Various

“ Such simple-heartedness and sincerity make a Russian fearfully zealous in his ideals. He accepts ideas no matter by whom propounded, and immediately makes them a part of himself. As Brandes says:—
"The cultivated Russian understands and always has understood the living, the new, the newest in foreign countries, and does not wait till it becomes cheap because it is old or has gained currency by the approbation of the stranger's countrymen. The Russian catches the new thought on the wing. Their culture makes a modern race, with the keenest scent for everything modern." ”

“ The Russian pessimist and the hostile foreigner see nothing but decadence. The thoughtful observer knows that such decadence is but the inevitable by-product in the formative process of a great nation." "Beyond any other European people the Russians possess a degree of receptivity, a radical humanity of feeling, a fund of high idealism, and a sense of the relationship of ideals to practical life, which cannot fail to carry them very far. These things, far more than either an outrageous militarism or the capacity for frantic industrial production, in the end make up civilization." ”

“ To the Russian authors, on the other hand, the famous Une of Terence — Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum puto — " I am a man : I deem nothing human foreign to me " —
is the principle par excellence; it is their chief and moving spirit. People with weak wills, with high-strung nerves, affected by the many other maladies of the day, are not looked down upon, but evoke the heart-felt pity of the author, who sees in them but incomplete portions of human beings as designed by their Creator, members of society crippled by the vagaries of the private, social, and political life of our times. ”

“ This huge expanse of earth's surface, often without a single tree for hundreds of miles, with only a carpet of grass in summer and a thick mantle of snow in winter, makes the Russian self-centered and contemplative, with a strong tendency towards the mystical, the vague, and the fantastic. ”

“ But with each successive swing of the pendulum the ethical school, with its altruistic teachings of love for the "lesser brother," invariably gathered more and more force at the expense of the school of pure art. The victories of the former ever represent the culminating points in the history of Russian letters; the latter as unfailingly mark the gloomiest periods in the reigns of a succession of gloomy autocrats. There is a throbbing joy of life, a hopefulness and vigor throughout the length and breadth of Russian Literature, when the ethical cause is predominant ”

“ All are good and all are bad. But the hero of my story whom I love with all the powers of my soul, whom I have striven to reproduce in all his beauty and who always has been, is, and will be beautiful, is truth."
Or elsewhere, in the preface which Tolstoy wrote for the Russian translation of Amiel's "Journal": "For we love and need an author only in proportion as he reveals to us the inner process of his soul, of course if this process is new and has not been gone through before. ”

“ On the one hand an ardent love for one's fellow-beings, on the other the iron hand of an autocratic government; the out- bursts of hopeful youth countered by the fury of merciless repression, — there is the environment which explains the apparently causeless oscillation between hopefulness and pessimism, unbridled merriment and fathomless grief, which lies in the make-up of every Russian. ”

“ Here one might say that the Russian's well-known idealism apparently runs counter to his uncompromising realism in Literature. But this contradiction is only surface deep; the Russian sees everything with the eyes of a thoroughgoing realist, but back of it all is a higher purpose, the realism becomes handmaid of a high ideal: to advance social progress, to better the lot of the unfortunate. ”

“ Comparative folk-lore abounds with problems which neither the most ancient literature nor the prehistoric treasures of our museums can explain. Looking at the full moon, I have often wondered why I could not discover in its landscape the figure of a hare or a rabbit; and yet in remote antiquity millions of Indians and millions of Chinese saw it, as well probably as millions of pre-Columbian Mexicans and Mayas. ”

“ Every respectable Chinese of the Confucian school tries to conform his character as nearly as possible to that of the Superior Man. We must, of course, look upon Confucius him- self as an example of the Chinese model gentleman of all ages, and so, indeed, he was, as regards purity of morals, loyalty to his sovereign and government, and deep respect for the social order of his time and nation. ”

“ The development of Literature in China corresponds with that of the nation itself. All attempts to derive its origin from quarters outside the traditional cradle of the Chinese race near the banks of the Yellow River should be treated with suspicion. In all such problems which cannot be supported by arguments derived from Literature itself it is safer to admit our ignorance than to trust to the vagaries of a lively imagination. ”

“ Owing to the extraordinary conditions of Russian political and social life, with its argus-eyed censors and dreadful system of espionage, Literature has by force of circumstances become the only means, the exclusive arena for struggle against the evils of Russian political, economic, and social life. Even the establishment of a free school is strongly objected to by the government and imphes untold difficulties. Tolstoy's pedagogic labors in Yasnaya Polyana had been made the subject of an especial investigation with a view to finding traces of revolutionary activity. ”

“ Mencius flourished about two centuries after Confucius; but he did more in working out the Confucian system, and especially in applying it to practical state and social life, than all the contemporaneous disciples and even the master himself. This may have been due to the fact that, to prove the correctness of his views against so many rival philosophers who had been successful since Confucius' lifetime, he had to double his efforts to make himself understood by the masses. Mencius has thus become a real educator of his people. ”

