The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India, an Epic Poem
Unimproved as their arts is their learning. Though their language
consists of few words, it is almost impossible for a stranger to attain
the art of speaking it. And what a European learns ere he is seven years
old, to read, is the labour of the life of a Chinese. In place of our 24
letters, they have more than 60,000 marks, which compose their writings:
and their paucity of words, all of which may be attained in a few hours,
requires such an infinite variety of tone and action, that the slightest
mistake in modulation renders the speaker unintelligible. And in
addressing a great man, in place of "my Lord," you may call him a
_beast_, the word being the some, all the difference consisting in the
tone of it. A language like this must ever be a bar to the progress and
accomplishments of literature. Of medicine they are very ignorant. The
ginseng, which they pretended was a universal remedy, is found to be a
root of no singular virtue. Their books consist of odes without poetry,
and of moral maxims, excellent in themselves, but without investigation
or reasoning. For, to philosophical discussion and metaphysics they seem
utterly strangers; and, when taught mathematics by the Jesuits, their
greatest men were lost in astonishment. Whatever their political wisdom
has been, at present it is narrow and barbarous. Jealous lest strangers
should steal their arts--arts which are excelled at Dresden, and other
parts of Europe--they preclude themselves from the great advantages
which arise from an intercourse with civilized nations. Yet, in the laws
which they impose on every foreign ship which enters their ports for
traffic, they even exceed the cunning and avarice of the Dutch. In their
internal policy the military government of Rome under the emperors is
revived, with accumulated barbarism. In every city and province the
military are the constables and peace officers. What a picture is this!
Nothing but Chinese or Dutch industry could preserve the traffic and
population of a country under the control of armed ruffians. But, hence
the emperor has leisure to cultivate his gardens, and to write
despicable odes to his concubines.
Whatever was their most ancient doctrine, certain it is that the
legislators who formed the present system of China presented to their
people no other object of worship than _Tien Kamti_, the material
heavens and their influencing power; by which an intelligent principle
is excluded. Yet, finding that the human mind in the rudest breasts is
conscious of its weakness, and prone to believe the occurrences of life
under the power of lucky or unlucky observances, they permitted their
people the use of sacrifices to those Lucretian gods of superstitious
fear. Nor was the principle of devotion, imprinted by Heaven in the
human heart, alone perverted; another unextinguishable passion was also
misled. On tablets, in every family, are written the names of the last
three of their ancestors, added to each, "Here rests his soul:" and
before these tablets they burn incense, and pay adoration. Confucius,
who, according to their histories, had been in the West about 500 years
before the Christian era, appears to be only the confirmer of their old
opinions; but the accounts of him and his doctrine are involved in
uncertainty. In their places of worship, however, boards are act up,
inscribed, "This is the seat of the soul of Confucius," and to these,
and their ancestors, they celebrate solemn sacrifices, without seeming
to possess any idea of the intellectual existence of the departed soul.
The Jesuit Ricci, and his brethren of the Chinese mission, _very
honestly_ told their converts, that _Tien_ was the God of the
Christians, and that the label of Confucius was the term by which they
expressed His divine majesty. But, after a long and severe scrutiny at
the court of Rome, Tien was found to signify nothing more than
_heavenly_ or _universal matter_, and the Jesuits of China were ordered
to renounce this heresy. Among all the sects who worship different idols
in China, there is only one which has any tolerable idea of the
immortality of the soul; and among these, says Leland, Christianity at
present obtains some footing. But the most interesting particular of
China yet remains to be mentioned. Conscious of the obvious tendency,
Voltaire and others have triumphed in the great antiquity of the
Chinese, and in the distant period they ascribe to the creation. But the
bubble cannot bear the touch. If some Chinese accounts fix the era of
creation 40000 years ago, others are contented with no less than 884953.
But who knows not that every nation has its Geoffry of Monmouth? And we
have already observed the legends which took their rise from the Annus
Magnus of the Chaldean and Egyptian astronomers, an apparent revolution
of the stars, which in reality has no existence. To the fanciful who
held this Annus Magnus, it seemed hard to suppose that our world was in
its first revolution of the great year, and to suppose that many were
past was easy. And, that this was the case, we have absolute proof in
the doctrines of the Brahmins, who, though they talk of hundreds of
thousands of years which are past, yet confess, that this, the fourth
world, has not yet attained its 6000th year. And much within this
compass are all the credible proofs of Chinese antiquity comprehended.
To three heads all three proofs are reduceable--their form of
government, which, till the conquest of the Tartars in 1644, bore the
marks of the highest antiquity; their astronomical observations; and
their history.
