TheChineselanguagenaturally
knows no grammar.
Ezra-Pound-Instigations
We need their best ideals to supplement our own--ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.
We have already seen proof of the vitality and practi- cal value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner.
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 359
I feel that I should perhaps apologize * for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives.
I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's serious literary performance. I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of profes- sional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cul- tivation.
Now my own impression has been so radically and di- ametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer en- thusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share withotherOccidentalsmynewlydiscoveredjoy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of aesthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting thepoetryofChina. Isubmitmycausesofjoy.
Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to
* [The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and I therefore transcribe his words. --E. P. ]
:
? 36o INSTIGATIONS
expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese charac- ters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been per- force content with provincial standards of English rhym- ing. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal defini- tions in dictionaries.
One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been some- what at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life, but her original* spirit still lives, grows, interprets, trans- ferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japa- nese to-day represent a stage of culture roughly corre- sponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a pri- vate pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is prob- ablythegreatestlivingauthorityonChinesepoetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial Uni- versity of Tokio.
My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written charac- ter, it is necessary to inquire how those universal ele- ments of form which constitute poetics can derive appro- priate nutriment.
In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hierogl3rphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could
:--
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 361
with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.
Contrast, for example, Gray's line:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
with the Chinese line
Moon Rays Like Pure Snow Moon rays like pure snow.
Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common ? It is not enough to adduce that each con- tains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the ques- tion is, how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose?
On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as thephoneticsymbolsofGray. Allthatpoeticformre- quires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other:
Moon rays like pure snow.
Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weak- ness of our subjective operations but because the opera- tions of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phe- nomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order. *
* [Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric. E. P. ]
:
? 362 INSTIGATIONS
Suppose that we look otit of a window and watch a man. Suddenlyheturnshisheadandactivelyfixeshis attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focussed upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say :
Man sees horse.
It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily de- note these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters
Man / Sees Horse
If we all knew what division of this mental horse- picture each of these signs stood for, we could communi- cate continuous thought to one another as easily by draw- ingthemasbyspeakingwords. Wehabituallyemploy the visible language of gesture in much this same man- ner.
But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural con- nection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 363
convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Sec- ond, his eye moves through space: a bold figure repre- sented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unfor- gettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.
The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters : they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the elejnent of natural succession.
Contrast the Laocoon statue with Browning's lines: "I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he
And into the midnight we galloped abreast. "
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both ele- ments. Itspeaksatoncewiththevividnessofpainting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, moreobjectivethaneither,moredramatic. Inreading1 Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters,
but to be watching things work out their own fate. Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structureofdetachedChinesewords. Theearlierforms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional
? 364 INSTIGATIONS
modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great fiumber of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that there- fore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.
But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.
For example, the ideograph meaning "to speak" is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning "to grow up with difficulty" is grass with a twisted root. But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, orig- inal pictures to compounds. In this process of com- pounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation be- tween them. For example, the ideograph for a "mess- mate" is a man and a fire.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in na- ture. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through ac- tions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east.
"Rice-field" plus "struggle"=male.
"Boat" plus "water," boat-water, a ripple.
Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 365
power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so univer- sally necessary in all languages? Why must all possess it, and what is the normal type of it ? If it be so univer- sal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.
I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types : one, that a sentence expresses a "com- plete thought"; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some nat- ural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought cannotbethetestofitsowncompleteness. Butinna- ture there is no completeness. On the one hand, prac- tical completeness may be expressed by a mere inter- jection, as "Hi! there! ", or "Scat! ", or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one's mean- ing more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence reallycompletesathought. Themanwhoseesandthe horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked whenthemantriedtocatchhim. Thetruthisthatacts aresuccessive,evencontinuous; onecausesorpassesinto another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processesinnatureareinter-related; andthustherecould be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce.
In the second definition of the sentence, as "uniting a subject and a predicate," the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. We do it all ; it is a little private jug- glingbetweenourrightandlefthands. Thesubjectis
? 366 INSTIGATIONS
thataboutwhich/amgoingtotalk; thepredicateisthat which / am going to say about it. The sentence accord- ing to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.
If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.
Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle ages. According to this logic, thought deals with ab- stractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the "qual- ities" which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling de- pended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the "thing" as a mere "particular," or pawn. ItwasasifBotanyshouldreasonfromtheleaf- patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.
The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a re- flection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transferenceofpomer. Thetypeofsentenceinnature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as:
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 367 term
? 368 INSTIGATIONS
cation, were it not the natural order--that is, the order * ofcauseandeffect.
^ It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb "tb be," and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logi- cians these have seemed more primitive than the transi- tive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the
transformation going on.
