WHEN BELL NOTED THAT CONVERSATIONAL CHINESE was presumably easy because it was monosyllabic, Anson that the Chinese language was an elaborate pretense, and Macartney that Western children seemed to learn it without trouble, they were joining a discussion that had been going on for several hundred years. Polo had stated that he knew several languages, but never specified whether Chinese was or was not one of them. Mandeville sidestepped, by saying the potentates he talked to knew French. Pinto, with his usual casualness, managed in the space of a couple of pages both to state that he knew Chinese and that “he did not know how to communicate with them.” Crusoe makes it clear that he relied on a Portuguese interpreter who “understood the language of that country and spoke good French and a little English.”1 Since the late sixteenth century a growing number of Western savants had been wrestling with Chinese grammar and written characters, trying to fathom the basic structures and the principles behind them. The result was an enormous accumulation of often erratic scholarship, and a group of alleged “keys” to the language, the most vaunted of which—never made available to others by its proud inventor—promised to teach the enlightened the Chinese language within a matter of weeks.2
In seeking to understand Chinese by uncovering its “keys,” these scholars were reflecting the passionate belief in the existence of systems that became a central part of seventeenth-century Western intellectual life after the writings of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. From the idea that there was one central key to Chinese language, it was a logical step to try to find a key to the whole society of China, to see if there was some single system that explained the country, just as knowledge of other systems explained the physical universe. If China was to be understood, that system had to be explored, analyzed, and explained in precise terms.
It is not surprising that the first great generator of this approach should be Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, for his extraordinary brilliance in mathematics and his deep interest in religion and logic predisposed him to the quest. Leibniz was born in 1646, just before the nightmare of the Thirty Years War came to an end. He spent several years studying in Paris in the 1670s, before returning to a busy bureaucratic career in Hanover, which led finally to his appointment as court librarian. With this appointment he finally had time to pursue his many intellectual interests, among which were included the fields of binary arithmetic and geometry. At the same time, Leibniz came across Jesuit descriptions of the nature of the hexagrams that composed the venerable text (allegedly edited by Confucius) of The Book of Changes, which the Chinese used in divination and as a source of philosophical wisdom. The sixty-four hexagrams were arranged in a mathematically precise sequence, with each line containing one long or two short strokes.3
Intrigued by this similarity to the organizational principles of binary arithmetic, Leibniz began a protracted and erudite correspondence with several Jesuits living in China, and with others who had returned to Europe. He also explored the writings of many of the scholars who had been searching for the key to Chinese, as well as John Webb, who sought to prove that Chinese was perhaps the first or “primitive” language from which all others later sprang. And he read with close attention the writings and arguments of those Jesuits who had been pursuing lines of inquiry first suggested by Matteo Ricci in the attempt to trace elements of monotheism back into China’s earliest classical texts.4
Leibniz had made it a central goal of his life to try to heal the vicious theological and political strife that wracked the society of his time. He believed in both the plurality and the essential harmony of matter, and in the power of pure reason to grasp ultimate truth if only it were guided by his organic philosophy. By such inquiry one would come to see that the indefinite number of substances or “monads” all in fact dance to a “pre-established harmony” that is the central manifestation of God.5 China, to Leibniz, could play a significant part in this quest for understanding, since he felt his own ideas on the reconciliation of extremes were compatible with Chinese thought; thus, in seeking a middle ground of compatibility with Catholicism and Protestantism, Chinese beliefs could be fruitfully invoked. It was such a synthesis alone that could lead to an era of international peace and harmony. When Leibniz heard in 1692 that Emperor Kangxi had issued an edict of toleration for the Catholics, his sense of China’s centrality seemed confirmed: for Kangxi’s action contrasted so obviously with that of Louis XIV’s 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which for almost a century had protected the rights of Protestants in France.
