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 NEW CO
MPARIS
ONS IN
WORLD L
ITERATUR
E

LAURA LONSDALE

Multilingualism
and Modernity
Barbarisms in Spanish
and American Literature
 New Comparisons in World Literature

Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK

Neil Lazarus
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on
one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approach-
ing ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as
a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body
of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and con-
tent, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish
works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature regis-
ters both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and
the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered
as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registra-
tion of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.

Editorial Board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA
Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland
Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK
Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK
Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA
Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
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 Laura Lonsdale

Multilingualism
and Modernity
Barbarisms in Spanish and American Literature
Laura Lonsdale
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-67327-1 ISBN 978-3-319-67328-8 (eBook)
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To my Barbarians, Theo and Tolly
 Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the following for their help and encouragement at
various stages of the project:

the Faculty of Modern Languages at Oxford and The Queen’s College,

for allowing me two terms of sabbatical leave in which to think and
write;
the Oxford EHRC, for funding a one-term teaching buy-out that
allowed me to write Chap. 2, and for providing a forum for the
exchange of ideas;
Edwin Williamson, for taking an interest from the beginning, and for his
kind and useful feedback;
Jane Hiddleston, for inviting me to share my ideas at the Oxford
Comparative Criticism and Translation seminar at TORCH, and for
involving me in the OWRI project on Creative Multilingualism;
Neil Lazarus and Pablo Mukherjee, for asking some very helpful ques-
tions;
Becky Beasley and Ritchie Robertson, for looking over a very early out-
line of the project;
and especially Richard Lonsdale, for wanting to read everything, and for
his love and support throughout.

vii
viii Acknowledgements

I am grateful for permission to reproduce and adapt material from the

following articles:
‘The Perils and Possibilities of Mistranslation: Equivocation and
Barbarism in For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ Readings 1.1 (April 2015). www.
readingsjournal.net.
‘Jorge Semprún and the Languages of Democracy.’ Nottingham
French Studies 56.2 (2017): 151–162. Special issue: ‘The Multilingual
Spaces of French and Francophone Writing,’ edited by Delphine Grass
and Charlotte Baker.
 Contents

Multilingualism, ‘Poétique imprévisible de la modernité’ 1

Five Authors and Their Work 5
Modes of the Multilingual 10
Multilingualism and Modernism 12
Cosmopolitanism, Hybridity, Barbarism 17
Further Reflections on Barbarism 21
Language and Modernity in the Spanish-Speaking World 25
Multilingualism, or How to Wrestle an Octopus 39
Works Cited 48

The Barbarous and the Divine: Ideologies of Language

in Valle-Inclán 55
Latin or Babel? Unity and Dispersal 59
Spanish and Galician: Modern Languages? 65
The Comedias bárbaras: A Language in Between 74
Works Cited 81

Equivocation and Barbarism: Hemingway’s Modernist

Mistranslations 85
Equivocation: False Cognates and Double Meanings 88
Barbarism: Verbal Meanings in Cultural Context 94
The Foreign as Foreign: Translating a ‘Primitive’ Spain 101
Works Cited 113

ix
x Contents

Transculturation and Mistura: Arguedas’s Provincial Poetics 117

The Language of Mistura 122
Images of Transculturation: Yawar fiesta 125
Bridging Cultures and Languages: Los ríos profundos 139
Works Cited 153

Totalitarianism and Translation in Semprún 157

Modernity’s Failures of Translation 159
A Confusion of Voices at the End of History: l’Algarabie 165
Translating Modernity: Veinte años y un día 175
Works Cited 189

Multilingualism and Utopia in Goytisolo 193

Of Polyglots and Palimpsests: A Multilingual Modernity 196
Of Tourists and Terrorists: The Trilogy of Treason 200
Multilingualism and Utopia: Makbara and Paisajes después
de la batalla 215
Works Cited 234

Index 237
 Multilingualism, ‘Poétique imprévisible
de la modernité’

The multilingual author is a strange animal, both typical of the cross-

cultural forces of the age and singular in ways that are hard to account
for through literary or cultural history. For while the majority of the
world’s speakers may have competence in more than one language‚ lit-
erary language tends not to reflect this diversity; however else it may
seek to disturb conventional modes of expression, it tends to pragmati-
cally belong to single, majority languages with cultural prestige and a
substantial readership. While there are notable multilingual currents in
modern literary history—from the implicit ‘galicismo mental’ [‘mental
gallicism’] of Rubén Darío’s modernismo,1 to the explicit language mix-
ing of surrealist or concrete poetry, to the open bilingualism of con-
temporary Latino writing in the USA—many of the most interesting
cases of multilingual writing are the very particular product of individ-
ual authorial circumstance. From a critical perspective, it is important
both to recognise the singularity of multilingual authorship, its typi-
cally oblique relationship to the cultural mainstream, and to acknowl-
edge that no writer operates in a cultural or historical vacuum. In the
1970s George Steiner drew attention to this combination of singularity

1 In a famous letter written in 1888 to the Nicaraguan poet and father of modernismo

Rubén Darío, whose work was heavily influenced by French poetry, the Spanish novelist
and critic Juan Valera distinguished between a purely lexical use of gallicisms and the poet’s
own, more profound ‘galicismo de la mente’ [gallicism of the mind], which Darío himself
later referred to as ‘galicismo mental’ [mental gallicism] (see López-Morillas 1944: 9).

© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Lonsdale, Multilingualism and Modernity, New Comparisons
in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67328-8_1
2 L. Lonsdale

and exemplarity in his study of the ‘extraterritorial’ authors Nabokov,

Borges and Beckett, emphasising their unique voices while recognising
the contemporary significance of their literary multilingualism in the
broad context of the twentieth century’s demographic upheavals. Not
only did these writers put in doubt the Romantic ‘equation of a sin-
gle pivot of language, of native deep-rootedness, with poetic author-
ity’ (1972, 6), but they generated a profoundly modern sensibility that
spoke for the historical constitution of their century: ‘It seems proper
that those who create art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has
made so many homeless, which has torn up tongues and peoples by the
root, should themselves be poets unhoused and wanderers across lan-
guage’ (11).
For the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, it is in the interplay
of languages that an unpredictable poetics of modernity is woven:
‘les langues en relation trament la poétique imprévisible de la moder-
nité’ (1981, 356). The question of how this unpredictable poetics is
produced multilingually, of the ways in which multilingual literary
expression constitutes a mode of response to modernity, is particu-
larly germane to contexts, such as Spain and Latin America, associ-
ated obliquely or latterly with canonical modernism and its linguistic
or multilingual turn (Taylor-Batty 2013, 4)‚ though the question seeks
to explore, more broadly, the multilingual as an imaginative articula-
tion of the sociocultural experience of modernity. Multilingualism is
particularly suited to such an imaginative articulation because it both
highlights the dynamic and cross-cultural forces that characterise the
modern era, and radically embodies the heteroglossia that for Mikhail
Bakhtin characterises the modern novel. It exemplifies the fractur-
ing of linguistic unity commonly associated with both modernist and
postmodernist aesthetics, but belongs more broadly to what Karl Marx
described as the ‘uninterrupted disturbance’ and ‘everlasting uncer-
tainty’ of modernity itself (2012, 38). Multilingualism is in this sense
the very speech and syntax of modernity. Yet if modernity is multiple
and disjunctive, it is also consistent and all-encompassing, as Marx’s
oxymoronic formulations indicate (uninterrupted disturbance, everlast-
ing uncertainty). Characterised as much by movements of national self-
definition as by the global movement of people, by unification as much
as dispersal, by the perpetuation of master narratives as much as their
unravelling, modernity is typified as much by the ‘mono’ as it is by the
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 3

‘multi’, and the plurality of multilingualism can therefore run counter

to some of modernity’s most powerful forces and currents.
The process of European nation-building that gathered pace in the
eighteenth century found one of its natural end-points in what Yasemin
Yildiz calls the ‘monolingual paradigm’, according to which ‘individu-
als and social formations are imagined to possess one “true” language
only, their “mother tongue,” and through this possession to be organi-
cally linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and
nation’ (2011, 3).2 This is in marked contrast to the ‘intercomprehen-
sibility and interchangeability of European tongues in the late Middle
Ages’, which the translator David Bellos (2012, 8) illustrates with refer-
ence to Christopher Columbus, who may not even have ‘conceptualized
Italian, Castilian or Portuguese as distinct languages […]’ (2012, 8–9).3
Columbus is, in Bellos’s example, an emblem of the polyglot Middle
Ages, though he is also a meaningful symbol of Spain’s early modernity
and its formation as a nation, his departure for the New World in 1492
coinciding with the end of the Reconquest (the Christian capture of the
last Moorish city) and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain‚ in a year
that, not incidentally, also brought the publication of the first Castilian

