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By Root 4170 0

into his bed, under the jealous and hating eye of his youngest son. Every one of these acts is, in Confucian society, an offense so horrible that there is hardly a name for it. Consider a man's taking his own slave into his bed. The pressure of opinion was so great on this point that disgrace would overtake the whole clan for centuries to come; indeed, the sons might well commit suicide if such a fact became known about their father. And a woman is always virgin when she is married in China. Women, yes, even slaves, are terribly touchy on this subject. If their chastity is even once questioned, they may commit suicide....

Since Mrs. Buck does not understand the meaning of the Confucian separation of man's kingdom from that of woman, she is like someone trying to write a story of the European Middle Ages without understanding the rudiments of chivalric standards and the institution of Christianity. None of her major descriptions is correct except in minor details....

The Good Earth, though it has no humor or profound lyric passion, shows good technique and much artistic sincerity. Thus, it is discouraging to find that the novel works toward confusion, not clarification. Its implied comparison between Western and Eastern ways is unjust to the latter.

(10) Comment by the editors of The New Republic at the end of Kang's review

Mr. Kang, we believe, is unjust to The Good Earth as a novel. In his indignation at what he considers to be a false picture of Confucian society, he neglects the literary qualities of a narrative which, among those published during the past season, was one of the very few that aroused a lasting enthusiasm. But precisely for this reason----because the story is so simple and effective that its accuracy has been taken for granted---The Good Earth deserves to be discussed from the standpoint of an Oriental familiar with the standards that underline Chinese life.

(11) Helen MacAfee, Yale Review, 1931

Mrs. Buck writes... without artifice, rather baldly indeed, and yet with an integrity that carries the reader before it. She has a knowledge of her material that may not be denied because it squares with knowledge of human nature at large. Its fundamentalism at once renders suspect several brilliant and subtle generalizations on the differences between Easterners and Westerners noted by a well-known European philosopher after a visit to China. Mrs. Buck's people are born to customs utterly strange to us, to an ignorance almost fantastic, to a poverty in famine years that is as remote as the Middle Ages from our experience. Yet they behave in these and other circumstances very much like our first cousins---struggling, enduring, puzzling over the meaning of things, seizing what they can of the common prizes of existence---enjoying some of them mightily, and finding others empty or bitter or elusive to the grasp.

(12) The Living Church, 1931

....This is the real stuff of humanity, a narrative as elemental and inevitable as some of the Old Testament, and as grandly simple in form. That the people are Chinese peasants matters nothing to the reader after a few pages. By which I mean that they are natural, understandable, pitiable: they arouse a passionate interest....

All this with a wealth of authentic color and a crowd of varied characters, makes a strong, absorbing book. A recent lecturer on China, remarking that no Westerner has yet produced an authoritative work on that ancient civilization, added, "But there's one book that is not only a fine product of the artistic imagination, but is the absolute truth about Chinese life. Read The Good Earth." If you do, it will remain a permanent part of your attitude to the Oriental.

(13) Catholic World, 1931

....Of her competence to describe China there can be no question, as she has spent all her life there, except when at college in the United States, and she now teaches at the Government University in Nanking. With a reservation made necessary on account of many over realistic pages, one may name the book an intimate and accurate picture of Chinese peasant