The most extensive of Leibniz’s writings on China appeared in 1699, in the preface to a volume he compiled called Novissima Sinica, or Latest News from China. In this volume, Leibniz presented the arguments he found most germane to the peaceful solution of the rites controversy in China, and appealed at the same time for the opening of a regular land route across Russia to China, and for the dispatch of Protestant missionaries to work along with the Catholics there. In a later letter to Peter the Great, Leibniz expressly warned the ruler how important it was to keep communications with China open and to keep information flowing in both directions, so as to prevent the Chinese from just taking a few elements from Europe that suited their purpose, only subsequently to close the door.6
Leibniz argued in his preface that in the closing years of the seventeenth century, “human cultivation and refinement” had come to be concentrated “in the two extremes of our continent,” namely, Europe and China. This might indicate the hope of Divine Providence that these “most cultivated and distant peoples [would] stretch out their arms to each other,” so that “those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.” As things now stood, China and the West were posed “in almost equal combat, so that now they win, now we.” Drawing up a complete balance sheet, Leibniz felt, was not particularly profitable, since in “the useful arts and in practical experience with natural objects we are, all things considered, about equal to them,” and accordingly, “each people has knowledge which it could with profit communicate to the other.”7 But Leibniz then proceeded to attempt the kind of precise balance he had seemed to shy away from:
In profundity of knowledge and in the theoretical disciplines we are their superiors. For besides logic and metaphysics, and the knowledge of things incorporeal, which we justly claim as peculiarly our province, we excel by far in the understanding of concepts which are abstracted by the mind from the material, i.e., in things mathematical, as is in truth demonstrated when Chinese astronomy comes into competition with our own. The Chinese are thus seen to be ignorant of that great light of the mind, the art of demonstration, and they have remained content with a sort of empirical geometry, which our artisans universally possess. They also yield to us in military science, not so much out of ignorance as by deliberation. For they despise everything which creates or nourishes ferocity in men, and almost in emulation of the higher teachings of Christ (and not, as some wrongly suggest, because of anxiety), they are averse to war. They would be wise indeed if they were alone in the world. But as things are, it comes back to this, that even the good must cultivate the arts of war, so that the evil may not gain power over everything. In these matters, then, we are superior.8
The Chinese, however, Leibniz believed, were far ahead in what he called “the precepts of civil life.”
. . . [C]ertainly they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and use of mortals. Indeed, it is difficult to describe how beautifully all the laws of the Chinese, in contrast to those of other peoples, are directed to the achievement of public tranquility and the establishment of social order, so that men shall be disrupted in their relations as little as possible.9
Chinese religious toleration, as evidenced since 1692, was proof of this discipline and morality, perfectly manifested in the person of China’s current ruler Kangxi, “a prince of almost unparalleled merit.” Leibniz was also fascinated by the news he had just received in a letter from China, that Kangxi’s son and heir-apparent, continuing his father’s openness and flexibility, “had acquired some knowledge of European languages.” The logical corollary of these developments was that there should be a trade-off to the current Western obsession with sending droves of missionaries to China. If the West believed that was all that they should do, then, Leibniz feared, “we may soon become inferior to the Chinese in all branches of knowledge.”10
What the West had to do was open itself to China, in an attempt to absorb from there those elements that would most strengthen Western society. Among these was the Chinese “practical philosophy” of everyday life, that might help redeem his own society, which Leibniz saw as slipping into “ever deeper corruption.” Another was the intuitive moral sense of the Chinese, as expressed through Confucian and other values, that Leibniz felt constituted a “natural religion.” Western Christianity seemed to be failing in the crucial task of organizing the people for moral life. It seemed to him, wrote Leibniz, “that we need missionaries from the Chinese.”11