2 In Spain, the eighteenth century brought the creation of the Real Academia de la
Lengua Española (the official body responsible for the preservation of the Spanish lan-
guage) in 1713, and a decree to establish Castilian as the official language of education and
public administration in 1768, to the detriment of other peninsular languages and their sta-
tus in the public sphere. In their turn, the Catalan, Basque and Galician regionalist move-
ments of the nineteenth century and beyond drew on the Romantic association between
language, ethnicity and nationhood to reinforce their claims to cultural particularity.
3 Bellos tells us that Columbus ‘wrote notes in the margins of his copy of Pliny in what

we now recognize as an early form of Italian, but he used typically Portuguese place
names—such as Cuba—to label his discoveries in the New World. He wrote his official cor-
respondence in Castilian Spanish, but used Latin for the precious journal he kept of his
voyages. He made a “secret” copy of the journal in Greek, however, and he also must have
known enough Hebrew to use the Astronomical Tables of Abraham Zacuto […]. He must
have been familiar with lingua franca—a “contact language” made of simplified Arabic
syntax and a vocabulary mostly taken from Italian and Spanish, used by Mediterranean sail-
ors and traders from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the nineteenth century […]. How
many languages did Columbus know when he sailed the ocean in 1492? […] the answer
would be somewhat arbitrary. It’s unlikely Columbus even conceptualized Italian, Castilian
or Portuguese as distinct languages […]’ (2012, 8–9).
4 L. Lonsdale

grammar.4 The historical coincidence of Spain’s formation as a nation

with conquest, reconquest, and the codification of its national language
might be considered a virtual allegory of modern civilisation’s drive
towards both inward consolidation and outward expansion, anticipating
Yildiz’s observations about European nation-building and the develop-
ment of the monolingual paradigm in the eighteenth century. Though,
in the present, globalisation might appear to promote a multilingual
paradigm, Yildiz argues that our era can more accurately be described
as ‘postmonolingual’, the term drawing on other such ‘post’ formula-
tions to refer to ‘a field of tension in which the monolingual paradigm
continues to assert itself and multilingual practices persist or re-emerge’
(2011, 5). By way of an example, Anjali Pandey notes the ‘seemingly
increasing presence of multilingualism in the domain of English fiction’,
a tendency she dismisses as mere tokenism playing into an awards culture
enamoured of the transnational (2016, 1). Such tokenism‚ she argues‚
generates a ‘familiar’ hybridity in which ‘momentary acts of multilingual-
ism [become] the hallmark of marketable art bound for global consump-
tion’ (20), ‘at the very same time that we are witnessing a strengthening
of linguistic hierarchies—forms of linguistic monolingualism in which
languages vie for value’ (10). As Yildiz argues, it is therefore against the
monolingual paradigm that multilingualism in the modern era must be
read, and it is against the backdrop of multilingualism’s ubiquity and yet
apparent invisibility that multilingual authorship needs to be understood.
Studying literary multilingualism therefore presents certain distinct
challenges and areas of enquiry, ranging from the methodological to the
cultural-historical, but converging around the idea that (non-tokenistic)
multilingual literary practices, which emerge from countless configura-
tions of linguistic experience and produce countless configurations of
linguistic encounter in the literary text, are highly singular, even as lit-
erary multilingualism itself can be thought of as emblematic, or at the
very least symptomatic, of the modern age. The five authors whose work

4 There is some dispute over whether 1492 can be considered the date of Spain’s forma-

tion as a nation (see Blanco 2017), though the national significance of the combined events
of that year is not in doubt. In particular, it ushered in an era defined by a concern with
both religious and linguistic cohesion, and with the establishment of Castilian as a national
and imperial language. Portuguese also entered a period of increasing expansion and codi-
fication after the fifteenth century; by way of contrast, the language of the north-western
region between Spain and Portugal, Galicia, entered a period known as Os séculos oscuros
[the Dark Centuries], when Galician disappeared from written usage.
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 5

is the subject of this book—Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ernest Hemingway,

José María Arguedas, Jorge Semprún and Juan Goytisolo—reflect the
eclecticism of literary multilingualism, though their otherwise very dis-
parate literary practice is united here along particular thematic lines. The
most salient of these lines is ‘barbarism’, a word whose origins and impli-
cations I consider in detail below, but which unites multilingualism and
modernity by etymological and onomatopoeic association with the bar-
barian’s incomprehensible foreign speech (ba-ba, bla-bla, bara-bara). In
what follows I introduce the five authors, both sketching out the ways in
which barbarism inheres in their work and contextualising it in relation to
various modes of the multilingual, before exploring in greater detail the
confluence of multilingualism and modernity in the theme of barbarism,
and examining the significance of this theme to the relationship between
language and modernity in the Spanish-speaking world. The final section
explores some of the methodological challenges associated with studying
literary multilingualism, taking a cross-sectional approach to the subject
that, it is hoped, will frame the author-centred chapters that follow.

Five Authors and Their Work

The names of the five authors studied in this book—Valle-Inclán,
Hemingway, Arguedas, Semprún and Goytisolo—would normally fall
on different sides of more traditional dividing lines: they are not of the
same nationality; they do not all write in the same language; their writ-
ing spans a period of over a hundred years; and their personal and politi-
cal circumstances vary widely. They all write narrative fiction, though
Valle-Inclán is also and perhaps principally a dramatist; and they are all
intimately connected with the Spanish-speaking world. But what unites
them most is their extended formal and conceptual engagement with
multilingualism, in the context of historical transitions and cultural
encounters associated with the sociocultural experience of modernity. It
was important to my choice of authors that their engagement with mul-
tilingualism was a feature of their wider oeuvre; each has a body of work
shaped and defined by interaction with other cultures and languages, and
by the creative literary articulation of those encounters. Each author can
therefore be said to have made a substantial contribution to the devel-
opment of a modern multilingual literary practice, and it is the contrast
between their themes, techniques and contexts, as well as their some-
times surprising overlaps, that informed my selection of their work.
6 L. Lonsdale

Between them, these five authors cover most of the twentieth cen-
tury and part of the twenty-first, touching most corners of the Spanish-
speaking world and evoking if not embodying the multiple ways in which
Spanish co-exists with other languages. In spite of the enormous diver-
sity of theme and approach in their work, two unifying strands come to
light: firstly, the use of multilingual techniques to reflect, engage with
and otherwise comment on moments of historical change and transition,
specifically those associated with modernity and modernisation; and sec-
ondly, the use of multilingual techniques to convey both the most barba-
rous elements of modernity (inarticulacy, incomprehension) and some of
its most utopian possibilities (translation). A concern with the barbarous,
with the eruption of the primitive in modernity or with modernity’s con-
struction of the primitive, is, as we shall see, clearly present in the work
of these otherwise very different authors. All five authors innovate in a
variety of ways on the stylistic and conceptual potential of the interac-
tion between Spanish, French, English, Galician, Quechua and Arabic, in
ways that both evoke and exceed the conventional boundaries of mod-
ernism. Through metaphors such as the bridge, the threshold and the
palimpsest, through an exploration of the boundaries between speech
and writing, through the use of semantic play to enlarge and expand
meaning, and through the formulation of political and cultural projects
in terms of mixing and translation, these authors variously and singularly
engage in examining the multilingual dimension of modernity, and the
modern dimension of multilingualism. Though they cover a differing
range of experience where modernity is concerned, they bring to light
certain global themes and events—industrialisation, war, urban experi-
ence, totalitarianism—while also highlighting historical turning points‚
events and experiences that have been particularly defining within the
Spanish-speaking world: the Reconquest and the conquest; the ‘disas-
ter’ of 1898 that brought an end to Spain’s empire; the Spanish Civil
War and Republican exile; military dictatorship and its migratory conse-
quences; and the aspiration to modernity, often via Paris, on both sides
of the Atlantic. None of these forms an object of study in its own right,
but they represent key historical and cultural realities within the study’s
broader concerns.
Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) was one of the most important
voices of Spanish modernism. Treating all language as speech or dialect,
he generated an aesthetic habla, or speech, designed to work as much
upon the ear as the intellect, drawing on as deep a repository of language
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 7

as he could access. Valle-Inclán incorporated into his literary dialect the

language of his Galician homeland; the American dialect of his Mexican
travels; caló, the language of Spanish and Portuguese Romani; germanía,
the slang of Cervantine thieves; the contemporary slang of the streets
of Madrid; and a range of archaisms, neologisms, jargon, and popular,
arcane and archaic words that drew eclectically and inventively on ver-
nacular speech. This linguistic eclecticism and emphasis on the spo-
ken word were the verbal medium for an artistic project that refused
any form of picturesque or social realism, tending instead towards the
immutable, symbolic and divine, to the alpha and omega of the alphabet.
Though his language was castizo, or nationally authentic, to the extent
that it mined the propio rather than the foreign, it also tended towards
barbarism in the sense that his injection of the unorthodox, of what was
foreign to conventional language, was a deliberate and even aggressive
attempt to reinvigorate Spanish. His concern with reinvigorating the
Spanish language and innovating with its sounds and meanings was inti-
mately bound up with anxieties about the cultural decline in the early
part of the twentieth century, and can be read in the context of contem-
porary debates about the relationship between language and modernity
after the end of Spanish empire. His work manifests a concern with both
linguistic unity and dispersal, ranging from the aesthetic possibilities of
a hybrid language in ‘Babel’ (1888) to the absolute authority of Latin
in Divinas palabras (1919). At the heart of these depictions was surely
Valle’s own acute sensitivity towards a Galicia that was diglossic if not
bilingual, and towards a Spain whose former empire was united only by
the bonds of language. Mapping Valle-Inclán’s ideological concern with
linguistic unity and dispersal onto his aesthetic interest in both the bar-
barous and the divine, the chapter considers how, in the Comedias bár-
baras and elsewhere, Valle makes linguistic barbarism the foundation of a
divine artistry.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was a cosmopolitan American
modernist who imported the syntax and idioms of other languages
into his prose, most notably in his novel of the Spanish Civil War, For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway’s presence in this study high-
lights, among other things, the way Spanish cultural identity has been
mediated by perspectives from abroad, particularly in light of the nov-
el’s primitivist depiction of Spanish Republican fighters in the context
of fascist barbarism and technological modernity. The incorporation of
the Spanish idiom into English is a means of exploring what ‘barbarous’
8 L. Lonsdale

