On a Chinese Screen quotes

They are built of dried mud and so dilapidated that you feel a breath of wind will lay them flat upon the dusty earth from which they have been made. A string of camels, heavily laden, steps warily past you.

They wear the disdainful air of profiteers forced to traverse a world in which many people are not so rich as they.

A little crowd, tattered in their blue clothes, is gathered about the gate and it scatters as a youth in a pointed cap gallops up on a Mongolian pony.

perhaps it is a singing girl in splendid silks and richly embroidered coat, with jade in her black hair, summoned to a party so that she may sing a little song and exchange elegant repartee with young blades cultured enough to appreciate wit.

The Peking cart disappears into the gathering darkness: it seems to carry all the mystery of the East.

but she did not like a dark ceiling, so she stretched a canvas across and papered it. Needing air and sunlight, she cut two large windows on one side. She very luckily had some blue curtains which were just the right size.

Blue was her favourite colour: it brought out the colour of her eyes.

Since the columns, great red sturdy columns, oppressed her a little she papered them with a very nice paper which did not look Chinese at all. She was lucky also with the paper with which she covered the walls.

Then, having finished, she surveyed her work with satisfaction.

“Of course it doesn’t look like a room in London,” she said, “but it might quite well be a room in some nice place in England, Cheltenham, say, or Tunbridge Wells.”

If you had happened upon him behind the counter of a department store or on a stool in a broker’s office you would have thought him perfectly in place.

But you would have noticed him as little as you noticed the counter or the stool.

There was so little in him to attract attention that in the end it became intriguing:

But I think his experiences were merely of the body and were never translated into experiences of the soul. Perhaps that is why at bottom you felt he was commonplace. The insignificance of his mien was a true index to the insignificance of his soul.

Behind the blank wall was blankness.

That was certainly why with so much to write about he wrote tediously, for in writing the important thing is less richness of material than richness of personality.

“Is it not strange,” he said, with his charming smile, “that we Chinese wear this gown because three hundred years ago the Manchus were horsemen?”

“Not so strange,” I retorted, “as that because the English won the battle of Waterloo Your Excellency should wear a bowler.”

“Do you think that is why I wear it?”

“Will these American students ever produce anything like this?” he asked with a rueful smile.

But to me the most charming part of it was that I knew all the time that he was a rascal.

Corrupt, inefficient, and unscrupulous, he let nothing stand in his way. He was a master of the squeeze. He had acquired a large fortune by the most abominable methods. He was dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and venal.

she was a perfect darling. You knew very well that in Constantinople she would have assured you that the Turks were such perfect gentlemen and the Sultana Fatima was a perfect dear and spoke such wonderful French.

Homeless, she was at home wherever her country had a diplomatic representative.

The first secretary of the British Legation thought the party rather mixed. He spoke French more like a Frenchman than any Frenchman who ever lived. He was a man of taste, and he had a natural aptitude for being right.

Untermeyer had written, and with his foot smeared his spittle over the name.

In a moment no trace remained that Willard B. Untermeyer had ever visited that place.

It was done very lightly, but with an admirable ease; I know not what happy chance guided the artist’s touch, for the bird was all a-quiver with life and the plum-blossoms were tremulous on their stalks.

The soft airs of spring blew through the sketch into that sordid chamber, and for the beating of a pulse you were in touch with the Eternal.

“Damn it, Sir,” he said furiously, “I almost thought the blighters would have the confounded cheek to shoot me.”

They are strange people the British. If their manners were as good as their courage is great they would merit the opinion they have of themselves.

It was a cheerful spot, comfortable, homelike, and cosy. It reminded me somewhat of the little intimate beer-houses of Berlin where the tired working man could go in the evening and spend a peaceful hour.

Fiction is stranger than fact.

“A nun in their eyes is only a woman,” she smiled indulgently.

“You must not ask from people more than they are capable of giving.”

How true, and yet how hard to remember!

but you recognised him at once, for he was a perfect specimen of his class.