“ Works on medicine, of which subject the Chinese have a very extensive Literature, and those on divination will be studied as long as the "Book of Changes" is considered the source of all wisdom; and foreign science with all its superior methods will find it hard to drive them out of the field. Works on Art, like Art itself, are always sure to have their eternal value; and Chinese Literature, unlike the literatures of Western Asia, is quite rich in such works throwing light on the development of pictorial art, calligraphy, music, archery, etc. ”

“ But this altruism in dealing with others makes them just as cruel in dealing with themselves (in their remorseless self-analysis and self-criticism) as they are tender in dealing with others, for in depicting in both cases with equal fidelity to actual life, they are drawn by their extreme idealism to explain away the faults of others while scourging themselves for the same. ”

“ The Chinese do not possess any work which might be called "a history of Chinese Literature." To make up for this deficiency, however, they possess catalogues of standard Literature as represented in their Imperial libraries. The oldest of these catalogues was the one of the Imperial collection of the earlier Han dynasty, which was destroyed by fire during the insurrection of the usurper Wang-mang, about nineteen hundred years ago. It consists mainly of a list of books, by more than six hundred authors, arranged with some kind of classification, and headed by the works of the Confucian school. ”

“ They consist of a series of combinations of broken and unbroken lines, the former representing the female, the latter the male, principle in Chinese natural philosophy.
It has always impressed me as one of the secrets of the origin of language, as well as of mankind, why early man assigned sex or gender—male, female, or neuter—to every object of nature. It must be one of the earliest traditions of mankind that, for instance, a stone cannot be merely a stone pure and simple, but that it must also be either a man or a woman. ”

“ The Chinese language knows nothing of the kind; but, to make up for it, the idea of gender has survived among the people in its natural philosophy as a popular science. For even the non-educated in China know that the sun is male and the moon female; that heaven and earth, day and night, north and south, white and black as opposites, are respectively male and female. ”

“ This enormous birthrate, this death-rate so enormous as sometimes to equal the births, this creation of human beings on so vast a scale and the testing and proving of them in the most trying of climates—in this great experimental operation Nature is, on the whole, still left to attain her own results in her own way. ”

“ The powerful eloquence of Cicero, the magnificent stateliness of Virgil, the pleasing poesy of Ovid, do not lose their worth in Russian. The finest philosophical concepts and reasoning, the multiform properties and changes of nature occurring in this visible edifice of the universe and in the intercourse among men as well, have, in our tongue, locutions befitting and expressing the matter. ”

“ A few generations after Confucius Chinese Literature reveals characteristics of culture, folk-lore, and art which must have required cen- turies to develop, and which are entirely lost in such works as the Shu-king, because they did not fit into the orthodox frame of a Confucian classic. The records regarding that early legendary period of Chinese national life have, of course, to be studied cum grano salis: the good men shown up in them are much too good, and the bad men are much too bad, to be considered as having been drawn from life. ”

“ In such an acute and destructive process of natural selection, not only are the weakest lost, but a certain number of human failures are necessarily left. Thus there are neurotic and degenerate elements in all classes of society, though, as the comparative harmlessness of Russian criminality and the absence of the physical signs of degeneracy clearly indicate, the process of selection on the whole works truly. ”

“ The "broad Russian nature," a "soul wide-open" (like a door ajar) , are the current phrases among the Russians themselves. To confer the highest encomium upon a man in his private or public relations is to say that he is "a man with a soul," a "soulful man," a "soul of a man." ”

“ Literature is, of course, destined to be set aside in order to be replaced by the more useful translations of works on European warfare. Similar experiences will be made in other branches, such as legislation, astronomy, and mathematics. The modern reform movement, initiated by the labors of K'ang Yu-wei and Liang K'i-chou, has already created a Literature of its own, and wall open up a new world to the Chinese mind within the next few decades. ”

“ The reshaping of old methods in China is bound to affect Chinese Literature as much as political and social life itself, and many of the time-honored works figuring now on the shelves of the philosophical "Treasury" will serve as a source for historical studies only. In this respect, however, they will retain their eternal value. The philosopher Kuan-tzi will at all times hold his position as the politician who applied the statistical method to practical statesmanship as early as the seventh century B.C. ”

“ The Imperial Catalogue contains hundreds of titles of books of great importance, though not included in the standard histories, works on biography and geography, descriptions of ancient capitals, and accounts of foreigns nations. Among geographical works China can boast of thousands of local gazetteers, resembling each other in general arrangement, the so-called chï. Provinces, prefectures, magistracies, famous hills, lakes, and rivers, even convents and temples, have their chï, giving accounts of their history, topography, antiquities, local literature, etc. ”

“ The "Treasury of Philosophers" closes with the two very important and voluminous divisions "Buddhism" and "Tauism." Thousands of works are devoted to that religion which came from India and which has taken possession of the masses probably more than any other teaching. The greater part of these Buddhist books consists of translations from the Sanskrit. These translations were prepared between the first and ninth centuries d.d., partly by Chinese devotees who traveled to India and returned to China laden with formerly unknown sacred books, and partly by Indians who had studied Chinese in China. ”