With regard to these school-books it has to be stated that there has never been any attempt made to render them attractive to the children that use them. In England the very reverse of this is the case. They are printed as a rule on clean white paper, and in a type that is so distinct that the pupils have never to strain their eyes to make out the letterpress. In addition to this, most of the books are illustrated with beautiful pictures that give a fascination to the pages, whilst they help the scholars to grasp the meaning of the subjects that they have to study.
Now in China there is nothing done to ease the sorrows of the lads in their grappling with this huge language of cryptic pictures that refuse to have their meanings explored excepting after years of most painful study. The books are printed upon the very poorest paper in order to lessen the cost. The words, too, are often blurred and indistinct, for the wooden blocks from which they are printed are generally so worn by years of use, that the delicate strokes and minute touches with the pen, and the involved and complicated interweaving of straight and waving lines that go to the making up of the old-world-looking pictures, get frayed and broken in the printing, so that it requires a practised eye to distinguish some of them from others that have a natural likeness.
The pages of these books present a most dreary and uninviting appearance. They are never lightened by any pictures, and no artist has ever attempted to vary the dreariness of school life by any sketches from nature or any scene from human life. It is no wonder that the artistic faculty in the Chinaman has been developed in a grotesque and unrealistic fashion, or that nature seems to be made to be conformed to the stiff and formal characters upon which the eyes of the youth of China have to look during the early years when the artistic element is waiting to be moulded into those finer shapes that will produce the great pictures that are seen in the West. Art in China has never had any room in which to play her part in the development of the mind, or in training the fancies and the imagination of men. The artist in this land is a man that draws his scenes by rule and compass, and he would lose caste were he to violate certain canons that must be observed in the drawing of a landscape or in the pose or attitude of the human figure. He never dreams of going out into the fields or of sitting on a hillside and of trying to reproduce the scene that lies stretched before him. There is no freedom and no losing of oneself in the inspiration of the moment, when forgetful of rules and mastered by the subtle forces that have touched his dreams into action, he shall produce something that no man has ever done before him. The chill of the years is upon him, when he was compelled, at the very time when his soul was in the process of formation, to keep his gaze upon those square unartistic hieroglyphics, and crushing down all the poetry and all the romance that lay dormant in his nature, to take these as the highest ideals for all his conceptions of art in the future.