'O, Poet! turn thee to the Capital-to the men who shall make thee forget. Surely the earth-sorrow for the passing of Spring from her quiet places is overwhelming.'

After all Chang-an, the Garden City, with its triple walls, their tall towers uprising at intervals; its seven royal palaces all girdled with gardens; its public parks and pleasaunces and museums; its wonderful Yen tower nine stories high encased in marble; its drum towers and bell towers; its canals and lakes with their floating theatres; and, over all, the sheen and glitter of blue tiles, was earthly Paradise and Mecca to artist and scholar alike. It haunted all who left it with its appeal of beauty in architecture, gem-like buildings set in green girdles, its coming and going of strange Embassies, the gorgeous cavalcade of Imperial hunting parties, the joyous, careless crowds drifting to the flower fair and the glimpse of familiar faces, members of the guild of good-fellowship, whose initiation test was a song, whose entrance-fee was a cup of wine. No wonder if Tu Fu, an exile in far Ssech'uan to the south, dreams and finds all beauty of colour and the play of butterflies, and the rapture of swallows breasting to the shore, calling him back to the beloved Capital.

'And I that scan the distant view of torn white clouds and mountains blue lift to the north my aching eyes; 'Tis there 'tis there the city lies! Chang-an, arise! arise!'

Butterflies and swallows, poets and dreams!-herein lies the weakness of the new impetus given by the poet Emperor. He divided Taoism from Confucianism, theory from practice, and sailed on the crest of the former into the backwaters of romance. Unfortunately, he was Emperor, and his Court and people followed him. Confucianism left to itself narrowed, as it always did, into mere officialism, and, after thirty cloudless years, the storm broke suddenly about him. His love for the beautiful T'ai Che'n, whom he made his Empress, led China to the brink of ruin. The Imperial economist turned spendthrift for her sake. Provinces and dependencies were ransacked for every imaginable delicacy, and Cloud Pavilions rose in a single night for her indulgence. Sings Li Po, Master of the Revels— Vol. 245.-No. 486.

X

"'Tis the time of glancing wings and the dancing of moonmoths whirling the hours away; When the golden armoured guardians are withdrawn, and pleasure haunts the rustling woods till Dawn.'

She rubbed the lamp of Aladdin so often that at last the dusky jinn revolted and inspired the great Turkic general, An Lu Shan, with ambition and unhallowed love for his Empress. So An Lu Shan marches on the Capital, and General Ko, with 70,000 men, or perhaps 70,000 butterflies, goes down before him, and the Emperor with a broken remnant flees into the province of Ssech'uan. Here even the loyal few mutiny: 'Give us the head of this woman who has been the cause of all our misfortunes and we will turn on the enemy!' Ultimately Ming-Huang, to save the Empire and dynasty, consents, and history glows with drama where 'She of the dark Moth eyebrows, lily pale, shines through tall avenues of spears to die.'

The rest is flight further and further Westward and long years of exile. The final triumph of his son, Su Tsung, and his grandson, Tai Tsung, brings the strange and pathetic figure of an old and broken man back to his ruined Capital only to say farewell to this and this remembered haunt before he set sail for the spirit Islands of the Blest, 'Where gaily coloured towers rise up like rainbow clouds and many gentle and beautiful Immortals pass their days in peace.'

The rest of the thirteen successors of Su Tsung need not detain us, for, as Mr Li Ung Bing points out, they were, with few exceptions, mere palace debauchees, or puppets in the hands of their eunuchs. The stream of Taoism broke into many rivulets. Here literature, there art or mythology, wandered and watered a lonely countryside. But the main channel, such as it was, became silted with superstition and the emptyings from the crucibles of the alchemists. Emperors lost their lives through drinking the elixir of immortality, or their thrones through the fatal misinterpretation of Lao Tzu's doctrine of weakness and Yang Chu's gospel of sensuality.

Trains of misfortune,' writes Mr Bing in his masterly summing up of the T'ang, ' rolled over the dynasty and the

reigns of the few energetic rulers notably Hsien Tsung (805-820) and Hsuan Tsung (847-859) may be likened to the sunset views on the Western horizon. They are beautiful but of brief duration and soon to be rapidly buried under the darkness of night. The troubles that now came thick to hasten the downfall of the house of T'ang may be summarised under three headings, viz.: the rise of the border tribes, the insubordination of the governors, and the power of the eunuchs.'

907 A.D. saw the pitiful end of it, the drifting out of a great dynasty, when a boy of sixteen surrendered the seal of Empire to a semi-barbarian general and set out on the long journey to Shantung, from which there was no return.

