with the Chinese line:
[Illustration: Chinese ideograms. 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 contains a certain body of prosaic
meaning; for the question 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 the phonetic symbols of Gray. All
that poetic form requires 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 weakness of our subjective
operations but because the operations of nature are successive. The
transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural
phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination
requires the same temporal order.[2]
Suppose that we look out of a window and watch a man. Suddenly he turns
his head and actively fixes his 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 denote these three stages of our thought by
symbols equally arbitrary, _which had no basis in sound_; for example,
by three Chinese characters:
[Illustration: Chinese ideograms]
If we all knew _what division_ of this mental horse-picture each of
these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one
another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually
employ the visible language of gesture in much this same manner.
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
connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention.
But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man
on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold figure
represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye,
a modified picture of running legs but unforgettable 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 element 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 elements. It speaks at once with the
vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some
sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading 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 structure of detached Chinese words.
The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold
upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional
modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great number
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 therefore 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, original pictures to
compounds. In this process of compounding, two things added together do
not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between
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 nature. Things are
only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions,
cross-sections cut through actions, 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 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
universally necessary _in all languages_? Why _must_ all possess it, and
what is the normal type of it? If it be so universal 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 "complete thought"; the other, that in it we bring
about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some natural objective
standard, since it is evident that a thought can not be the test of its
own completeness. But in nature there is _no_ completeness. On the one
hand, practical completeness may be expressed by a mere interjection, as
"Hi! there!", or "Scat!", or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is
needed to make one's meaning more clear. On the other hand, no full
sentence really completes a thought. The man who sees and the horse
which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before
he looked. The horse kicked when the man tried to catch him. The truth
is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or passes into
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 processes in nature are inter-related; and thus there
could 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 juggling between our right and left hands.
The subject is that about which _I_ am going to talk; the predicate is
that which _I_ am going to say about it. The sentence according 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 abstractions, concepts drawn out of things by a
sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the "qualities"
which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their
little checker-board juggling depended 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. It was as
if Botany should reason from the leaf-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 reflection of the temporal order in
causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth
is the _transference of power_. The type of sentence in nature 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:
term transference term
from of to
which force which
If we regard this transference as the conscious or unconscious act of an
agent we can translate the diagram into:
agent act object
In this the act is the very substance of the fact denoted. The agent and
the object are only limiting terms.
It seems to me that the normal and typical sentence in English as well
as in Chinese expresses just this unit of natural process. It consists
of three necessary words; the first denoting the agent or subject from
which the act starts; the second embodying the very stroke of the act;
the third pointing to the object, the receiver of the impact. Thus:
Farmer pounds rice.
The form of the Chinese transitive sentence, and of the English
(omitting particles) exactly corresponds to this universal form of
action in nature. This brings language close to _things_, and in its
strong reliance upon verbs it erects all speech into a kind of dramatic
poetry.
A different sentence order is frequent in inflected languages like
Latin, German or Japanese. This is because they are inflected, i.e.,
they have little tags and word-endings, or labels to show which is the
agent, the object, etc. In uninflected languages, like English and
Chinese, there is nothing but the order of the words to distinguish
their functions. And this order would be no sufficient indication, were
it not the _natural order_--that is, the order of cause and effect.
It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms,
sentences built out of the verb "to be," and, finally, negative forms.
To grammarians and logicians these have seemed more primitive than the
transitive, 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 (itself)." "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 reflects light
to our eye?
The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all transitive 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 law and with ordinary
experience. The English passive voice with "is" seemed at first an
obstacle to this hypothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a
generalized transitive verb meaning something like "receive," which had
degenerated into an auxiliary. It was 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 Chinese we can still watch positive verbal
conceptions passing 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 specific 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."
This is an ultimate weakness of language. It has come from generalizing
all intransitive words into one. As "live," "see," "walk," "breathe,"
are generalized into states by dropping their objects, so these weak
verbs are 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" 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 snatch from the moon with the hand." Here the
baldest 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 poetical 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 individual 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 English. 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 individual written word.
How are such words to be classified? Are some of them nouns by nature,
some verbs and some adjectives? Are there pronouns, and prepositions 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 to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life.
All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature
before they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryan 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.[3] 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 another. They _act for_ one another because they were
originally 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, budding forth one from another. Like nature, the
Chinese words are alive and plastic, because _thing_ and _action_ are
not formally separated. The Chinese language naturally knows no grammar.
It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begun to
torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their
definitions. We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness of
our own formalisms. This is especially sad in poetry, because the one
necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as
possible, as full of the sap of nature.
Let us go further with our example. In English we 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," which
is abstract, being derived from an adjective.[4] To get a tolerably
concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and
light upon a thing arbitrarily cut off from its power of action, say
"the sun" or "the moon." Of course there is nothing in nature so cut
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
something extremely abstract, too intangible for use.