His unconventionality was exquisitely conventional.

Everything about him was according to standard, from his square-toed, serviceable boots to his rather long, untidy hair. He wore a loose low collar that showed a thick neck and loose, somewhat shabby but well-cut clothes. He always smoked a short briar pipe.

But he was junior partner in a well-known and respectable firm, and one of the peculiarities of China is that your position excuses your idiosyncrasies.

It may be notorious that you beat your wife, but if you are manager of a well-established bank the world will be civil to you and ask you to dinner.

So when Henderson announced his socialistic opinions they merely laughed. When he first came to Shanghai he refused to use the jinrickshaw. It revolted his sense of personal dignity that a man, a human being no different from himself, should drag him hither and thither.

But this misfortune he bore with a courage and a dignity which were absolutely characteristic. His demeanour was so perfect that his infelicity positively raised him in the eyes of his friends. He was to all an object of sympathy.

He might be a cuckold, but he remained a person of quality.

Whenever, indeed, Mme. de Steenvoorde took a new lover he insisted that her parents should give him a sufficient sum of money to make good the outrage to his name and honour.

You can make no longer a pattern of them as they wend their way. Their effort oppresses you. You are filled with a useless compassion.

In China it is man that is the beast of burden.

To be harassed by the wear and tear of life, and to pass rapidly through it without the possibility of arresting one’s course—is not this pitiful indeed?

Dr. Macalister gave a chuckle.

“That’s what I looked like when I first came out to China,” he said.

It was a photograph of himself.

Dr. Macalister chuckled as he thought of that long passed time.

“The first night I got here, when I was alone in my room, I threw myself on my bed and I just cried like a child.”

Dr. Macalister went on talking, but I could not pay much attention to what he said. I wondered by what steps he had come to be the man I knew now from the man he had been then.

Dr. Macalister went on talking, but I could not pay much attention to what he said. I wondered by what steps he had come to be the man I knew now from the man he had been then.

That is the story I should like to write.

The missionary mounted, gave his pony a sharp cut with the whip, and cantered away. The Chinese cart lumbered slowly after. But when Birch was left alone his anger left him and a sob broke unwillingly from his lips.

The barren mountains were less hard than the heart of man.

He turned and walked slowly back to the little walled city.

It was an enchanting sight, but there was in it nothing unaccustomed and what I sought was not there. I turned away. But when I returned to my bamboo shelter the magic which had given it so extraordinary a character was gone.

Alas, I was like a man who should tear a butterfly to pieces in order to discover in what its beauty lay.

And yet, as Moses descending from Mount Sinai wore on his face a brightness from his converse with the God of Israel, my little cabin, my dish of charcoal, my lamp, even my camp bed, had still about them something of the thrill which for …

now a man will risk his life with a joke from Comic Cuts on his lips, then it was with a Latin quotation.

But how can I analyse the subtle quality which distinguished this old man?

Read a page of Swift: the words are the same as those we use today and there is hardly a sentence in which they are not placed in the simplest order;

and yet there is a dignity, a spaciousness, an aroma, which all our modern effort fails to attain: in short there is style.

And so with him; there was style, and there is no more to be said.

But presently ideas, insinuating themselves into your consciousness like the lapping waves of a rising tide, absorb you to the exclusion of those which old Chuang-Tzu suggested, and notwithstanding your desire to idle, you sit down at your table.

Only the dilettante uses a desk.

Your pen goes easily and you write without effort. It is very good to be alive. Then two amusing people come to luncheon and when they are gone you drop into Christie’s.

But the beating is what he can never get over. It surprises him yet and he cannot, he simply cannot understand it. He has no ill-feeling towards the magistrate who ordered it; on the contrary it appeals to his sense of humour.

“He was a great old sportsman, the old blackguard,” he says. “Nerve, eh?”

She hesitated for a moment and a curious look came into her eyes.

“There’s something in the way his hair grows on his forehead that I can’t help liking,” she answered.

