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New Frontiers in Translation Studies

Limin Chi

Modern
Selfhood in
Translation
A Study of Progressive Translation
Practices in China (1890s–1920s)
New Frontiers in Translation Studies

Series editor
Defeng Li
Centre for Studies of Translation, Interpreting and Cognition,
University of Macau, Macau SAR
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11894
Limin Chi

Modern Selfhood
in Translation
A Study of Progressive Translation Practices
in China (1890s–1920s)
Limin Chi
Kiangsu-Chekiang College
Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

ISSN 2197-8689     ISSN 2197-8697 (electronic)

New Frontiers in Translation Studies
ISBN 978-981-13-1155-0    ISBN 978-981-13-1156-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1156-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950665

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

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To my father
Acknowledgments

My engagement with modern Chinese scholarship started in the early 2000s, soon
after my initial foray into IB Chinese teaching in New Zealand. It was my study
under the guidance of Professor Gloria Davies of Monash University, however,
that sustained my enthusiasm for this engagement. Over the years, she exercised
earnest patience, providing incisive counsel and constructive criticism which
went a long way toward sharpening my scholarly abilities. I benefited immensely
from her juxtaposition of perspicacious observations and encouraging words in
our conversations and email exchanges. I regard Gloria as the epitome of an
empowering and transformative mentor, who, through her own example, has
inculcated in me the personal qualities essential for good scholarship so that I was
able to cope with academic rigor with a tenacity and grit previously unparalleled
in my life.
Throughout this journey I have been privileged to receive precious help and vital
encouragement from many other people, who have greatly facilitated the comple-
tion of such a herculean project.
My special thanks go to Dr. Susan Daruvala of the University of Cambridge. I
express my gratitude for her invaluable input as well as her ebullient appreciation of
my work. I have incorporated many of her suggestions into the book. I indubitably
take accountability for all the deficiencies and inadequacies that remain.
I am deeply indebted to Professor Rita Wilson of Monash University for her
guidance and support, to Associate Professor Warren Sun for being an engaging
interlocutor, to Professor Wang Yiyan of Victoria University of Wellington for her
comments on my manuscript, and to Professor Li Defeng of Macau University for
his encouragement and friendship. My ex-students Clarice Tse and Naomi Tse are
gratefully recognized here for their help with providing the books unavailable in
Hong Kong public libraries. The friendly and supportive staff at Hong Kong Central
Library were instrumental in maintaining an inclusive milieu and enabling me to
avail myself of the great resources in the library, from the earlier editions of Liang
Qichao’s works to the microfilms of late Qing and early Republican periodicals.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the dedicated editors and professionals during the production

of this book, notably Ms. Ramabrabha Selvaraj, for her prompt responses to my
queries.
Finally, gratitude is owed to my family. Their spiritual support has been a valu-
able source of unremitting hope and resilience. I dedicate this book to my father Chi
Xueqing, who has been my hero since childhood.
Introduction

In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China, the term “national extinction”
(wangguo) was increasingly used by progressive Chinese scholars who were
alarmed by their country’s decline. They were convinced that China was doomed
unless there were modern Chinese citizens to defend the nation’s interest. The forg-
ing of a modern Chinese identity became an important part of Chinese intellectual
culture of the period. From then on, cultural modernization became tied to the
imperative of national survival. Translation was seen by Chinese advocates of mod-
ernization as essential for China’s cultural alignment with the modern West.
This study examines the development of Chinese translation practice in relation
to the rise of ideas of modern selfhood in China from the 1890s to the 1920s. The
chapters that follow attempt to contribute to our understanding of the historical
interweaving of continuity and discontinuity in the formation of a modern Chinese
identity. The selected translations over the three decades in question reflect a preoc-
cupation with new personality ideals informed by foreign models and the healthy
development of modern individuality, in the face of crises compounded by feelings
of cultural inadequacy.
In general, the translation practices of this period exhibited a range of approaches:
from early attempts in the 1890s at accommodating traditional elements of story-­
telling in the introduction of Western ideas and values, through incipient incorpora-
tion of foreign literary techniques in addition to the importation of foreign concepts
and moral ideals, to a broad choice of source countries and a dominant direct trans-
lation (zhiyi) strategy in the 1910s and early 1920s. In this study, I assign special
importance to the translation of literature. In the 1890s, Liang Qichao (1873–1929)
uplifted the status of fiction in his promotion of new citizens. Although Yan Fu
(1854–1921) was known for his translation of Western social scientific and philo-
sophical works, he also put a high premium on the role of literature in social trans-
formation, stating in 1897 that fiction was “the root of orthodox history” (zhengshi
zhi gen) (in Chen and Xia 1997: 27). Yan’s positing of elegance (ya) as one of his

ix
x Introduction

principles of translation and his esoteric pre-Han style of translation, while running
counter to the lucidity of Liang Qichao’s semi-vernacular writing, are indicative of
Yan’s literary inclinations. From the 1900s onwards, increasing attention was paid
to the translation of literature, with a wider choice of genres.
According to Bassnett and Lefevere (1990: vii), translation reflects a certain ide-
ology and a poetics and as such manipulates literature to function in a given society
in a given way. The history of translation is the history also of literary innovation
and of the shaping power of one culture upon another, although there are also cases
where it can repress innovation, distort and contain. It is therefore necessary to go
into “the vagaries and vicissitudes of the exercise of power in a society, and what the
exercise of power means in terms of the production of culture, of which the produc-
tion of translations is a part” (ibid: 5).
In this study, translation is viewed as a primary agent of cultural change and a
privileged locus of intellectual activity. In the context of late Qing and early
Republican China, it provided Chinese intellectuals with imported paradigms of
critical thinking, images of modern selfhood and knowledge of modern science that
served as a cultural ideology. In the 1910s, this ideology came to be seen as neces-
sary for the enlightenment of the mind. The ideals of modern selfhood that late Qing
and New Culture intellectual leaders promoted represented a significant deviation
from the goals of political and military reforms of earlier decades (1840s–1880s)
and involved a process of personal development through exposure to a wide variety
of translated works.
My research attempts to clarify how these translated works supplied the mean-
ings for new terms and concepts that signify modern human experience and to shed
light on the ways in which they taught readers to internalize the idea of the modern
as personal experience.
I am particularly interested in the ways the focus on character building as nation
building encouraged an ideologically motivated approach to understanding modern
culture, and my investigation of translation will revolve around three interrelated
aspects: (i) the construction of a recognizably modern Chinese identity through the
promotion of particular concepts and attitudes; (ii) the representations of Chinese
society of the late Qing and early Republican period, illustrated via comparison or
contrast with accounts of foreign cultures and societies (as presented in the source
works); and (iii) the role of highly influential translators and their textual selections
on the development of modern Chinese elite culture.
The ethical and moral dimensions of concepts of selfhood have an effect on why
individuals act or fail to act in various situations (Ricoeur 1992). Adaptation to new
sources of values refashions the moral role of selfhood and brings about the trans-
formation of identity. In this study, identity construction is presented as synony-
mous with character building. This is because the influential Chinese translators of
this period were all focused on how Chinese citizens should acquire foreign moral
and ethical values of the kind that appeared in the works they translated.
Introduction xi

From Self-Strengthening to New Culture

In Chinese scholarship, the idea of the modern is frequently discussed as a process

involving distinct phases of political and cultural development. Liang Qichao, argu-
ably China’s leading intellectual of the late Qing and early Republican period,
played a significant part in shaping this view. In 1923, Liang (in Feng 1994: 170)
delineated in a treatise entitled “Fifty Years of China’s Evolution” (Wushi nian
Zhongguo jinhua gailun) three phases of China’s modern development. In Phase
One, the focus was on machinery (qiwu), corresponding to the importation of
armoury and machinery during the Self-Strengthening Movement1 of the 1860s and
1890s, within the framework of “Chinese learning as basis, and Western learning for
practical application” (Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong).2 During this period,
“[Western] influence on intellectual thought was insignificant”, and the few scien-
tific books translated by government-run agencies were “among the most memora-
ble” (ibid). Phase Two was characterized by the engagement in the installation of
modern political, economic and educational institutions (zhidu) in the wake of the
First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Despite their failure in instigating reforms,
the pioneering activists of this period became powerful advocates of the acquisition
of Western social science and literature. According to Liang (ibid), the most valu-
able works produced in this period were Yan Fu’s translated books, which intro-
duced important trends in social sciences to Chinese readers. In Phase Three, the
emphasis was on culture (wenhua), marked by Chinese intellectuals’ realization of
their cultural inadequacy in understanding the modern world and their questioning
of the compatibility of traditional Chinese culture with modern institutions. This
was the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Liang’s use of the word
“culture” may have kept its traditional Chinese meaning of “the acquisition of civic
values” or “becoming edified”, which, dating from the Western Han dynasty (206
BCE to 9 CE), involves the combination of “civility” or “good manners” (wen) and
“becoming” or “changing” (hua). Given the importance Liang accorded to Meiji
Japan as a model of modernization for China, it is also very likely that he borrowed
wenhua from the Japanese bunka, which as a modern concept drew its meaning
from European definitions of culture.3 Clearly, Liang Qichao was attempting to
highlight the cultivation or edification of people when he used the word “culture”.
As he observed in the same essay: “Society and culture are inseparable; therefore, it