means when ‘highly civilized beings are flying overhead trying to kill
me’ (Orwell 1941, 138), the persistent use of the words ‘barbarous’
and ‘barbarian’ pointing to a self-conscious use of barbarisms and mis-
translation. Hemingway exploits the Spanish idiom in this novel to both
defamiliarise English and multiply meaning, finding in the ‘translation’
of a word a semantic range that both overlaps with and extends its mean-
ing in English. In this way he not only reflects on the writer’s craft, but
explores the unstable and changing value of words in the context of mas-
sive conflict. The apparent mistranslations that have so upset critics are
therefore not surface errors pointing to ignorance, but are rather both
rich sources of alternative meaning and evidence of a self-reflexive trans-
lational practice. Hemingway’s ‘Spanish’ embodies many of the conflicts
and contradictions he perceived to be at play in the civil war, and offers
both an artistic interpretation and an ethical translation of a culture he
loved. Hemingway’s interlingual use of the word ‘barbarous’ highlights
the connections between form and theme in a novel troubled by the
writer’s capacity to express truth in language, in which bad, incorrect, or
‘barbarous’ language produces an assault on the reader’s linguistic sensi-
bilities that is part and parcel of the novel’s thematic engagement with a
complex war.
José María Arguedas (1911–1969) was a Peruvian novelist, transla-
tor and ethnographer writing about the ethnic and social divisions of his
native country. If multilingual literary production often approximates a
cosmopolitan literary practice, Arguedas’s innovative literary response
to his own and his country’s bilingualism was one that he proudly and
defensively identified as provincial. For Arguedas, the incorporation of
Quechua into Spanish is an attempt to reproduce an idealised mestizaje
in language, to give a positive value to a native culture and language per-
ceived as primitive, and to present alternative social and cultural models
based on transculturation, or mutual cultural influence. The bilingualism
of his expression asserts the legitimacy of Quechua culture, celebrating
its survival through the adaptation and absorption of colonial practices
while celebrating the immense plasticity of Spanish, though in the con-
text of rampant modernisation the author becomes increasingly pessimis-
tic about its aesthetic or social possibilities. Arguedas explores a range
of modes of the multilingual, from linguistic mestizaje to translation
to Babelian collapse: Yawar fiesta (1941) [Blood Festival] seeks a form
of linguistic synthesis that will reflect both the reality and the creative
potential of cultural synthesis; Los ríos profundos (1958) [Deep Rivers]
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 9

seeks to find in translation a mode of cultural reconciliation and empow-

erment; while in his final novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo
(1971) [The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below], the attempt to
internalise difference through mistura, or to value the stranger through
translation, mushrooms into a doubling of the stranger under the sign of
the inarticulate.
Jorge Semprún (1923–2011) was a Spanish exile and Buchenwald
survivor whose memoirs and novels were written principally in French,
though his last novel, written in Spanish, is a meditation on Spanish
modernity through the motif of translation. Writing translingually
with frequent recourse to citation, translation emerges throughout
his oeuvre as a courteous and fraternal act, a metaphor for intellec-
tual curiosity and democratic thought, the only ethically acceptable
response to fascist barbarism and totalitarian uses of language, and
the only answer to the confusion of voices at the end of history. The
translated text is the image par excellence of layered contexts, dis-
placed origins, transferable but not wholly assimilable truths, which
Semprún takes from the experience of exile and makes the stuff of
his political and aesthetic vision. This vision is both questioned and
affirmed in his bilingually titled novel L’Algarabie (1981), where, in
the context of ideological breakdown, Semprún extends the layering
and displacement of the bilingual or translated text to the possession
and haunting of time, place and consciousness, as he explores what a
polyphonic and postmodern democracy might look like at the end of
history. Thirty years on, Semprún’s only novel in Spanish, Veinte años
y un día (2003) [Twenty Years and a Day], would revisit L’Algarabie’s
concern with the ideological shaping of modernity in the context of
Francoist Spain in the 1950s, offering translation as a challenge to
both provincial notions of cultural purity and to a superficial, incestu-
ous cosmopolitanism.
Juan Goytisolo (1931–2017) was a Spanish novelist and essay-
ist who spent most of his adult life in voluntary exile, first in Paris
and then in Morocco, a fierce critic of both Western capitalism and
radical Islamism with a profound interest in and love for the Islamic
world. Goytisolo’s ideal city spaces are depicted in multilingual terms,
as emblems of a temporally and geographically fluid, utopian moder-
nity located in the past, the future, elsewhere or nowhere. Yet mul-
tilingualism also encapsulates the inverse of this ideal, namely the
repetitious, consuming spread of Western capitalism in the inane
10 L. Lonsdale

polyglot forms of tourism. It is to this satirical end that multilingual

techniques are often put in the novels, generating a tension in the
conceptual relationship between multilingualism and modernity in
his work, though the utopian possibilities of the multilingual argu-
ably remain uppermost in Goytisolo’s vision of modernity. His pref-
erence for Rabelaisian, Cervantine or immigrant multilingualism
speaks to a layered and complex linguistic model that either precedes
the monolingual paradigm or points to its eventual obsolescence;
and it also points to a conception of modernity defined by mixing
and mutual influence. It is fluidity, hybridity and adaptability that
he seeks in times and spaces (real and virtual) where normative ide-
ologies are suspended, and he finds this in the linguistic pragmatism
of both a medieval lingua franca and cyber language. In Goytisolo’s
prose, multilingualism is barbarous and utopian in almost equal meas-
ure, variously the symbol of a vacuous and sterile capitalist modernity
that must be undone by barbarous means, and the rich palimpsest
of an earlier modernity, in which the polyglot variety of a more bar-
barous era, city or virtual space prefigures, perhaps, an alternative
postmodernity.

Modes of the Multilingual

Before moving on to a more detailed examination of the relation-
ship between multilingualism and modernity, it is worth pausing to
consider what is meant by multilingual writing, for though, as I have
observed, multilingual authorship is highly singular, there are nonethe-
less identifiable modes of multilingual practice. Aside from a height-
ened interest in translation as a node of linguistic and conceptual
possibilities, evident, for example, in the work of Borges and Javier
Marías (both with reference to Cervantes) as well as in many of the
writers studied here, there are four principal ways in which multilin-
gualism can manifest itself in literature, of which translingualism (writ-
ing in a second language) and self-translation are perhaps the most
common and widely studied. In the Anglophone context, renowned
translingual authors include the ‘extraterritorial’ Nabokov and
Beckett, as well as Joseph Conrad; in the Hispanic context, translin-
gual writers include the avant-garde poets Vicente Huidobro (Chile)
and César Moro (Peru), who, like the Spanish Republican exiles
Fernando Arrabal, Agustín Gómez Arcos and Jorge Semprún, wrote
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 11

in French, though for very different reasons.5 Self-translation is a com-

mon phenomenon among writers working in a minority language,
like the Catalan novelist Carme Riera or the Galician poet and novel-
ist Manuel Rivas, who often translate their own work into a majority
language in order to reach a wider audience. In some cases, language
loyalty leads authors working in a minority language to refuse to self-
translate or indeed to be translated, like Gaelic-language poet Biddy
Jenkinson, who hopes that ‘if the princess feels irritated at times that
this small untranslated green pea is disturbing her equanimity, let it be
a reminder to her of the great treasures of our literature that lie, unex-
cavated and unregarded, under her bed’ (quoted in Ní Dhomhnaill
2003, 89).6 Two other ways in which multilingualism can manifest
itself in literature include the attempt by writers to make one lan-
guage ‘speak’ or resound in another, as in the novels of Hemingway
or Arguedas; and the integration of two or more languages simulta-
neously into the body of the text, a technique that particularly arises
in situations of language contact, such as in Spanish-speaking com-
munities in the USA, though it may also reflect the private experience
of bilingualism, or constitute an attempt to innovate with literary lan-
guage, even radically destabilise conventional language. It is these last
two manifestations of the multilingual—the voicing of one language in
another and the combination of languages on the page—that will pri-
marily interest me in this book.
In writing that is recognisably multilingual, two or more languages
are actively and evidently present in the text. If in poetry this technique
is most canonically associated with the modernists T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound, in the novel James Joyce is of course famous for the linguistic
diversity of Ulysses and, especially, Finnegans Wake, first published under
the title Work in Progress in the pages of Eugène Jolas’s multilingual
avant-garde journal transition in the 1930s. Joyce’s influence in Spain
was considerable; in particular, Finnegans Wake inspired Julián Ríos’s
polyglot novel Larva: Babel de una noche de San Juan (1983) [Larva:
Midsummer Night’s Babel], considered by some to be the epitome of

5 Huidobro and Moro made an artistic choice in the 1920s to write in the language of

the avant-garde (which for them was French), whereas for Semprún, Arrabal and Gómez
Arcos it was a choice imposed on them, at least initially, by exile.
6 Ní Dhomhnaill herself ‘allow[s] translations, indeed encourage[s] them, so long as the

books involved have a dual-language format’ (2003, 89).

12 L. Lonsdale

the postmodernist Spanish novel and praised by Carlos Fuentes for its
linguistic creativity, though, for a work published in the 1980s, it is
also oddly anachronistic. If Ríos’s Larva is at one end of a spectrum of
multilingual play, at the other is the mimetic use of a second language
to reflect the speech habits of a particular community or class, a tech-
nique often evident in the nineteenth-century novel, such as in the use
of French by the Russian aristocracy of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
or the use of Galician by the countryfolk of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s nov-
els. Though the ‘demographic verisimilitude’ (Kellman 2000, 16) of this
technique survives into the contemporary novel, it is clear that in the
twentieth century the sustained interaction of two languages becomes a
significant formal and thematic feature of narratives in which multilin-
gualism is a self-conscious rather than a purely mimetic technique.
At its most creative, multilingualism can have a formal and concep-
tual dimension which makes it more than a stylistic attribute, theme, or
representational mode, internalising its own variety and contrariness and
making it the stuff of the work’s engagement with the world, though
it may nonetheless channel Babel into fluid translational outlets. The
most interesting manifestations of literary multilingualism are therefore
at a remove from mimetic realism and from demographic verisimili-
tude in particular; I say this not as a result of any arbitrary preference
for ‘experimental’ modes, but rather because the representation of lan-
guages in parallel is not in itself an innovation in literary language, even
if it contributes to an impression of creativity. If literary language dif-
fers from ordinary language it is because it has the capacity to absorb
and transmit ranges of meaning beyond those we are accustomed to in
the everyday; the writer with a sensitivity to meaning in other languages
is better placed than any other to exploit this inherent attribute of the
literary, as the practice of those writers identified by Steiner—Nabokov,
Borges and Beckett—surely indicates. Nonetheless, an explicit and inno-
vative engagement with the multilingual can also limit meaning with the
raw and sometimes ugly intrusion of the incomprehensible, and it is the
oscillation between these possibilities that gives multilingual writing its
formal and conceptual power.