This dream was not to be, and the scattering of Chinese who managed to reach Europe at the end of the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth centuries were all Catholic converts, so they were unlikely to bring the kinds of insights about their own value system to Europe that Leibniz had hoped for.12 In his later writings on China, Leibniz lost this view of a grander scheme, though he did explore more carefully what he termed “the civil cult of Confucius.” He invoked this in support of those Jesuits in the rites controversy who argued that Confucianism was an ethical rather than a religious system of belief, and hence did not conflict with basic churchly doctrine. He acknowledged that Navarrete was probably correct in saying that “many Chinese inform all this pomp with superstition,” but Leibniz felt that the rites themselves were “innocuous,” and the superstitious elements were not the dominant ones. Matteo Ricci had surely been on the right path, even if he had made some errors in his interpretations—in this he had been like the earlier Church fathers in their attempts to interpret Plato in a Christian framework. “If we ever impute to Confucius doctrines that are not his,” wrote Leibniz, “certainly no pious deception would be more innocent, since danger to those mistaken and offense to those who teach is absent.”13 Leibniz even held out the suggestion that someone like Ricci could in some cases understand the early Chinese texts better than the Chinese scholars themselves, for “how often strangers have better insight into the histories and monuments of a nation than their own citizens!”14
In his writings on China after the year 1708, Leibniz once more somewhat shifted his ground. He now paid more heed to the idea that the West might have philosophical skills to offer the Chinese, especially in terms of interpreting their own texts for them: “Among the Chinese, I believe, neither history nor criticism nor philosophy are sufficiently developed. No one at all has yet emerged who has produced a literary history of the Chinese and who has attributed the true works, meanings and sense to each author. I also fear that the ancient texts suffer interpolations.”15 He no longer suggested that the Chinese scholars he had once wished sent to Europe should be in charge of interpreting Western classical texts to the Westerners.
In his closing work on China, written in the year of his death, 1716, Leibniz roamed with great thoroughness across the whole sphere of what he called “the Natural Theology of the Chinese.” Here, contrasting the newness of European civilization to the age of China, Leibniz concluded that it would be “highly foolish and presumptuous on our part, having newly arrived compared with them, and scarcely out of barbarism, to want to condemn such an ancient doctrine simply because it does not appear to agree at first glance with our ordinary scholastic notions.”16 And he proceeded to offer a spirited defense of the Chinese moral position:
What we call the light of reason in man, they call commandment and law of Heaven. What we call the inner satisfaction of obeying justice and our fear of acting contrary to it, all this is called by the Chinese (and by us as well) inspirations sent by the Xangti (that is, by the true God). To offend Heaven is to act against reason, to ask pardon of Heaven is to reform oneself and to make a sincere return in word and deed in the submission one owes to this very law of reason. For me I find all this quite excellent and quite in accord with natural theology. Far from finding any distorted understanding here, I believe that it is only by strained interpretations and by interpolations that one could find anything to criticize on this point. It is pure Christianity, insofar as it renews the natural law inscribed in our hearts—except for what revelation and grace add to it to improve our nature.17
In commenting on the moral excellence of the Chinese, Leibniz had at one point mentioned a problem. While it was true that China’s discipline, obedience, and such values as filial piety were indeed highly developed, some people might feel that these Chinese behavioral patterns “smack of servitude.”18 Leibniz rejected this idea on the ground that Westerners holding such a negative view were “not enough accustomed to act by reason and rule.” Yet he had hit a nerve, of the kind that was to be exploited to the full by Defoe with his talk of Chinese “slavishness.” And in the writings of Montesquieu, this minor gloss as Leibniz had seen it was transformed into a major component of a universal system.