1
I adopt the standard translation of yangwu yundong for ease of reference. The literal translation is
foreign affairs movement.
2
Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong can also be translated as “Chinese learning as essence, and
Western learning as function”.
3
There has been a plethora of notions that were associated with the word “culture”. In Europe
“culture” had already acquired the modest and restricted sense of “cultivation” by the fifteenth
century; in the sixteenth century, it extended from the physical into the spiritual sphere, so that it
suggested the refinement of human manners and intellectual attainment. In Japan, the word took
on the meaning of “national character” during the Meiji era (1868–1912). See Tessa Morris-Suzuki
(2004).
xii Introduction

is impossible to apply the old psyche to the new system. People’s self-­consciousness
will gradually be required” (ibid).4 While deploring the intellectual and scientific
underdevelopment in China as compared to foreign countries such as the United
States, Britain, Germany, Russia and Japan, he expressed hope for Phase Three to
surpass the previous two phases in acquiring the quintessence of foreign cultures.
We can assume that he included translation as an instrument of modernization, for
the countries that he named were among those that furnished important source
materials for translation projects of the New Culture period.
Despite the vagueness of Liang’s “phases”,5 his pithy summary of the change
from “machinery” to “institution” and finally to “culture” and “people” has been
frequently quoted in Chinese scholarship as reflecting the trajectory of China’s
modernization process from the late Qing to the May Fourth period.
Translation was an important aspect of the Self-Strengthening Movement, which
started in the early 1860s. Prompted by imperial decline, military defeats and for-
eign occupation in the wake of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), lead-
ing Chinese scholar-officials, such as Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), Zeng Guofan
(1811–1872), Yixin (1833–1898) and Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), regarded trans-
lation as crucial for building up a strong nation. They attached equal importance to
the work of translation bureaus and the establishment of shipyards and arsenals.
Translation activities of the Self-Strengthening period (1861–1894) centred on engi-
neering, military and natural science, because of the senior bureaucrats’ advocacy of
“Chinese learning as essence and Western learning for practical application”, an
approach to China’s modern development reflective of what many Chinese intel-
lectuals of the 1900s and since perceived as the conservative mentality of that era.
Following China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the
imperial Qing government in China was forced to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki
(Maguan tiaoyue) that included ceding territory and making reparations to Japan.
This defeat led educated Chinese of the time to conclude that the reforms under-
taken to date had been insufficient. They began a concerted process of introducing
ideas they considered vital for China’s institutional transformation and moderniza-
tion. Kang Youwei (1858–1927), his protégé Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong (1865–1898)
and other late Qing reformist intellectuals urged for effective political reform
towards the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in China. Adopting ideas of
modernization that had fuelled the reforms of Meiji Japan, Chinese reformers
­solicited the support of the Guangxu Emperor (1871–1908). Their efforts culmi-
nated in the Hundred Days’ Reform (wuxu weixin or bairi weixin) in 1898. This
political and educational reform movement was crushed in a coup d’état by power-
ful conservative opponents led by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908).

4
Translations from Chinese in this book are mine unless otherwise indicated.
5
Liang’s clear-cut demarcation between Phase Two and Phase Three apparently underestimated
the role late Qing reformist intellectuals, among others, had played in constructing representations
of the self and the nation towards the creation of Chinese modernity.
Introduction xiii

In defence of their proposals, the reformers of the late 1890s drew heavily on
popular nineteenth-century Western writings such as those that had been translated
into Chinese by missionaries residing in China and well-known translators like Yan
Fu (e.g. Timothy Richard’s (1845–1919) translation6 of Robert Mackenzie’s (1823–
1881) History of the Nineteenth Century and Yan Fu’s translation of Thomas
Huxley’s (1825–1895) Evolution and Ethics). To strengthen their arguments, they
also cited success stories of modernization outside China, including accounts of
Russia after the rule of Peter the Great and Prussia and, above all, reports about the
rapid modernization of Meiji Japan. Japan’s modernization was of particular inter-
est to Chinese advocates of political reform largely because of the cultural proxim-
ity between Japan and China.7 The reformist intellectuals believed that education in
the broader sense included reading massive amounts of translated texts and noted
that translations had contributed greatly to Japan’s reforms, enabling the Japanese
to learn from the successes and failures of the West.
Historical accounts published in China and in international scholarship often
present the years following the 1911 revolution as being overshadowed by a deepen-
ing sense of “national humiliation” and “cultural crisis” among the Chinese, charac-
terized by the instability of the post-Qing Chinese state, the continuing decline of
the political situation and, in particular, Yuan Shikai’s (1859–1916) capitulation to
Japan’s extraterritorial demands. Amid Yuan’s autocratic rule, the warlord hegemo-
nies, the outbreak of World War I and the rapid economic growth in urban China, a
new cosmopolitan elite, of whom a large number had received their education in
Japan and Western countries, began to dominate the intellectual scene, bolstered by
a substantial literary establishment, whose activities were organized around literary
societies and the journals they published.
The New Culture Movement was instigated by new literary initiatives proposed
in the journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian), notably Hu Shi’s (1891–1962) essay
“Tentative Proposals for a Reform of Literature” (Wenxue gailiang chuyi), pub-

6
Richard’s translation was through the help of his Chinese assistant Cai Erkang (1851–1921). The
Chinese title of the translation is Taixi xinshi lanyao.
7
Many late Qing scholars wrote about the importance of learning from Japan after the Meiji
Restoration. Among them was the noted educator Sheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916). He observed:
“After the Japanese Meiji Restoration, Japan busied itself with the translation of Western works.
Now its people have a coherent grasp of the various branches of Western learning, and derive con-
siderable power from those translations” (Sheng in Reynolds 1993: 111). In his memorials before
and during the Hundred Days’ Reform, Kang Youwei chronicled the first 23 years of the Meiji
period and interpolated the history with his explanatory annotations. Kang exhorted the Guangxu
Emperor to follow the Japanese example and build a Meiji-like political structure in China. For
Kang (in Jiang and Zhang 2006: 66), Japan had adapted the essentials of Western civilization to
their own purposes, and China should learn from the West via Japan. Liang Qichao (in Willcock
1995: 818) was also convinced that the Japanese victory was the result of Japan’s swift and suc-
cessful modernization and that “behind the great success of modernization in Meiji Japan lay the
ability of the Japanese to select and assimilate foreign values in the existing social and cultural
tradition”.
xiv Introduction

lished in January 1917. Basing their new intellectual agenda on an essential rejec-
tion of elements of the national tradition, New Culture proponents viewed the
translation of foreign literary works as a source of modern enlightenment and
­introduced new literature and new ideas in their endeavour to develop an enlight-
ened national culture.
The period between the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the New
Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s marks a watershed in the break with the
imperial past in China. This was a time when the idea of a modern awakened China
grew popular and a modern commodity culture developed rapidly in urban China.
By the late 1890s, Chinese reformist intellectuals had realized the limitations of
“Western learning for practical application”, advocated by self-strengtheners
between the 1860s and the 1890s. They promoted a more spiritual (as opposed to
the previous instrumental) conception of modernization. Meanwhile, large quanti-
ties of social scientific and literary translations were produced by publishing com-
panies and literary societies mainly based in Beijing and Shanghai.
Under the weight of new foreign threats, the word “imperialism” (diguozhuyi)
was introduced to China via Japanese in the early 1900s and appeared frequently in
popular periodicals of the time, such as Liang Qichao’s Upright Discussions (Qingyi
bao) (Ma 2014). Accordingly, the term “anti-imperialism” (fandi) became an impor-
tant idea and was widely promoted in the early 1920s through the political dis-
courses of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party.
Bassnett and Lefevere’s (1990: vii) observation that translation “reflect[s] a cer-
tain ideology and a poetics” is useful to consider in relation to the self-­strengtheners’
slogan of “learning the superior techniques of the [Western] barbarians to control
the barbarians” (shiyi zhi changji yi zhiyi), first proposed by Wei Yuan (1794–1857)
in 1842. The emotional ambivalence towards Western imperialism prevalent among
scholar-officials of this time persisted into the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, ambiva-
lence continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual discourse a century later in the
2010s. In this study, the concepts, ideas and literary distortions and innovations
adopted in the Chinese translation of foreign works (1890s–1920s) are examined as
choices and decisions undertaken by translators who were gripped by the prospect
that China was on the brink of political and cultural extinction.
The terms “nation” (minzu) and “self” (ziwo) became important in the early
twentieth century. Leading Chinese intellectuals were preoccupied with the identi-
fication of the source of China’s degeneration and sought to raise awareness of
impending crisis through appeals of social Darwinism and national survival. In the
meantime, they set a cultural pattern of self-inspection and national improvement.
Equipped with foreign-derived new ideas and the spirit of science, the intellectuals
started to probe the inadequacies in the “national character” (guominxing), another
Japanese-derived neologism that appeared in Chinese periodicals in 1903. Works
such as A Doll’s House (to be discussed in Chap. 5) were key events in the popular
dissemination of the vocabulary of character building as nation building.
Introduction xv

Identity, Chinese Modernity and Translation

Identity, one of the most important political and cultural concepts of the twentieth
century, is often examined in relation to subjectivity, understood as the psychologi-
cal and emotional state of the subject.8 Anthony Giddens’s (1991: 76) definition of
personal identity as an evolving project suits the purpose of this book: “We are not
what we are, but what we make of ourselves”. It is “not something that is just a
given, as a result of the continuities of the individual’s action system, but something
that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the indi-
vidual” (ibid). Stephen Frosh (1991: 187) shares Giddens’s argument and considers
identity to be “always in danger of being undermined, of withering away or explod-
ing into nothingness”. To maintain the coherence of human experience and the func-
tioning of social life, the individual continually adopts techniques intended to
display agency or competence of self to others and to the social world. As societies
change through the operation of political, economic and other social forces, the
individual makes necessary adjustments to cope with the new challenges and
situations.
In studying translated Chinese works for what they indicate about the kind of
“modern identity” being promoted, I draw on the modernity frameworks of contem-
porary sociologists such as Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens. Namely, I
examine the translated texts as characteristically modern. They all display a focus
on the consciousness that is needed for constructing a new self. Both Habermas and
Giddens see this focus on consciousness as a hallmark of the modern age or moder-
nity. Moreover, as Jorge Larrain (1994: 143) points out: “One of the main philo-
sophical characteristics of modernity is that it made the human being the centre of
the world, the measure of all things, …the necessary point of reference for all that
goes on. But originally this conception of the ‘subject’ was…separated from history
and social relations, that is to say deprived of a sense of change and of its social
dimension”.
In other words, the link between individuals and society is one aspect of a char-
acteristically modern way of thinking. Charles Taylor (1994), well known for his
communitarian critique of liberal theory’s understanding of the “self”, puts a pre-
mium on the political and social recognition of one’s community and claims that the
individual’s acceptance or internalization of socially significant meanings and val-
ues, along with his active exchange with the social environment, makes him part of
society. Bernd Simon (2004: 61) echoes Taylor in claiming that personal identity “is
increasingly required as an appropriate psychological reflection of one’s own com-
plex social positioning in modern society”. He goes on to argue that “in modern
society, the increasing prepotency of individual identity is sustained especially by
the decreasing permanence and increasing interchangeability of ‘we-relations’ and