The consul had never heard anything so outrageous. It really was the last straw.

It really was the last straw. And now while he strode along, trying to walk off his anger, though he was not a man who often used bad language he really could not restrain himself, and he said fiercely:

“Women are simply bloody.”

His gruffness was an almost absurd attempt to persuade those with whom he came in contact that he was not frightened of them. You felt that no one was more surprised than himself that he was taken seriously.

He was like those little grotesque figures that children blow out like balloons and you had an idea that he went in lively fear of bursting and then everyone would see that he was but a hollow bladder.

It was his wife who was constantly alert to persuade him that he was a man of iron and when the explosion was over she would say to him:

I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social intercourse difficult to persons of a sensitive nostril.

The matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth, wealth, or education.

It is very significant that those novelists who have risen from the ranks of labour are apt to make it a symbol of class prejudice, and one of the most distinguished writers of our day always marks the rascals of his entertaining stories by the …

The invention of the “sanitary convenience” has destroyed the sense of equality in men. It is responsible for class hatred much more than the monopoly of capital in the hands of the few.

It is a tragic thought that the first man who pulled the plug of a water-closet with that negligent gesture rang the knell of democracy.

“I thought she heralded the Spring of a new era,” he said.

“She was but the last flower of this great nation’s Fall.”

From a drawer in his roll-top desk he took a few cash, and handing them to her, sent her away.

“Well, we’ve had a most interesting chat. It does one good in a place like this, so far away from civilisation, to exchange ideas with one’s intellectual equals.”

“Especially other people’s,” I murmured.

“I always think that one should profit by the great thoughts of the past,” she retorted. “It shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain.”

“I always think that one should profit by the great thoughts of the past,” she retorted. “It shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain.”

Her conversation was devastating.

He took his shot. He made a little break. At the end of it, chalking his cue, he said:

“I do. I believe if things are coming to you, you can’t escape them.”

That was all. He said nothing more. When we had finished the game he went up to bed, and I never saw him again. I shall never know what strange emotion impelled him to put that sudden question to a stranger.

He was silent for quite a long time and I thought his mind had wandered to other things. But I was wrong; he was thinking my statement over in all its bearings, for at last he said:

“Look here, I’m not a working man. Hang it all, I was at Harrow.”

I was looking in vain for a certain nerve and it needed his greater skill to discover it in a place in which I had not sought it. I was aggrieved because the text book had misled me. He smiled and said:

“You see, the normal is the rarest thing in the world.”

And though he spoke of anatomy he might have spoken with equal truth of man.

“Well, thank God, her mother’s coming out soon.”

I don’t think he was quite a normal man after all.

Because he had seen all this so often it affected him strangely. The dying day made him think, he knew not why, of his long past and of his great age. He regretted nothing.

“By George,” he muttered, “I’ve had a fine life.”

“I have never studied the philosophers,” he said, “but of course we have at our university a professor of Chinese philosophy and if you are interested in that I will ask him to come and call on you.”

It is useless to argue with a pedagogue, as the Spirit of the Ocean (somewhat portentously to my mind) remarked to the Spirit of the River

and I resigned myself to discuss the drama. My professor was interested in its technique and indeed was preparing a course of lectures on the subject, which he seemed to think both complicated and abstruse.

“The Americans are an extremely practical people,” I answered. “

I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs.

”

“I do not think I quite understand you.”

“If you can’t write a play no one can teach you and if you can it’s as easy as falling off a log.”

Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.

He looked at her age on the tombstone. She’d be no chicken if she were alive now. And as he thought of all those dead people a sense of satisfaction spread through him. He had beaten them all.

They were dead and he was alive, and by George he’d scored them off.

His eyes collected in one picture all those crowded graves and he smiled scornfully. He very nearly rubbed his hands.

But suddenly he awoke.

He had dreamed of that open grave and the coolies digging leisurely.