The Chinese have one word, _ming_ or _mei_. Its ideograph is the sign of
the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun,
adjective. Thus you 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 like sun," i.e., shines. "Sun-and-moon cup" is naturally a bright
cup. There is no possible confusion of the real meaning, though a
stupid 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 Chinese word is properly just such
an underlying word, and yet it is _not_ abstract. It is not exclusive of
parts of speech, but comprehensive; not something which is neither a
noun, 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 language is
forestalled by the Aryan. Almost all the Sanskrit 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 recognize 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 the
extremes of the pounding. But in themselves, apart from this
sentence-function, they are naturally verbs. 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 exemplifies
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 "the measurer." The sun means that which begets.
The derivation of adjectives from the verb need hardly 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 verbal
meaning. We should try to render this in translation, not be content
with some bloodless adjectival abstraction plus "is."
Still more interesting are the Chinese "prepositions," they are often
post-positions. Prepositions are so important, 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.[5]
Prepositions represent a few simple ways in which incomplete 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 difficult
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 are often used in their specially verbal sense, and it
greatly weakens an English translation if they are systematically
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 Chinese: Because = to use; and = to be included under
one; another form of "and" = to be parallel; or = to partake; if = to
let one do, to permit. The same is true of 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 personality. In Chinese even they
yield up their striking secrets of verbal metaphor. They are a constant
source of weakness if colorlessly translated. Take, for example, the
five forms of "I." There is the sign of a "spear in the hand" = a very
emphatic I; five and a mouth = 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 pleasure 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 material 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. It must appeal to emotions with the charm of direct
impression, flashing through regions where the intellect can only
grope.[6] Poetry must render what is said, not what is merely meant.
Abstract meaning gives little vividness, and fullness of imagination
gives all. Chinese poetry demands that we abandon our narrow grammatical
categories, 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 and processes in nature. These embody true
poetry as 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 relations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in
processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too large, in
vibrations, cohesions and in affinities. The Chinese compass these also,
and with great power and beauty.
You will ask, how could the Chinese have built up a great intellectual
fabric from mere picture writing? 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 the unseen by exactly the same process
which all ancient races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of
material images to suggest immaterial relations.[7]
The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of
metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient
roots still embedded in direct action. But the primitive metaphors do
not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only
because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself.
Relations are more real and more important than 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, govern the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve,
a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which
communication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is
identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the world not
been full of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have
been starved and language chained to the obvious. There would have been
no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major
truth of the unseen. Not more than a few hundred roots out of our large
vocabularies could have dealt directly with physical processes. These we
can fairly well identify in primitive Sanskrit. They are, 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 of poetry. The
known interprets the obscure, the universe is alive with myth. The
beauty and freedom of the observed world furnish a model, and life is
pregnant with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of
æsthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the
abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediæval
logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of
separate "particulars," for such rows do not exist. Poetry is finer than
prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of
words. Metaphor, its chief device, is at once the substance of nature
and of language. Poetry only does consciously[8] what the primitive
races did unconsciously. The chief work of literary men in dealing with
language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the
ancient lines of advance.[9] He must do this so that he may keep his
words enriched by all their subtle undertones of meaning. The original
metaphors stand as a kind of luminous background, giving color and
vitality, forcing them closer to the concreteness of natural processes.
Shakespeare everywhere teems with examples. For these reasons poetry was
the earliest of the world arts; poetry, language and the care 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 passing from verb to pronoun. It retains the primitive
sap, it is not cut and dried like a walking-stick. We have been told
that these people are cold, practical, mechanical, 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 less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of
quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of
meaning. Nature would seem to have 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 embalmed 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 forgotten 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 possibly 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
poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These centre about the
graphic symbol. The memory can hold them and use them. The very soil of
Chinese life seems entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold
illustrations which crowd its annals of personal experience, 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 reinforcing values with an accumulation of meaning which a phonetic
language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideographs are like
blood-stained battle flags to an old campaigner. 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 Chinese the visibility of
the metaphor tends to raise this quality to its intensest power.
I have mentioned the tyranny of mediæval logic. According 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 sticking 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 characteristic
concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo. 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 carried on indefinitely and with all sorts of
material. We may go on forever building pyramids of attenuated concept
until we reach the apex "being."
But we have done enough to illustrate the characteristic process. At the
base of the pyramid lie _things_, but stunned, as it were. They can
never know themselves for things until they pass up and down among the
layers of the pyramids. The way of passing up and down the pyramid may
be exemplified as follows: We take a concept of lower attenuation, such
as "cherry"; we see that it is contained under one higher, such as
"redness." Then we are permitted to say in sentence form, "Cherryness is
contained under redness," or for short, "(the) cherry is red." If, on
the other hand, we do not find our chosen subject under a given
predicate we use the black copula and say, for example, "(The) cherry is
not liquid."