Simply and purely patriarchal, every father was the magistrate in his
own family; and the emperor, who acted by his substitutes, the
Mandarins, was venerated and obeyed as the father of all. The most
passive submission to authority thus branched out was inculcated by
Confucius, and their other philosophers, as the greatest duty of
morality. But, if there is an age in sacred or profane history where the
manners of mankind are thus delineated, no superior antiquity is proved
by the form of Chinese government. Their ignorance of the very ancient
art of ingrafting fruit-trees, and the state of their language (like the
Hebrew in its paucity of words), a paucity characteristic of the ages
when the ideas of men required few syllables to clothe them, prove
nothing farther than the early separation of the Chinese colony{*} from
the rest of mankind; nothing farther, except that they have continued
till very lately without any material intercourse with the other nations
of the world.
{*} The Chinese colony! Yes, let philosophy smile; let her talk of the
different species of men which are found in every country; let her brand
as absurd the opinion of Montesquieu, which derives all the human race
from one family. Let her enjoy her triumph. Peace to her insolence,
peace to her dreams and her reveries. But let common sense be contented
with the demonstration (See Whiston, Bentley, etc.) that a creation in
every country is not wanted, and that one family is sufficient in every
respect for the purpose. If philosophy will talk of black and white men
as different in species, let common sense ask her for a demonstration,
that climate and manner of life cannot produce this difference; and let
her add, that there is the strongest presumptive experimental proof that
the difference thus happens. If philosophy draw her inferences from the
different passions of different tribes; let common sense reply, that
stripped of every accident of brutalization and urbanity, the human mind
in all its faculties, all its motives, hopes and fears, is most
wonderfully the same in every age and country. If philosophy talk of the
impossibility of peopling distant islands and continents from one
family, let common sense tell her to read Bryant's Mythology. If
philosophy asserts that the Kelts wherever they came found aborigines,
let common sense reply, there were tyrants enough almost 2000 years
before their emigrations, to drive the wretched survivors of slaughtered
hosts to the remotest wilds. She may also add, that many islands have
been found which bore not one trace of mankind, and that even Otaheite
bears the evident marks of receiving its inhabitants from a shipwreck,
its only animals being the hog, the dog, and the rat. In a word, let
common sense say to philosophy, "I open my egg with a pen-knife, but you
open yours with the blow of a sledge hammer."
A continued succession of astronomical observations, for 4000 years, was
claimed by the Chinese, when they were first visited by the Europeans.
Voltaire, that _son of truth_, has often with great triumph mentioned
the indubitable proofs of Chinese antiquity; but at these times he must
have received his information from the same dream which told him that
Camoëns accompanied his friend GAMA in the voyage which discovered the
East Indies. If Voltaire and his disciples will talk of Chinese
astronomy, and the 4000 years antiquity of its perfection, let them
enjoy every consequence which may possibly result from it. But let them
allow the same liberty to others. Let them allow others to draw _their_
inferences from a few stubborn facts, facts which demonstrate the
ignorance of the Chinese in astronomy. The earth, they imagined, was a
great plain, of which their country was the midst; and so ignorant were
they of the cause of eclipses, that they believed the sun and moon were
assaulted, and in danger of being devoured by a huge dragon. The stars
were considered as the directors of human affairs, and thus their
boasted astronomy ends in that silly imposition, judicial astrology.
Though they had made some observations on the revolutions of the
planets, and though in the emperor's palace there was an observatory,
the first apparatus of proper instruments ever known in China was
introduced by Father Verbiest. After this it need scarcely be added,
that their astronomical observations which pretend an antiquity of 4000
years, are as false as a Welch genealogy, and that the Chinese
themselves, when instructed by the Jesuits, were obliged to own that
their calculations were erroneous and impossible. The great credit and
admiration which their astronomical and mathematical knowledge procured
to the Jesuits, afford an indubitable confirmation of these facts.
Ridiculous as their astronomical, are their historical antiquities.
After all Voltaire has said of it, the oldest date to which their
history pretends is not much above 4000 years. During this period 236
kings have reigned, of 22 different families. The first king reigned 100
years, then we have the names of some others, but without any detail of
actions, or that concatenation of events which distinguishes authentic
history. That mark of truth does not begin to appear for upwards of 2000
years of the Chinese legends. Little more than the names of kings, and
these often interrupted with wide chasms, compose all the annals of
China, till about the period of the Christian era. Something like a
history then commences, but that is again interrupted by a wide chasm,
which the Chinese know not how to fill up otherwise, than by asserting
that a century or two elapsed in the time, and that at such a period a
new family mounted the throne. Such is the history of China, full
brother in every family feature to those Monkish tales, which sent a
daughter of Pharoah to be queen of Scotland, which sent Brutus to
England, and a grandson of Noah to teach school among the mountains in
Wales.
[662] _Immense the northern wastes their horrors spread._--Tartary,
Siberia, Samoyada, Kamtchatka, etc. A short account of the Grand Lama of
Thibet Tartary shall complete our view of the superstitions of the East.
While the other pagans of Asia worship the most ugly monstrous idols,