A Chinese Novel
The Golden Lotus. Translated by Clement Egerton. Four vols.
(Routledge. 45.) THE author's identity is uncertain: he wrote in the sixteenth century of life in the twelfth. The story is chiefly about the rise and fall of a prosperous, enervtic, sensual and unscrupu- lous man living in a time of social and official corruption, about his household of six wives, and his dependents and
hangers-on. The translator says his task has taken him fifteen years, and that he engaged himself on it because he wished to study the social applications of a modern school of psycho- logy in the case of a developed civilisation other than our own. He regards the book as a masterpiece of fiction, and particularly praises the author's powers of characterisation.
Whether we agree with him or not, we cannot help admiring his diligence and the readability of his translation, and we are obliged to him for making a large and remarkable specimen of a novel, unknown except to sinologists, available in English —excluding a number of passages which, on account of their frankness, that some readers would consider obscenity, he has turned into Latin.
The narrative is preceded by a sermon, which reminds us that we can never wholly free ourselves from the Seven Feel- ings and the Six Desires, and that we must beware of wine and women, wealth and ambition: of these, women and wealth "most surely bring disaster." In fact, "the silken hose, the tiny feet are like the pick and shovel that dig our graves," and if we aren't careful we shall be boiled in oil for ever and ever, just like Hsi-Men Ch'ing, the hero (if that is the word) of this book. Certainly the author brings his naughty people to a bad end, but he gives them such a wonderful run for their money, and dwells with such obvious gusto on their pleasures, that we doubt whether he is such a moralist as he pretends: he almost seems to believe that the game is worth the candle—or rather the cauldron.
The story begins briskly enough. A highly sexed, discon- tented and ambitious beauty, Golden Lotus, has a dim hus- band who sells buns. An equally highly sexed and ambitious young man of the world, Hsi-Men Ch'ing, falls for her. With the aid of an amusingly rascally old procuress, he puts his designs into action. The dim husband gets bumped off, and Hsi-Men Ch'ing takes Golden Lotus into his house as one of his wives. So far, so good. Golden Lotus is a glamour girl, a raging beauty ; her fingers are "as slender as the tender shoots of a young onion " ; she looks "like the early morning moon shining above the topmost branches of a pink apricot- tree " ; she is a born courtesan, with funny old-fashioned graces like drinking wine, for a lark, out of an embroidered shoe. We expect her to maintain her hold over her new hus- band, and she does; full of guile and craftiness and cupidity, she grows vainer and more arrogant ; and we are not in the least surprised when she is unfaithful. Hsi-Men Ch'ing, whose fortune seems to derive from a wholesale chemist's and money- lending business, bluffs, buys and bribes his way to success and spends nearly all his spare time in amorous activities, not always with members of the opposite sex.
In the background of the story, which is crude and monotonous in matter and manner, "rapacious officials and their foul underlings over-ran the Empire. Press-gangs and forced labour weighed heavily upon the people . bandits and thieves multiplied. The Empire was completely demoralised . . . the people of the Middle Kingdom were drenched with blood."
In the foreground the household of Hsi-Men Ch'ing was a hotbed of intrigue, jealousy, meanness and cruelty, and the decent example set by the Moon Lady (Wife No. t) counted for little. Daily life is complicated by social formalities, the exchange of presents and so on, but is wanting in elegance. Culture is missing ; almost everybody is coarse and worldly, ravening after money, new clothes, or a new bedfellow ; music is represented by drinking songs. Manners are bad, and where everybody has a low opinion of everybody else, men are contemptuously spoken of as " turtles " and women as "strumpets." The story that showed at first signs of wit and imagination has grown unwieldly. Forewarned, we knew that Golden Lotus and her second husband would get what was coming to them, but nemesis is too long delayed and has too formal an air, like the moral at the end of a fable. Hsi-Men Ch'ing dies from an overdose of an aphrodisiac ; Golden Lotus is bumped off and disembowelled by her first
husband's brother home at length for revenge, one of those conventional strong silent men who think with their biceps and speak with their fists.
As a work of art the book is disappointing. It illustrates a platitude rather than a philosophy. It sprawls, is wanting in finesse and variety, and is ponderous in a Zolaesque way. The leading characters, though ambitious and vigorous, are not rewarding to know. We gather that the original has no stylistic beauty and is written "in a sort of telegraphese," and it may be the equivalent in some respects of a dime magazine of hot, tough stories. Its merit is that of a curiosity : it is like one of those enormous Oriental vases which people put away in attics because they are really too big to keep umbrellas in, because they have had them for a long time, because they are not made nowadays, and because they have such quaint designs on them. As for the pornographic passages, their being in another language gives an impression that they are italicised, and lends them an importance they would otherwise lack. They may titillate some old man in a chimney-corner after he has brushed up his Latin, but they tell us nothing very new about human habits and, like so much pornography, they miss the point that it can be more effective to rely on suggestiveness than to make an exhibition. A crude or jaded palate, however, may respond to a crude stimulus.
WILLIAM PLOMER.
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