Welsh Journals

date of heaven-as the Manchus did the other day; and the man from among you that has the native gift will come to the top and make him- self emperor; and will then, ipso facto, be a god, and his family divine; his descendants, while they retain the mandate of heaven-which is fit- ness to rule-will be the Sons of Heaven. It does not matter what his origin. Liu Pang, founder of the greatest dynasty of all-the Han- began his career as a parish beadle; the Ming dynasty founder, Hung Wu, as a begging friar. So the greatest crime of all in China, correspond- ing to treason in England, was parricide. That struck at the root of the philosophy underlying the Chinese governmental system, as treason struck at the roots of the English system. You can't say, of the philosophy underlying that last; because in the west we have had no philosophy behind our systems. When trouble arose, it was the ruler who was responsible, not the people. In the last resort, it was the Son of Heaven himself who was to blame. Trouble in the empire took its rise from trouble within his soul. The remedy was, in the first place-you will smile !-to sacrifice to one or more of the Five Sacred Mountains. These were a Northern one in Shansi, a Central one in Honan, a Western one in Shensi, a Southern one in Hupeh or Hunan, and, holiest of all, T'ai Shan, the Eastern one in Confucius's own pro- vince of Shantung. The Son of Heaven pro- ceeded with his court generally to T'ai Shan, and purified his nature by contemplation of the purity and majesty of the mountain. It is a pl?n that may confidently be recommended. Try it with the Wyddfa or Cadair Idris, and see Here then you have a governmental system in which the bond is not force, but love. The work- ing out of it would of course have been imperfect; AN ARTIST OF VISION -THE WORK OF RHYS GRIFFITHS by Geraint Goodwin IF one is to accept Wyndham Lewis's definition of literature as something over six- pence and in a stiff cover, then I have, without ever joining the pundits, written up a young Welshman most whole-heartedly during the past few years. In another place, or in other places, I have proclaimed the work of Rhys Griffiths, a young Welsh artist of such strength and vigour, that it seems foolish to admit the word proclaim at all. But in the kaleidoscopic nineteen twenties and thirties there are so many colleges of wit-crackers, agreeing, if on no other point, to be the trumpets of their own virtues, that it is by accident we but the theory of it, the thing aimed at, was truth to nature; and to that fact China owes her longevity. While the Yellow Emperor sat upon his throne maintaining the peace of the world. Memphis was declining and giving place to Thebes; the Akkadians were rising to power in Mesopotamia. Ur of the Chaldees, and Baby- lon, and Nineveh, were yet to be, Achaemenians were to rise in Persia, and wane away; the Greeks were to be; Macedonians, and Romans, and Saracens, and Turks, and Spaniards were to wield their imperial power and decline. Will someone please tell me that China's longevity was due to her age-long isolation. The west is hypnotized with that notion; I have seen it re- ferred to as gospel by Chinese writers psycholo- gized by the West. China's age-old isolation be- gan, as a matter of history, in the reign of Ch'ien- lung, 1732, to 1795 A.D. It came about in this way. In the reign of Ch'ien-lung's grandfather Kanghsi4 Jesuit missionaries had brought a deal of western science to Pekin, which interested the emperor profoundly; he therefore befriended them. Ch'ien-lung, however, found that they brought with them other things than western science rightly or wrongly, he attributed to them a deal of intrigue; and shut the doors of the empire on them. As they were the representa- tives of the Occident in China, he took it that all occidentals were Jesuits; and shut the doors of China against Europeans. Of old, the Chinese lived in a bigger world than the Europeans did, and had more contacts with the external. Also, China was incessantly attacked; and twice con- quered but knew how to subdue her conquerors, and to make her subject peoples love to be her subjects. How? Because her bond of empire was the Law of Love. (To be continued.) stumble across the man who paints, who writes, who does his own work in his own way in the hope it will alone proclaim his worth. Griffiths was, and is, such a man. One might say in passing that his work does so well that which he cannot do at all that our sympathies are out of place. And now an exhibition* of his work is to be held at the headquarters of Young Wales in London, followed by a show at the Wertheim Galleries in *[It is proposed to hold this exhibition at No. 11, Mecklenburgh Square, London, on 20th and 21st April. — Editor].