It is impossible to guess what the effect might have been on European culture if Leibniz’s recommended Chinese teachers had arrived in the early eighteenth century to proclaim their cultural values to all who would listen. But certainly the case of Montesquieu in the year 1713 suggests that the impact would have been ambiguous and might perhaps have been used in unexpected ways. Montesquieu was at that time a young man of twenty-four, broadening his mind and doing some legal work in Paris, when he heard that there was a Chinese man of some education living in Paris, by the name of Hoange. Through intermediaries, Montesquieu arranged a meeting. Hoange—brought to Europe from China by a French Catholic missionary who hoped he would enter the Church—had decided against a religious vocation, and instead found a job cataloguing Chinese books and working on a Chinese-French dictionary for the court. Montesquieu’s notes from the talks he held with Hoange—he just says there were several conversations, not how many—enable us to gauge at least how one Chinese man responded to the kinds of questions that a French aristocrat with a lively mind chose to ask.19
The first questions Montesquieu posed were about the nature of Chinese religion. Hoange replied that there were three main sects: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Confucius did not hold that the soul was immortal, but that a kind of vapor or spirit suffused our bodies and slowly dissipated at death. For this reason, the elite always chose execution by strangulation, rather than by beheading, which would split their spirit in twain. Chinese scholars did sacrifice to their ancestors, believing that the vapor from the sacrifice was joyfully commingled with the former vapor of the spirit on such occasions. They were atheist or Spinozist in doctrine, regarding heaven as the soul of the world. As to the enforcement of social custom, women were kept totally secluded, even from most of their in-laws, while punishments were savage, even against those officials whose duty it was to remind the emperor of any faults he had committed. Details of ordinary life were so enshrouded by geomantic practice that misunderstandings and even struggles were a constant occurrence—so much so, wrote Montesquieu, that he doubted “if the Chinese could ever be fully understood.” Dress was now a matter of personal choice, no longer dictated by sumptuary laws. Families held their property in common, and shared the guilt and punishment for crimes committed by family members, the result being remarkable family durability and strength.20
Montesquieu and Hoange spent a great deal of time discussing the nature of the Chinese language. Grammatically it was simple, and despite a few very unusual sounds—one, for example, qu, was similar to the sound that French “carriage-drivers used to check their horses”—posed no particular problems. One especial difficulty was in the number of characters, over eighty thousand in total, though with eighteen to twenty thousand one could get by, and a European could probably learn to read pretty fluently in three years.
Montesquieu suspected that the origins of this writing system might lie in some secret confraternity of long ago, like the “cabalists” of his own time, who rejected the simpler system of hieroglyphics for those more abstract forms. Hoange explained, correctly in terms of the language reforms widely spread by Emperor Kangxi, that there were 214 radicals that singly or in combination—up to a maximum of around 33 separate strokes—formed the basic components of most Chinese characters. With a dictionary writer’s precision, he gave Montesquieu a number of examples of character composition, and recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang a popular song to Montesquieu to demonstrate tonal differences. Hoange and Montesquieu also discussed the problems of writing interesting novels about a Chinese world where “there is no contact between men and women . . . and it takes extraordinary contrivances for the girl to get a glimpse of her swain, and then another four or five years for them to get a chance to speak to each other.”21
In argument and discourse, the Chinese appeared muted and well-mannered, but in actual fact, “someone who has higher status than another can beat the other person without that person daring to defend himself.” Montesquieu and Hoange moved logically from such social or legal distinctions to discuss the civil service and military exams of China and their respective hierarchies, before considering the nature of the state itself. It had not been unchanging, Hoange explained. Long ago, before the Christian era, there had been as many as three rulers at once, for the country was often fragmented, and there were even periods of republican government. Now, the second Tartar conquest had “completely disfigured if not abolished the Chinese government,” “the most sacred laws of the state had been violated,” and the Chinese people “were still groaning under their tyranny.” The emperors were now more powerful than they had ever been, and the country remained isolated and secure behind its Great Wall and its desolate border regions and deserts. Clearly, though, the Chinese government had atrophied before the Tartar conquest, for never had such a huge country been so swiftly conquered as China was in 1644. Montesquieu added that he pursued this question of the nature of the Chinese government further with Hoange, and came to this conclusion: “The ruler’s authority there is completely unlimited, he combines ecclesiastical power with secular power, for the Emperor is the head of the school of literati. Thus the goods and the lives of his subjects are always at the sovereign’s disposition, exposed to all the caprices and untamed whims of a tyrant.”22
Their conversations concluded by probing a wide range of other topics: the severity of the justice system, the castration of eunuchs, the selection of concubines, the nature of the Manchu military organization, the limitations of Chinese scientific discoveries, the absurdity of the ritual gestures and conventions with which the Chinese interlarded their conversations, and the length and the sophistication of the Chinese written historical record. One final grace note, Hoange told Montesquieu, was that the Manchus had somewhat loosened the tyranny previously exerted over women. Progress would be even swifter if the Manchus were allowed to intermarry with Chinese, but that was still forbidden.23 Hoange himself had recently married a French woman, and the Catholic Montesquieu was shortly to marry a Protestant, so each may have been reflecting on such comparative freedoms.
