run dry.--In ancient Grecce, it was no
such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of
Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's. In India, the faery
light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history
that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you
should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his
throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the
fountains of time. Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases,
stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs
and Sibyls: a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight
at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for
Rome. Even modern Europe is much less modern than Medieval
Constantinople or Chow China. We can breathe still the
mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find
still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted
valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in
the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very
near to Poetry. But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries,
was desperately prosaic: not so much modern, as pertaining to an
ugly not impossible future. Antiquity was far, far away. The dawn
with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their
splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan
selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down. If
you can imagine an American several hundred years from now--one
in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more
unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard
and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone;
with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union;
advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all
religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the
atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial
childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that
China. A material civilization, with (except in war areas)
reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her. Her
people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and
tables, chopsticks, plates and dishes of pottery; had for
transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and
"cany wagons light." They had a system of writing, the origin of
which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which
fragments remain. They were home-loving, war-hatin