8
“Subjectivity” and “identity” are sometimes used interchangeably in this study despite their dif-
ference in historical origin and perspective, as one stresses an inner stable core and the other
focuses on the making of selfhood.
xvi Introduction

finds expression, inter alia, in psychological privatization, reflexive subjectivism

and individual self-expression” (ibid: 62).9
All of these statements are highly relevant to our analysis of translation practice
in the late Qing and early Republican era, especially in relation to the types of issues
highlighted by the translators in their own essays or translation prefaces/
postscripts.
For leading late Qing and New Culture intellectuals, being a “new” person
required the “sacrifice” of “old” Confucian social-familial relations so that people
could relate to each other as “humans”. This was a key feature of the translated
works that were influential in the period under study.
However, because self-transformation was related to nation building, there was
also the implication that reading translated works should not only benefit the “self”
(ziwo) but also the “nation” (minzu). The pursuit of a modern identity in late Qing
and early Republican China was further complicated by the legacy of state
Confucianism, in which intellectuals perceived themselves as “spokespeople” for
the Chinese public. In this regard, their writings often included “a claim of pre-
science” (Davies 2007: 52). Identity can only be “originary” as “it is constructed in
and through language”; therefore, representations of self and the people constitute a
discursive means of realizing their self-worth and identifying with the public, and
“awakened articulations” thus become entangled with the larger discourse of
national salvation and enlightenment (ibid: 39). With regard to translation, the trans-
lators were thus prescribing certain foreign works as necessary for nation building
and the development of the person.
In the Qing dynasty, the need to liberate the individual from the shackles of
Confucian moralism was initiated as early as 1823 by the eminent litterateur Gong
Zizhen (1792–1841), whose positing of the fundamentality of self to the human
condition and social functioning exerted a great influence on his contemporaries and
later Qing-era scholars. Gong (1975: 13) started his 1823 essay “The First of My
Preliminary Thoughts Between 1822 and 1823” (Kuiren zhiji taiguan diyi) with
these words: “The world is created by people, and not by sages….People’s destiny
is not dominated by the Way of Heaven or Great Pole but by ‘me,’ a term people call
themselves”. In 1897, Tan Sitong published his 50,000-word philosophical work,
entitled A Study of Benevolence (Renxue), alternatively translated as On Humanity,
in which he accused absolute monarchy as being the root of social evils and argued
that the creative disposition of human agency would contribute to the agendas defin-
ing a modern China.10 Tan’s promotion of a ren-centred self tallied with Yan Fu’s
propagation of national strength (minli), national intellect (minzhi) and national

9
Similar statements can be found in other works. For instance, Stryker and Serpe (1982: 206) stress
that “a complexly differentiated and organized society requires a parallel view of the self”. Elias
(1991) affirms that, since the European Middle Ages, the balance between collective identity (“we-
identity”) and individual identity (“I-identity”) has changed tremendously towards an increasing
prepotency of individual identity.
10
For discussions about Renxue, see, for example, Ip (2009), Sakamoto (1985) and Chan (1984).
Introduction xvii

morality (minde).11 Liang Qichao (1998), who fled to Japan after the aborted attempt
at nationwide reform in the summer of 1898, emphasized the importance of new
citizenry and entrusted the young generation with the task of adopting a new moral-
ity befitting a modern nation-state.12 These late Qing literati’s efforts to cultivate the
people, along with their nationalistic narrative of cultural resilience, wielded an
enormous influence on the intellectual life and translation projects in the 1910s and
1920s.13
During the May Fourth era, the concept of the individual became elevated to the
defining feature of the human in the modern intellectuals’ consideration of political,
cultural and literary issues. Japan-educated modern Chinese writer Yu Dafu (1896–
1945) (1935: 5) noted: “The greatest success of the May Fourth Movement consists
in the discovery of the individual. In the past people lived for their emperors, the
moral Way (dao), and their parents. They are now living for themselves”. The May
Fourth intellectuals’ rediscovery of self and their emphasis on the value of self-­
existence (ziwo cunzai) became the basis for distinguishing a modern Chinese iden-
tity from its traditional counterpart, most commonly presented in terms of the
difference between the “new” and the “old”. The two rallying cries of the May
Fourth Movement, i.e. democracy and science, are reflective of the May Fourth
intellectuals’ apotheosization of the self and the new. Derived from foreign sources,
democracy signifies new political institutions involving a new view of self vis-à-vis
others; on the other hand, being scientific entails the questioning of established
traditional beliefs and the remedying of old, defective mode of thinking.
New Culture leaders’ reconstitution of Chinese identity was manifested through
the literary apotheosis of new people as well as new literary techniques and modern
concepts derived from foreign works. Influenced by the emphasis on self and sub-
jectivity in Western, Russian and Japanese literature, New Culture avant-gardes
made presentations of the people, along with the analysis of the complexities and
contradictions of their existence, an integral process of their imagination of Chinese
modernity. The frequent appearance of these literary characters in translated works,
presented with new narrative forms and neologisms, not only advanced readers’
understanding of themselves and their world but also actively shaped a new modern
language that was being promoted as vernacular (baihua) Chinese.
Chinese modernity is often construed as a reaction to Western aggressions and to
historical unequal relations between China and the West. While ideas associated
with modernity and the Enlightenment in the West are regularly subjected to criti-
cism in post-modern discourse, there has been a significant scholarly interest in
alternatives to the established Western sense of modernity and in representing

11
Taken from Yan Fu’s article “On Strength” (Yuan qiang), published in 1895. See Wang (1986: 12).
12
Between 1902 and 1906, Liang Qichao published 20-odd articles on new citizenry in The New
Citizen’s Gazette (Xinmin congbao). These articles were later published in book form entitled On
the New Citizen (Xinmin shuo).
13
John Fitzgerald (1996: 67–8) argues that the collapse of the established order in imperial China
launched literati on voyages of self-discovery in the same way as the discovery of the modern self
in Europe.
xviii Introduction

modernity as a positive development for China, to the extent that the idea of Chinese
modernity is often viewed by Chinese scholars as “embodying the nation-building
goals of several generations of the Chinese” (Yang 2003: 8). Seen from the perspec-
tive of translation activities in early twentieth-century China, however, there was an
active process of assimilating Western concepts into Chinese culture, across the
twentieth century.
A good description of Chinese modernity should highlight the historicity of its
formative period and the fact that it is “a mirror and consequence of the experience
of European hegemony” (Mudimbe 1988: 185),14 as well as the development of a
modern Chinese identity and the key features of this identity, such as “newness,
progress, enlightenment, revolution, and self received from Western sources but
remoulded by intellectuals in response to a specific historical context of imperialism
and domestic decay” (Denton 1998: 6–7).
Denton’s statement highlights the Chinese intellectuals’ adoption of Western dis-
course of self and historical progress in their pursuit of Chinese modernity. Although
the pluralistic nature of China’s experience of modernity can be better reflected,
such descriptions do point to the importance of borrowed ideas. In the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth-century China, intellectual endeavour at the construction
of a modern identity via translation contributed fundamentally to the creation of a
“translated modernity” (to use Lydia Liu’s expression).15 In this regard, translation
can be seen as becoming an integral part of Chinese modernity.

 he Role of Translation and Translators in Translation

T
Studies

In the present study, translation is a key source of new ideas and values, harnessed
by Chinese translators to foster a strong sense of the modern self. Developments in
the field of translation studies have provided useful underpinnings for my research.
In the 1970s and 1980s, translation theorists started to consider translation from
the point of view of the target culture within a broader context of communication,
beyond the preoccupation with the mere words on the page and the static linguistic
analysis of translation shifts, which characterized earlier approaches to the study of
translation. More emphasis was also placed on the reception of the translation in the
target culture (e.g. Steiner 1975; Holmes et al. 1978; Van den Broeck 1978; Bassnett
1980; Toury 1980; Newmark 1981; Nord 1988; Reiss and Vermeer 1984).16 In the
mid-­1980s, the theses in the anthology The Manipulation of Literature evolved into

14
Although Mudimbe was dealing with the conception framework of African thinking, I think it
may well apply to the Chinese thinking.
15
See Liu (1995).
16
Although these theorists have in common an emphasis on the sociocultural context and the target
culture, they approach translation from quite different disciplinary perspectives.
Introduction xix

the “cultural turn” in translation studies (Hermans 1985). The scholars who had
contributed to the anthology revealed that the source text could be manipulated to
create the kind of “culture” desired. Of particular importance is André Lefevere’s
(1985) “Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites?” In this treatise, Lefevere gave a full
presentation of his argument about the polysystem theory,17 which was further elab-
orated in his writings of the 1990s. He observed that the production of literature in
a culture is influenced by a series of poetic, ideological and power-related elements,
which can have constraining effects on both creative writing and translation and
which are active both inside and outside the literary system (1992).
Subsequent years saw a surge of new investigations that extended beyond the
range of linguistic and literary translation and into issues of cultural formation. In
their search for an answer to how translation related to cultural dominance, cultural
assertion and cultural resistance, translation scholars brought to the core questions
of politics and power (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002).
The new orientation in translation studies also led to a reconsideration of the power
relationship between writer and reader and a re-evaluation of the authority of the
source text. Since then, resistance to the notion of translation as a secondary activity
has started to accelerate, and the notion that a translation might be a transparent
copy of a superior original has gradually been dismissed as untenable.
In the traditional Euro-American conception of translation, the subordination of
the translator to the author was typically taken for granted, just as translation was
frequently contrasted unfavourably with original writing.18 Since the cultural turn,
many scholarly works have examined the role of translators in the context of the
interrelationship between history, society and culture and helped pull the translator
out of the traditional invisibility. Among these are Translation, Rewriting and
Manipulation of Literary Fame (Lefevere 1992), Constructing Cultures: Essays on
Literary Translation (Bassnett and Lefevere 1998), Translation Studies (Bassnett
1980/2002), Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Bassnett 1993) and
The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Venuti 1995), to mention a