It was to take Montesquieu many years to digest all these ideas, for he was still a young man when he talked to Hoange and conceived the outline of his great work, The Spirit of the Laws, even though it was not completed until 1748. In the meantime he had written The Persian Letters (1721) and a history of The Roman Greatness and Decline (1734), as well as traveling extensively in England, marrying, caring for his estates, and reading voraciously on all aspects of human political and legal history. Montesquieu’s goal was to isolate empirically certain specific principles of laws, rather than relying on general theories of natural law or universal principle, and certainly Hoange’s comments must have helped him on his way.
In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu divided governments into three main blocks—Monarchies, Despotisms, and Republics—which were directed, respectively, by the principles of honor, fear, and small-scale government linked to principles of virtue. The monarchy and its principles of honor led to rigorous hierarchies of institutions; despotisms and their principle of fear led to a lone ruler, a slave to his passions; and the republic with its small scale and its virtues led to growth of equality among citizens. In subsidiary portions of the argument, Montesquieu reflected on the balance of power within certain societies such as the British monarchy that arose from the separation of the legislative, the judicial, and the executive branches of government. He analyzed the effect of different forces on typologies of government, such as climate, temperament, family structure, commerce, religion, and history. And he discussed the relationship between three forces that were often confused: mores, which regulated internal conduct and could not be imposed from above or without; manners, designed to regulate external conduct; and laws designed to regulate specific personal actions.24
Montesquieu’s numerous comments on China were scattered throughout his lengthy and carefully orchestrated work, but cumulatively they added up to an indictment of China that showed how far he had moved away from the more favorable assessments of the Jesuits on which he had initially drawn, and nearer to the harsher critiques found in Defoe’s fiction—which he may have read—and Anson’s account, which he definitely had. Many of these facets flowed together in his concluding chapter 21 to Book 8, “On the corruption of principles of the three governments,” which Montesquieu headed “On the Chinese Empire.” Montesquieu first addressed the question of whether the example of China contradicted his wider theories: “Our missionaries speak of the vast empire of China as of an admirable government, in whose principle intermingle fear, honor, and virtue. I would therefore have made an empty distinction in establishing the principles of the three governments.” But he rejected the missionaries’ interpretation on the grounds that the realities of Chinese society demonstrated an absence of the idea of honor that was central to other monarchies: “I do not know how one can speak of honor among peoples who can be made to do nothing without beatings.” Similarly, the virtue that informed republican government was equally lacking, for “our men of commerce, far from giving us an idea of the same kind of virtue of which our missionaries speak, can rather be consulted about the banditry of the mandarins. I also call to witness the great man, Lord Anson.” The missionaries in their letters, by detailing the murderous politics that accompanied the naming of an heir-apparent in China, gave further force to such arguments, he felt. It looked to him as if “the missionaries were deceived by an appearance of order,” not its reality.25
Montesquieu was willing to admit that China had special characteristics that explained its current form, so that almost ironically: “Particular and perhaps unique circumstances may make it so that the Chinese government is not as corrupt as it should be. In this country causes drawn mostly from the physical aspect, climate, have been able to force the moral causes and, in a way, to perform prodigies.” China’s favorable climate had led to the growth of a huge population, since “women there have such great fertility that nothing like it is seen elsewhere on earth. The cruellest tyranny cannot check the progress of propagation.” Yet the vast numbers led to frequent famines, and the famines in turn led to a rise in banditry. Though most bandits were wiped out, an occasional group would survive, grow stronger, march on the capital, and overthrow the ruler. The result was a curious form of fatalism, for the Chinese ruler would “not feel, as our princes do, that if he governs badly, he will be less happy in the next life, less powerful and less rich in this one; he will know that, if his government is not good, he will lose his empire and his life.”26
The ruler’s fear for his throne, the people’s battle for subsistence, formed a symbiotic whole. The outline of the system began to emerge:
As the Chinese people become ever more numerous despite exposing their children, they must work tirelessly to make the lands produce enough to feed themselves; this demands great attention on the part of the government. It is in its interest for everyone at every moment to be able to work without fear of being frustrated for his pains. This should be less a civil government than a domestic government.
