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IN India, it is still ourselves that we see. If the grandiose pessimism, which makes her plastic language so intoxicating, opens up to us regions in ourselves that we had not explored, it dominates us from the first, because the rhythm of that language relates it, secretly, with all those other languages that express Occidental optimism. In China, on the contrary, we no longer understand. Although it includes a third of mankind, this country is the most distant, the most isolated of all. We are confronted with a method that escapes us almost absolutely, with a point of departure that is not ours, with a goal that does not resemble ours, with a movement of life that has neither the same appearance nor the same direction as ours. To realize unity in the spirit is, doubtless, what the Chinese tends toward, as we do. But he does not seek that unity along the roads where we seek it.

China has not, however, remained as closed as it is said to have been. It mingled with Aryanism incessantly, to the point of producing mixed civilizations, as in Indo-China and in Tibet, for example, where it allowed the rivers of love pouring from the Hindu soul to carry a little of their disquieting ardor into its serious, positive, easy-going, and rather sullen soul. It knew the worlds that were the farthest removed from it, and the most ancient. Rome trafficked with it two thousand years ago; Chaldea, twenty centuries before Rome, taught it astronomy. Nearer to our time, Islam affected it to the point of bringing twenty or thirty millions of Chinese to the god of Mohammed. In the sixteenth century, after the Mongol conquest, Pekin was perhaps the most cosmopolitan and the most open city in the world. The Portuguese and the Venetians sent their merchants there, and the imperial court had artists and savants come from India, from Persia, and even from western Europe.

However, as far back as we look into the past of China, it seems not to have moved. The myth period of its life ends about the century of Pericles, perhaps; the apogee of its vital power oscillates between the fifth and the fifteenth century of our era, its decline begins at the hour when the Occident is about to put its stamp on history. But one must look closely to distinguish one or another of these phases of its activity. The material testimony of its legendary period that comes down to us does not differ very greatly from what it is producing in our own day, and if its most vigorous effort coincides with that of the Middle Ages of the Occident, the fact would seem to demonstrate only the more clearly—through the insensible passages that attach it to its past and its present—that it has never come out of its own Middle Ages and that we do not know when it entered upon them. In reality, it is the inner world of the Chinese that has never opened for us. It is in vain that we feel their social civilization as more perfect than our own, it is in vain that we admire the results among them of a moral effort that was as great as our own. We do not always understand them better than we do the ants or the bees. There is the same mystery, awe inspiring and almost sacred. Why are we so made that we can conceive only of our own mode of association and only our own mechanism of reasoning? Whether the Chinese is superior to us or inferior is something that it is impossible for us to say, and the problem, thus presented, is without significance. The Chinese has followed an evolution that we have not followed; he constitutes a second branch of the human tree that separated from the first; we do not know whether their branches will reunite.

The Indo-European world turns, with all its instinct, toward the future. The Chinese world, with all its consciousness, turns toward the past. Therein lies the gulf which, perhaps, cannot be crossed. There is the whole secret of the power of expansion of the Occident, of the hermitism of China, of the strange impersonality of its plastic language. Taken in the mass, China shows no change in time, no movement in space. One would say that it expresses a people of old men, ossified from infancy. It is never to himself that the Chinese looks for his law; it is to his father, to his grandfather, and, beyond his father and grandfather, to the infinite multitude of the dead who govern him from the depths of the centuries. And in fact, it is not the law that he asks, but the recipe for adapting himself to the surroundings that nature has made for him, surroundings, moreover, which change but little.

