mixture of concrete words of imagery, taken from the homely English language, and
words of more exact definition and literary meaning, taken from the Romanic
heritage. A written language which considers such expressions as "a nose for
news," "the cobwebs of knowledge," "the drift of language," "riding on the tide of
success" and "Lloyd George's flirtations with the Conservative Party" as good,
standard English must remain a virile literary medium. A false literary standard which
weeds out the words nose, cobwebs, drift, tide, etc., and enforces substitutes like
appreciation, accumulations, tendency, forward movement, must at once lose this
virility. The two components, concrete and abstract words, exist in great richness in
the Chinese language. Its basic structure is concrete throughout, like the
Anglo-Saxon words, and the literary heritage of the classical literature has left behind
a vocabulary more stylistic and refined in meaning, which corresponds to the
Romanic terminology in English. From the mixture of these two elements in the
hands of a true literary craftsman there will yet emerge a prose of the greatest power
and beauty.
VIII. POETRY
It seems fair to say that poetry has entered more into the fabric of our life than it has
in the West and is not regarded with that amused indifference which seems quite
general in a Western society. As I have already mentioned, all Chinese scholars are
poets, or pretend to be, and fifty per cent of the contents of a scholar's collected works
usually consists of poetry. The Chinese imperial examinations, ever since the T'ang
Period, have always included the composition of poems among the important tests of
literary ability. Even parents who had talented daughters to give away, and sometimes
the talented girls themselves, often chose their bridegrooms on the strength of a few
lines of really good poetry. Captives often regained their freedom or received extra
courtesy by their ability to write two or three verses which appealed to the men in
power. For poetry is regarded as the highest literary accomplishment and the surest
and easiest way of testing a man's literary skill. Moreover, Chinese painting is closely
connected with Chinese poetry, being akin to it, if not essentially identical with it, in
spirit and technique.
To my mind, poetry has taken over the function of religion in China, in so far as
religion is taken to mean a cleansing of man's soul, a feeling for the mystery and
beauty of the universe, and a feeling of tenderness and compassion for one's
fellowmen and the humble creatures of life. Religion cannot be, and should not be,
anything except an inspiration and a living emotion. The Chinese have not found this
inspiration or living emotion in their religions, which to them are merely decorative
patches and frills covering the seamy side of life, having largely to do with sickness
and death. But they have found this inspiration and living emotion in poetry.
Poetry has taught the Chinese a view of life which, through the influence of proverbs
and scrolls, has permeated into society in general and given them a sense of
compassion, an overflowing love of nature, and an attitude of artistic acceptance of
life. Through its feeling for nature it has often healed the wounds in their souls, and
through its lesson of enjoyment of the simple life it has kept a sane ideal for the
Chinese civilization. Sometimes it appeals to their romanticism and gives them a
vicarious emotional uplift from the humdrum workaday world, and sometimes it
appeals to their feeling of sadness, resignation and restraint, and cleanses the heart
through the artistic reflection of sorrow. It teaches them to listen with enjoyment to
the sound of raindrops on banana leaves, to admire the chimney smoke of cottages
rising and mingling with the evening clouds nestling on a hillside, to be tender toward
the white lilies on the country path, and to hear in the song of the cuckoo the longing
of a traveller for his mother at home. It gives them a kind thought for the poor
tea-picking girl or for the mulberry maiden, for the secluded and forsaken lover, for
the mother whose son is far away in army service, and for the common people whose
lives are harassed by war. Above all, it teaches them a pantheistic union with nature,
to awake and rejoice with spring, to doze off and hear time visibly flying away in the
droning of the cicada in summer, to feel sad with the falling autumn leaves, and "to
look for lines of poetry in snow" in winter. In this sense, poetry may well be called the
Chinaman's religion. I hardly think that, without their poetry梩 he poetry of living
habits as well as the poetry of words 梩 he Chinese people could have survived to this
day.
Yet Chinese poetry would not have achieved such an important place in Chinese life
without definite reasons for it. First, the Chinese artistic and literary genius, which
thinks in emotional concrete imagery and excels in the painting of atmosphere, is
especially suitable to the writing of poetry. Their characteristic genius for contraction,
suggestion, sublimation and concentration, which unfits them for prose within the
classical limits, makes the writing of poetry natural and easy to them. If, as Bertrand
Russell says, "in art they aim at being exquisite, and in life as being reasonable," then
it is natural for them to excel in poetry. Chinese poetry is dainty. It is never long, and
never very powerful. But it is eminently fitted for producing perfect gems of
sentiment and for painting with a few strokes a magical scenery, alive with rhythmic
beauty and informed with spiritual grace.