Multilingualism and Modernism
The capacity of multilingualism to disturb mimetic modes and intro-
duce an unpredictable element of creativity into language is, of course,
suggestive of modernism. If in the 1970s George Steiner claimed the
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 13

extraterritorial writers Nabokov, Borges and Beckett as spokesmen for

the modern age, Fredric Jameson, writing in the 1990s, identified them
instead as anachronistic late modernists who ‘had the misfortune to span
two eras [the modern and the postmodern] and the luck to find a time
capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms’
(1991, 305). The dismissiveness of his judgement aside, Jameson’s iden-
tification of these writers as modernists, albeit late ones, usefully high-
lights one of canonical modernism’s most salient features: its linguistic
or even multilingual turn (Taylor-Batty 2013, 4), its consciousness of the
fraught relationship between language and world that manifested itself in
multilingual experimentalism. The multilingualism of canonical modern-
ism was a diverse phenomenon encompassing a range of attitudes and
approaches to the newness and mobility for which it stood, but it was
in any case a phenomenon that left an indelible mark on twentieth-cen-
tury literature. The indelible nature of this mark of the modern is not
merely a testament to modernism, however, but is more particularly, as
Steiner indicates, a reflection of the on-going nature of modernisation,
in particular the demographic upheaval, postcolonial consciousness and
globalisation that characterised the twentieth century well beyond the
period traditionally associated with modernism.7
If for the Anglophone reader the relationship between multilin-
gualism and modernity is most recognisably filtered through canonical
modernism (the work of Joyce, Eliot and Pound in particular), this is
because it supplies the familiar historical and geographical coordinates
within which we perceive literary responses to modernity. But of course
literary responses to modernity far exceed those traditional coordinates,
not least because modernisation has been, and remains, a protracted
and uneven process manifesting itself at different times and to differing
degrees in different parts of the world as the engines of modernisation
have successively whirred into action. As a result of this unevenness lit-
erary responses to modernity are produced well outside the traditional
historical and geographical bounds of modernism, while engaging

7 In their classic study of European modernism, which excludes Spain, Malcolm Bradbury

and James McFarlane situate the modernist period between 1890 and 1930. Richard
Sheppard believes that by ‘broad consensus’ it can be situated between 1885 and 1935,
though ‘some critics set its starting-date as early as 1870 (so as to include Nietzsche and
Rimbaud), while others, notably North American critics, set its ending in the 1950s (so as
to include the early novels of Vladimir Nabokov, the late poetry of William Carlos Williams,
the abstract Expressionists, and work produced under the impact of émigré European mod-
ernists)’ (1993, 1–2).
14 L. Lonsdale

nonetheless at times with its techniques and concerns and drawing pro-
ductively on its influences, as Latin American writers drew on primitiv-
ism (Williamson 2009, 517), or rejecting them out of hand as elitist and
imperialistic. The fact that multilingualism remains at the heart of literary
responses to modernity outside the conventional bounds of modernism,
and not merely in imitation of it, invites a consideration of the ways in
which multilingualism is put at the service of a critical engagement with
modernity.
Contemporary definitions of both modernity and modernism are,
according to one commentator, ‘hopelessly confused’ (Jean-Jacques
Lecercle quoted in Cunningham 2003, 43). The sociologist Anthony
Giddens describes modernity as an on-going and uneven historical and
social reality that is becoming more ‘radicalised and universalised’ with
time (1990, Chap. 1, loc. 104): more than just a historical phenome-
non of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernity is for
Giddens a sociocultural experience characterised by rupture and discon-
tinuity (1990, Chap. 1, loc. 124). These transformations are for Giddens
‘double-edged’, revealing both an ‘opportunity side’ and a ‘dark side’ to
modernity (Chap. 1, loc. 154). Beyond the ‘high modernity’ (Chap. 5,
loc. 2165) of the present, argues Giddens, ‘we can perceive the contours
of a new and different order, which is “post-modern;” but this is quite
distinct from what is at the moment called by many “post-modernity”’
(Chap. 1, loc. 102). Rather than being characterised by a loss of con-
trol and a loss of content, for Giddens a postmodern world would be
one in which the local and the global were interlaced in complex fashion
(Chap. 6, loc. 2353). In A Singular Modernity (2012), Fredric Jameson
strongly challenges both Giddens’ assertion that we are living in late
modernity, and his view that postmodernity has neither happened nor is
likely to take the form that has so far been envisioned, arguing that this
prevents us from asking ‘the kinds of serious political and economic, sys-
temic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable’
(34). He is particularly scornful of the idea that there can be ‘alternate’
or ‘alternative’ modernities, that ‘there can be a modernity for everybody
which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model.
Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position
it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion
that you can fashion your own modernity differently […]’ (34–35). In
his review of A Singular Modernity David Cunningham dismisses this as
sour grapes, observing that ‘it is essential to the argument of [Jameson’s]
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 15

book that any contemporary discourse of modernity be regarded as sim-

ply a reactionary “revival,” rather than as a legitimate philosophical and
political challenge to the concept of postmodernity which has accom-
panied it from its very first emergence in the intellectual marketplace’
(2003, 42). An example of such a challenge may be found in Richard
Sheppard’s justification of a revitalised interest in modernism in the
1990s, in which he argued that, faced with the consequences of ‘esca-
lating environmental problems, the growing gap between the haves and
the have-nots, the boredom, violence and alienation which haunt our
advanced societies, [and] the difficulties involved in making relationships
within a system which is inherently hostile to Gemeinschaften [communi-
ties], the anxiety of modernism may well be a more appropriate response
to that turn than postmodernism’s ludic acceptance’ (1993, 42).
In the context of both Spain and Latin America it has long been
observed that a notion of postmodernity, as understood in the
Anglophone context, is problematic when modernity itself arrived later
and more unevenly than it did in the major industrialised nations. The
uneven pace and spread of modernity is illustrated in relation to Latin
America by Santiago Castro-Gómez, who notes that ‘a diferencia de
lo acaecido en Europa, la consolidación de la modernidad en América
Latina no precede al cine, la radio y la televisión, sino que se debe precisa-
mente a ellos’ [‘unlike what happened in Europe, the consolidation of
cultural modernity in Latin America did not precede cinema, radio and
television, but rather owes itself precisely to them’] (quoted in Castillo
2005, loc. 898). In this context Giddens’ model of an on-going moder-
nity is useful to a consideration of the way literary responses to moder-
nity manifest themselves over an extended period of time, and not just in
the period traditionally associated with modernism. Nonetheless, I find
Jameson’s distinctions between the modernist and postmodernist to be
useful working concepts, not least because they mark an important evo-
lution from one type of consciousness (that still remembers what came
before) to another (that doesn’t). The very fact that none of the authors
in this study manifests the amnesia of the latter mode, that indeed a pre-
occupation with memory and historical depth is common to them all, is
in itself helpful in identifying their relationship to modernity. Particularly
useful is the tripartite and essentially moveable structure of relation-
ships that Jameson describes between modernisation as economic pro-
cess, modernity as sociocultural experience, and modernism as cultural
expression (1991, 310), keeping the word in structured relationship to
16 L. Lonsdale

the processes and experiences to which it bears witness, while allowing

for historical and geographical variety in their manifestation.
The limitations of the conventional coordinates of modernism have
been widely acknowledged in the transnational turn of modernist stud-
ies, which has expanded the geographical and historical boundaries of
modernism in ways that are both necessary and problematic. Hispanists,
for example, have long bemoaned the almost complete absence of
Spanish-speaking authors in general studies of modernism—notably
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s textbook study Modernism:
A Guide to European Literature, which explicitly excludes both Iberia
and, by extension, Latin America (1991, 14) (see Bretz 2001, 25–6)—
at the same time as they have warned against the wholesale adoption
of imported terms into critical discourse. Noting the very considerable
distinction between Hispanic modernismo and Anglophone Modernism,
to which we might add Catalan modernisme as another variation, Carlos
Blanco Aguinaga faces the dilemma of an unattractive choice:

We may stubbornly insist on our two meanings of ‘modernismo’ or, like

truly neocolonized little lambs we can accept the—for us—new meaning
of modernism. If we choose the first option one of the most significant
moments of our modern culture will, at best, be relegated to a brief foot-
note about some irrelevant part of the border while the rest of the world
moves on. Accepting the second option will, perhaps, permit us to speak
with those who study Eliot, or Pound, or Kafka, but will make it difficult,
if not impossible, to speak coherently among ourselves about Rubén Darío
or Valle-Inclán. (1999, 6)

In response to this choice, which is also that of other literatures periph-

eral to the ‘Greenwich meridian’ of culture (Casanova 2007, 87), it has
become common practice to use modernism with a small ‘m’ to distin-
guish it from, but also to include, the canon of high Modernism. This is
useful insofar as it lends itself to the structure of relationships Jameson
describes between modernisation, modernity and modernism, recog-
nising that the impact of the modernising process causes shockwaves in
the literary representation of reality that continue to resound through-
out the twentieth century and beyond. However, extending the scope
of modernism to encompass all literary responses to an on-going moder-
nity risks emptying the word of historical content, eliding key reference
points in literary and cultural history, and blurring the word’s critical
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 17

usage: for this reason I talk more about literary responses to moder-
nity than about modernism itself, allowing the pace of change and the
historical telescoping of processes and experiences to render distinc-
tions between the realist, modernist and postmodernist productively
problematic.