At first, one thinks of Egypt, of its geological and agricultural immobility, of its impersonal, collective art, hermetical and abstract. But Egypt is restless; it cannot quench the flame that, despite the will of the people, bursts from the heart of the material in which they worked with such passion. An invincible idealism crowded them to a horizon which was distasteful for them to behold. The Chinese also evolved under outside influence, unquestionably, but around the same fixed point. He remained practical and self-centered, narrowly realistic, devoid of imagination, and, in reality, without desires. Where the Egyptian people suffers from the domination of the priest and tries to forget him by exploring life in its depths, the Chinese accepts without revolt the tyranny—the benevolent tyranny, we may observe—of the mandarin, because it in no wise disturbs the doting satisfaction of his tastes. At least, we know nothing of the immemorial evolutions which must have led him to that state of mind. Confucius regulated morality once for all; it remained fixed in very accessible formulas and kept to its traditional rut through the unquestioning, dogmatic respect, ritualized and blind, that one owes to one's parents, to the parents of one's parents, to the dead parents of one's ancestors. The upward movement, which characterizes life for us and prevents us from arresting it in a definite formula, crystallized, for the Chinese, into a form which is perhaps not always the same, but through which one gets back to the same principle, a form determined by this principle to the minutest detail. The Chinese is satisfied with it, he has no need to seek any other principle. In reality, if he remains motionless, it is because he has so many native virtues and because his imagination atrophies through never having to exert itself or to struggle. He will receive without difficulty the moral teachings of Buddhism and later on of Islam, because they are practically in agreement with the essential part of what Confucius brought to him. In the religion of Confucius he will find even the belief in Nirvana of the one and the fatalism of the other, and they will cause him to lull into indifference whatever momentary impulses toward revolt he may have.

As far back as we go into the distant childhood of China, we find the race already molded to certain metaphysical abstractions and certain moral entities from which all later forms of expression will descend. The Aryan goes from the concrete to the abstract, the Chinese from the abstract to the concrete. With the Aryan, the general idea is the flower of objective observation, and abstraction is always a thing in process of evolution. With the Chinese, the general idea seems to precede the objective study of the world and the progress of the abstraction ends sharply as soon as a moral law sufficient to sustain social relationships has appeared to the philosopher. In the Occident the symbol comes out of life, and frees itself from life, little by little, through progressive generalizations which are forever broadening, or which start out anew on other bases. In China the symbol governs life and shuts it in from every side.

The ever-changing reality which the Occidental desires, the idealistic conquest which tempts him, and man's attempt to rise toward harmony, intelligence, and morality seem to remain unsuspected by the Chinese. He has found, at least he thinks he has found, his mode of social relationships. Why should he change? When we denounce his absence of idealism, perhaps we are only saying that his old ideal realized its promises long ago and that he enjoys the unique privilege of maintaining himself in the moral citadel of which he has been able to gain possession, while, around him, everything ebbs away, decomposes, and re-forms itself. However that may be, we shall never see him approach form with the desire to make it express the adaptation by the human being of his intellect and his senses to surrounding nature. That is what the whole of ancient art and the whole of Renaissance art did, but when the Chinese turns to form, it is with the will to draw from it a tangible symbol of his moral adaptation. He will always aim at moral expression, and will do so without requiring the world to furnish him with other elements than those which he knows in advance he will find in it; he will require no new revelations from the gestures which translate it. Morality will be crystallized in the sentences that guide him. He has only to treat nature as a dictionary whose pages he will turn until he finds the physiognomies and the forms which, in their combination, are the proper ones to fix the teachings of the sages. The agitation of the senses no longer comes upon him save by surprise—when he studies the elements of the plastic transposition too closely, and his science of form, detached wholly from material things, no longer serves him for more than the defining of abstractions. His immobile art demonstrates acquired truth, instead of affirming new intuitions.

To sum up, the Chinese does not study the material of the world that he may ask it to instruct him. He studies it when he needs to objectify his beliefs in order to attach more firmly to them the men who share them. It is true that he brings to this study gifts of patience, tenacity, and slowness which are beyond comparison. The ancient gropings of the first Chinese artists escape us. . . One would say that for ten or twenty centuries they studied, in secret, the laws of form before demanding of form that it express the laws of the spirit.

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