17
Polysytem theory was first proposed by Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar. He adopted the
Russian formalists’ theory of a hierarchical literary system and studied the status and function of
translated literature in target-culture systems. For Even-Zohar, semiotic phenomena, such as cul-
ture, language, literature and society, need to be studied and understood as the elements of a mul-
tiple, dynamic system. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which various semiotic systems
are hierarchized within the polysystem (central vs. peripheral, canonized vs. non-canonized, pri-
mary vs. secondary) and in the struggle among the various strata. As a part of that approach, he
claims it necessary to regard translated literature as a subsystem within the literary polysystem and
to study translation as an activity dependent on the relations within a certain cultural system (Even-
Zohar 1978: 27).
18
Attempts to redress the supremacy of the original text and the marginalization of translators have
never stopped. As early as 1923, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) published his seminal essay “The
Task of the Translator”, which emphasized the role of translation and translators in social progress
and the evolution of human thought. It was Benjamin’s introduction to a Baudelaire translation.
The text was translated by Harry Zohn in1968 and was included in Lawrence Venuti’s 2000 anthol-
ogy The Translation Studies Reader.
xx Introduction

few. In the 1990s, translation studies also started to incorporate poststructural and
postcolonial thought into its realm. The role of translators was studied along the
lines of cultural identity (e.g. Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Venuti 1998; Robinson
1992, 1997; Alvarez and Vidal 1996; Delisle and Woodsworth 1995), and transla-
tion began to be seen as an expressive form of cultural identity. The beginning of the
twenty-first century also saw a number of research studies focusing on the role of
translators in the context of cultural change, political discourse and identity forma-
tion in a variety of contexts (e.g. Ellis and Oakley-Brown 2001; Tymoczko and
Gentzler 2002; Cronin 2006). Of particular importance was the study of the sociol-
ogy of translation, which integrated the work of eminent sociologists like Pierre
Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Bernard Lahire, Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann
into translation studies (e.g. Wolf and Fukari 2007).
Since the cultural turn of the early 1980s, it has been generally acknowledged
that what distinguishes translation studies from translating is the emphasis on cul-
tural history and the role and function of translation in the broader sociocultural
context. Poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists have led translation scholars to
emphasize the translator’s agency in the evolving social, political and cultural con-
figurations that make up society. Instead of just redirecting pre-existing messages,
translators give voices to new texts and intervene in them and, “in so doing, estab-
lish a subject-position in the discourse they shape” (Munday 2009: 96). In addition,
scholars such as Venuti (1992) and Pym (1998) have accorded great importance to
the study of the role of translators from historical perspectives. Venuti (1992: 10)
posits that the objects of analysis in translation studies should not only encompass
a broader spectrum of cultural forms and practices but be taken from various histori-
cal periods and put to a thoroughgoing historicization.
Amid the development of translation studies in Europe and America, ventures
into non-Western traditions have breathed new life into the research on canonical
Western European literature and its past. Acknowledging the limitations to their
scope of enquiries, Bassnett and Lefevere (in Hermans 1999: 45) “have urged
expansion [of critical studies in non-Western contexts] along these lines”.
Bachmann-Medick (2009: 8) claims that the study of global translation processes
calls for a reinterpretation of the transition of non-European nations to capitalism
and the distinctive forms of multiple modernities, which should be perceived as a
result of historical distinctions and translational ruptures.
In this study, I am particularly concerned with the decisions involved in transla-
tion, such as the choice of foreign works and translation strategies, which bear upon
the historical conditions of the Chinese experience of modern selfhood. The chal-
lenge, then, is to go beyond the words on the page and examine what they reveal of
translation practice at the given time by considering the sociocultural context in
which these translated works were produced. The agency of translation in shaping
distinctive forms of intercultural communication in late Qing and early Republican
China is central to this study. These forms of intercultural communication indicate
the active role of translators in promoting a cosmopolitan view of modern selfhood,
prior to its politicization under the KMT and CCP.
Introduction xxi

 pproaches to Researching Chinese Translation History

A
and Overview of Chapters

Following John Fairbank (2005) and Ren Shukun (2009), the May Fourth era in the
present study covers the period between 1917 and 1927. However, as the book is
focused on the New Culture aspect of May Fourth, it deals with events primarily up
to 1924.
The 30-year period between the end of the First Sino-Japanese War and the wan-
ing of the New Culture Movement is often described in the People’s Republic of
China as “anti-imperialist”. As noted earlier, the word “imperialism” was imported
into Chinese in the early 1900s. The fact that the Chinese translation of foreign
works has always been saddled with a political mission (that of “national salva-
tion”) makes it important for us to distinguish between the broader and more cos-
mopolitan understanding of “national salvation” from the 1890s to the 1920s and
the idea of “national salvation” that became tied to the political doctrines of the
KMT and CCP from the mid- and late 1920s onwards. I am mindful that there are
well-established accounts of translation activities of the period in question that
highlight their nation-saving or “revolutionary” aspects from a CCP historiographi-
cal perspective. The approach I have taken emphasizes certain liberal, cosmopolitan
aspects of translation in the period.
In Chinese studies, May Fourth is generally accepted as marking the beginning
of a decisive cultural difference that, since the 1990s, has been referred to as
“Chinese modernity” (Zhongguo xiandaixing). In English language scholarship, the
works of scholars such as David Der-wei Wang (1997), Lydia Liu (1995) and Leo
Ou-fan Lee (1999), as well as Wen-Hsin Yeh’s (2000) edited volume Becoming
Chinese, show general agreement that the dramatic intellectual shifts of the May
Fourth period and thereafter were facilitated by cultural trends that first emerged in
the late nineteenth century.
We know from studies of late Qing translations (e.g. Huters 2005; Fogel 2004;
Wong 1999; Liu 1995) that late Qing constructions of modern selfhood were funda-
mentally informed by Western and Japanese definitions. Yan Fu, well-known for his
translation of social Darwinist and liberal concepts from Western sources, and
Liang Qichao, who not only patronized translation projects of the time but also
acquired significant reputation for his translated fiction from and via Japanese, were
the most prominent intellectuals of the time to instil in their countrymen a modern
sense of self. They also promoted a new linear consciousness of time and history, in
which what was new and modern was presented as contrasting values with the past.
Their translations enabled New Culture intellectuals to scrutinize China through, as
it were, “foreign eyes”. Comparisons between China and the West brought into
sharp relief problems in Chinese society (shehui, a neologism of Western origin
introduced into China via Japan in the late nineteenth century) of the time.
Less than two decades from the time Yan Fu and Liang Qichao published their
key translations of social science and fiction, the New Culture Movement developed
in a significantly more radical direction. The New Culture quest for paragons of
xxii Introduction

spiritual rebellion against old values and ways of life led the intellectuals to call for
a literary revolution to inaugurate a modern written vernacular. It was in this ver-
nacular that works from diverse Western and Japanese philosophers and litterateurs,
from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) to Kuriyagawa
Hakuson (1880–1923), were translated. Meanwhile, portrayals of the plight of the
working people in the literature of Russia and Eastern European countries high-
lighted the dark aspects of social reality and encouraged the cultivation of compas-
sion and universal love. The translation activities of New Culture intellectuals,
consisting mainly of editors and major contributors of the journal New Youth,
became an integral part of the New Culture mission of constructing the modern self.
This New Culture emphasis on self-development bifurcated by 1920, when intel-
lectuals such as Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Li Dazhao (1888–1927) began to
promote the cause of communism, leading to the breakup of the New Youth organi-
zational core.
Recent scholarship has tended to highlight differences and divisions between
various models of modernity or between key historical actors in Chinese intellectual
life of the late Qing and early Republican period. In my view, while it is important
to acknowledge the contributions that non-New Culture intellectuals and writers
made to the enrichment and pluralism of the May Fourth intellectual thought, the
depth and breadth of the New Culture inquiry into modern selfhood should not be
discredited.19 Equipped with an extensive education background and writing in a
period of warlordism and burgeoning print culture, New Culture advocates did take
an unconventional approach to sociocultural issues; they helped to make the May
Fourth “a period of greatest intellectual debate and creativity in twentieth-century
China” (Schwarcz 2003: 236–7).
Since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), in
which Anderson stresses the image of nationhood as held in the minds of members
of a nation and the forging of national consciousness through modern publishing,
the rise of modernity has generally been considered to have been accompanied by
print capitalism or the fruits of modernization in general. In examining modernity
as modernization of beliefs and values, however, most scholarly publications fail to
direct the reader’s attention to the material culture in which this process of self-­
transformation was located. Since the 1990s, Sinology has started to include socio-
cultural institutions and the educational and economic milieu in its inquiries.
Denton’s (1998) The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature, Lee’s
(1999) Shanghai Modern, Shu-mei Shih’s (2001) The Lure of the Modern, Davies’s

19
Scholarly attempts at dethroning the centrality of New Culture radicals in constructing the
Chinese experience of modernity became prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the
mounting of undue blame put on the May Fourth paradigm, some scholars have cautioned against
the other extreme in the decentring of May Fourth. For instance, Vera Schwarcz (2003: 236) points
out that some scholars in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project
conflate the political autocracy that led to the flattening of historical and literary imagination in
communist societies with the intellectual arrogance of cultural innovators during the May Fourth
Movement. Schwarcz (ibid) argues that if China’s post-1919 literature and history became an arid
terrain, the blame does not rest primarily with May Fourth intellectuals.
Introduction xxiii