The intransitive form derives from the transitive by
dropping a generalized, customary, reflexive or cognate object. "He runs (a race). " "The sky reddens (it- self). " "We breathe (air). " Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word "state" would hardly be recognized as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say, "The wall shines," we mean that it actively re- flects light to our eye?
The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all tran- sitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific
lawandwithordinaryexperience. TheEnglishpassive voice with "is" seemed at first an obstacle to this hy- pothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a gen- eralized transitive verb meaning something like "re-
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 369
ceive,"whichhaddegeneratedintoanauxiliary. Itwas a delight to find this the case in Chinese.
In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician: all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost, but in Chi- nese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions pass- ing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning "to be lost in the forest" relates to a State of non-existence. English "not"=:the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish.
Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a spe- cific colored verb the universal copula "is," followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree "greens itself," but "the tree is green;" not that "monkeys bring forth live young," but that "the monkey is a mammal. " Thisisanultimateweaknessoflanguage. Ithascome from generalizing all intransitive words into one. As "live," "see," "walk," "breathe," are generalized into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs nre in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely,
bare existence.
There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no
such original conception, our very word exist means "to stand forth," to show oneself by a definite act. "Is"
? 370
INSTIGATIONS
comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. "Be" is from bhu, to grow.
In Chinese the chief verb for "is" not only means actively "to have," but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely, "to snatchfromthemoonwiththehand. " Herethebald- est symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.
I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how po- etical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and indi- vidual verbs.
Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for- word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical Eng- lish. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.
Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the indi- vidualwrittenword. Howaresuchwordstobeclassi- fied? Aresomeofthemnounsbynature,someverbs and some adjectives ? Are there pronouns, and preposi- tions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages ?
One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians
? tHE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 371
to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature be- fore they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryati etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar. * Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions ! A "part of speech" is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for an- other. They act for one another because they were orig- inally one and the same.
Few of us realize that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation ; that they still retain life. It is . only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will.
One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, buddingforthonefromanother. Likenature,theChinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are notforiiiallyseparated.
TheChineselanguagenaturally knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begim to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions.
* Even Latin, living Latin had not the network of rules they foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen Eng- lish grammars borrowing oblique cases from Latin grammars. Sometimes they sprang from the grammatizing or categorizing passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion. --E. P.
? 372 INSTIGATIONS
We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness ofourownformalisms. Thisisespeciallysadinpoetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature.
Letusgofurtherwithourexample. InEnglishwe call "to shine" a verb in the infinitive, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, "bright. " If we need a noun we say "luminosity," whichisabstract,beingderivedfromanadjective. * To get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbi- trarily cut off from its power of action, say "the sun" or "themoon. " Ofcoursethereisnothinginnaturesocut off, and therefore this nounizing is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once
the verb "shine," the adjective "bright" and the noun "sun," we should probably call it an "infinitive of the infinitive. " According to our ideas, it should be some- thing extremely abstract, too intangible for use.
TheChinesehaveoneword,mingormet. Itsideo- graph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the
moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective.
write literally, "the sun and moon of the cup" for "the cup's brightness. " Placed as a verb, you write "the cup sun-and-moons," actually "cup sun-and-moon," or in a weakened thought, "is Hke sun," i. e. , shines. "Sun-and- mooncup"isnaturallyabrightcup. Thereisnopos- sible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid
* [A good writer would use "shine" (i. e. , to shine), shining, and "the shine" or "sheen", possibly thinking of the German "schone' and Schonheit"; but this does not invalidate Prof. Fenollosa's next contention. --E. P. ]
Thus you
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 373
scholar may spend a week trying to decide what "part of speech" he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English.
The fact is that almost every written Chiftese word is properly just such an underlying word, and yet it is not abstract. It is not exclusive of parts of speech, but com- prehensive; notsomethingwhichisneitheranoun,verb, or adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all times. . Usage may incline the full meaning now a little more to one side, now to another, according to the point of view, but through all cases the poet is free to deal with it richly and concretely, as does nature.
In the derivation of nouns from verbs, the Chinese lan- guage is forestalled by the Aryan. Almost all the San- skrit roots, which seem to underlie European languages, are primitive verbs, which express characteristic actions of visible nature. The verb must be the primary fact of nature, since motion and change are all that we can rec- ognize in her. In the primitive transitive sentence, such as "Farmer pounds rice," the agent and the object are nouns only in so far as they limit a unit of action. "Farmer" and "rice" are mere hard terms which define theextremesofthepounding. Butinthemselves,apart from this sentence-function, they are naturally vei'bs. The farmer is one who tills the ground, and the rice is a plant which grows in a special way. This is indicated in the Chinese characters. And this probably exempli- fies the ordinary derivation of nouns from verbs. In all languages, Chinese included, a noun is originally "that which does something," that which performs the verbal action. Thus the moon comes from the root ma, and means"themeasurer. " Thesunmeansthatwhichbe- gets.
