IN THE MIDST OF LIFE

Hokitika Guardian, 26 May 1927, Page 1

IN THE MIDST OF LIFE

(By Aldoits Huxley, the famous novelist, author of “those Barren Leaves’ and that brilliant travel-book “Jesting Pilate,” here describes his hnprensions of Shanghai.

London is crowded. New A’ork is a swarming nightmare the narrow alleys of Naples and Lahore exuberantly pullulate. But of all the cities 1 liavocvei seen the native town of Shanghai is one whore life seems to me most densely and di.squietingly clotted. It is not u question. 1 think of the mere quantity of people—though there are, goodness knows, enough of tlie yellow men. There is something it seems to me in the actual quality of Chinese life which makes it seem more formidably vital, more dense, so to speak, and massive than life elsewhere.

Java for example, is more thickly populated than China. But never in Java are you oppressed by Lliat sense of strong alien life which overwhelms you at every step in China. Benares is like an anthill ; but the European finds tin difficulty in keeping bis spiritual end up in that city of alien religions. Only in China—l speak, at any rate, of my experience—does Tie feel oppressed by the strange life surrounding him.

The. secret, I repeal, lies in the finality of Chinese life—the quality imposed on it by an ancient and unchan-

ging civilisation is also ancient : but it js a more passve kind of civilisation than the Chinese. Its thnngelessness is one of resignation not like the C hinese i hangelessness, of activity. AYidking .through the streets ot Shunguai, von are overwhelmed by the realisation of this changeless activity (so unlike our changing and precarious Western activity), you feel the extraordinary power, for good or lor evil, of the ancient civilisation.

The traditional art still lives and forces itself on your attention. The marvellous writing, each letter a tiling of exquisite beauty, stares down at you from the innumerable painted banners and signs anti lanterns. In their booths tln* master writers sit brush in hand painting the beautiful ideographs, just as their ancestors painted them two thousand years ago. lit the street of the seal cutters the engravers work with all the ancient cunning. The cups from which the coolies drink their tea are miracles of beauty. In the furriers’ shops bang astonishing coats patterned with flowers or great dragons worked in different coloured furs. And within tlie houses Chinese family life goes on as it has gone on since ihe time of Confucius —a life of abnegation and self-effacement for the sake of the larger social unit, such as we in the AYest find it impossible to understand .

No less fixed are the absurdities of the civilisation. Grotesque superstitions survive along with an admirable rationalism. Indifference to filth coexists with «i sensibility unknown in tlie West.

A few hundred yards away, in the European settlement, you can buy scientifically compounded drugs; hut the chemists’ shops in the Chinese city are stocked with pickled spiders, tigers’ whiskers, and rhinoceros horns. The astrologers and magicians sit at the street corners doing a thriving business. (Their colleagues in the West, it may he added, still do well enough.') The temples are thronged with men and women practising divination. In its good and it its evil aspects the old civilisation survives Intact.

And you get the impression that it will go on surviving, in spite of every-

thing. Food, famine, civil war. invasion—these tilings are irrelevant. The civilisation has survived them in the past., and one sees no reason to suppose that it will not do so in the future—and survive, not passively, resignedly, like the Indian civilisation, hut actively. That is the impression, profound and disquieting, which one carries away from a Chinese city. And meanwhile, what is going to happen to the white man in China? One can only mournfully speculate.