Cosmopolitanism, Hybridity, Barbarism

In spite of the transnational turn in literary and especially modern-
ist studies, multilingualism has only recently begun to gain traction as
an area of sustained interest in literary study, and is still largely studied
within national contexts. But, as Jahan Ramazani argues with respect to
transnational poetry, ‘although creolization, hybridization, and the like
are often regarded as exotic or multicultural sideshows to literary histo-
ries of formal advancement or the growth of discrete national poetries,
these cross-cultural dynamics are arguably among the engines of modern
and contemporary poetic development and innovation’ (2009, 2–3). If
cross-cultural dynamics are among the engines of modern literary devel-
opment, multilingualism is not just a consequence of those dynamics but
is rather emblematic of the mixing effects they produce. Yet like mod-
ernism itself, multilingual literary practices are both varied and ambiva-
lent in their relationship to modernity. On the one hand, multilingualism
can be a triumphant form of newness and resistance to conventional
speech; on the other, it can express the unreconciled tensions of colo-
nised or globalised speech. A tension between the deracinated and the
organic, the ‘artificial’ and the ‘natural’, was already strongly present in
canonical modernism’s linguistic turn, as Taylor-Batty illustrates (2013,
11); and while the conceptual framing of this tension may have changed,
it has undoubtedly been absorbed into postmodernist and postcolonial
formulations, especially the ubiquitous notion of hybridity. It therefore
becomes important to conceive multilingualism in broader relation to
modernity, to view it not only in literary-historical terms as a modern-
ist practice, but to think of it figuratively as a literary embodiment of
modernity. But how to describe this figurative embodiment?
Two terms in particular offer descriptive and normative param-
eters within which to conceive it: cosmopolitanism on the one hand,
and hybridity on the other, associated respectively with modernism and
postcolonialism, the two most prominent areas of critical enquiry to
date where literary multilingualism is concerned. Cosmopolitanism,
18 L. Lonsdale

understood as ‘a worldview according to which subjects understand

themselves as citizens of the world’, as an ‘ethos of worldliness’ and ‘a
belief in human unity’ (Kurasawa 2011, 279), may be associated norma-
tively with ‘struggles for global justice and the making of a new world
order’ (Rovisco and Nowicka 2011, 2), though it has also come under
scrutiny for its pretensions to ‘planetary humanism’ and its ‘epistemologi-
cal privilege’ (Walkowitz 2006, 2). Moreover, as Fuyuki Kurasawa writes,
‘cosmopolitan worldliness can […] be a kind of thin multiculturalism,
limited to facile or domesticated, consumerist modes of interaction with
unfamiliar socio-cultural expressions (food, music, etc.) and never extend-
ing beyond a liberal concern for tolerance’ (2011, 281). For its part, the
notion of hybridity, which gained such currency during the 1990s in par-
ticular, attempted to provide a cultural model based on a challenge to the
colonial formulation of cultural difference, operating ‘according to the
form of logic that Derrida isolates in the term “brisure,” a breaking and
joining at the same time, in the same place: difference and sameness in an
apparently impossible simultaneity’ (Young 2006, 158). With its emphasis
on mixing and simultaneity it might well function as a model for multi-
lingual practice, though, as its chief proponent Homi Bhabha has himself
acknowledged, as a cultural model hybridity has itself been ‘recruited into
the service of global homogeneity’, as technological connectivity is con-
fused with intercultural dialogue (2015, xi).
The fact that multilingualism and hybridity supply ideal metaphors
for one another has been taken up by US scholars keen to give a positive
and progressive value to the USA’s linguistic diversity, especially given
the exponential growth of Spanish. The book jacket of Steven Kellman’s
Translingual Imagination (2000) reads, ‘Monolingualism is a form of
oppression. Join the future: read this book’, while in her Bilingual Games
Doris Sommer asserts that ‘now mono is a malady, an adolescent condition
for times that have outgrown the one-to-one identity between language
and people’ (2003, 4). But others have sounded a note of caution about
this celebration of multilingualism as a metaphor for plural democracy: as
the Cuban-American academic and bilingual poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat
writes, ‘Although bilingualists are often playful, bilingualism is not a game.
[…] the bilingual muse is a melancholy muse; it divides and does not con-
quer’ (2003, 6). Multilingualism may be an ideal metaphor for the hybrid
(and vice versa), but it may also be a fiction of plurality attempting to com-
pensate for alienation: as Derrida memorably put it in his Le Monolinguisme
de l’autre (1996) [Monolingualism of the Other], ‘je n’ai qu’une langue;
 MULTILINGUALISM, ‘POÉTIQUE IMPRÉVISIBLE DE LA MODERNITÉ’ 19

ce n’est pas la mienne’ [‘I have only one language, and it isn’t mine’].
Thinned out and absorbed into globalised networks, and yet increasingly
challenged by the resurgent spectre of populist nationalism in the West,
cosmopolitanism and hybridity retain a normative value in seeking, at their
most critical and intelligent, to counter xenophobia; and yet as descriptive
terms for linguistic and cultural encounter, their utopianism runs the risk of
masking the fraughtness of those encounters where they are fraught, and
the privilege of those encounters where they are privileged.
Given these concerns and limitations, it is perhaps more productive
to describe the relationship between multilingualism and modernity not
prescriptively, in relation to a set of normative ideals, but thematically or
metonymically, establishing a network of associations that allows for a
more imaginative formulation of this relationship. The theme that sup-
plies such a network of associations in this book is barbarism, a word that
does not attempt to describe, much less prescribe, the character of liter-
ary multilingualism itself, but which acts rather as a semantic hub for a
complex of ideas around multilingualism in modernity.
For the ancient Greeks, the barbarian was the uncivilised foreigner or
outsider, the word barbaros onomatopoeically conveying the stuttering
or repetitive sound of incomprehensible foreign speech (ba-ba, bla-bla,
bara-bara). The most common meanings of barbarism gravitate around
violence and the primitive, while in relation to language barbarism
denotes an imported foreign element or error in morphology, reinforcing
the association of foreignness with intrusion and disruption, the incom-
prehensible and inarticulate. The association of barbarism with violence
and the primitive sets it in apparently natural opposition to civilisation,8

8 As Brett Nielson explains, the universal history of Enlightenment thought distinguished

between primitivism, barbarism and civilisation as three stages of historical social develop-
ment: primitive societies hunt and gather; barbaric societies have hierarchical institutions
through which they dominate and subordinate; and civilised societies have civil institutions
that guarantee, at least in principle, social justice and personal liberty. In this scheme barba-
rism belongs with primitivism to the extent that both are considered to be pre-modern, to
precede civilisation, but it belongs with civilisation in that it operates through state institu-
tions (1999, 79–80). The historical constitution of the Enlightenment scheme—the notion
that primitivism, barbarism and civilisation succeed one another temporally—collapsed in
the Western imagination ‘after Auschwitz’, as Adorno so memorably stated (1981, 34;
1973, 362–363); the traditional three-part dynamic of primitivism, barbarism and civilisa-
tion is therefore reformulated in modernity as spatial as well as temporal, the three terms
co-existing rather than supplanting one another in neat temporal order.
Another random document with
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 fact that these five officials always showed considerable
ability in handling diplomatic questions, and, as a mark of our
favour, we therefore restore to them their original rank.”