This is what has produced the rules that are so much discussed. Some have wanted to have laws reign along with despotism, but whatever is joined to despotism no longer has force. This despotism, beset by its misfortunes, has wanted in vain to curb itself; it arms itself with its chains and becomes yet more terrible.
Therefore, China is a despotic state whose principle is fear. In the first dynasties, when the empire was not so extensive, perhaps the government deviated a little from that spirit. But that is not so today.27
Elsewhere in his analysis, Montesquieu probed how geography and environment flowed together in a particular way in China, and gave the country less chance to develop healthily than Europe. In Asia, strong and weak nations were neighbors, “the brave and active warrior peoples are immediately adjacent to effeminate, lazy and timid peoples; therefore, one must be the conquered and the other the conqueror.” Whereas in Europe, adjacent states had similar levels of courage. This increased the tendency “for the liberty of Europe and the servitude of Asia: a cause,” Montesquieu proudly added, “that I think has never before been observed. This is why liberty never increases in Asia, whereas in Europe it increases or decreases according to the circumstances.”28
On the problem of the rites, which Leibniz had also spent much labor trying to understand, Montesquieu concluded that the Chinese had fatally blurred the four key forces—religion, laws, mores (or customs), and manners—that should cumulatively give the moral structure to society. By lumping all these four distinct elements together and calling them rites, the state at one level “triumphed: One passed all of one’s youth learning them, all of one’s life practicing them. The scholars taught them; the magistrates preached them.” The difficulty of Chinese written script ensured that Chinese youth would be totally immersed in learning their texts, while the comparative simplicity of the package of values thus created seemed to make ethical learning intellectually easy. They also gave Chinese society a spurious permanence, since those conquering China’s land or its armies could never replace the four elements that composed the rites. “As either the vanquisher or the vanquished must change, in China it has always had to be the vanquisher; for, as the mores of the vanquishers are not their manners, nor their manners, their laws, nor their laws, their religion, it has been easier for the vanquishers to bend slowly to the vanquished people than for the vanquished people to bend to the vanquishers.” For similar reasons, Christian missionaries would find it as impossible as the foreign conquerors had to convert the Chinese to their own beliefs.29
These critiques of Chinese values were not echoed by Montesquieu’s slightly younger contemporary, Voltaire. It is true that in his witty novel Candide, written in 1758 or 1759, Voltaire mocked what he considered the excessive optimism of Leibniz that all would turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But from perhaps as early as his own schooldays with Jesuit teachers, Voltaire had been saturated with the moralistic literature on China, and the praises of the natural goodness of that civilization. It was his particular genius to see the force of divorcing these favorable analyses from the Christian context in which they were placed, and to argue that in fact the very presence of such morality in a non-Christian China pointed to the relativity of morality itself and nullified arguments on the need for Christian institutions in imposing moral systems. Starting in the 1740s, Voltaire pursued his Chinese thoughts along two parallel tracks, both critical of contemporary interpretations, one in the field of drama, one in history.
In drama, he focused on the recently translated Chinese play, The Orphan of Zhao, a moral and family tragedy of loyalty and conquest set in the period of the Yuan dynasty. (Goldsmith had reviewed the slightly later English reworking of the play.) Voltaire wrote that he learned more about China from this play than from all the history books he had read. In his own stage version of 1755, Orphelin de la Chine, Voltaire went back to the thirteenth century for his setting, but chose to recast the play entirely as a proof of the comparative superiority of Chinese moral values over the innate cruelties of the conquering Mongol lord Genghis Khan. Voltaire also condensed the plot so as to highlight the clash between aspects of Mongol violence and contrition, a major point in the play being the impassioned speech by Octar, one of Genghis Khan’s senior officers, who pleads with the Khan to carry out absolute vengeance against the Chinese who have flouted the Mongol’s will:
Can you then admire their weakness?