(2007) Worrying About China and the treatises in Liu and Tang’s (1993) anthology
Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, to mention but a few,
point to a broader approach to combine intellectual inquiry with the cultural appa-
ratus of translation that has sustained the growth of Chinese modernity and
modernism.
In China, published works on translation history were few before 1990, and these
include Ma Zuyi’s (1984) A Concise History of Translation in China: Before the
May Fourth Movement (Zhongguo fanyi jian shi: Wusi yiqian bufen) and Chen
Yugang’s (1989) Historical Material for Translated Literature in China (Zhongguo
fanyi shigao). The 1990s saw the publication of about a dozen such works, but the
majority of these did little more than outline historical facts, much as what Ma and
Chen did in the 1980s. The 1990s, however, also saw bilingual Chinese scholars
such as Lawrence Wang-chi Wong publishing on the history of Chinese translation
in both English and Chinese. Wong’s (1999) Reinterpreting Faithfulness,
Comprehensibility and Elegance: A Study of Translation in Twentieth-Century
China (Chong shi xin, da, ya: Ershi shiji Zhongguo fanyi yanjiu) is a work that has
been widely cited and discussed in mainland Sinophone scholarship since the 2000s.
Wong’s incorporation of functional approaches in his case studies of late Qing and
early Republican translators provided an innovative way of interpreting historical
sources. Another important work to appear in Chinese (2002), following its initial
publication in English (1995), is Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice: Literature,
National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937. Liu examined the
process by which new words, meanings, discourse and modes of representation
arose, circulated and acquired legitimacy with the host language due to, or in spite
of, the latter’s contact/collision with the guest language. Liu’s probe into literary
representations of the emerging new relationships between individual, nation and
culture not only advanced scholarly understanding of the complexities involved in
translation or “translingual practice” but also opened new perspectives for postcolo-
nial critiques of May Fourth.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a significant increase in
the number of studies on the translations of late Qing and early twentieth-century
China. Influenced by Party historians of earlier decades, some of these works hailed
Lu Xun as a Marxist imbued with “a revolutionary sense of responsibility” (geming
zerengan) (Meng and Li 2005: 127) and gave prominence to the contributions that
Lu Xun and others made to the spread of Bolshevik and Marxist literature, while the
translations of other prominent New Culture intellectuals such as Zhou Zuoren and
Hu Shi remained marginalized. Moreover, the preoccupation of many writers with
a comprehensive history or all-inclusive account of the translation activities of the
period precluded in-depth inquiry into many of the important issues encountered.
Nonetheless, several scholars writing in Chinese attempted to employ appropri-
ate theoretical models to “combine analysis and argumentation with historical
description” and “draw conclusions out of historical data” (Wang 2003: vii). Among
them were the contributors to the anthology Translation and Creation: On Translated
Fiction in Early Modern China (Fanyi yu chuangzuo: Zhongguo jindai fanyi
xxiv Introduction

xiaoshuo lun) (Wong 2000)20 and Eva Hung (Kong Huiyi), author of Translation,
Literature and Culture (Fanyi, wenxue, wenhua) (2000) and Rewriting Translation
History (Chongxie fanyi shi) (2005). Hu Cui’e’s (2007) Literary Translation and
Cultural Engagement: A Cultural Study of Late Qing Fiction Translation (Wenxue
fanyi yu wenhua canyu: Wanqing xiaoshuo fanyi de wenhua yanjiu) is one of the
earliest books written by mainland Chinese scholars in which insights from the
cultural studies of translation were drawn upon to investigate Chinese translation
history. In the book, Hu examined late-Qing fiction translation from historical, func-
tional and cultural perspectives. She analysed the political and cultural reasons for
the popularity of the domesticated translation strategy and presented translation as
the transformation of Chinese culture through new ideas primarily between 1902
and 1909. Similar works produced in mainland China include Ren Shukun’s (2009)
An Investigation of Literary Translation During the May Fourth Period (Wusi shiqi
waiguo wenxue fanyi yanjiu) and Wang Xiaoyuan’s (2010) Translation Discourse
and Ideology: Literary Translation in China, 1895–1911 (Fanyi huayu yu yishixing-
tai: Zhongguo 1895–1911 nian wenxue fanyi yanjiu).
The present study is focused on the impact of key translations in late Qing and
early Republican China on the development of models of modern selfhood and
modern ways of seeing and feeling in Chinese intellectual culture. It is my hope that
this study will contribute to the recognition of the fundamental role that translation
played in the construction of modern senses of self, society and nation. Such an
investigation requires the researcher to have an open attitude such that the translated
works can be examined more fully as culturally hybrid artefacts, reflective of the
exigencies of the time and the views of the translators. The translations produced by
the late Qing and New Culture intellectuals, while often reflecting a nation-building
goal, were largely attempts at imagining and fashioning a Chinese identity in keep-
ing with the requirements of the modern world. A cosmopolitan outlook, derived
from translated works, was manifested through Yan Fu’s preoccupation with evolu-
tionism and liberalism, Liang Qichao’s concern with moral ideals of “new citizens”
and New Culture emphasis on “wholesome individualism”, “humanism” and the
transformation of the national character in pursuit of universal values of empathy
and love.
The study takes into account the emergence and development of translation as a
“field”, in which certain types of symbolic and material capital circulate, to use
Bourdieu’s concept of the field.21 In this regard, I will include in my discussion
specific aspects of translation as cultural production, such as the running of journals
for the publication of translated works, the number of print runs and translation

20
See Vittinghoff (2000) and Du (2000) for reviews of this book.
21
For Pierre Bourdieu, the field is the site where different forms of symbolic and material capital
are disseminated, while his habitus is the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills and ways of act-
ing, which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. Bourdieu brings the
individual and society together and reconciles the subjective and the objective. Translation scholar-
ship has taken a cue from Bourdieu’s sociological theory of symbolic goods in an effort to adapt it
to the investigation of translation practice. For more information, see, for example, Gouanvic
(2005).
Introduction xxv

manuscript fees, with the assumption that translation is an inevitable by-product of

modernization.
Throughout the book, I adopt Toury’s broad definition of a translation: “any tar-
get text which is presented or regarded as such within the target system itself, on
whatever grounds” (1980: 37). Many of the translated texts in the study may well be
called “rewritings”, which, in Lefevere’s use of the term, include what have tradi-
tionally been conceived as both adaptations and translations (Lefevere 1992: 47).
The translators who worked in the particular cultural and political environment of
the late Qing and early Republican China were mostly men who belonged to an
exclusive group. They were well trained in Chinese and had studied in Britain, the
United States and Japan before they made their names as translators and cultural
innovators.22
The personal views and personal agendas of these translators were often evident
in their treatment of the foreign source texts. I will analyse the translators’ selection
of source texts and their approaches to translation to indicate how their translations
served to highlight key beliefs and values that were important to them. Insofar as the
translator of a foreign work is a reader who translates, it is necessary to note that
there is always an “unpredictable and potentially transformative to and fro of a
reciprocal, open-ended exchange” between the foreign work and its Chinese trans-
lator (Armstrong 2008: 219). The translator, as a reader-cum-translator, plays an
important part in deciding how foreign wordings can acquire an expressive power in
Chinese.
The following is a brief overview of the seven chapters.
Chapter 1 examines translation activities in the 1890s and 1900s. During this
period, the vast bulk of translations of Western scientific and literary works were
carried out, championed and produced mainly by the Chinese educators and pub-
lishers who were disillusioned with the government’s earlier attempts at military
emulation of the West. The chapter provides an organized account of the develop-
ment of translation as part of modern publishing and education and then considers
how translations were selected for the purpose of popularizing modern values.
During the last two decades of the Qing dynasty (1890s–1900s), intellectual dis-
course started to be actively reshaped by Chinese translators, writers and critics in
response to the social and political problems of the day. Chapter 2 singles out Yan
Fu and Liang Qichao, “the twin beacons of reformist thought in the period after
1895” (Huters 2005: 205), for an examination of how the importation and manipula-
tion of Western ideas contributed to the construction of an alternative cultural imag-
inary. Despite their deep attachment to cultural traditions, Yan and Liang effected
the popularization of important Western concepts and values that helped to link the
Chinese experience with the rest of the world. The chapter will focus on Yan’s trans-
lation of social Darwinism and liberalism and Liang’s translation of political and
adventure fiction as key events in the history of modern Chinese translation.
Chapter 3 (the 1900s and early 1910s) traces the formative trajectory of the new
generation of Chinese intellectuals, who became New Culture leaders in the late

22
Liang Qichao was not educated overseas, but he travelled extensively.
xxvi Introduction

1910s and mid-1920s, and examines the role of translation in shaping their views of
China and China’s place in the modern world. They were brought up in a world of
Chinese learning but became acquainted in their teens with Western ideas, as con-
veyed in the translations of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao, as well as other translators
like Lin Shu (1852–1924). The chapter treats their exposure to Western knowledge
and engagement in promoting literary and social changes through translation prac-
tice as important factors that shaped the up-and-coming intellectual elite’s under-
standing of modern selfhood, guiding them towards discovering and fostering
values essential for the construction of a modern Chinese identity.
Chapter 4 explores the field of translation production as an aspect of social mobi-
lization in urban China in the mid-1910s and mid-1920s, as Western ideas were
being widely disseminated via a modern education system and in public culture. It
examines how leading literary societies and their journals contributed to the rise of
a modern intellectual discourse in China. The focus is on New Youth (Xin qingnian),
the vehicle for the literary revolution and the modern written vernacular, and Short
Story Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), a flagship magazine of the Association for
Literary Studies (Wenxue yanjiu hui), and on how the intellectuals associated with
these magazines forged an avant-garde identity that became a highly desired image
among their followers.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are case studies of New Culture intellectuals’ use of transla-
tion in their construction of modern individuality. The translations of Hu Shi and the
Zhou brothers (i.e. Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren) are selected for analysis. Different in
their selection of source texts as they were, they underscored the importance of
individual morality, self-reflection and human feeling in their translation of litera-
ture while at the same time exemplifying modern vernacular writing in Chinese and
experimenting with new literary forms. Their translations, along with their appro-
priation and propounding of individualism and humanism, became a counternarra-
tive to the old literary and cultural traditions. They challenged the traditional
understanding of family and social relations and offered a cosmopolitan perspective
on the development of modern personality. Such a cosmopolitan, liberal-democratic
conception of self can be perceived as a significant aspect of these New Culture
intellectuals’ efforts to affirm a new morality and a belief in the social possibilities
of the individual and as a representation of a unique vision of Chinese modernity.
The activism implicit in their translation practice is thus best described as
progressive.