The derivation of adjectives from the verb need hardly
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be exemplified. Even with us, to-day, we can still watch participles passing over into adjectives. In Japanese the adjective is frankly part of the inflection of the verb, a special mood, so that every verb is also an adjective. This brings us close to nature, because everywhere the quality is only a power of action regarded as having an abstract inherence. Green is only a certain rapidity of vibration, hardness a degree of tenseness in cohering. In Chinese the adjective always retains a substratum of verbalmeaning. Weshouldtrytorenderthisintrans- lation, not be content with some bloodless adjectival ab- straction plus "is. "
Still more interesting are the Chinese "prepositions," they are often post-positions. Prepositions are so im- portant, so pivotal in European speech only because we have weakly yielded up the force of our intransitive verbs. We have to add small supernumerary words to bring back the original power. We still say "I see a horse," but with the weak verb "look," we have to add the directive particle "at" before we can restore the natural transitiveness. *
Prepositions represent a few simple ways in which in- complete verbs complete themselves. Pointing toward nouns as a limit they bring force to bear upon them. That is to say, they are naturally verbs, of generalized or condensed use. In Aryan languages it is often diffi- cult to trace the verbal origins of simple prepositions. Only in "off" do we see a fragment of the thought "to throw off. " In Chinese the preposition is frankly a verb, specially used in a generalized sense. These verbs
* [This is a bad example. We can say "I look a fool", "look", transitive, now means resemble. The main contention is however correct. We tend to abandon specific words like resemble and substitute, for them, vague verbs with prepo- sitional directors, or riders. --E. P. ]
;
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 375
are often used in their specially verbal sense, and it greatly weakens an English translation if they are sys- tematically rendered by colorless prepositions.
Thus in Chinese : By = to cause ; to ^ to fall toward in =to remain, to dwell; from=to follow; and so on. Conjunctions are similarly derivative, they usually serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves actions. Thus in Chi-
nese : Because = to use ; and = to be included under one another form of "and" := to be parallel ; or = to par- take; if3=toletonedo,topermit. Thesameistrueof a host of other particles, no longer traceable in the Aryan tongues.
Pronouns appear a thorn in our evolution theory, since they have been taken as unanalyzable expressions of per- sonality. In Chinese even they yield up their striking secretsofverbalmetaphor. Theyareaconstantsource of weakness if colorlessly translated. Take, for exarri- ple, th? five forms of "I. " There is the sign of a "spear inthehand"=averyemphaticI; fiveandamouth=a weak and defensive I, holding off a crowd by speaking; to conceal=a selfish and private I; self (the cocoon
sign) and a mouth = an egoistic I, one who takes pleas- ure in his own speaking; the self presented is used only when one, is speaking to one's self.
I trust that this digression concerning parts of speech may have justified itself. It proves, first, the enormous interest of the Chinese language in throwing light upon our forgotten mental processes, and thus furnishes a new chapter in the philosophy of language. Secondly, it is indispensable for understanding the poetical raw mate- rial which the Chinese language affords. Poetry differs
from prose in the concrete colors of its diction. It is not enough for it to furnish a meaning to philosophers.
t--
? I
1
It must appeal to emotions with the charm of direct im- pression, flashing through regions where the intellect can onlygrope. * Poetrymustrenderwhatissaid,notwhat is merely meant. Abstract meaning gives little vividness, and fullness of imagination gives all. Chinese poetry demands that we abandon our narrow grammatical cate- gories, that we follow the original text with a wealth of concrete verbs.
But this is only the beginning of the matter. So far we have exhibited the Chinese characters and the Chinese sentence chiefly as vivid shorthand pictures of actions andprocessesinnature. Theseembodytruepoetryas far as they go. Such actions are seen, but Chinese would be a poor language and Chinese poetry but a narrow art, could they not go on to represent also what is unseen. The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure re- lations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too largS, in vibrations, cohesions and in affinities. The, Chi-
nese compass these also, and with great power and beauty.
You will ask, how could the Chinese have built up a
greatintellectualfabricfrommerepicturewriting? To
the ordinary western mind, which believes that thought
is concerned with logical categories and which rather
condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat
seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with
its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to
376
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the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient 1
races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of i|jnaterial images to suggest immaterial relations.