The Death of Chao Shu-ch’iao.—This Grand Councillor, one of the

Empress’s favourite Ministers, whom to the last she endeavoured to
protect from execution, was originally sentenced only to
imprisonment for life. He was confined in the prison of the Provincial
Judge at Hsi-an, where his family were allowed to visit him. On the
day before the issue of the Decree which sentenced him to
imprisonment, the Old Buddha had said, at a meeting of the Grand
Council, “I do not really believe that Chao sympathised in the very
least with the Boxers; the error that he made lay in under-estimating
the seriousness of the movement.” This was reported to Chao, who
was naturally much elated, and believed that his life would surely be
spared. A few days later, however, it was freely rumoured that the
foreign Powers were insisting upon his decapitation, and the news
created the greatest excitement throughout the city, which was his
native place. Some three hundred of the chief men of the city having
drawn up a monster petition, proceeded with it to the office of the
Grand Council, and begged, in the name of the whole community,
that his life be spared. The Grand Councillors were afraid to take the
petition to Her Majesty, but, in reply to the deputation, the President
of the Board of Punishments (who was related to Chao) declared
that his execution would be an act of monstrous injustice.
On the first day of the New Year, these rumours took more definite
shape, and on that day Her Majesty’s audience with the Grand
Council lasted from six to eleven in the morning; but even then no
decision had been come to in regard to complying with the demand
for Chao’s execution. Throughout the neighbourhood of the Drum
Tower the streets were packed with a huge crowd, who threatened
that they would certainly rescue Chao if he were taken out for
execution. So great was the clamour that the Grand Council feared a
riot, and they determined, therefore, to beg Her Majesty to permit
Chao to commit suicide. This was done, and Tzŭ Hsi reluctantly
agreeing, issued the Decree at one o’clock on the following morning,
which fixed the hour for reporting his death to Her Majesty at five
o’clock in the afternoon of the same day. Governor Ts’en was
ordered to proceed to the prison, and read the Decree to Chao,
which he did in due form. After hearing it in silence to the end, Chao
asked: “Will there be no further Decree?” “No,” said Ts’en. “Surely,
there must be,” said Chao. At this his wife, intervening, said, “There
is no hope; let us die together!” She then gave him poison, of which
he took a little, but up till 3 p.m. it appeared to have had no effect
whatsoever, for he seemed most vigorous, and discussed at great
length with his family the arrangements to be made for his funeral.
He was much exercised in mind at the effect which his death would
have upon the health of his aged mother. All day long his room was
crowded by friends and colleagues; the Governor had endeavoured
at first to prevent their coming, but had eventually yielded, so that the
number of those present was very large. Chao, addressing them,
said: “I have been brought to this pass entirely by the fault of Kang
Yi.” The Governor, observing that his voice sounded clear and firm,
and that, at this hour, there were no signs of impending death about
him, ordered one of the attendants to give him some opium to
swallow. At 5 o’clock, the opium having apparently taken no effect,
the attendants were ordered to give him a liberal dose of arsenic,
after which he rolled over on to the ground, and lay there, groaning
and beating his breast with his hands. Later, complaining of extreme
pain, he asked that friction might be applied to his chest, but so
strong was his constitution, and so determined his will, that even at
11 o’clock it was evident that there was still no little life left in him.
The Governor was much disturbed and distressed, being well aware
that the Old Buddha would require some adequate explanation of
this long delay in the execution of her orders. “I was to report his
death at 5 o’clock,” said he, “the man will not die: what is to be
done?” The attendants suggested that he should screw up some
pieces of thick paper, dip them in strong spirit, and with them close
the breathing passages; by this means he would be speedily
suffocated. Ts’en approved of the suggestion, and after five wads of
paper had been inserted, death ensued. His wife, weeping bitterly,
thereupon committed suicide. To the end, Chao could not believe
that the Empress Dowager would allow his death, and for this reason
it is probable that he purposely took an insufficient dose of opium in
order to gain time for a reprieve.
The Death of Prince Chuang.—Prince Chuang, with his concubine
and son, went to Tu Chou, in South Shansi, there to await the
decision of the Empress Dowager as to his fate. He lodged in an
official house of entertainment. When Ko Pao-hua, the Imperial
Commissioner, brought thither the Decree commanding him to
commit suicide, it was early in the morning; nevertheless, upon his
arrival, crackers were fired, in accordance with etiquette, to greet
him. The noise greatly irritated Prince Chuang, who turned savagely
upon the attendants, and asked what they meant by making such a
noise at such an hour. “An Imperial Commissioner has arrived,” they
said. “Has he come about me?” asked the Prince. “No,” they replied,
“he is merely passing through on business.” When the Imperial
Commissioner was ushered in, the Prince began to ply him with
questions about the Court, to which Ko briefly replied. After talking
for a little while Ko went off to inspect the premises, at the back of
which he found an old temple, in which he selected an unoccupied
room to be the scene of Prince Chuang’s suicide. From a beam in
the roof he hung a silken cord, and, after fastening it securely, he
directed the Prefect and the District Magistrate to send some
soldiers to keep order. Having made these preparations he returned
to the presence of the Prince, and informing him that he had an
Imperial Decree to read to him, ordered him to go down on his knees
to hear it. The Prince, drawing himself up to his full height, said, “Is it
my head that you want?” The Imperial Commissioner made no direct
reply, but proceeded to read the Decree to the Prince, who
reverently knelt.[116] When the Commissioner had finished, “So it is
suicide,” said the Prince, “I always expected they would not be
content with anything less than my life. I greatly fear that even our
Old Buddha will not be allowed to last much longer.” He next asked
the Imperial Commissioner to be permitted to bid farewell to his
family, which was allowed him. At this moment, his concubine and
his son, having learned of the Imperial Commissioner’s business,
entered the room. The Prince, addressing his son, said:
—“Remember that it is your duty to do everything in your power for
your country; at all costs, these foreigners must not be allowed to
possess themselves of the glorious Empire won for us by our
ancestors.”[117] His son, bitterly weeping, could not reply, while his
concubine passed from frantic grief to a swoon. The Prince,
unmoved, asked:—“Where is the death chamber?” The Imperial
Commissioner replied:—“Will your Highness please to come to the
empty room at the back of the house.” When the Prince, following
him, saw the silken cord hanging from the beam, he turned and said:
—“Your Excellency has indeed made most admirable and complete
arrangements.” With these words he passed the cord around his
neck, and in a very few minutes life was extinct.
The Death of Ying Nien.—Ying Nien was an arrant coward. On the
day of the issue of the first Decree, ordering his imprisonment at Hsi-
an, his family deserted him, and he remained all through the night,
weeping, in great distress of mind. To his attendants he complained
bitterly that Prince Ch’ing had not intervened to protect him. The next
day was the New Year Festival, and as everybody was busy with
preparations for the occasion, little heed was paid to him, and he
spent the day weeping. Towards midnight his crying suddenly
ceased, and on the following morning he was found by his servant,
prone upon the ground, his face covered with mud, quite dead. He
had choked himself by swallowing mud, but as the Decree ordering
him to commit suicide had not actually been issued, the fact of his
death was suppressed for forty-eight hours, after which Governor
Ts’en was informed, and he reported it to the Old Buddha.
The Decapitation of Yü Hsien.—When the Decree, commanding
his decapitation, reached Yü Hsien, he had already started under
escort for his place of banishment, but he was a sick man and could
only totter weakly along. On learning the news, he appeared as one
dazed, a very different man indeed from that fierce Governor of
Shansi, who had displayed such bloodthirsty activity. On the day
before his death he was very seriously ill, and when the time came,
he was so weak that he had to be supported to the execution
ground. On the previous day the leading citizens of Lan-chou fu
expressed their desire to offer him a valedictory banquet, but he
declined the honour with thanks, expressing his wish to spend his
last day in quietude. He wrote a pair of scrolls as an expression of
his gratitude for the courtesy thus shown to him, and the elders of
the city decided and informed him that the execution ground would
be decorated with red cloth, as for a festival, in his honour. Towards
evening, notices were placarded in the principal streets, calling on
the people to insist upon his being reprieved, but Yü Hsien knew that
this was quite useless. He composed a statement of his actions in
the form of an official proclamation, maintaining stoutly that his death
was to be regarded as a glorious and patriotic end, and bidding the
people on no account to interfere with the execution of his sentence.
Finally he wrote, with his own hand, a pair of valedictory scrolls, the
text of which was widely quoted after his death all over China. The
first may be translated as follows:—

“The Minister dies for his Sovereign; wives and concubines

die for their lord. Who shall say that this is unseemly? It is sad
that my aged mother is ninety years of age, and my little
daughter only seven. Who shall protect them in their old age
and tender youth? How shall that filial piety be fulfilled which a
man owes to his parent? The Sovereign commanded, and the
Minister obeyed. I slew others; now, in my turn, am I slain.
Why should I regret it? Only one cause for shame have I—
that I have served my Sovereign all these years, and have
held high rank in three provinces, without displaying merit
more conspicuous than a grain of sand in the desert or a drop
of water in the ocean. Alas, that I should thus unworthily
requite the Imperial bounty.”

And the second reads:—

“The Minister has by his guilt incurred the sentence of

decapitation. At this moment there is no thought in my mind
except the hope that my death may be as glorious as my life
has been honest.[118] I would far rather die than pine away
the rest of my life in degrading imprisonment. I have ill-
requited Her Majesty’s kindness. Who shall now relieve her
 grief? I sincerely hope that you, the Statesmen who surround
the Throne, may yet find means to restore our fallen fortunes,
and that you will honourably fulfil your bounden duty in
ministering to the distress of their Imperial Majesties.”

On the following day, at one o’clock of the afternoon, Yü Hsien’s

head was severed from his body, in the presence of a great crowd,
which greeted his end with sounds of lamentation.
The Death of Ch’i Hsiu.—Ch’i Hsin was executed, together with
Hsü Ching-yu, outside the wall of the Tartar city, in Peking, early one
morning in February, 1901, the execution being witnessed by more
than one European. When informed that he was to die, Ch’i Hsiu’s
only question was: “By whose commands?” and when told that a
Decree had come from Hsi-an fu, he said, “It is by the will of the
Empress Dowager; I die happy then, so long as it is not by order of
the foreigners.” This Grand Councillor had been arrested several
months before by the Japanese, and Prince Ch’ing had been able to
obtain his release on the ground that his aged mother was very ill;
but when she subsequently died, he strongly advised Ch’i Hsiu “to
make his filial piety coincide with his loyalty by committing suicide.”
Coming from Prince Ch’ing, the suggestion was one hardly to be
misunderstood, but Ch’i Hsiu failed to act upon it, thereby incurring a
certain amount of criticism.
 XXII
THE OLD BUDDHA PENITENT

When the wrath of the Powers had been appeased by the death
and banishment of the leading Boxers, and when the Empress
Dowager had come to realise that her future policy must be one of
conciliation and reform, she proceeded first of all to adjust the annals
of her reign for the benefit of posterity, in the following remarkable
Edict (13th February, 1901):—

“In the summer of last year, the Boxers, after bringing about
a state of war, took possession of our Capital and dominated
the very Throne itself. The Decrees issued at that time were
the work of wicked Princes and Ministers of State, who, taking
advantage of the chaotic condition of affairs, did not hesitate
to issue documents under the Imperial seal, which were quite
contrary to our wishes. We have on more than one previous
occasion hinted indirectly at the extraordinary difficulty of the
position in which we were placed, and which left us no
alternative but to act as we did. Our officials and subjects
should have no difficulty in reading between the lines and
appreciating our meaning.
“We have now punished all the guilty, and we hereby order
that the Grand Secretariat shall submit for our perusal all
Decrees issued between the 24th day of the 5th moon and
the 20th day of the 7th moon (20th June to 14th August), so
that all spurious or illegal documents may be withdrawn and
cancelled. Thus shall historical accuracy be attained and our
Imperial utterances receive the respect to which they are
properly entitled.”
 Having thus secured the respect of posterity, Tzŭ Hsi proceeded to
make the “amende honorable,” (with due regard to the Imperial
“face,”) for so many of her sins as she was prepared to admit. In
another Decree, in the name of the Emperor, which gives a
Munchausen account of the Throne’s part and lot in the crisis of
1900, and a pathetic description of her own and the Emperor’s
sufferings during the flight, she makes solemn confession of error
and promise of reform. As an example of the manner in which history
is made in China, the Edict is of permanent interest and value.