To say that the lessons of history differ according to nations and times and circumstances is merely to utter a truism. Yet there is one lesson which may be learnt from all the histories of the East and all periods, one inevitable cause of weakness and ultimate disaster. It lies in the outlook of the oriental on his women. The denial of a human soul, the withholding of all freedom of movement and action and choice, the treatment of woman as a plaything, a human butterfly, an instrument of passion, or a mere domestic slave, is responsible time after time for the downfall of Empire and dynasty. When Mr Li Ung Bing speaks of the power of the eunuchs he is paying tribute to the harem system with its atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue, the inevitable result of all human oppression whether by law or immemorial custom. The influence of women upon Chinese politics was sinister because the attitude of man towards woman was sinister. And so whenever the throne of China was filled by a woman the Ministers of State became the ministers of her passions and pleasures and extravagances. Alone among the fatal women of the East who brought dishonour and ruin to the Empires they misgoverned, the Empress Wu kept politics and pleasures apart. That is why the story of her long, and in many ways successful, reign is of exceptional interest to the historian. Confucius ignored women as he ignored Heaven. Both appeared to be beyond his understanding, and, therefore, he left them wisely alone. Only here and there do we get any indication of a

cautious masculine mind on subjects he knew little about. Girls and servants,' said Confucius, are the most difficult people to handle. If you treat them familiarly they become disrespectful; if you keep them at a distance they resent it.'

In Taoism we get but little, and that mostly in terms of Philosophy. For Taoism was above all the philosophy of world-music, the harmony of all things in Tao, and for Chuang Tzů the harmony of human life was produced by the blending of the female and male principles, the Yin and the Yang. One of the grandest passages in Chinese literature is the yellow Emperor's description in the book of Chuang Tzu of his playing a piece of music called Han-Ch'ih.

'When I played again, it was the harmony of the Yin and Yang, lighted by the glory of sun and moon; now broken, now prolonged, now gentle, now severe, in one unbroken unfathomable volume of sound. Filling valley and gorge, stopping the ears and dominating the senses, adapting itself to the capacities of things-the sound whirled around on all sides, pure and clear. The spirits of darkness kept their domain. Sun, Moon, and stars pursued their appointed course.'

Such was the harmony of T'ai Tsung, one of the noblest characters of Chinese history, and his queen Sin Hwei, whom he married at the age of twenty and worshipped all his life. Her last words to her husband are memorable and in keeping with the simplicity of her character.

'I have not been of much use while I lived, and therefore I don't want any one to be made to suffer by my death. Build no magnificent grave for me and then the people will not hate me, since they have not been called upon to make any sacrifice in building it. Neither put any jewels and precious stones in my coffin. All that I want is a tile under my head for a pillow, and my hair fastened up with some wooden pins.'

The Empire of Sin-Hwei lay beyond her time, as it lies beyond ours. It is the heritage of the humble that is building stone by stone for the future of the race.

L. CRANMER BYNG.

Art. 7.- MOVIES' AND MORALS.

THE enormous growth of the cinema in recent years has raised many problems for the moralist and the psychologist. In 1917 some of these problems were patiently investigated by a Commission of Inquiry set up by the National Council of Public Morals, and the results of the investigation were published as a detailed report under the title of The Cinema: its Present Position and Future Possibilities.' This volume attracted much attention at the time; it is still the most valuable source of information on an increasingly important subject. This year it has been supplemented by a further report on 'The Cinema in Education,' edited by Sir James Marchant, and embodying the conclusions of two sub-committees appointed by the original Commission of Inquiry for research into the methods and results of film education. Elaborate experiments have been conducted with children of both sexes, and the results have been carefully collated. The parent Commission in 1917 did not find itself able, in the absence of sufficient evidence, to arrive at an 'authoritative solution' of the problems raised by the educational possibilities of the film. We fear that the ordinary reader will not find that this authoritative solution' has been achieved even by the further scientific labours of the sub-committees. The elaborate tables and analyses will no doubt be highly instructive to educational psychologists; but we search in vain for any general conclusion beyond this, that appropriate films on a necessarily limited number of subjects, constructed with an expert understanding not only of elementary natural science but of the child mind, may be an instructive accessory to elementary education.

This aspect of the cinema is of slight importance beside the wider question of its general influence on the public mind and morals. The popularity of this kind of entertainment has now transcended anything which has before existed. It is estimated that in the British Isles there are about 20 million attendances at cinemas per week, or well over a billion per year. We have about 4000 picture theatres. Probably 80,000 persons are engaged in various branches of the trade. Gross