* [Cf. principle of Primary apparition, "Spirit of Romance". E. P. ]
t [Compare Aristotle's Poetics. --E. P. ]
j
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 377
The whole dehcate substance of speech is built upon substrataofmetaphor. Abstractterms,pressedbyety- mology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in di- rect action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. -^^hey are possible only becausethey follow objective liaes of relations in
''jatljreTierselfy* Relations are more real and more im-J portantthan the things which they relate. \ The forces/ which produce the branch-angles of an oaK lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half curbing the out-pressing vitalities, goverri the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which commu- nication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. NaBir^:fagi^fes"1iiiF'owircH^ Had the world not been full "of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have been starved and languagechainedtotheobvious. Therewouldhavebeen no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seentothemajortruthoftheunseen. Notmorethana few hundred roots out of our large vocabularies could have dealt directly with physical processes. These we canfairlywellidentifyinprimitiveSanskrit. Theyare, almost without exception, vivid verbs. The wealth of European speech grew, following slowly the intricate maze of nature's suggestions and affinities. Metaphor was piled upon metaphor in quasi-geological strata.
Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance ofpoetry. Theknowninterpretstheobscure,theuni- verseisalivewithmyth. Thebeautyandfreedomofthe observed world furnish a model, and life is pregnant with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some philos- ophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has
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been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of sep- arate "particulars," for such rows do not exist. Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truthinthesamecompassofwords. Metaphor,itschief device, is at once the substance of nature and of lan- guage. Poetryonlydoesconsciously*whattheprim- itive races did unconsciously. The chief work of liter- ary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance. f He must do this so that he may keep his words enriched byalltheirsubtleundertonesofmeaning. Theoriginal metaphors stand as a kind of luminous background, giv- ing color and vitality, forcing them closer to the concrete- ness of natural processes. Shakespeare everywhere teemswithexamples. Forthesereasonspoetrywasthe earliestoftheworldarts poetry,languageandthecare
;
of myth grew up together.
I have alleged all this because it enables me to show
clearly why I believe that the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue. Let us first see how near it is to the heart of nature in its metaphors. We can watch it passing from the seen to the unseen, as we saw it pass-
* [Vide also an article on "Vorticism" in the Fortnightly Re- view for September, 1914. "The language of exploration" now in my "Gaudier-Brzeska. "--E. P. ]
t [I would submit in all humility that this applies in the rendering of ancient texts. The poet in dealing with his own time, must also see to it that language does not petrify on his hands. He must prepare for new advances along the lines of true metaphor that is interpretative metaphor, or image, as dia- metrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental metaphor. --E. P. ]
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ingfromverbtopronoun. Itretainstheprimitivesap, it is not cut and dried like a walking-stick. We have been told that these people are cold, practical, mechani- cal, literal, and without a trace of imaginative genius. That is nonsense.
Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages to-day are thin and cold because we think lessandlessintothem. Weareforced,forthesakeof quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowestedgeofmeaning. Naturewouldseemtohave become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and em- balmed in the dictionary. Only scholars and poets feel painfully back along the thread of our etymologies and piece together our diction, as best they may, from for- gotten fragments. This anemia of modern speech is only too well encouraged by the feeble cohesive force of our phonetic symbols. There is little or nothing in a phonetic word to exhibit the embryonic stages of its growth. It does not bear its metaphor on its face. We
forget that personality once meant, not the soul, but the soul's mask. This is the sort of thing one can not pos- sibly forget in using the Chinese symbols.
In this Chinese shows its advantage. Its etymology is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse and process, visible and at work. After thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in
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poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These centreaboutthegraphicsymbol. Thememorycanhold themandusethem. TheverysoilofChineselifeseems entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold il- lustrations which crowd its annals of personal experi- ence, the lines of tendency which converge upon a tragic climax, moral character as the very core of the principle --all these are flashed at once on the mind as reinforc- ing values with an accumulation of meaning which a phonetic language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideo- graphs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old cam- paigner. With us, the poet is the only one for whom the accumulated treasures of the race-words are real and active. Poetic language is always vibrant with fold on fold of overtones, and with natural affinities, but in Chi- nese the visibility of the metaphor tends to raise this
quality to its intensest power.
I have mentioned the tyranny of mediaeval logic. Ac-
cording to this European logic thought is a kind of brick- yard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts. These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled with words for future use. This use consists in picking out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and stick- ing them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by the use either of white mortar for the positive copula "is," or of black mortar for the negative copula "is not. " In this way we produce such admirable propositions as "A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly. "
Let us consider a row of cherry trees. From each of these in turn we proceed to take an "abstract," as the phrase is, a certain common lump of qualities which we may express together by the name cherry or cherry-ness. Next we place in a second table several such character- istic concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo.
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 381
From these we abstract some further common quality, dilutation or mediocrity, and label it "red" or "redness. " It is evident that this process of abstraction may be car- ried on indefinitely and with all sorts of material. We may go on forever building pyramids of attenuated con- cept until we reach the apex "being.
