library, founded two thousand years ago, the Han Library, with its 3,123 classics, its 2,706 works on philosophy, its 2,528 books on mathematics, its 790 works on war, its 868 books on medicine, 1,318 on poetry, not to speak of thousands of essays.

I could not but wonder as I talked, where were the Americans and their literature when our fathers were reading these books two thousand years ago! Even the English people were wild savages, living in caves and huts, when our people were printing books and encyclopedias of knowledge. I dwelt upon our poetry, the National Airs, Greater Eulogies, dating back several thousand years. I told her of the splendors of our great versifier, Le-Tai-Pih; and I might have said that many American poets, like Walt Whitman, had doubtless read the translations to their advantage. I had the pleasure at least of commanding this lady's attention, and I believe she was the first American who deigned to take a Chinaman seriously. The facts of our literature are available, but only scholars make a study of it, and so far as I could learn not a word of Chinese literature is ever taught in American schools, though in the great universities there are facilities, and the best educated people are familiar with our history.

The American authors, especially novelists, who constitute the majority of authors, are by no means all well educated. Many appear to have a faculty of "story-telling," which enables them to produce something that will sell; but that all American authors, and this will surprise you, are included among the great scholars, is far from true. Some, yes many, are deplorably ignorant in the sense of broad learning, and I believe this is a universal, national fault. If one thing Chinese more than another is ridiculed in America it is our drama. I met a famous "play-writer" at the ---- dinner, who thought it a huge joke. I heard that his income was $30,000 per annum from plays alone; yet he had never heard of our "Hundred Plays of the Yuen Dynasty," which rests in one of his own city libraries not a mile distant, and he laughed good-naturedly when I remarked that the modern stage obtained its initiative in China.

A listener did me the honor to question my statement that Voltaire's "L'Orphelin de la Chine" was taken from the Orphan of