“A Penitential Decree
“26th day, 12th moon of Kuang-Hsü’s 26th year (Feb. 13th,
1901).
“Last summer the Boxers sowed the seeds of rebellion,
which led to our being involved in a war with friendly Powers.
Thereafter, our Capital being thrown into a state of great
disorder, we escorted the Empress Dowager, our mother, on a
progress of inspection throughout the Western Provinces. To
Prince Ch’ing and to the Grand Secretary Li Hung-chang we
entrusted full powers, and bade them negotiate with the
foreign Ministers for the cessation of hostilities and a Treaty of
peace. These Plenipotentiaries having lately telegraphed to
us the twelve principal clauses of the proposed protocol, we
have consented thereto, but at the same time have instructed
them carefully to scrutinise their various provisions in the light
of China’s ability to fulfil them.
“It having been accorded to us to retrieve our disastrous
mistakes, we are in duty bound to promulgate this Penitential
Decree, and to let every one of our subjects know how vast
and harassing were the perplexities with which the Throne
has been beset.
“There are ignorant persons who believe that the recent
crisis was partly caused by our government’s support of the
Boxers; they must have overlooked our reiterated Decrees of
the 5th and 6th moons, that the Boxers should be
exterminated, and the Christians protected. Unfortunately
these rebels and their evil associates placed us in a position
from which it was impossible to escape; we exhausted every
possible effort of strong remonstrance, appalled at the
impending ruin of our Empire. Events moved swiftly until, on
the 21st of the 7th moon, our Capital fell; on that day, both
Her Majesty the Empress Dowager and ourselves decided to
commit suicide in the presence of the tutelary deities of our
Dynasty and the gods of the soil, thus making atonement and
offering propitiation to the spirits of our nine Imperial
ancestors. But, at the critical moment of dire lamentation and
confusion, we were seized by our Princes and Ministers, and
forcibly led away from that place where bullets fell like rain,
and where the enemies’ guns gathered thick as forest trees.
Hastily, and with souls perturbed, we started on our Western
tour. Were not all these disasters caused by the Boxers? The
imminent danger of her sacred Majesty, the overwhelming
ruin of our ancestors’ inheritance, our prosperous Capital
turned to a howling wilderness, its ravines filled with the dead
bodies of our greatest men: how can it possibly be said that
the Throne could protect the rebels who brought such
disasters upon us?
“There was, however, an explicable cause for the Boxer
movement and for its disastrous results.” (The Decree
proceeds here to ascribe blame to local Magistrates for not
administering even justice between Christians and non-
Christians, and thus producing a state of discontent and
unrest, which afforded opportunities to the Boxers. The latter
received a further impetus by reason of the inefficiency of the
Imperial troops sent to quell the first rising. Finally, references
are made to the evil advice and ignorance of the highly placed
clansmen and Ministers of State who favoured the Boxer
cause. This Decree is in fact a complete justification of the
views expressed in the three memorials by Yüan Ch’ang and
Hsü Ching-ch’eng, for which these patriotic officials laid down
their lives. After describing the entry of the Boxers into
Peking, and lamenting the position of the Throne as
resembling “a tail which is too big to wag,” the Decree
proceeds):—“Nevertheless, and while the Legations were
being besieged, we repeatedly directed our Ministers of the
Tsungli Yamên to put a stop to hostilities, and at the same
time to keep up communication with the foreign Ministers,
assuring them of our kindly and sympathetic regard. This
latter order, however, was not carried out because of the
continuous artillery and rifle fire between the besiegers and
the besieged, and it was impossible for us, under such
conditions, to insist upon its execution. Supposing, by some
horrible fatality, the Legations had actually fallen, how could
China have hoped to preserve her integrity? To the Throne’s
strenuous efforts is really due the avoidance of such a
dreadful catastrophe, and the gifts of wine, fruit and water-
melons to the besieged Legations, were an indication of Her
Majesty’s benevolent intentions. It was but natural and right
that the friendly Powers should appreciate these our feelings,
and the fact that at such a crisis they have respected the
integrity of our Empire as a Sovereign State, goes to prove
that the Allies attribute no longer any blame to the Throne.
This, however, only adds to our wrath at the ignorance and
violence of our offending subjects; when we look back upon
the past, we are filled with shame and indignation. We are
convinced that, in these peace negotiations, the foreign
Powers will not attempt to extract from us more than we are
able to concede. We have ordered Prince Ch’ing and Li
Hung-chang, negotiating this Treaty, to continue patiently in
friendly discussion, maintaining all questions of vital principle,
while recognising the special circumstances which attach to
any given case. Foreign Powers are lovers of justice, and
they are bound to consider what China is capable of doing if
they wish to see this negotiation brought to a successful
conclusion. To this end we expect that our Plenipotentiaries
will display their virtue of patriotism to the very best of their
ability.
“At the time of the terror in Peking, our provincial authorities
were ordered to keep the peace in their respective provinces,
and to take no part in provoking hostilities. If the Southern and
Eastern parts of our Empire enjoyed full protection from
disorders, the fact was solely due to our Decrees, which
insisted upon the rigid maintenance of peace. The trade of
foreign Powers was in no way injured, our Viceroys and
Governors being able to preserve normal conditions in those
parts of our Empire. As regards the Southern provinces,
however, which are always talking loudly of strengthening
their defences, it cannot be gainsaid that, upon the outbreak
of any trouble, they fall into a state of hopeless confusion.
Caring nothing for the innumerable difficulties which beset our
Throne, they stand idly by, contenting themselves with
delivering oracular opinions and catch-words, and they even
go so far as to reproach their Sovereign, the father of his
people. We would have them bear in mind that when our
Imperial chariot departed in haste from the Forbidden City, the
moaning of the wind and the cry of the heron overhead
seemed to our startled ears as the tramp of an advancing
enemy. As we fled through Ch’ang-ping chou northward to
Hsüan-hua, we personally attended on the wants of the
Empress Dowager. We were both clad in the meanest of
garments, and to relieve our hunger we were scarcely able to
obtain a dish of beans or porridge. Few of our poorest
subjects have suffered greater hardships of cold and hunger
than befell us in this pitiful plight. We wonder whether those
who call themselves our faithful Ministers and servants have
ever taken real thought of their bounden duty towards their
afflicted and outraged Sovereigns?
“To sum up the matter in a word, is it not the case that,
when either our Statesmen or our people are guilty of any
offence, it is upon our Imperial persons that the blame must
fall? In recalling this fact to mind, we do not desire to rake up
bygone offences, but rather because it is our duty to warn our
subjects against their repetition. For the past twenty years,
whenever difficulties have arisen with foreign nations, it has
been our duty to issue solemn warnings and reproofs. But the
saying which is in common use, that we ‘sleep on brushwood
and taste gall’ has, by lapse of time, become almost
meaningless; when we talk of putting our house in order, and
reforming our finances, the words have no real significance.
The time of danger once over, favouritism and the neglect of
public business go on as of old; as of old, money purchases
rank, and the Throne continues to be persistently misled. Let
our officials ask themselves in the silence of the night
watches whether, even had there been no Boxer rebellion,
China could possibly have become a great Power? Even
before these disasters occurred there was great difficulty in
maintaining our position as a nation, and now, after this awful
visitation, it must be obvious to the dullest amongst us that
our weakness and poverty have been greatly increased. To
our Ministers of State, who have received high favour from
the Throne, we would say that, at this time of our nation’s
history, it is essential to display new qualities of integrity and
patriotism. Taxation should now be re-arranged in such a
manner as to enable us to repay the foreign indemnities,
while bearing in mind the poverty of the lower classes of the
people. In the selection of officials, good character should be
considered the first essential, and men of talent should be
encouraged to the utmost.
“The whole duty of a Minister of State may be summed up
in two words: to abolish corrupt tendencies, and to put off the
abuses of former days. Justice and energy should be the
principles guiding towards economical and military efficiency;
on this the spirit of the nation and its future depend as upon
its very life blood.
“For nearly thirty years our mother, the Empress Dowager,
has laboured without ceasing to instruct us and train us in the
right way, and now, at one blow, all the results of her labour
are brought to nought. We cannot but remember the
abomination of desecration which has overthrown our
ancestral shrines and the temples of our gods. Looking to the
North, we think upon our Capital ruined and profaned, upon
the thousands of our highest officials whose families have lost
 their all, of the millions of our subjects whose lives and
property have been sacrificed in this cataclysm. We can never
cease to reproach ourselves: how then should we reproach
others? Our object in issuing this solemn warning is to show
that the prosperity or the ruin of a State depends solely upon
the energy or apathy of its rulers and people, and that the
weakness of an Empire is the direct result of rottenness in its
administration. We desire to reiterate our commands that
friendly relations with foreign Powers are to be encouraged,
that at the same time our defences are to be strengthened,
that freedom of speech and the employment of trustworthy
servants are to be encouraged. We expect obedience to
these commands, and sincere patriotism from our subjects.
Earnestly the Empress Dowager and ourselves pray that it
may be brought home to our Ministers of State, that only out
of suffering is wisdom developed, and that a sense of duty
insists upon unceasing effort. Let this Decree be made known
throughout the entire Empire.”