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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Where that Æaean isle forgets the main....

or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss
and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man”
rushed through by Alph the sacred river to where we

see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

IV
No: I am not talking fantastically at all. Let us be sober-serious,
corrugating our brows upon history: and at once see that these
Cambridge men of Thackeray’s generation—FitzGerald (to whom he
was “old Thack”), Tennyson, Brookfield, Monckton Milnes, Kinglake
—all with the exception of Arthur Hallam (whom I sadly suspect to
have been something of a prig) cultivated high fooling and carried it
to the nth power as a fine art. Life, in that Victorian era of peace
between wars, was no lull of lotus-eating for them—the England of
Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin admitted no lull of the young mind—but a
high-spirited hilarious game. As one of them, Milnes, wrote of “The
Men of Old”:

They went about their gravest deeds

As noble boys at play.

A plenty of English writers—some of them accounted highly serious

writers—had indulged in what I may call similar “larks” before them.
Swift, for example, has a glorious sense of the high-nonsensical;
Cowper has it, of course. I regret to say that I even suspect Crabbe.
Canning had it—take, for example, a single stage-direction in The
Rovers:

Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from

the Thirty Years’ War.

Lamb of course had it; and in his letters will carry it to a delirium in
excelsis. But this Cambridge group would seem to have shared and
practised it as a form, an exercise, in their free-masonry. Take for a
single instance James Spedding’s forehead. James Spedding,
afterwards learned editor of Bacon, and a butt in that profane set,
had a brow severe and high, of the sort (you know) that tells of moral
virtue with just a hint of premature baldness. It was very smooth; it
rose to a scalp all but conical. His admiring friends elected to call it
Alpine. Now hear FitzGerald upon it, in a letter:

That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Lawrence has

given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan
butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable
forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude:
no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the
common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I
occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s
forehead: we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering
out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He
also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont
Blanc, and reflected in the lake of Geneva. The forehead is at
present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or Glamorganshire: or
Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its
Christmas there.

And later, May 22, 1842:

You have of course read the account of Spedding’s forehead

landing in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel,
mistaking it for Beachy Head.
I have quoted this just to enforce my argument that, to understand
Thackeray’s work, you must understand just what kind of a man he
was in his upbringing and the way of his early friendships. And when
I add that his gift for nursery folly was expended upon a widowed
and desolate home—on a home from which his heart drove him to
flee, no matter how ambitiously he rebuilt and adorned it, to scribble
his novels on Club paper or in hotels, you may get (I hope) a little
closer to understanding his generous, but bitter and always sad
heart.

V
I must dwell on another point, too. The Thackerays (or
Thackwras—which I suppose to be another form of Dockwras) had
for some generations prospered and multiplied as Anglo-Indians in
the service of the old East India Company. Their tombs are thick in
the old graveyard of Calcutta, and I would refer anyone who would
ponder their epitaphs, or is interested in the stock from which
Thackeray sprang, to a little book by the late Sir William Hunter
entitled The Thackerays in India and some Calcutta Graves (Henry
Frowde, London: 1897). Thackeray himself was born at Calcutta on
the 18th of July, 1811, and, according to the sad fate of Anglo-Indian
children, was shipped home to England at the age of five, just as
Clive Newcome is shipped home in the novel; and when he pictured
the sad figure of Colonel Newcome tottering back up the ghaut, or
river-stairs, Thackeray drew what his own boyish eyes had seen and
his small heart suffered. Turn to the “Roundabout Paper” On Letts’s
Diary and you will read concerning that parting:

I wrote this, remembering in long, long distant days, such a

ghaut, or river-stair, at Calcutta, and a day when down those
steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose
mothers remained on the shore. One of those ladies was never
to see her boy more.... We were first cousins; had been little
 playmates and friends from the time of our birth; and the first
house in London to which I was taken was that of our aunt, the
mother of his Honour the Member of Council.

This young cousin and playmate returned in time, as Thackeray

never did, to the shore they were leaving; and died Sir Richmond
Shakespeare (no vile nomen!), Agent to the Governor-General for
Central India. The news of his death gave occasion to the tender
little essay from which I have been quoting.
On the passage their ship touched at St. Helena, and their black
servant took them a long walk over rocks and hills “until we reached
a garden, where we saw a man walking. ‘That’s he,’ said the black
man: ‘that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the
little children he can lay hands upon.’”—After which terrible vision no
doubt the youngsters resumed their Odyssey—as Homer would put
it—

ἀκαχήμενοι ἦτορ,
ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο.

“Stricken at heart yet rejoicing to have escaped perdition.” They

reached London to find it plunged in mourning (and, for many
reasons, in very genuine mourning) by the death of the Princess
Charlotte: and young Thackeray proceeded to Chiswick, to the
charge and care of his aunt Mrs. Ritchie. One day she caught the
child trying on his uncle’s large hat, and, finding to her alarm that it
accurately fitted him, swept him off to the fashionable physician, Sir
Charles Clark: “Reassure yourself, madam,” the doctor is reported
as saying: “he has, to be sure, an abnormal head; but I think there’s
something in it.” He was put to school first at a young gentlemen’s
academy at Chiswick, maybe next door to Miss Pinkerton’s
Seminary for Young Ladies through the portals of which (if you
remember, and into the garden) Miss Rebecca Sharp hurled back
her “leaving copy” of Dr. Johnson’s “Dixonary.” The master would
seem to have been a Dr. Swishtail, compounded of negligence and
tyranny, as so many “private schoolmasters” chose to be even to
days of my own experience. But here is the child’s first letter, dated
February 18, 1818, to his mother in India and composed in a round
hand between ruled lines:

My dear Mama—I hope you are quite well. I have given my

dear Grandmama a kiss. My aunt Ritchie is very good to me. I
like Chiswick, there are so many good boys to play with. St.
James’s Park is a very nice place. St. Paul’s Church, too, I like
very much. It is a finer place than I expected. I hope Captain
Smyth is well: Give my love to him and tell him he must bring
you home to your affectionate little son.
William Thackeray.

The separating sea was wide: but what a plucky little letter!

VI
I shall lay stress on it for a moment because, as it seems to me,
if we read between the childish lines, they not only evince the pluck
of the child, and not only breathe a waft of the infinite pathos of
English children, Indian born: but because I hold that no one who
would understand Thackeray can afford to forget that he was of
Anglo-Indian stock, bone and marrow.
Now I want, avoiding so much of offence as I may, to say a word
or two (and these only as a groping through private experience, to
illustrate Thackeray) about the retired Anglo-Indian as he has come
within the range of a long experience at an English town by the
seashore. On the whole I know of no human being more typically
pathetic. His retirement may be happier in some places such as
Cheltenham, where he has a Club in which he can meet old Indian
cronies or men from “the other side,” and tell stories and discuss the
only politics which interest them. But in any odd angle of this capital
yet most insular isle his isolation is horrible and fatal. Compared with
it, the sorrows of a British child “sent home” (as conveyed, and to the
very heart, in Mr. Kipling’s Wee Willie Winkie, for example) are
tragically insignificant. Youth is elastic and can recover. But this
grown man, through the “long, long Indian days,” has toiled and
supported himself upon a hope, to end in England with fishing or
shooting and a share of that happy hospitality which (God knows) he
has earned.
What happens? The domestic servant question (always with us),
cold rooms, dinner-parties at which stories about Allahabad are
listened to patiently by ladies who confuse it with Lahore, polite men
who suggest a game of “snooker pool” as a relief, hoping for not too
many anecdotes in the course of it. And for this your friend and his
admirable wife have been nursing, feeding themselves on promise
for, maybe, thirty years and more, all the time and day after day—
there lies the tragedy—dutifully giving all their best, for England, in
confidence of its reward.
It is not altogether our fault. It is certainly not our fault that the
partridges do not rise on the stubble or the salmon leap up and over
the dams in such numbers as the repatriated fondly remember. To
advise a lady accustomed to many Indian servants upon tact with a
couple or three of English ones—post-War too—is (as Sir Thomas
Browne might say) to bid her sleep in Epicurus his faith, and
reacclimatise her notion. But, to be short, they talk to us politics
which have no basis discoverable in this country.
Yet, withal, they are so noble! So simple in dignity! Far astray
from any path of progress as we may think him; insane as we may
deem his demand to rule, unreasonable his lament over the lost
England of his youth which for so long he has sentimentalised, or
domestic his interest in his nephews, the Anglo-Indian has that key
of salvation which is loyalty. He is for England: and for that single
cause I suppose no men or women that ever lived and suffered on
earth have suffered more than those who lie now under the huddled
gravestones of Calcutta.
 VII
I am coming to this: that those who accuse Thackeray of being a
snob (even under his own definition) should in fairness lay their
account that he came of people who, commanding many servants,
supported the English tradition of rule and dominance in a foreign
land.
I believe this to explain him in greater measure than he has
generally been explained or understood. Into a class so limited, so
exiled, so professional in its aims and interests—so borné and
repugnant against ideas that would invade upon the tried order of
things and upset caste along with routine—so loyal to its own
tradition of service, so dependent for all reward upon official
recognition (which often means the personal caprice of some
Governor or Secretary of State or Head of Department), some
Snobbery—as we understand the word nowadays—will pretty
certainly creep; to make its presence felt, if not to pervade. But I am
not going to discuss with you the question, “Was Thackeray that
thing he spent so much pains, such excessive pains, in
denouncing?”—over which so many disputants have lost their
tempers. It is not worth our while, as the whole business, to my
thinking, was not worth Thackeray’s while. When we come to it—as
we must, because it bulks so largely in his work—we shall quickly
pass on.
To me it seems that Thackeray’s geniture and early upbringing—
all those first impressions indelible in any artist—affected him in
subtler ways far better worth our considering. Let me just indicate
two.