He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to say it was an hallucination when he had seen them with his own eyes. Then he heard the rattle of the night watchman going his rounds.

Their exuberance bewilders. You cannot refuse your admiration to the ingenuity with which they so diversify the ideas that occupy them as to give you an impression of changing fantasy, but the fact is plain that the ideas are few.

The Chinese artist is like a fiddler who with infinite skill should play infinite variations upon a single tune.

Now, I happened upon a French doctor who had been in practice for many years in the city in which I then found myself; and he was a collector of porcelain, bronze, and embroidery. He took me to see his things.

It was a fragment of no great importance, but it was Greek, and perhaps because I was surfeited with Chinese beauty it affected me strangely.

It spoke in a tongue with which I was familiar. It rested my heart.

I passed my hands over its age-worn surface with a delight I was myself surprised at.

I was like a sailor who, wandering in a tropic sea, has known the lazy loveliness of coral islands and the splendours of the cities of the East, but finds himself once more in the dingy alleys of a Channel port.

It is cold and grey and sordid, but it is England.

The doctor—he was a little bald man, with gleaming eyes and an excitable manner—rubbed his hands.

And he and his men listening may have felt themselves the peers of the old seaman and his followers. What magnificence did that stained fragment of marble call up and what fabulous adventures! How long had the kingdom lasted and what tragedy marked its fall?

Ah, just then I could not look at Tibetan banners or celadon cups; for I saw the Parthenon, severe and lovely, and beyond, serene, the blue Aegean.

He played the piano and he had a pleasing voice; it required little persuasion to induce him to sit down and sing you the popular ditties he had heard when last he was at home.

It was quite singular to me, the unfathomable frivolity of this grey-haired man; it was even a little uncanny.

But people applauded him loudly when he finished.

Ships’ captains for the most part are very dull men.

Their conversation is of freights and cargoes. They have seen little more in the ports they visit than their agent’s office, the bar which their kind frequents, and the bawdy houses.

It was his duty to take the purchasers of land to their plots and if they were not satisfied persuade them that they need not regret their bargain.

“We sold one fellow a farm on de side of a mountain,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling at the recollection, “an’ it was so steep dat de chickens had one leg longer dan de oder.”

After five years he had the idea that he would like to go back to China. He had no difficulty in getting a job as mate of a ship sailing west and soon he was at the old life once more.

“I’ll be off right away,” said the captain.

Not a pound of cargo had been removed, but an astute Chinaman had neatly repainted the numbers.

And later when mutinous regiments with an eye on the silver we carried sought to prevent us from leaving one of the riverside cities he showed an agreeable firmness. His equable temper was tried and he said:

The agitated compradore said the military would fire if we attempted to move. An officer uttered a command and the soldiers, going down on one knee, levelled their rifles. Captain Boots looked at them.

“Put down de bullet proof screen,” he said. “I tell you I’m going and de Chinese army can go to hell.”

He gave his orders to raise the anchor and at the same time the officer gave the order to fire.

He knows more Chinese than any man in China. He has been working for ten years on a dictionary which will supersede that of a noted scholar whom for a quarter of a century he has personally disliked.

He is thus benefiting sinological studies and satisfying a private grudge.

He has all the manner of a don and you feel that eventually he will be professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and then at last exactly in his place.

Because he has immersed himself in his particular pursuits and has cared nothing for racing and shooting the Europeans think him queer.

They look upon him with the suspicion and awe with which human beings always regard those who do not share their tastes.

They suggest that he is not quite sane and some accuse him of smoking opium.

But it is a specialised life. Art and beauty seem not to touch him, and as I listen to him talk so sympathetically of the Chinese poets I cannot help asking myself if the best things have not after all slipped through his fingers.

Here is a man who has touched reality only through the printed page.

The tragic splendour of the lotus moves him only when its loveliness is enshrined in the verse of Li Po and the laughter of demure Chinese girls stirs his blood but in the perfection of an exquisitely chiselled quatrain.