the anxiety. I have seen a boy sicken and die of love for a girl he had seen but once and whose name he never knew; I have known boys and girls to commit suicide because of despair over some matrimonial arrangement. They commit suicide with the most horrifying ease.
One may see this terrifying capacity for feeling in the Chinese love poetry, a feeling which has with it too often an edge of despair. The emphasis is all the more marked in that it is put into delicate, restrained words almost devoid of physical allusions, yet breathing a power as final as death itself.
The Chinese have until now been a people possessed by quietism. An imposed fatalistic turn of mind, inevitable from their religions and philosophy, has rendered them seemingly impassive, and even indifferent. Now, with the breakdown of the old forms of Buddhism and the reassertion of nationalism, always latent, fatalism is fast disappearing and they are beginning to form a determination to wrest their fate from the hands of heaven and mold it nearer to their heart's desire. It is, undoubtedly, true that the present situation aggravates their high emotional state. This crisis of fever and madness must wear away to some extent.
But there will remain a person new to many of us, a person who will be exceedingly easily hurt (as he has always been in reality), a person whose sword will now fly from its scabbard at the slightest breath of insult where before it remained sheathed, not in cowardice or from insensitivity but from the restraint of dignity. It will take a good many years of sincere friendliness and honest, disinterested treatment on the part of other nations to convince him that the world is not waiting to devour him.
At such a time as this, then, when the pent-up emotionalism of centuries has been released, it is absurd that we should demand an ability to judge any situation impartially. It is not in the power of the Chinese, certainly not of the young Chinese—and he is in the ascendancy in China just now—to see any side but his own. It is inevitable and a wholly natural result of his state of mind. Judicial investigations only increase his indignation. He is profoundly skeptical of conferences. Any appeals or demands to reform himself first and talk about foreign aggression afterward simply infuriate him further.
Many younger Chinese apparently believe that if China were a sovereign nation with all her rights restored, she would automatically become strong, quiet, and prosperous. The source of all evils, from foot-binding and concubines to cigarette-smoking and the movies, is to be found in the unequal treaties. Nothing will change this conviction short of giving up the unequal treaties and letting the truth show itself.
And in the long run it will be worth it to everyone. Aside from the moral question involved, which makes it the only honorable thing for the Western nations to return to China what has been all too often unlawfully seized, the fact remains that it is really the only solution to the situation now in China. Until China has no excuse to turn her attention to anyone except herself, until she has no one except herself to blame for her condition, this emotionalism now rampant will not cease to express itself in chauvinism and in an actual willingness to shed blood. Once the immediate cause of irritation can be removed, there is hope that this intensity of nature, common to the Chinese people, may turn upon itself and really force some sort of order out of chaos.
The Lost Art of Profanity
Some writers in the metropolitan press have been lamenting the decline of profanity, the passing of old-time brimstone language, of Trojan and trooper talk. Nobody has a profane vocabulary any more, there is no variety in oaths, nothing unique, no artistry, no sparkle. Everybody uses the same words in swearing.
This indisputable fact is of course chargeable to the universal trend toward standardization in the United States. We are victims of the machine. We have become a nation of copy-cats, with the same commonplace newspapers everywhere, the same movies, the same parroted phrases issuing from every throat. Chains of drug stores, groceries, filling stations, waffle parlors, lunchrooms, beauty dens. Cities all alike. Originality faces starvation. Artists get no encouragement. Emotion is at a low ebb. Passion is gone from us.
Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson in their play "What Price Glory?" exemplify the appalling standardization of profanity in this republic. Most of the actors play the role of marines in the late war. In every scene, amid tense battle action and during lulls in the fighting, there is a plethora of swearing and there are interpolations of obscenity. But the dingy speech lacks variety, as the speech of marines lacks it in everyday life. Over and over the actors use the same oaths; they take a handful of profane idioms and beat them to the thinness of a blanket in a junction-town hotel. It is dull reality; to have lent imagination to the profanity in "What Price Glory?", to have made it anywhere unique would have belied the truth.
The impotency of our modern epithet-makers was brought to our doorstep by the vain effort to make popular the coined word "scofflaw" to denote one who tramples heedlessly upon the Volstead Act. Try uttering "scofflaw" aloud. How much force can you put into it? How far can you throw it? It is akin to a ball of cotton thrown at an infant's head; its component letters are too soft, too yielding; they can hurt no one.
Memories of the old days have the mantle of illusion about them. The difference between the profanity of earlier times and that now prevailing was quite as much one of emotional values as of vocabulary. Men gave freer vent to their feelings then. True, there were individuals who found diversion in building up a great repertoire of swearwords, who delighted in the admiration of listeners. They livened the mining towns, the railroad camps, the cattle ranches. There were more of such men to the 100,000 population than now, but even then they stood out as a small minority.
I remember a man of unassuming appearance named Marryat, who captained a double span of white mules which pulled the State boat, a repair barge, up and down the length of the Illinois and Michigan canal. We kids would watch him when he was starting from our town with a boat heavily loaded with dredged mud. He was a marvel to listen to. There was a whip in his hand, but he rarely utilized it. He didn't need to, for he had a voice and unfailing vocal energy. His store of unprintable words was not large, but he constantly varied his combinations, and he put tonal force into them. An oath would strike just behind the ears