We have already seen proof of the vitality and practi- cal value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner.
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I feel that I should perhaps apologize * for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives.
I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's serious literary performance. I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of profes- sional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cul- tivation.
Now my own impression has been so radically and di- ametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer en- thusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share withotherOccidentalsmynewlydiscoveredjoy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of aesthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting thepoetryofChina. Isubmitmycausesofjoy.
Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to
* [The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and I therefore transcribe his words. --E. P. ]
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? 36o INSTIGATIONS
expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese charac- ters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been per- force content with provincial standards of English rhym- ing. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal defini- tions in dictionaries.
One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been some- what at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life, but her original* spirit still lives, grows, interprets, trans- ferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japa- nese to-day represent a stage of culture roughly corre- sponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a pri- vate pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is prob- ablythegreatestlivingauthorityonChinesepoetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial Uni- versity of Tokio.
My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written charac- ter, it is necessary to inquire how those universal ele- ments of form which constitute poetics can derive appro- priate nutriment.
In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hierogl3rphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could
:--
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with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.
Contrast, for example, Gray's line:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
with the Chinese line
Moon Rays Like Pure Snow Moon rays like pure snow.
Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common ? It is not enough to adduce that each con- tains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the ques- tion is, how can the Chinese line imply, as form, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose?
On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as thephoneticsymbolsofGray. Allthatpoeticformre- quires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other:
Moon rays like pure snow.
Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weak- ness of our subjective operations but because the opera- tions of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phe- nomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order. *
* [Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric. E. P. ]
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Suppose that we look otit of a window and watch a man. Suddenlyheturnshisheadandactivelyfixeshis attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focussed upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say :
Man sees horse.
It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily de- note these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, which had no basis in sound; for example, by three Chinese characters
Man / Sees Horse
If we all knew what division of this mental horse- picture each of these signs stood for, we could communi- cate continuous thought to one another as easily by draw- ingthemasbyspeakingwords. Wehabituallyemploy the visible language of gesture in much this same man- ner.
But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural con- nection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 363
convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Sec- ond, his eye moves through space: a bold figure repre- sented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unfor- gettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.
The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters : they are alive. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the elejnent of natural succession.
Contrast the Laocoon statue with Browning's lines: "I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he
And into the midnight we galloped abreast. "
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both ele- ments. Itspeaksatoncewiththevividnessofpainting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, moreobjectivethaneither,moredramatic. Inreading1 Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters,
but to be watching things work out their own fate. Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structureofdetachedChinesewords. Theearlierforms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional
? 364 INSTIGATIONS
modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great fiumber of these ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a thing, and that there- fore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.
But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.
For example, the ideograph meaning "to speak" is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning "to grow up with difficulty" is grass with a twisted root. But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, orig- inal pictures to compounds. In this process of com- pounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation be- tween them. For example, the ideograph for a "mess- mate" is a man and a fire.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in na- ture. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through ac- tions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east.
"Rice-field" plus "struggle"=male.
"Boat" plus "water," boat-water, a ripple.
Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 365
power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so univer- sally necessary in all languages? Why must all possess it, and what is the normal type of it ? If it be so univer- sal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.
I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types : one, that a sentence expresses a "com- plete thought"; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some nat- ural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought cannotbethetestofitsowncompleteness. Butinna- ture there is no completeness. On the one hand, prac- tical completeness may be expressed by a mere inter- jection, as "Hi! there! ", or "Scat! ", or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one's mean- ing more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence reallycompletesathought. Themanwhoseesandthe horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked whenthemantriedtocatchhim. Thetruthisthatacts aresuccessive,evencontinuous; onecausesorpassesinto another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processesinnatureareinter-related; andthustherecould be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce.
In the second definition of the sentence, as "uniting a subject and a predicate," the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. We do it all ; it is a little private jug- glingbetweenourrightandlefthands. Thesubjectis
? 366 INSTIGATIONS
thataboutwhich/amgoingtotalk; thepredicateisthat which / am going to say about it. The sentence accord- ing to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.
If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.
Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle ages. According to this logic, thought deals with ab- stractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the "qual- ities" which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling de- pended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the "thing" as a mere "particular," or pawn. ItwasasifBotanyshouldreasonfromtheleaf- patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope.
The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a re- flection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the transferenceofpomer. Thetypeofsentenceinnature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as:
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 367 term
? 368 INSTIGATIONS
cation, were it not the natural order--that is, the order * ofcauseandeffect.
^ It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb "tb be," and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logi- cians these have seemed more primitive than the transi- tive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the
transformation going on.
