between literature and mere writing is only that some say it beautifully and others do
not, and they who say it more beautifully than others survive.
The lyrical origin of literature makes it possible for us to regard literature as a
reflection of man's soul, and to regard a nation's literature as the reflection of man's
spirit in that nation. For if life may be compared to a large city, a man's writing may
be regarded as the window in his garret from which he views the city. In reading a
man's writing we but wish to look at life from his garret window and obtain a view of
life as the writer sees it. The stars, the clouds, the mountain peaks lining the horizon,
and the alleyways and housetops in the city are all the same, but that garret view of
the city is individualistic and peculiarly his own. In reviewing a nation's literature we
are therefore but trying to get a glimpse of life as the best minds of that nation see it
and as they express it through their own peculiar medium.
II. LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
The accident of the Chinese literary medium, or the Chinese language, has largely
determined the peculiar development of Chinese literature. By comparison with the
European languages it is possible to trace how much of the peculiarities of Chinese
thought and literature are due simply to their possession of a so-called monosyllabic
language. The fact that the Chinese spoke in syllables like chingy chong> chang was
appalling in consequences. This monosyllabism determined the character of the
Chinese writing, and the character of the Chinese writing brought about the continuity
of the literary heritage and therefore even influenced the conservatism of Chinese
thought. It was further responsible for the development of a literary language quite
distinct from the spoken language. This, in turn, made learning difficult and
necessarily the privilege of a limited class. Finally, the monosyllabism directly
influenced the development of certain peculiarities of Chinese literary style.
Every nation has developed a writing most suitable to its language. Europe did not
develop a writing on pictorial principles because the phonetic structure of
Indo-Germanic words, with its comparative profusion of consonants and
infinitely variable combinations, required an analytic alphabet, and would make the
representation of these words by pictographs hopelessly inadequate. For no system
of ideographs could be used alone, and it was found, as in the case of Chinese,
necessary to supplement the pictorial principle by the phonetic principle before it
could have any important development. These elementary pictographs were then used
in combinations purely for their phonetic value, and actually nine-tenths of the over
forty thousand characters in Chinese dictionaries are built on the principle of phonetic
combination, with about thirteen hundred ideographs as phonetic signs. With a
monosyllabic language, such as the Chinese, which has only about four hundred
syllabic combinations (not counting the tones) like ching9 chong, chang, this could
suffice. But with a Germanic language the invention of a new symbol for
every new sound-combination like Schlacht and Kraft in German or
scratched, scraped, splash and scalpel in English would be obviously an impossible
task. The Chinese language failed to develop a phonetic script in the Western sense
because the phonetic use of ideographic symbols could suffice. Had the Chinese
been spea.Td.ng a language with words like the German Schlacht and Kraft or the
English scratched and scalpel, they would have, by sheer necessity, invented a
phonetic script long ago.
The perfect adjustment between the Chinese monosyllabic language and the written
characters can be easily made plain. The language is characterized by a great scarcity
of syllabic forms and consequently a great number of homonyms or words of the
same sound. The sound pao can mean over a dozen things: "a package/' "to carry/'
"well - filled in stomach," "a bubble," etc. Since the pictorial principle was limited in
application to concrete things or actions, and was even then necessarily complicated, the original word for "package" was used for its purely phonetic value and
"borrowed9* to denote other words of the same sound. What happened then was that
there was a great deal of confusion, and before the script was more or less fixed in the
Han Dynasty, we had a great number of such "borrowed" words indicating different
things. Necessity forced the Chinese to add a sign (called "radical") to indicate the
class of ideas which this particular/^ was intended to refer to.
The use of phonetic symbols was not too exact, and hence we have the following
words, pronounced pao or p'ao in different tones in modern Chinese, all written with
the original "package"-sign ( gj), but each taking a class-sign or radical, as
Thus pao plus a "hand" radical means to carry, plus a "foot" means to run, plus
"clothes" means a gown, plus an "eat" means well- filledinstomach, plus "water"
means a bubble, plus "fire" means firecrackers, plus a "fish" means the name of a fish,
plus "flesh" means the womb, plus "stone" means a cannon, plus "mouth" means to
roar, plus "grass" means a flower bud, plus "rain" means hail, plus a "knife" means to
scrape. This was the adjustment to solve the problem of homonyms.
But suppose the problem was not homonyms, suppose the Chinese language had
words like the English scraped, scratched, and scalpel, or suppose the English people
started out with a basic phonetic picture for sc-a-p, they would have been forced
equally by necessity to distinguish between the sounds cape and scape, or between
scape and scrape, or between scrape and scraped, or between scrape and scratch, and
the result could not have been anything except an alphabet with signs to denote s, r,
ed(t},p, ch, etc. Had the Chinese done this they too would have had an alphabet, and
consequently have had a more widespread literacy.
Given, therefore, the monosyllabic character of the Chinese language, it was almost
inevitable that pictorial characters were used. This fact alone has profoundly changed
the character and position of learning in China. By their very nature the Chinese
characters are not subject to changes in the spoken tongue. The same symbol could be
read in different ways in different dialects or even languages, as the sign of the
Christian cross could be pronounced cross in English and croix in French.