What are their boasted arts, the puny offspring
Of luxury and vice, that cannot save them
From slavery and death? the strong and brave
Are born to rule, the feeble to obey.30
Genghis, however, torn by his emotions of love and admiration for the courage of the Chinese heroine Idame, and by the loyalty of her husband, weakens in his resolve to subdue them by violence and cruelty, and at length comes to acknowledge the reality of China’s moral superiority.
Ye’ve done me ample justice, be it mine
Now to return it: I admire you both;
You have subdued me, and I blush to sit
On Cathay’s throne, whilst there are souls like yours
So much above me; vainly have I tried
By glorious deeds to build myself a name
Among the nations; you have humbled me,
And I would equal you: I did not know
That mortals could be masters of themselves;
That greatest glory I have learned from you:
I am not what I was; to you I owe
The wondrous change . . .
At length you may confide in Genghis; once
I was a conqueror, now I am a king.31
In his dedicatory essay to the play, Voltaire made it clear that he thought his version of the Orphan was far superior to the Chinese original. The Chinese however didn’t really care. Not only would they not learn from the West, but they did not “so much as know whether we have any history or not.”32 This Chinese disinterest in Western history was not matched by Voltaire’s disinterest in theirs. At just this time in the mid-1750s, indeed, he was completing his own major work on world history, the Essai sur les Moeurs et l’esprit des nations or History of the Manners and Spirit of Nations, which he had commenced writing in 1740, and revised for final publication in 1756. In the preface to this massive history, he wrote that the West had the duty “to learn the genius of those nations which our European traders have constantly visited, ever since they first found out the way to their coasts,”33 and true to his words, Voltaire began his book with China. By so doing, he gave a new twist to Western historiography.
Despite the pride of place he gave to China, his praise was muted and qualified. China had grown long and steadily, wrote Voltaire, and enjoyed great prosperity; the Manchu conquerors of 1644 (like Genghis Khan in The Orphan of Zhao) had “submitted, sword in hand, to the laws of the country they invaded.”34 Yet China had failed to develop to its fullest potential a single one of the great inventions to which its people could lay claim in the recesses of their past:
It is surprising that this people, so happy at invention, have never penetrated beyond the elements of geometry; that in music they are even ignorant of semitones; and that their astronomy, with all their other sciences, should be at once so ancient and imperfect. Nature seems to have bestowed on this species of men, so different from the Europeans, organs sufficient to discover all at once, what was necessary to their happiness, but incapable to proceed further: we, on the other hand, were tardy in our discoveries; but then we have speedily brought everything to perfection.35
In pursuing the root causes of this stagnation, Voltaire’s analysis focused on the very reverence for the past that suffused China’s culture, and on the nature of their language. Both of these impeded China’s inclusion in the force that could now be seen as driving the West onward, that of progress:
If we inquire why so many arts and sciences, so long cultivated without interruption in China, have nevertheless made so little progress, perhaps we shall discover two causes that have retarded their improvement. One is the prodigious respect paid by these people to everything transmitted from their progenitors. This invests whatever is antique with an air of perfection. The other is the nature of their language, which is the first principle of all knowledge. The art of communicating ideas by writing, which should be plain and simple, is with them a task of the utmost difficulty. Every word is represented under a different character; and he is deemed the most learned, who knows the greatest number of characters.36
Voltaire, in the following pages of his discussion, invoked both Commodore (by this time Admiral) Anson, on Chinese commerce, and Navarrete on the Chinese concept of the soul. He was cautious about following either too far, and clear about the comparativist reasons for his care. On Anson, Voltaire asked if it was ever fair “to judge the government of a mighty nation by the morals of the populace in its frontier places?”37 And on the theological fulminations of “the famous archbishop Navarrete”—for Navarrete too had received elevations after returning from China—Voltaire offered a different and elegantly critical warning note:
We have calumniated the Chinese, merely because they differ from us in their system of metaphysics. We should rather admire in them two articles of merit, which at once condemn the superstition of the pagans, and the morals of the Christians. The religion of their learned men was never dishonored by fables, nor stained with quarrels or civil wars. In the very act of charging the government of that vast empire with atheism, we have been so inconsistent as to accuse it of idolatry; an imputation that refutes itself. The great misunderstanding that prevails concerning the rites of the Chinese, arose from our judging their customs by our own; for we carry our prejudices, and spirit of contention along with us, even to the extremities of the earth.38
As the idea of placing China in a world of systems took ever firmer hold in the later eighteenth century, the modifications that Montesquieu and Voltaire in their different ways had tried to impose began to fade, until they ultimately were lost without trace. The idea of Chinese stasis or lack of progress was succeeded by the ideas of exhaustion or even petrification. Perhaps picking up on a curious phrase of Montesquieu’s, that “servitude always begins with drowsiness,” the German polymath and historian Johann Gottfried von Herder described the Chinese empire as having the “internal circulation of a dormouse in its winter sleep.”39 This sentence appears in Herder’s major life work, The Outline of a Philosophy of the History of Man, published in 1784, a work purportedly drawing together all his thoughts on the nature of man and his experience in history. To Herder, the Chinese nation was like “an embalmed mummy, wrapped in silk, and painted with hieroglyphics,” governed by “unalterably childish institutions.”40 There was nothing the Chinese could do to alter their destiny. They were “planted on this spot of the Globe,” and even if they wished, they “could never become Greeks or Romans. Chinese they were and will remain: a people endowed by nature with small eyes, a short nose, a flat forehead, little beard, large ears and protuberant belly.” Presiding over this hollow society was an emperor “harnessed to this yoke” of imitation and superficiality, doomed to “go through his exercise like a drill corporal.”41
As Herder moved to condemn their language along with their cupidity and their guile, all the pent-up grievances of his predecessors seemed to boil and seethe within him, even as the individual phrases of his diatribe seem to point back to specific sources and offer a clue to his undeniable erudition and assiduity:
What a want of invention in the great, and what miserable refinement in trifles, are displayed in contriving for this language, the vast number of eighty thousand compound characters from a few rude hieroglyphics, six or more different modes of writing which distinguish the chinese from every other nation upon Earth. Their pictures of monsters and dragons, their minute care in the drawing of figures without regularity, the pleasure afforded their eyes by the disorderly assemblages of their gardens, the naked greatness or minute nicety in their buildings, the vain pomp of their dress, equipage, and amusements, their lantern feasts and fire-works, their long nails and cramped feet, their barbarous train of attendants, bowings, ceremonies, distinctions, and courtesies, require a mungal [Mongol] organization. So little taste for true nature, so little feeling of internal satisfaction, beauty, and worth, prevail through all these, that a neglected mind alone could arrive at this train of political cultivation, and allow itself to be so thoroughly modelled by it. As the chinese are immoderately fond of gilt paper and varnish, the neatly painted lines of their intricate characters, and the jingle of fine sentences; the cast of their minds resembles this varnish and gilt paper, these characters and clink of syllables.42
Nothing in his account, wrote Herder, should be seen as “coloured by enmity or contempt.” Everything he was saying had been said already by China’s “warmest advocates.” Thus he claimed his analysis to be a totally neutral one, designed to show nothing more or less than “the nature of the case.” One could continue to admire Confucius, as others had, and Herder noted that “Confucius is to me a great man.” But the trouble with Confucius was that he was shackled by “fetters,” which, “with the best intentions, he rivetted eternally on the superstitious populace,” leaving to China and its people a “mechanical engine of morals for ever checking the progress of the mind.” As a consequence, no “second Confucius” having arisen to move them forward, “Ancient China stands as an old ruin on the verge of the World.”43 The implication seemed too simple to be even poignant any more. A push to those on the verge, and over they tumble, into the abyss.