The intransitive form derives from the transitive by
dropping a generalized, customary, reflexive or cognate object. "He runs (a race). " "The sky reddens (it- self). " "We breathe (air). " Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word "state" would hardly be recognized as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say, "The wall shines," we mean that it actively re- flects light to our eye?
The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all tran- sitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific
lawandwithordinaryexperience. TheEnglishpassive voice with "is" seemed at first an obstacle to this hy- pothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a gen- eralized transitive verb meaning something like "re-
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 369
ceive,"whichhaddegeneratedintoanauxiliary. Itwas a delight to find this the case in Chinese.
In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. We can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician: all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost, but in Chi- nese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions pass- ing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning "to be lost in the forest" relates to a State of non-existence. English "not"=:the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish.
Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a spe- cific colored verb the universal copula "is," followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree "greens itself," but "the tree is green;" not that "monkeys bring forth live young," but that "the monkey is a mammal. " Thisisanultimateweaknessoflanguage. Ithascome from generalizing all intransitive words into one. As "live," "see," "walk," "breathe," are generalized into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs nre in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely,
bare existence.
There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no
such original conception, our very word exist means "to stand forth," to show oneself by a definite act. "Is"
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INSTIGATIONS
comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. "Be" is from bhu, to grow.
In Chinese the chief verb for "is" not only means actively "to have," but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely, "to snatchfromthemoonwiththehand. " Herethebald- est symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.
I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how po- etical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and indi- vidual verbs.
Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for- word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical Eng- lish. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.
Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the indi- vidualwrittenword. Howaresuchwordstobeclassi- fied? Aresomeofthemnounsbynature,someverbs and some adjectives ? Are there pronouns, and preposi- tions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages ?
One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians
? tHE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 371
to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature be- fore they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryati etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar. * Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions ! A "part of speech" is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for an- other. They act for one another because they were orig- inally one and the same.
Few of us realize that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation ; that they still retain life. It is . only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will.
One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, buddingforthonefromanother. Likenature,theChinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are notforiiiallyseparated.
TheChineselanguagenaturally knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begim to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions.
* Even Latin, living Latin had not the network of rules they foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen Eng- lish grammars borrowing oblique cases from Latin grammars. Sometimes they sprang from the grammatizing or categorizing passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion. --E. P.
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We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness ofourownformalisms. Thisisespeciallysadinpoetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature.
Letusgofurtherwithourexample. InEnglishwe call "to shine" a verb in the infinitive, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, "bright. " If we need a noun we say "luminosity," whichisabstract,beingderivedfromanadjective. * To get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbi- trarily cut off from its power of action, say "the sun" or "themoon. " Ofcoursethereisnothinginnaturesocut off, and therefore this nounizing is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once
the verb "shine," the adjective "bright" and the noun "sun," we should probably call it an "infinitive of the infinitive. " According to our ideas, it should be some- thing extremely abstract, too intangible for use.
TheChinesehaveoneword,mingormet. Itsideo- graph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the
moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective.
write literally, "the sun and moon of the cup" for "the cup's brightness. " Placed as a verb, you write "the cup sun-and-moons," actually "cup sun-and-moon," or in a weakened thought, "is Hke sun," i. e. , shines. "Sun-and- mooncup"isnaturallyabrightcup. Thereisnopos- sible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid
* [A good writer would use "shine" (i. e. , to shine), shining, and "the shine" or "sheen", possibly thinking of the German "schone' and Schonheit"; but this does not invalidate Prof. Fenollosa's next contention. --E. P. ]
Thus you
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 373
scholar may spend a week trying to decide what "part of speech" he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English.
The fact is that almost every written Chiftese word is properly just such an underlying word, and yet it is not abstract. It is not exclusive of parts of speech, but com- prehensive; notsomethingwhichisneitheranoun,verb, or adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all times. . Usage may incline the full meaning now a little more to one side, now to another, according to the point of view, but through all cases the poet is free to deal with it richly and concretely, as does nature.
In the derivation of nouns from verbs, the Chinese lan- guage is forestalled by the Aryan. Almost all the San- skrit roots, which seem to underlie European languages, are primitive verbs, which express characteristic actions of visible nature. The verb must be the primary fact of nature, since motion and change are all that we can rec- ognize in her. In the primitive transitive sentence, such as "Farmer pounds rice," the agent and the object are nouns only in so far as they limit a unit of action. "Farmer" and "rice" are mere hard terms which define theextremesofthepounding. Butinthemselves,apart from this sentence-function, they are naturally vei'bs. The farmer is one who tills the ground, and the rice is a plant which grows in a special way. This is indicated in the Chinese characters. And this probably exempli- fies the ordinary derivation of nouns from verbs. In all languages, Chinese included, a noun is originally "that which does something," that which performs the verbal action. Thus the moon comes from the root ma, and means"themeasurer. " Thesunmeansthatwhichbe- gets.