This Edict was issued in February, coincidently with Her Majesty’s

acceptance of the conditions imposed by the Powers in the peace
negotiations at Peking. From that date until, in June, the terms of the
Protocol were definitely settled by the plenipotentiaries, her attitude
continued to be one of nervous apprehension, while the discomfort
of life at Hsi-an, as well as the advice repeatedly given her by Jung
Lu and the provincial Viceroys, combined to make her look forward
with impatience to the day when she might set out for her capital.
There remained only one source of difficulty, namely, the presence
of Prince Tuan’s son, the Heir Apparent, at her Court. Tzŭ Hsi was
well aware that she could hardly look for cordial relations with the
representatives of the Powers at Peking, or for sympathy abroad, so
long as this son of the Boxer chief remained heir to the Throne. It
would clearly be impossible, in the event of his becoming Emperor,
for him to consent to his father remaining under sentence of
banishment, and equally impossible to expect the Powers to consent
to Prince Tuan’s rehabilitation and return. Yet the youth had been
duly and solemnly appointed to succeed to the Throne, a thing not
lightly to be set aside. Once again the Old Buddha showed that the
sacred laws of succession were less than a strong woman’s will.
Politics apart, it was common knowledge that Tzŭ Hsi had for
some time repented of her choice of Prince Tuan’s ill-mannered,
uncouth son as Heir Apparent. More than once had she been
brought to shame by his wild, and sometimes disgraceful, conduct.
Even in her presence, the lad paid little heed to the formalities of
Court etiquette, and none at all to the dignity of his own rank and
future position. Tzŭ Hsi was therefore probably not sorry of the
excuse for deposing him from that high estate. In the Decree
cancelling his title to the Throne, she observed that his father, Prince
Tuan, had brought the Empire to the verge of ruin, and that the guilt
which he had thus incurred towards his august ancestors could
never be wiped out. In order to save the “face” of the Heir Apparent
and her own, in a difficult position, the Edict describes him as being
fully convinced of the impossibility of his succeeding to the Throne
under existing conditions, and that he himself had therefore
petitioned Her Majesty to cancel her previous decision. In granting
this request and directing him to remove himself forthwith from the
Palace precincts, the Empress conferred upon him the rank of an
Imperial Duke of the lowest grade, excusing him at the same time
from performance of any official duties in that capacity. By this
decision she meant to mark the contempt into which the Heir
Apparent had fallen, for the rank thus granted him was a low one,
and, without any official duties or salary, he was condemned to a life
of poverty and obscurity. This fallen Heir to the Dragon Throne is a
well-known figure to-day in the lowest haunts of the Chinese City at
Peking: a drunkard and disreputable character, living the life of a
gambler, notorious only as a swashbuckler of romantic past and
picturesque type,—one who, but for adverse fate and the accursed
foreigner, would have been Emperor of China at this moment.
Having deposed him, the Empress let it be known that the
selection of an heir to the disconsolate shade of T’ung-Chih would
be postponed “until a suitable candidate should be found,” an
intimation generally understood to mean that the vital question of
providing an heir in legitimate and proper succession to the Throne
could not well be determined until China’s foreign relations, as well
as her internal affairs, had been placed upon a basis of greater
security. It is curious to note how, in all such utterances, it appears to
have been tacitly understood that the Emperor Kuang Hsü was a
“bad life.”
Thus, in exile, the Old Buddha wore philosophically the white
sheet of penance and burned the candle of expiation, preparatory to
re-entering anon upon a new lease of power in that Peking where, as
she well knew, the memory of the foreigner is short and his patience
long. In June, 1901, the terms of peace were settled; on the 7th
September the Peace Protocol was solemnly signed by the
representatives of all the Powers, that “monument of collective
inefficiency” which was to sow the seeds of trouble to last for many
years to come. At Hsi-an “in the profound seclusion of the Palace”
she knew remorse, not unstimulated by fear; on the return journey to
her capital (from 20th October, 1901, to 6th January, 1902), while
preparing her arts and graces to captivate the barbarian, she was
still a victim to doubt and apprehension. Meanwhile, at Peking, the
mandarin world, reassured by the attitude of the peace negotiators
and their terms, was fast shedding its garments of fear and
peacocking as of yore, in renewed assurance of its own indisputable
superiority. Evidence of this spirit was to be met with on all sides,
gradually coming to its fine flower in the subsequent negotiations for
the revision of the commercial Treaties, and bringing home once
more, to those who study these things, the unalterable truth of the
discovery made years ago by one of the earliest British
representatives in China, namely, that “this people yields nothing to
reason and everything to fear.”
One of the most remarkable instances of this revival of the
mandarin’s traditional arrogance of superiority occurred, significantly
enough, in connection with the penitential mission of the Emperor’s
brother, Prince Ch’un (now Regent) to Berlin, an episode which
threatened for a moment to lead to a rupture between Germany and
China. By Article 1 of the Peace Protocol, Prince Ch’un had been
specially designated for this mission to convey in person to the
German Emperor the regrets of the Chinese Government for the
murder of Baron von Ketteler. He left Peking for the purpose on the
12th July, 1901, with definite instructions as to the manner in which
the Chinese Government’s regrets were to be expressed. The
German Emperor’s proposals as to the form of ceremony to be
followed in this matter were regarded by Prince Ch’un as
incompatible with his instructions, and it will be remembered that,
after some hesitation on the part of the German Government, the
Chinese policy of passive resistance eventually carried the day. The
following telegraphic correspondence on the subject is of permanent
interest. Prince Ch’un (whose personal name is Tsai Feng)
telegraphed from Germany on the 26th September to the Peace
Plenipotentiaries, Prince Ch’ing and Li Hung-chang, as follows:—

“I have duly received the Grand Council’s message, and

note that I am commanded to act as circumstances may
require, and that a middle course is suggested as expedient. I
fully appreciate the intelligent caution of your policy, and
fortunately had already taken steps to act in the sense
indicated. On the 14th of this moon the German Emperor had
given orders to stop preparations for the ceremony, but as I
noticed that the Royal train had not been withdrawn nor had
his aide-de-camp left my suite, I inferred that there was a
possibility of his yielding the points in dispute. Accordingly,
after a long discussion of the situation with Yin Ch’ang, I
directed him to write in German to Jeng-yintai[119] requesting
his friendly intervention at the Foreign Office with a definite
explanation that China could not possibly agree that the
mission should be received kneeling, that Germany had
nothing to gain on insisting upon such a procedure, and that
the only result of a fiasco would be to make both countries
appear extremely ridiculous. I therefore begged that the
Emperor should accede to my personal appeal and waive the
point. At the same time I requested the German gentleman
who acts as Chinese Consul for Bavaria to address the
Foreign Office to the same effect, and with a request that we
might enter upon discussion of the point. Four days later I
directed Lü Hai-huan to return to his post at Berlin to make
such arrangements as might be possible, and on the following
day I telegraphed to him a summary of the Grand Council’s
views on the matter. In the afternoon of the 20th I received the
Consul for Bavaria, who informed me that he had received a
telegram from the Foreign Office inquiring when I proposed to
start for Berlin, and hoping that I would do so speedily, as the
Emperor had now consented to waive the question of our
kneeling, but required that only Yin Ch’ang should accompany
me when presenting the letter of regret, the remainder of my
suite to remain in another place.
“The same evening I received a message from Lü Hai-
huan, stating that the Emperor would undoubtedly receive
me, and that, since all other difficult questions had been
settled, His Majesty wished to leave for the country in a few
days. Under these circumstances I did not consider it
advisable to insist too strictly on minor details of etiquette,
being pressed for time, and I therefore requested the German
Emperor’s Chamberlain to have a special train prepared for
my journey. We reached Potsdam at 3 p.m. on the 21st[120]; I
was met by a General sent by the Emperor with his state
carriage. Myself and my suite were lodged in the Palace,
where every attention was shown to us, and it was arranged
that I should fulfil my mission on the following day, after
depositing a wreath on the grave of the late Empress. On the
morning of the following day I visited her tomb, and at noon
the state carriage came to take me to the New Palace, where,
after being ushered into the Emperor’s presence, I read aloud
Their Majesties’ complimentary letter. The members of my
suite were awaiting in an adjoining apartment. After the
ceremony I was escorted back to my residence, and at 2 p.m.
the Emperor came to call upon me. He was very cordial and
remained talking with me for a long time. By his orders a
steam launch was provided for me, in which I visited the Lake
and Peacock Island; on the following day I saw a review of
the troops, and was presented to the Empress. The Emperor
 begged me to remain longer in Berlin, suggesting that I
should visit the arsenals and inspect the fleet under Prince
Henry at Stettin. I could scarcely decline these polite
attentions, and after visiting the Empress I took lodging in an
hotel at Berlin. Thanks to the glorious prestige of our Empire,
matters have thus been satisfactorily settled, and the
knowledge that my mission has been satisfactorily carried out
will, I hope, bring comfort to Their Imperial Majesties in their
anxiety. I beg that you will memorialise the Throne
accordingly. Tsai Feng.”

The Empress Dowager was pleased to express her approval of

the result of this mission, which in the eyes of the Chinese
Government was undoubtedly one of those diplomatic triumphs
which China appears to attain most easily when her material
resources have completely failed. Reading the above despatch, it is
difficult to realise that the Prince’s mission had for its object the
expiation of a brutal murder committed, with the full approval of the
Chinese Government and Court, on the representative of a friendly
nation. The opinion is commonly believed, held by the Legations at
Peking, that the present Regent has learned much since he returned
from that penitential mission to the German capital. During the
present year his brothers have been engaged on missions ostensibly
intended to acquire knowledge for the sorely-needed reorganisation
of China’s army and navy, missions which have been received with
royal honours by almost every civilised Power; but there are many
close observers of the changing conditions at Peking who see in
these missions merely a repetition of farces that have often been
played before, and an attempt to gain prestige in the eyes of the
Chinese people for the Regent’s family and the Court, rather than
any definite intention or desire to reform the official system.
 His Highness Prince Tsai Hsün.

Brother of the late Emperor and Present Regent—recently head of the Naval
Mission to Europe and America.
 XXIII
THE RETURN OF THE COURT TO PEKING

The state of mind of the Empress Dowager during the flight from
the Capital, and subsequently while the Court remained in exile at
Hsi-an, was marked by that same quality of indecision and vacillating
impulse which had characterised her actions throughout the Boxer
crisis and the siege of Peking. This may be ascribed partly to her
advancing age and partly to the conflicting influences of astrologers
and fortune-tellers, to whose advice she attached the greatest
importance in all times of peril. We have dealt in another place with
her marked susceptibility to omens and superstitious beliefs; its
effect is most noticeable, however, at this stage of her life, and was
conspicuous in matters of small detail throughout the return journey
to Peking.
The influence of Jung Lu at Hsi-an, and that of Li Hung-chang at
Peking, had been systematically exercised to induce Her Majesty to
return to the Capital; but until the Peace Protocol conditions had
been definitely arranged, and until she had been persuaded to
decree adequate punishment upon the Boxer leaders, the
predominant feeling in her mind was evidently one of suspicion and
fear, as was shown when she ordered the hurried flight from T’ai-
yüan fu to Hsi-an. The influence of Li Hung-chang, who, from the
outset, had realised the folly committed by the Chinese Government
in approving the attack upon the Legations, was exercised to create
in the mind of Her Majesty a clearer sense of the folly of that policy.
At the height of the crisis (21st July, 1900), realising that the foreign
forces brought to bear upon China were steadily defeating both
Boxers and Imperial troops, she appointed Li Hung-chang to be
Viceroy of Chihli, and directed that he should proceed from Canton
with all haste, there being urgent need of the services of a diplomat
versed in foreign affairs. Her Majesty went so far as to suggest that