From this point we might go on to the theory of the syllogism, but we
refrain. It is enough to note that the practised logician finds it
convenient to store his mind with long lists of nouns and adjectives,
for these are naturally the names of classes. Most text-books on
language begin with such lists. The study of verbs is meagre, for in
such a system there is only one real working verb, to-wit, the
quasi-verb "is." All other verbs can be transformed into participles and
gerunds. For example, "to run" practically becomes a case of "running."
Instead of thinking directly, "The man runs," our logician makes two
subjective equations, namely: The individual in question is contained
under the class "man"; and the class "man" is contained under the class
of "running things."
The sheer loss and weakness of this method is apparent and flagrant.
Even in its own sphere it can not think half of what it wants to think.
It has no way of bringing together any two concepts which do not happen
to stand one under the other and in the same pyramid. It is impossible
to represent change in this system or any kind of growth. This is
probably why the conception of evolution came so late in Europe. _It
could not make way until it was prepared to destroy the inveterate logic
of classification._
Far worse than this, such logic can not deal with any kind of
interaction or with any multiplicity of function. According to it, the
function of my muscles is as isolated from the function of my nerves, as
from an earthquake in the moon. For it the poor neglected things at the
bases of the pyramids are only so many particulars or pawns.
Science fought till she got at the things. All her work has been done
from the base of the pyramids, not from the apex. She has discovered how
functions cohere in things. She expresses her results in grouped
sentences which embody no nouns or adjectives but verbs of special
character. The true formula for thought is: The cherry tree is all that
it does. Its correlated verbs compose it. At bottom these verbs are
transitive. Such verbs may be almost infinite in number.
In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic.
Primitive men who created language agreed with science and not with
logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy.
Poetry agrees with science and not with logic.
The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective
inclusions, poetry evaporates. The more concretely and vividly we
express the interactions of things the better the poetry. We need in
poetry thousands of active words, each doing its utmost to show forth
the motive and vital forces. We can not exhibit the wealth of nature by
mere summation, by the piling of sentences. Poetic thought works by
suggestion, crowding maximum meaning into the single phrase pregnant,
charged, and luminous from within.
In Chinese character each work accumulated this sort of energy in
itself.
Should we pass formally to the study of Chinese poetry, we should warn
ourselves against logicianized pitfalls. We should beware of modern
narrow utilitarian meanings ascribed to the words in commercial
dictionaries. We should try to preserve the metaphoric overtones. We
should beware of English grammar, its hard parts of speech, and its lazy
satisfaction with nouns and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear
in mind the verbal undertone of each noun. We should avoid "is" and
bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs. Most of the existing
translations violate all of these rules.[10]
The development of the normal transitive sentence rests upon the fact
that one action in nature promotes another; thus the agent and the
object are secretly verbs. For example, our sentence, "Reading promotes
writing," would be expressed in Chinese by three full verbs. Such a form
is the equivalent of three expanded clauses and can be drawn out into
adjectival, participial, infinitive, relative or conditional members.
One of many possible examples is, "If one reads it teaches him how to
write." Another is, "One who reads becomes one who writes." But in the
first condensed form a Chinese would write, "Read promote write." The
dominance of the verb and its power to obliterate all other parts of
speech give us the model of terse fine style.
I have seldom seen our rhetoricians dwell on the fact that the great
strength of our language lies in its splendid array of transitive verbs,
drawn both from Anglo-Saxon and from Latin sources. These give us the
most individual characterizations of force. Their power lies in their
recognition of nature as a vast storehouse of forces. We do not say in
English that things seem, or appear, or eventuate, or even that they
are; but that they _do_. Will is the foundation of our speech.[11] We
catch the Demiurge in the act. I had to discover for myself why
Shakespeare's English was so immeasurably superior to all others. I
found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of
hundreds of transitive verbs. Rarely will you find an "is" in his
sentences. "Is" weakly lends itself to the uses of our rhythm, in the
unaccented syllables; yet he sternly discards it. A study of
Shakespeare's verbs should underlie all exercises in style.
We find in poetical Chinese a wealth of transitive verbs, in some way
greater even than in the English of Shakespeare. This springs from their
power of combining several pictorial elements in a single character. We
have in English no verb for what two things, say the sun and moon, both
do together. Prefixes and affixes merely direct and qualify. In Chinese
the verb can be more minutely qualified. We find a hundred variants
clustering about a single idea. Thus "to sail a boat for purposes of
pleasure" would be an entirely different verb from "to sail for
purposes of commerce." Dozens of Chinese verbs express various shades of
grieving, yet in English translations they are usually reduced to one
mediocrity. Many of them can be expressed only by periphrasis, but what
right has the translator to neglect the overtones? There are subtle
shadings. We should strain our resources in English.