The derivation of adjectives from the verb need hardly
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be exemplified. Even with us, to-day, we can still watch participles passing over into adjectives. In Japanese the adjective is frankly part of the inflection of the verb, a special mood, so that every verb is also an adjective. This brings us close to nature, because everywhere the quality is only a power of action regarded as having an abstract inherence. Green is only a certain rapidity of vibration, hardness a degree of tenseness in cohering. In Chinese the adjective always retains a substratum of verbalmeaning. Weshouldtrytorenderthisintrans- lation, not be content with some bloodless adjectival ab- straction plus "is. "
Still more interesting are the Chinese "prepositions," they are often post-positions. Prepositions are so im- portant, so pivotal in European speech only because we have weakly yielded up the force of our intransitive verbs. We have to add small supernumerary words to bring back the original power. We still say "I see a horse," but with the weak verb "look," we have to add the directive particle "at" before we can restore the natural transitiveness. *
Prepositions represent a few simple ways in which in- complete verbs complete themselves. Pointing toward nouns as a limit they bring force to bear upon them. That is to say, they are naturally verbs, of generalized or condensed use. In Aryan languages it is often diffi- cult to trace the verbal origins of simple prepositions. Only in "off" do we see a fragment of the thought "to throw off. " In Chinese the preposition is frankly a verb, specially used in a generalized sense. These verbs
* [This is a bad example. We can say "I look a fool", "look", transitive, now means resemble. The main contention is however correct. We tend to abandon specific words like resemble and substitute, for them, vague verbs with prepo- sitional directors, or riders. --E. P. ]
;
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 375
are often used in their specially verbal sense, and it greatly weakens an English translation if they are sys- tematically rendered by colorless prepositions.
Thus in Chinese : By = to cause ; to ^ to fall toward in =to remain, to dwell; from=to follow; and so on. Conjunctions are similarly derivative, they usually serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves actions. Thus in Chi-
nese : Because = to use ; and = to be included under one another form of "and" := to be parallel ; or = to par- take; if3=toletonedo,topermit. Thesameistrueof a host of other particles, no longer traceable in the Aryan tongues.
Pronouns appear a thorn in our evolution theory, since they have been taken as unanalyzable expressions of per- sonality. In Chinese even they yield up their striking secretsofverbalmetaphor. Theyareaconstantsource of weakness if colorlessly translated. Take, for exarri- ple, th? five forms of "I. " There is the sign of a "spear inthehand"=averyemphaticI; fiveandamouth=a weak and defensive I, holding off a crowd by speaking; to conceal=a selfish and private I; self (the cocoon
sign) and a mouth = an egoistic I, one who takes pleas- ure in his own speaking; the self presented is used only when one, is speaking to one's self.
I trust that this digression concerning parts of speech may have justified itself. It proves, first, the enormous interest of the Chinese language in throwing light upon our forgotten mental processes, and thus furnishes a new chapter in the philosophy of language. Secondly, it is indispensable for understanding the poetical raw mate- rial which the Chinese language affords. Poetry differs
from prose in the concrete colors of its diction. It is not enough for it to furnish a meaning to philosophers.
t--
? I
1
It must appeal to emotions with the charm of direct im- pression, flashing through regions where the intellect can onlygrope. * Poetrymustrenderwhatissaid,notwhat is merely meant. Abstract meaning gives little vividness, and fullness of imagination gives all. Chinese poetry demands that we abandon our narrow grammatical cate- gories, that we follow the original text with a wealth of concrete verbs.
But this is only the beginning of the matter. So far we have exhibited the Chinese characters and the Chinese sentence chiefly as vivid shorthand pictures of actions andprocessesinnature. Theseembodytruepoetryas far as they go. Such actions are seen, but Chinese would be a poor language and Chinese poetry but a narrow art, could they not go on to represent also what is unseen. The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure re- lations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too largS, in vibrations, cohesions and in affinities. The, Chi-
nese compass these also, and with great power and beauty.
You will ask, how could the Chinese have built up a
greatintellectualfabricfrommerepicturewriting? To
the ordinary western mind, which believes that thought
is concerned with logical categories and which rather
condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat
seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with
its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to
376
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the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient 1
races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of i|jnaterial images to suggest immaterial relations.
