Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

an expression of quality in the perceiving person. To eliminate the ideal element from art, the element of style, the element of interpretation is therefore utterly impossible. What we call the successive manners of the same master are mainly the result of changes in his way of thinking and feeling, which have necessitated corresponding changes in his interpretation of nature. Compare Raphael's treatment of the female nude in his small panel of the Three Graces (once in Lord Dudley's, now in the Duc d'Aumale's possession) with his treatment of the female nude in the Farnesina frescoes, and you will perceive how the man's emotional and intellectual attitude had altered between the period of his first and that of his third manner.—JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, in The Fortnightly Review.

THE INUNDATION IN CHINA.

EVEN in Asia, where everything is immoderate, where a forest covers kingdoms, a river deposits a country in a decade, and man grows feeble from an abiding sense that Nature is too strong for him, there has been no calamity in our time at once so terrible and so dramatic as the bursting of the Yellow River on September 27, 1887. It exceeds in its extent if not in the separateness of its horror, the submerging of the island of Deccan Shahbazpore in 1876, when a storm-wave in two hours swept off three hundred thousand human beings.

The Hoang-Ho, or "Yellow River," larger and swifter than the Ganges, and containing more water perhaps than five Danubes, bears to the immense province called Honan, which is ten thousand square miles larger than England and Wales, much the relation borne by the Po towards the Lombard Plain-at once a blessing and scourge. Its waters originally created the lowlands of the province by depositing silt through ages, and they are now their torment. The alluvial land, once above the water, is rich with a richness of which Englishmen have no experience, being covered with a thick pad of yellow mould a hundred feet or more deep, on which everything will grow, from the teak-tree to the pineapple, yielding, when planted with rice, one hundred and sixty fold, and in places producing, almost without manure and with light ploughing, two full crops a year. No people living by agriculture can resist the temptation of such a soil, and for ages the Chinese-of all races in the world the most instinctively agricultural-have swarmed to these lowlands, to find that, in spite of all their profits, they must embank the river or perish.

The surplus water of autumn, probably, like that of the Ganges, nine times the regular outflow, rushing down in huge masses from the hills at a speed of twelve miles an hour, pours its overspill over whole countries,

drowning everything not ten feet above the river-level, and when it retires, leaves, besides a deposit fatal to one year's crop, an unendurable variety of fever. Down go whole populations at once, not dead, but paralyzed for work and with their constitutions ruined.

The Chinese, who in their courage for labor are a grand people, fought the river, embanked it, and for two thousand years at least reaped enormous harvests from the protected soil. Every two centuries or so, however, the river, rising in its strength like a malignant genius, swept every barrier away, cut for itself a new bed-nine such beds are known-and ruined a province; but the people swarm in again, the new work is easier at first, and the land is again recovered from the vast lagoons. The last outburst occurred twenty-five years ago; but the Chinese still persevered, immense dykes were completed, and the province once more became a garden.

There is, however, a difficulty in embanking any river carrying huge deposits. The water not only deposits silt where it debouches, but all along its course; and if it is shut in by embankments, the bed of the river incessantly rises higher, until at last it is far above the plain. The bed of the Po, for example, is in places forty feet above the rice-lands, and some of the dykes of the Mississippi are like artificial hills. The Yellow River, from the enormous rapidity of its volume when swollen by melted snow, is the worst of offenders in this respect; its new bed, even in twenty-five years, has risen far above the plain, and as the dykes grow from hillocks into hills, from mere walls into ranges of earthworks like fortress-sides, hundreds of miles long, the effort overtaxes the skill of the engineers, and the perseverance even of Chinese laborers. The ablest engineers in India were beaten by the Damoodah, though it is, compared with the Hoang-Ho, like a trumpery European stream, and though the labor available could hardly be exhausted.

The truth of the matter is that, in all such cases, the upper sections of the dykes cost too much for complete repair, and tend to be inadequate; and when the Yellow River, gorged with water from the mountains till it forms in reality a gigantic reservoir, averaging a mile broad, from three to five hundred miles long, and seventy feet deep, all suspended in air by artificial supports, comes rushing down in autumn, the slightest weakness in those supports is fatal.

On September 27th the river was at its fullest, its speed was at its highest, there was almost certainly a driving wind from the West, a bit of dyke gave way, the rent spread for 1,200 yards, and-our readers remember, for Charles Reade described it, the rush into Sheffield of the Holmfirth reservoir. Multiply that, if you can, by two thousand, add exhaustless renewals of the water from behind-five Danubes pouring from a height for two months on end—and instead of a long valley with high sides which can be

reached, think of a vast, open plain, flat as Salisbury Plain, but studded with three thousand villages, all swarming as English villages never swarm: and you may gain a conception of a scene hardly rivalled since the Deluge. The torrent, it is known, in its first and grandest rush, though throwing out rivers every moment at every incline of the land, had for its centre a stream thirty miles wide and ten feet deep, traveling probably at twenty miles an hour, a force as irresistible as that of lava. No tree could last ten minutes, no house five, the very soil would be carried away as by a supernatural ploughshare; and as for man-an ant in a broken stop-cock in a London street would be more powerful than he. Swim? As well wrestle with the Holyhead express. Fly? It takes hours in such a plain to reach a hillock three feet high, the water the while pouring on faster than a hunter's gallop. There is no more escape from such a flood than there is escape from the will of God, and those Chinese who refused even to struggle were the happiest of all, because the quickest dead. Over a territory of ten thousand square miles, or two Yorkshires at least (for the missionaries report a wider area), over thousands of villages-three thousand certainly, even if the capital is not gone, as is believed-the soft water passed, silently strangling every living thing, the cows and the sheep as well as their owners; and for ourselves, who have seen the scene only on a petty scale, we doubt whether the "best informed European in Pekin" is not right when he calculates the destruction of life at seven millions, and whether the Times' reporter is not too fearful of being taken for a romancer when he reduces it to one or two millions. These great villages are crammed with population, and alive with children; the whole water of the Hoang-Ho has been pouring on them for two months, none reaching the sea; and even by the highest estimate the dead are fewer than those who died of starvation a few years ago in the famine of the two Shans. In Asia, kingdoms and capitals have perished of pestilence, as Cambodia probably, and Gour certainly did; and there is no reason, the physical conditions being favorable, why equal multitudes should not perish in a flood.