This has a very close bearing on the unity of Chinese culture throughout the old
empire. More important than that, the use of the characters made the reading of the
Confucian classics possible after the lapse of a thousand years. The idea that the
Confucian classics could have become unreadable in the sixth century of our era is
extremely intriguing, and one is tempted to wonder what would have happened to the
tremendous respect for Confucianism had that happened.
Actually, the Chinese characters underwent a great revolution at the time of the
burning of books by Ch' in Shihhuang, and to-day Confucian scholars are split into
two camps, one believing in the classic texts in "ancient scripts" which are supposed to have escaped destruction in the walls of Confucius's own home, and the other
believing in the "modern scripts" which were handed down orally by old scholars who
had committed the classic texts to memory, and survived the shortlived Ch' in Dynasty.
Nevertheless, from that time onward (213 B.C.), there is a continuity of writing, with
a comparatively unimportant evolution of forms, which must largely account for the
hypnotic power these classics have exercised over the Chinese minds.
What is true of the early texts of Confucianism is true of the entire literary heritage,
especially that coming after the Han days. A Chinese schoolboy who can read an
author of a hundred years ago could, by that very training, read works of the thirteenth,
tenth or second century, almost in the same sense that a modern artist can appreciate
the Venus de Milo with the same ease as he appreciates Rodin. Would the influence of
the classic heritage have been so powerful, and would the Chinese mind have been so
conservative and worshipful of the past, had that past been less readily understood?
One wonders.
Yet in another way the use of the characters helped in the creation of a fairly stable
literary language, quite different from the spoken language, and rather too difficult for
the average scholar to master. Whereas a phonetic script would! follow naturally the
changes and idioms of a living language, the language of written symbols, by being
less dependent upon sounds, achieved a greater freedom irx idiom and grammar. It did
not have to obey the laws of any spoken language, and, in time, it had its laws of
structure and a store of idioms which accumulated by literary accidents from the
works of different dynasties. Thus it came to have an independent reality of its own,
subject more or less to literary fashions.
As time went on, this discrepancy between the literary language and the living
language of the age became greater and greater, until to-day the study of the ancient
language is, in point of psychological difficulties involved, exactly similar to the
learning of a foreign tongue for the Chinese people. The laws of ordinary
sentence-structure differ between the literary and the spoken language, so that one
cannot write in the ancient language by merely substituting certain ancient words for
the modern words. A simple phrase like three ounces silver should be syntactically
changed into silver three ounces^ and whereas the modern Chinese say / never saw
(it}9 the ancient idiom requires the construction / never it saw, the accusative object
being regularly placed before the verb in the case of negative verbs. Modern Chinese
schoolboys are therefore apt to commit the same idiomatic blunders as when English
schoolboys say je vois vous in learning French. Just as in learning a foreign language
a very extensive acquaintance with that language is necessary before one can really
master the ordinary idioms, so in the practice of writing ancient Chinese, years of oral
repetition and reading of masterpieces (minimum ten years) are required before one
can write fairly presentable ancient Chinese. And just as very few people succeed in
really mastering a foreign language^ so in reality very few Chinese scholars succeed
in writing really idiomatic ancient Chinese. Actually, there are only three or four Chinese to-day who can write "idiomatic" Chinese of the classic Chou Dynas ty. Most
of us have to put up with that bookish sort of language which foreigners command
easily enough, but which lacks the true flavour of the mother tongue.
The use of the Chinese characters made this development possible* Moreover, the
independence of character from sound greatly accelerated its monosyllabic quality.
Actually, bisyllabic words in the spoken language can be represented by a
monosyllabic character, because the character itself by its composition makes the
meaning already quite clear. Thus, in the spoken language we require a bisyllabic lao
hu ("old tiger") to distinguish it aurally from a dozen other AM'S, but in writing, the
character hu alone is sufficient. The literary language is therefore much more
monosyllabic than the spoken language, since its basis is visual and not aural.
From this extreme monosyllabism then developed an extreme terseness of style,
which cannot be imitated in the spoken language without the risk of unintelligibility,
but which is the characteristic beauty of Chinese literature. Thus in China we have a
metre of exactly seven syllables to each line as the standard metre, saying probably as
much as two lines of English blank verse, a feat which is inconceivable in the English
language, or in any spoken language. Whether in prose or in verse, this economy of
words produced a style where each word or syllable is carefully weighed to its finest
nuance in soundvalue and is surcharged, as it were, with meaning. As with meticulous
poets, Chinese writers are careful in the use of a syllable. A real mastery of this
clean-cut style therefore means extreme mastery in the choice of words. Hence arose a
literary tradition for mincing words which later became a social tradition and finally a
mental habit of the Chinese.
The consequent difficulty of this literary craft caused the limitation of literacy in
China, which needs no elaboration. The limitation of literacy in turn changed the
whole organization of Chinese society and the whole complexion of Chinese culture,
and one sometimes wonders whether the Chinese people as a whole would be so
docile and so respectful to their superiors had they spoken an inflexional language and
consequently used an alphabetic language. I sometimes feel that, had the Chinese
managed to retain a few more final or initial consonants in their language, not only