It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not
now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations
frequently contribute only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible
that any such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever existed
alone as abstract sound without the concrete character. It contradicts
the law of evolution. Complex ideas arise only gradually, as the power
of holding them together arises. The paucity of Chinese sound could not
so hold them. Neither is it conceivable that the whole list was made at
once, as commercial codes of cipher are compiled. Therefore we must
believe that the phonetic theory is in large part unsound. The metaphor
once existed in many cases where we can not now trace it. Many of our
own etymologies have been lost. It is futile to take the ignorance of
the Han dynasty for omniscience.[12] It is not true, as Legge said, that
the original picture characters could never have gone far in building
up abstract thought. This is a vital mistake. We have seen that our own
languages have all sprung from a few hundred vivid phonetic verbs by
figurative derivation. A fabric more vast could have been built up in
Chinese by metaphorical composition. No attenuated idea exists which it
might not have reached more vividly and more permanently than we could
have been expected to reach with phonetic roots. Such a pictorial
method, whether the Chinese exemplified it or not, would be the ideal
language of the world.
Still, is it not enough to show that Chinese poetry gets back near to
the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure, its wealth of such
figure? If we attempt to follow it in English we must use words highly
charged, words whose vital suggestion shall interplay as nature
interplays. Sentences must be like the mingling of the fringes of
feathered banners, or as the colors of many flowers blended into the
single sheen of a meadow.
The poet can never see too much or feel too much. His metaphors are only
ways of getting rid of the dead white plaster of the copula. He resolves
its indifference into a thousand tints of verb. His figures flood things
with jets of various light, like the sudden upblaze of fountains. The
prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious
framework of nature, they sang out her processes in their hymns. And
this diffused poetry which they created, Shakespeare has condensed into
a more tangible substance. Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with
its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each
other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear,
continuous light-bands.
Now we are in condition to appreciate the full splendor of certain lines
of Chinese verse. Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet
selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a
delicate and lucid harmony. All arts follow the same law; refined
harmony lies in the delicate balance of overtones. In music the whole
possibility and theory of harmony is based on the overtones. In this
sense poetry seems a more difficult art.
How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighboring words?
We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor. We can find the
concord or harmonizing at its intensest, as in Romeo's speech over the
dead Juliet.
Here also the Chinese ideography has its advantage, in even a simple
line, for example, "The sun rises in the east."
The overtones vibrate against the eye. The wealth of composition in
characters makes possible a choice of words in which a single dominant
overtone colors every plane of meaning. That is perhaps the most
conspicuous quality of Chinese poetry. Let us examine our line.
[Illustration: Chinese ideograms. Sun Rises (in the) East]
The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east,
which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle
sign, the verb "rise," we have further homology; the sun is above the
horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing
trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a
way to the method, and to the method of intelligent reading.
[1] The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make
it, and I therefore transcribe his words.--E.P.
[2] Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric.--E.P.
[3] 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 English 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.
[4] A good writer would use "shine" (i.e., to shine), shining, and "the
shine" or "sheen", possibly thinking of the German "_schöne_" and
"_Schönheit_"; but this does not invalidate Prof. Fenollosa's next
contention.--E.P.
[5] 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 prepositional directors, or riders.--E.P.
[6] _Cf_. principle of Primary apparition, "Spirit of Romance".--E.P.
[7] Compare Aristotle's _Poetics_.--E.P.
[8] Vide also an article on "Vorticism" in the _Fortnightly Review_ for
September, 1914. "The language of exploration" now in my
"Gaudier-Brzeska."--E.P.
[9] 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 diametrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental
metaphor.--E.P.
[10] These precautions should be broadly conceived. It is not so much
their letter, as the underlying feeling of objectification and activity,
that matters.--E.P.
[11] Compare Dante's definition of "rectitudo" as the direction of the
will, probably taken from Aquinas.--E.P.
[12] Professor Fenollosa is well borne out by chance evidence. The
vorticist sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room before he went off to
the war. He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound
signs almost at pleasure. He was of course, used to consider all life
and nature in the terms of planes and of bounding lines. Nevertheless he
had spent only a fortnight in the museum studying the Chinese
characters. He was amazed at the stupidity of lexicographers who could
not discern for all their learning the pictorial values which were to
him perfectly obvious and apparent. Curiously enough, a few weeks later
Edmond Dulac, who is of a totally different tradition, sat here, giving
an impromptu panegyric on the elements of Chinese art, on the units of
composition, drawn from the written characters. He did not use Professor
Fenollosa's own words, he said "bamboo" instead of "rice". He said the
essence of the bamboo is in a certain way it grows, they have this in
their sign for bamboo, all designs of bamboo proceed from it. Then he
went on rather to disparage vorticism, on the grounds that it could not
hope to do for the Occident, in one life-time, what had required
centuries of development in China.--E.P.