VIII
For the first.—It seems to me that Thackeray—a social
delineator or nothing—never quite understood the roots of English
life or of the classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in
Pall Mall or Piccadilly or the Houses of Parliament ramify
underground deep and out, fetching their vital sap from the
countryside. Walter Bagehot, after quoting from Venus and Adonis
Shakespeare’s famous lines on a driven hare, observes that “it is
absurd to say we know nothing about the man who wrote that: we
know he had been after a hare.” I cannot find evidence in his works
that this child, brought from Calcutta to Chiswick, transferred to the
Charterhouse (then by Smithfield), to Cambridge, Paris, Fleet Street,
Club-land, had ever been after a hare: and if you object that this
means nothing, I retort that it means a great deal: it means that he
never “got off the pavement.” It means that he is on sure ground
when he writes of Jos. Sedley, demi-nabob, but on no sure ground at
all when he gets down to Queen’s Crawley: that in depicting a class
—now perhaps vanishing—he never, for example, got near the spirit
that breathes in Archdeacon Grantly’s talk with his gamekeeper:

“I do think, I do indeed, sir, that Mr. Thorne’s man ain’t

dealing fairly along of the foxes. I wouldn’t say a word about it,
only that Mr. Henry is so particular.”
“What about the foxes? What is he doing with the foxes?”
“Well, sir, he’s a trapping on ’em. He is, indeed, your
reverence. I wouldn’t speak if I warn’t well nigh mortial sure.”
Now the archdeacon had never been a hunting man, though
in his early days many a clergyman had been in the habit of
hunting without losing his clerical character by doing so; but he
had lived all his life among gentlemen in a hunting county, and
had his own very strong ideas about the trapping of foxes. Foxes
first, and pheasants afterwards, had always been the rule with
him as to any land of which he himself had had the
management.... But now his heart was not with the foxes,—and
especially not with the foxes on behalf of his son Henry. “I can’t
have any meddling with Mr. Thorne,” he said; “I can’t and I won’t
... I’m sure he wouldn’t have the foxes trapped.”
 “Not if he knowed it, he wouldn’t, your reverence. A
gentleman of the likes of him, who’s been a hunting over fifty
year, wouldn’t do the likes of that; but the foxes is trapped ... a
vixen was trapped just across the field yonder, in Goshall
Springs, no later than yesterday morning.” Flurry was now
thoroughly in earnest; and, indeed, the trapping of a vixen in
February is a serious thing.
“Goshall Springs don’t belong to me,” said the archdeacon.
“No, your reverence; they’re on the Ullathorne property. But
a word from your reverence would do it. Mr. Henry thinks more
of the foxes than anything. The last word he told me was that it
would break his heart if he saw the coppices drawn blank....”
“I will have no meddling in the matter, Flurry.... I will not have
a word said to annoy Mr. Thorne.” Then he rode away....
But the archdeacon went on thinking, thinking, thinking. He
could have heard nothing of his son to stir him more in his favour
than this strong evidence of his partiality for foxes. I do not mean
it to be understood that the archdeacon regarded foxes as better
than active charity, or a contented mind, or a meek spirit, or than
self-denying temperance. No doubt all these virtues did hold in
his mind their proper places, altogether beyond contamination of
foxes. But he had prided himself on thinking that his son should
be a country gentleman.... On the same morning the archdeacon
wrote the following note:—
Dear Thorne,—My man tells me that foxes have been
trapped on Darvell’s farm, just outside the coppices. I know
nothing of it myself, but I am sure you’ll look to it.—
Yours always,
T. Grantly.

Absurd? Very well—but you will never understand the politics of the
last century—that era so absurdly viewed out of focus, just now, as
one of mere industrial expansion—unless you lay your account with
it better than Thackeray did. As you know, he once stood for
Parliament, as Liberal candidate for the City of Oxford: and it is
customary to rejoice over his defeat as releasing from party what
was meant for mankind. In fact he never had a true notion of politics
or of that very deep thing, political England. Compare his sense of it
—his novelist’s sense—with Disraeli’s. He and Disraeli, as it
happens, both chose to put the famous-infamous Marquis of Hertford
into a novel. But what a thing of cardboard, how entirely without
atmosphere of political or social import, is Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair
as against Lord Monmouth in Coningsby!

IX
The late Herman Merivale, in a very brilliant study, interrupted by
death and left to be completed by Sir Frank Marzials, finds the two
key-secrets (as he calls them) of Thackeray’s life to be these—
Disappointment and Religion. I propose ten days hence to examine
this, and to speak of both. But I may premise, here and at once, that
Thackeray was a brave man who took the knocks of life without
flinching (even that from young Venables’ fist, which broke his nose
but not their friendship), and that to me the melancholy which runs
through all his writing—the melancholy of Ecclesiastes, the eternal
Mataiotes Mataioteton—Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity—was drawn
by origin from the weary shore of Ganges and brought in the child’s
blood to us, over the sea.
“Vanity of vanities,” saith the Preacher—Thackeray was before
all else a Preacher: and that is the end of it, whether in a set of
Cornhill verses or in his most musical, most solemn, prose—

How spake of old the Royal Seer?

(His text is one I love to treat on.)
This life of ours, he said, is sheer
Mataiotes Mataioteton ..., etc.
And now hear the burden of it on that famous page telling how Harry
Esmond walked home after breaking the news of Duke Hamilton’s
duel and death:

As Esmond and the Dean walked away from Kensington

discoursing of this tragedy, and how fatal it was to the cause
which they both had at heart, the street-criers were already out
with their broadsides, shouting through the town the full, true,
and horrible account of the death of Lord Mohun and Duke
Hamilton in a duel. A fellow had got to Kensington, and was
crying it in the square there at very early morning, when Mr.
Esmond happened to pass by. He drove the man from under
Beatrix’s very window, whereof the casement had been set
open. The sun was shining, though ’twas November: he had
seen the market-carts rolling into London, the guard relieved at
the palace, the labourers trudging to their work in the gardens
between Kensington and the City—the wandering merchants
and hawkers filling the air with their cries. The world was going
to its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies
mourned for them, and kings, very likely, lost their chances. So
night and day pass away, and to-morrow comes, and our place
knows us not. Esmond thought of the courier now galloping on
the North road, to inform him who was Earl of Arran yesterday
that he was Duke of Hamilton to-day; and of a thousand great
schemes, hopes, ambitions, that were alive in the gallant heart,
beating a few hours since, and now in a little dust quiescent.

A heavy passage, Gentlemen—and commonplace? Ah! as you grow

older you will find that most of the loveliest, most of the most sacred
passages in literature are commonplaces exquisitely turned and
tuned to catch and hold new hearts.
 THACKERAY (II)

I
I LEFT off, Gentlemen, upon a saying of Herman Merivale’s that the
two key-secrets of Thackeray’s life were Disappointment and
Religion, and I proposed, examining this to-day, to speak of both.
Well, for the first, I have already (I think) given full room in the
account to that domestic sorrow which drove him, great boon
favourite of the nursery, to flee from his grand new house in
Kensington Gardens—

Cedes coemptis saltibus et domo

Villaque—

to write his novels anywhere rather than at home. In the words of

Barnes’ beautiful lament, which I here make free to divorce from its
native dialect—

Since now beside my dinner-board

Your voice does never sound,
I’ll eat the bit I can afford
Afield upon the ground;
Below the darksome bough, my love,
Where you did never dine,
And I don’t grieve to miss you now
As I at home do pine.
 II
But those who stress this Disappointment in Thackeray go on to
allege other causes, additional causes, for it: as that he lost a
comfortable patrimony early in life, and that, conscious of great
powers, he felt them for many years unappreciated, and, when
appreciated, partially eclipsed by the popularity of his great rival,
Dickens. Now I don’t deny that one disappointment may accumulate
upon another on a man: but I ask you to consider also that in
criticism one nail may drive out another, and that in ordinary one
explanation is better than two, almost always far better than three:
the possible conclusion being that not one of the three—not even the
first—is the right one.
Actually, then, Thackeray as a young man lost his patrimony by
flinging the hazard quite gallantly and honourably, as a young man
should; foolishly perhaps, as a young man will, but having been just
as young and foolish I am even now not turned Cato enough to
condemn a boy for that. Let us see just what happened.
From the Charterhouse he came up here, to Trinity. His means
have been variously computed: but you may put it down pretty safely
at £500 a year—a very pretty sum indeed for an undergraduate.
What he did with it you may find for yourselves in those brilliant
chapters in Pendennis—perhaps the very best written on University
life—which treat of Pen’s career at Cambridge.
(For it is Cambridge, of course, though he calls it Oxbridge. And
here may I parenthetically drop a long-hoarded curse upon that trick
of the Victorian novelists of sending up their young heroes to
Oxbridge or Camford, entering them usually at the College of St.
Boniface, head of the river or just about to be head. If, from the
pages of Victorian fiction, a crew could be mustered to unmoor and
paddle down the dear old ’Varsity barge, in the early June twilight,
past the Pike and Eel to Iffley, there to await the crack of the rifle that
loosens the tense muscles,—heavens! what a crew!—or, as Matthew
Arnold would say, “what a set!”—all so indifferent to the rules of
training, so like in appearance to young Greek gods, so thirsty!—
and, on the run of it, what laurels for dear old St. Boniface!... I don’t
know why these hermaphrodite names “Oxbridge” and “Camford”
have always been so peculiarly repugnant to me: but they always
have been, and are. I feel somehow as if to be a graduate of either
were to offend against the Table of Forbidden Degrees. But
Thackeray achieved one success in the blending—when he
combined “scout” and “gyp” into “skip.”)
Oxbridge, then, in Pendennis is Cambridge. Thackeray came up
in February, 1829—in the Lent term, that is, instead of in the
previous October—I cannot discover for what reason. It made him,
however, by the rules then prevailing, a non ens or non annus man
for that year: and being also a non-reading man, he decided after
two years of genially unprofitable residence, to refuse the Tripos and
a degree, and retire on London, and took chambers at Hare Court in
the Temple. His age was twenty.