What is the remedy? What is the remedy for an earthquake? There is no remedy. In that division of Honan, a generation has been swept away by a fiat stronger than man's, which has concentrated into two months the natural and inevitable slaughter of fifty years. The Chinese Government, which can be stirred by some things, and which, when stirred, has an elephantine energy, has given £500,000 from the central treasury to repair the dykes, and, as we read the orders, the whole revenue of Honan till the work is completed; has stopped 32,000,000 lbs. of rice on its way to the capital and given it to the survivors, and has ordered all who are ruined, but not dead, to work at once on the dykes under military discipline. The laborers will not be paid, but they will be fed; the Chinese engineers

understand hydraulics fairly well; the channel being new, the embankments need not be cyclopean at first-though, be it remembered, the river of itself rises certainly twenty feet in autumn;-and at the cost of about as many lives as were sacrificed on the Suez Canal, and which will fall victims to the malaria developed as the waters retire, the Yellow River will for another generation be chained up once more. The old attraction will then prove irresistible; all husbandmen without land for three hundred miles on each side of the river will silently steal in to settle on the alluvium, fruit-trees will be planted, rice will be sown, and in five years life in Honan will be proceeding exactly as before, as it does on the slopes of Vesuvius after an eruption.

For the past, however, there is no remedy, and for the future little hope. Nothing, if the river is simply dyked, can prevent its destroying the dykes when they reach a certain height; for the work, increasing every year, must at some point overpower the resources of any State. If the Chinese Government could cut a broad and deep canal for three hundred miles to the ocean, or build, amid the hills from which the water flows, a reservoir vast as an inland sea, or construct a second line of dykes on each side five hundred yards from the water, the overspill of the Yellow River might be drained away in sufficient time to arrest grand catastrophes; but that Government is at once too fatalistic and too weak for such gigantic efforts, and will be content if it can only secure safety for its own generation, leaving the next to suffer or escape, as may please the unknown powers. It is useless for Europeans to advise, or even to mourn, for they can do nothing, except, indeed, reflect that for the safety of their own civilizations, perhaps for part of the greatness of their town minds, they are indebted to the pettiness of scale on which their temperate dwelling-place has been constructed. We owe everything to the comparative insignificance of the works of Nature in Europe. One can dyke the Thames, but not the Yellow River; tunnel the Alps, but not the Himalayas.-Spectator.

THE PROGRESS OF CREMATION.

IN January, 1874, fourteen years ago, I wrote an article, which appeared in the Contemporary Review, entitled "Cremation: the Treatment of the Body after Death," advocating as forcibly as I could its employment instead of the method by burial in the soil. The reason assigned for taking this step was my belief-supported by a striking array of facts-that cremation is now a necessary sanitary precaution against the propagation of disease among a population rapidly increasing, and becoming large in relation to the area it occupies.

1

The degree of attention which this proposal aroused was remarkable, not only here but abroad, the paper being translated into several European languages. In the course of the first six months of that year I received eight hundred letters on the subject, from persons mostly unknown to me, requiring objections to be answered, explanations to be given, supposed consequences to be provided for; some, indeed, accompanied with much bitter criticism on the "pagan," "anti-Christian," if not altogether irreligious tendency of the plan. I was encouraged, however, to find that about a fourth of the number were more or less friendly to the proposal. But I confess I had been scarcely prepared to expect that people in general would be so much startled by it, as if it were a novelty hitherto unheard of. Long familiar with it in thought myself, cherishing a natural preference, on sanitary grounds, for its obviously great superiority to burial, and after thoughtful comparison on those also commonly regarded as "sentimental," the opposition manifested appeared to me curiously out of proportion with the importance of the interests or sentiments I had perhaps underestimated. Even the few who approved yielded for the most part a weak assent to the confident assertion of a host of opponents, that whatever might be the fate of the theory, any realization of it could never at all events occur in our time. To use a phrase invented since that date, the proposal was not to be regarded as coming within the range of a practical policy. At some future day, when the world's population had largely increased, we might possibly be driven to submit to such a process, but, thank heaven! the good old-fashioned resting-place in the churchyard or cemetery would amply suffice to meet all needful demands for several future generations still.

To some of the more formidable objections, especially those which had been urged by men of experience, weight, and position, entitled to be listened to with respect and attention, I endeavored to reply in a subsequent article which appeared two months later in the same journal. Since that date, although maintaining an undiminished interest in the subject, I have taken no public part in any of the numerous platform discussions and pub. lished controversies which have frequently appeared both in this country and abroad. But I think the time has come to present, as far as it is possible to do so within the narrow limits of an article, a sketch of what has been accomplished here, after a patient and quiet service of twice seven years, by a few earnest friends and co-operators, in regard of the practice of cremation, and also to what extent it has been employed in other countries.

This will occupy the first portion of the paper. But it is more important still to meet one or two objections to cremation commonly urged, as well as to formulate conditions by which the practice should be regulated in future. An endeavor to do so will occupy the concluding portion.

« ZurückWeiter »