* [Cf. principle of Primary apparition, "Spirit of Romance". E. P. ]
t [Compare Aristotle's Poetics. --E. P. ]
j
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The whole dehcate substance of speech is built upon substrataofmetaphor. Abstractterms,pressedbyety- mology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in di- rect action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. -^^hey are possible only becausethey follow objective liaes of relations in
''jatljreTierselfy* Relations are more real and more im-J portantthan the things which they relate. \ The forces/ which produce the branch-angles of an oaK lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half curbing the out-pressing vitalities, goverri the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which commu- nication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. NaBir^:fagi^fes"1iiiF'owircH^ Had the world not been full "of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have been starved and languagechainedtotheobvious. Therewouldhavebeen no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seentothemajortruthoftheunseen. Notmorethana few hundred roots out of our large vocabularies could have dealt directly with physical processes. These we canfairlywellidentifyinprimitiveSanskrit. Theyare, almost without exception, vivid verbs. The wealth of European speech grew, following slowly the intricate maze of nature's suggestions and affinities. Metaphor was piled upon metaphor in quasi-geological strata.
Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance ofpoetry. Theknowninterpretstheobscure,theuni- verseisalivewithmyth. Thebeautyandfreedomofthe observed world furnish a model, and life is pregnant with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some philos- ophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has
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been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of sep- arate "particulars," for such rows do not exist. Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truthinthesamecompassofwords. Metaphor,itschief device, is at once the substance of nature and of lan- guage. Poetryonlydoesconsciously*whattheprim- itive races did unconsciously. The chief work of liter- ary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance. f He must do this so that he may keep his words enriched byalltheirsubtleundertonesofmeaning. Theoriginal metaphors stand as a kind of luminous background, giv- ing color and vitality, forcing them closer to the concrete- ness of natural processes. Shakespeare everywhere teemswithexamples. Forthesereasonspoetrywasthe earliestoftheworldarts poetry,languageandthecare
;
of myth grew up together.
I have alleged all this because it enables me to show
clearly why I believe that the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue. Let us first see how near it is to the heart of nature in its metaphors. We can watch it passing from the seen to the unseen, as we saw it pass-
* [Vide also an article on "Vorticism" in the Fortnightly Re- view for September, 1914. "The language of exploration" now in my "Gaudier-Brzeska. "--E. P. ]
t [I would submit in all humility that this applies in the rendering of ancient texts. The poet in dealing with his own time, must also see to it that language does not petrify on his hands. He must prepare for new advances along the lines of true metaphor that is interpretative metaphor, or image, as dia- metrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental metaphor. --E. P. ]
? THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER 379
ingfromverbtopronoun. Itretainstheprimitivesap, it is not cut and dried like a walking-stick. We have been told that these people are cold, practical, mechani- cal, literal, and without a trace of imaginative genius. That is nonsense.
Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages to-day are thin and cold because we think lessandlessintothem. Weareforced,forthesakeof quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowestedgeofmeaning. Naturewouldseemtohave become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and em- balmed in the dictionary. Only scholars and poets feel painfully back along the thread of our etymologies and piece together our diction, as best they may, from for- gotten fragments. This anemia of modern speech is only too well encouraged by the feeble cohesive force of our phonetic symbols. There is little or nothing in a phonetic word to exhibit the embryonic stages of its growth. It does not bear its metaphor on its face. We
forget that personality once meant, not the soul, but the soul's mask. This is the sort of thing one can not pos- sibly forget in using the Chinese symbols.
In this Chinese shows its advantage. Its etymology is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse and process, visible and at work. After thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in
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poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These centreaboutthegraphicsymbol. Thememorycanhold themandusethem. TheverysoilofChineselifeseems entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold il- lustrations which crowd its annals of personal experi- ence, the lines of tendency which converge upon a tragic climax, moral character as the very core of the principle --all these are flashed at once on the mind as reinforc- ing values with an accumulation of meaning which a phonetic language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideo- graphs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old cam- paigner. With us, the poet is the only one for whom the accumulated treasures of the race-words are real and active. Poetic language is always vibrant with fold on fold of overtones, and with natural affinities, but in Chi- nese the visibility of the metaphor tends to raise this
quality to its intensest power.
I have mentioned the tyranny of mediaeval logic. Ac-
cording to this European logic thought is a kind of brick- yard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts. These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled with words for future use. This use consists in picking out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and stick- ing them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by the use either of white mortar for the positive copula "is," or of black mortar for the negative copula "is not. " In this way we produce such admirable propositions as "A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly. "
Let us consider a row of cherry trees. From each of these in turn we proceed to take an "abstract," as the phrase is, a certain common lump of qualities which we may express together by the name cherry or cherry-ness. Next we place in a second table several such character- istic concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo.
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From these we abstract some further common quality, dilutation or mediocrity, and label it "red" or "redness. " It is evident that this process of abstraction may be car- ried on indefinitely and with all sorts of material. We may go on forever building pyramids of attenuated con- cept until we reach the apex "being.