III
Sainte-Beuve—I have read reasonably in his voluminous works,
but without as yet happening on the passage which, quoted by
Stevenson in his Apology for Idlers, really needs no verification by
reference, being just an opinion dropped, and whoever dropped it
and when, equally valuable to us—Sainte-Beuve, according to
Stevenson, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a
single great book, in which to study for a few years before we go
hence: and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in
Chapter XX, which is the Differential Calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX,
which is hearing the band play in the gardens. Note well, if you
please, that I am not endorsing this as a word of advice for Tripos
purposes. I am but applying it to Thackeray, who never sat for his
degree, but left Cambridge to write Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Esmond,
sundry other great stories, with several score of memorable trifles—
ballads, burlesques, essays, lectures, Roundabout Papers, what-not.
If I may again quote from Sir Walter Raleigh, “there are two Days of
Judgment, of which a University examination in an Honours School
is considerably the less important.” The learning we truly take away
from a University is (as I conceive) the talent, whatever it be, we use
(God helping), and turn to account. Says Mr. Charles Whibley of
Thackeray’s two years here:

The friendships that he made ended only with his life, and he
must have been noble, indeed, who was the friend of Alfred
Tennyson and of Edward FitzGerald. Moreover, Cambridge
taught him the literary use of the university, as the Charterhouse
had taught him the literary use of a public school. In a few
chapters of Pendennis he sketched the life of an undergraduate,
which has eluded all his rivals save only Cuthbert Bede. He
sketched it, moreover, in the true spirit of boyish extravagance,
which he felt at Cambridge and preserved even in the larger
world of London; and if Trinity and the rustling gown of Mr.
Whewell had taught him nothing more than this, he would not
have contemplated them in vain.

As a matter of fact, of course, the Charterhouse and Cambridge had

taught him much more, even of scholarship. “Scholarship,” is, to be
sure, a relative term which, if lifted to the excellent heights—to scorn
lower degrees of comparison—(as heaven forbid it should not be)
will exclude all who have so learnt their Horace at school that in after
life merely to rehearse and patch together from memory an Ode of
his, long ago learnt for “repetition,” brings comfort to the soul and
can steel it, Romanly, under the stars even on Himalayan outposts.
But if there be aught worthy the name of scholarship to have that
one author bred into your bones—why, then, I challenge that
Thackeray did carry away a modicum of scholarship (and a very
pure modicum, too) from school and university. I shall come to his
prose cadences by and by, and will say no more of them here than
that—in Esmond especially, but in general and throughout his prose
—they are inconceivable by me save as the cadences of a writer
early trained upon Greek and Latin. For blunter evidence, you will
find the Roundabout Papers redolent—in quotation, reminiscences,
atmosphere—of Horace on every page; and for evidence yet more
patent take his avowed imitation of Horace (Odes i. 38), the two
famous, jolly Sapphic stanzas beginning Persicos odi. Turn to your
Conington (say) and you will find them most neatly and adequately
rendered: and then take your Thackeray—

But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy,

I prithee get ready at three;
Have it smoking and tender and juicy,
And what better meat can there be?

And when it has feasted the master,

’Twill amply suffice for the maid:
Meanwhile I will smoke my canaster,
And tipple my ale in the shade.

Years ago, I discoursed, standing here, on the Horatian Model in

English Verse, attempting to show you how this man and that man—
Andrew Marvell, for example, and Matthew Prior, had attempted it
here and there and how nearly achieved it: of Milton, again, how he
tried to build his Sonnet, redeeming it from the Petrarcan love-
business upon the model of the Horatian Ode; how some sonnets of
his (familiar or political—that To Mr. Lawrence for instance, as a
specimen in one mode, or those To the Lady Margaret Ley, or On
the Late Massacre in Piedmont as specimens in another) are
deliberately, experimentally Horatian; and how narrowly—how very
narrowly—William Cowper, by deflection of religious mania, missed
to be our purest Horace of all. But Thackeray is of the band. To alter
a word of Carlyle’s, “a beautiful vein of Horace lay struggling about
him.”

IV
 But, to return upon the first of the two “key-secrets”—
Disappointment and Religion—and to leave Religion aside for a
moment—I cannot find that, save in his domestic affliction,
Thackeray can rightly be called a disappointed man. There is of
course a sense—there is of course a degree—in which every one of
us, if he be worth anything, arrives at being a disappointed man. We
all have our knocks to bear, and some the most dreadful
irremediable wounds to bind up and hide. But whatever Thackeray
spent or owed at Cambridge (to pay in due time), he took away, with
his experience, a most gallant heart. He went to London, lost the rest
of his money in journalistic adventures, and fared out as a random
writer, without (as they say) a penny to put between himself and
heaven. What does he write later on in reminiscence to his mother,
but that these days of struggle were the jolliest of all his life?—

Ye joys that Time hath swept with him away,

Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
For you I pawned my watch full many a day,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

That is good gospel. “Fall in love early, throw your cap over the mill;
take an axe, spit on your hands; and, for some one, make the chips
fly.”

V
But (say the critics) he was disappointed, soured because—
conscious of his powers of “superior” education and certain gifts only
to be acquired through education, he felt that Dickens—whom
certain foolish people chose to talk of endlessly as his rival—was all
the time outstripping him in public favour. Now, as for this, I cannot
see how Thackeray, in any wildest dream, could have hoped to catch
up with Dickens and pass him in popularity. To begin with, he came
to fruition much later than Dickens: in comparison with the precocity
of Pickwick Thackeray was in fact thirty-seven before he hit the
target’s gold with Vanity Fair. His earlier serious efforts—Catherine,
Barry Lyndon, The Book of Snobs—are sour and green stuff, call
them what else you will. They deal with acrid characters and (what is
more) deal with them acridly. But even supposing them to be
masterpieces (which title to two of the three I should certainly deny)
where was the audience in comparison with that to which Dickens
appealed? Where, outside a few miles’ radius of Club-land, did men
and women exist in any numbers to whom Thackeray’s earlier work
could, by any possibility, appeal? The dear and maiden lady in
Cranford, Miss Jenkyns, as you remember, made allowances for
Pickwick in comparison with Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas. “Still perhaps
the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may
become, if he will take the Great Doctor for his model.” But what—
what on earth would she have made of Barry Lyndon? And what
would good Captain Brown himself have made of it? I can almost
better see the pair, on the sly, consenting to admire Tristram Shandy.
Now Dickens and Thackeray were both thin-skinned men in their
sensitiveness to public approbation. On at least one occasion each
made a fool of himself by magnifying a petty personal annoyance
into an affair of the world’s concern. As if anybody mattered to that
extent!—

Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta

Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.

But in literary London there are always (I regret to say) busybodies

who will estrange great men if they can; and, the cause of quarrel
once set up, I still more regret to say that the great men quite as
often as not come most foolishly out of it. Thackeray’s estrangement
from Dickens happened over an article by a young journalist of
twenty-seven—Mr. Edmund Yates, afterwards Editor of The World, a
society newspaper—and Thackeray’s foolish insistence, in the teeth
of remonstrances by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, that young Yates
should be expelled from the Garrick Club. A week before
Thackeray’s death, he and Dickens met on the steps of the
Athenæum, passed, turned, and looked at each other. Thackeray
held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.
Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of
which I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you—
some of the best of you, I hope—may leave Cambridge for Fleet
Street, a street which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions;
but withal the centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto
of which, though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude
the “Liberty” that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and
younger brethren. I remember this plea for Fraternity being put up by
an eminent man of letters, still with us; and being so much
impressed by it that it outlasted even the week-after-next, when I
found him taking off the gloves to punish a rival scribe. But these two
were musical critics, arguing about music: and I have sometimes,
pondering, thought that there must really be something naturally akin
between music and prosody (arts of which I know so little), seeing
that the professors of both pelt each other in terms of insult so
amazingly similar and with a ferocity the likeness of which one has to
recognise even while murmuring, “Come, come! What is this all
about, after all?” I suppose the average Musical Review in the
weekly papers to contain more mud to the square inch than even
The Dunciad! And you must acknowledge, Gentlemen, The Dunciad,
for all its wit, to be on the whole a pretty wearisome heap of bad
breeding. It kicks: but as they say in the country, there is “plenty hair
on the hoof.” What I plead is that all we engaged in literature take
some warning from the discourtesies of the past, and that you, at
any rate, who pass out into literary practice from this Tripos of ours,
shall pass out as a confraternity of gentlemen. Consider, if you will,
that Literature, our mistress, is a goddess greater than any of us.
She is Shakespeare and Ben Jonson too; Milton and Dry den; Swift,
Addison, Steele; Berkeley and Goldsmith; Pope and John Gay;
Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan; Cowper and Burns; Blake and
Wordsworth and Coleridge; Landor, Scott, Keats, Shelley and Byron;
Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, all, says the Preacher, “giving
counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies.” I name
but a few of the procession, but all were her knights; and each, in his
time, fought for his ideal of her—

Blue is Our Lady’s colour,

White is Our Lord’s:
Tomorrow I will make a knot
Of blue and white cords;
That you may see it where I ride
Among the flashing swords.

Or let me lower the key and put it thus—addressing you as plain

apprentices and setting the ground no higher than an appeal for the
credit of our craft. I once wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, and with
truth, that he never seemed to care who did a good piece of work so
long as a good piece of work got itself done. Consider, on top of this,
the amount of loss to the world’s benefit through those literary broils
and squabbles. You are expected, for example, to know something,
at least, of The Dunciad in your reading for the English Tripos: and I
dare say many of you have admired its matchless conclusion:

Lo! thy dread empire c h a o s is restor’d:

Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall.

But turn your admiration about and consider what a hand capable of
writing so might have achieved in the long time it had wasted, turning
over an immense buck-basket of foul linen. No, Gentlemen—take
the example of poor Hazlitt—contemporary misunderstandings,
heart-burnings, bickerings make poor material for great authors. I
cannot find that, although once, twice or thrice, led astray into these
pitfalls, Thackeray (and this is the touchstone) ever really envied
another man’s success.
“Get David Copperfield,” he writes in a familiar letter: “by jingo,
it’s beautiful; it beats the yellow chap (Pendennis) of this month