The whole tenor of Chinese thought, too, encourages the writing of poetry as the
highest crown of the literary art. Chinese education emphasizes the development of
the allround man, and Chinese scholarship emphasizes the unity of knowledge. Very
specialized sciences, like archaeology, are few, and the Chinese archaeologists always
remain human, capable of taking an interest in their family or in the pear tree in their
courtyard. Poetry is exactly that type of creation which calls for man's faculty of
general synthesis; in other words, for man's ability to look at life as a whole. Where
they fail in analysis, they achieve in synthesis. There is yet another important reason. Poetry is essentially thought coloured with emotion, and the Chinese think always
with emotion, and rarely with their analytical reason. It is no mere accident that the
Chinese regard the belly as the seat of all their scholarship and learning, as may be
seen in such expressions, "a bellyful of essays'* or "of scholarship." Now Western
psychologists have proved the belly to be the seat of our emotions, and as no one
thinks completely without emotion, I am ready to believe that we think with the belly
as well as with the head. The more emotional the type of thinking, the more are the
intestines responsible for one's thoughts. What Isadora Duncan said about women's
thoughts originating in the abdomen and travelling upward, while men's thoughts
originate in the head and travel downward, is true of the Chinese. This corroborates
my theory about the femininity of the Chinese mind (Chapter III). Whereas we say in
English that a man "ransacks his brain" for ideas during a composition, we say in
Chinese that he "ransacks his dry intestines'* for a good line of poetry or prose. The
poet Su Tungp'o once asked his three concubines after dinner what his belly contained.
The cleverest one, Ch'aoytin, replied that he had "a bellyful of unseasonable
thoughts." The Chinese can write good poetry because they think with their intestines.
Further, there is a relation between Chinese language and poetry. Poetry should be
crisp, and the Chinese language is crisp. Poetry should work by suggestion, and the
Chinese language is fiill of contractions which say more than what the words mean.
Poetry should express ideas by concrete imagery, and the Chinese language revels in
word- imagery. Finally, the Chinese language, with its clear-cut tones and its lack of
final consonants, retains a sonorous singing quality which has no parallel in non-tonal
languages, Chinese prosody is based on the balance of tonal values, as English poetry
is based on accent. The four tones are divided into two groups: the "soft" tones (called
p'ing], long and theoretically even but really circumflex, and the "hard" tones (called
tsek], which consist of acute, grave and abrupt tones, the last theoretically ending inp,
t, &*s, which have disappeared in modern mandarin. The Chinese ear is trained to
sense the rhythm and alternation of soft and hard tones. This tonal rhythm is observed
even in good prose, which explains the fact that Chinese prose is "singable" (see page
219). For anyone who has ears, this tonal rhythm can be easily sensed in Ruskin's or
Walter Pater's prose. Observe the contrast between words ending in "liquids" like /, m,
n, ng and words ending in "explosives" like p> t, k in Ruskin's writings, and this total
rhythm can be easily analysed.
In classical T'ang poetry this alternation is quite complex, as in the following
"regular55 scheme ("o" standing for the soft tones and "? standing for the hard tones).
In reading the following, say "sing" for "o" and "say" for "?, to feel the contrasting
effect, giving the says a final, more or less abrupt tone:
f i. o O ?O o (rhyme)
\ 2. o O o (rhyme)
| 3. o o o
{4. o o ?o o (rhyme)
f 5. o o o o ?
\ 6. o ?o o o (rhyme)
(7. O o o
(8. o o * o o (rhyme)
After the fourth syllable in each line there is a hiatus. Each two lines form a couplet
by themselves, and the middle two couplets must be real couplets, i.e., all the words in
each line must be balanced against corresponding words in the other line, both in tone
and meaning. The easiest way to understand this sense of alternation is to imagine two
interlocutors speaking to one another, each speaking a line. Take the first four and the
last three syllables of each line as two individual units, and substitute for them two
English words, and the result is a pattern as outlined below.
(A) ah, yes?
(B) but, no?
(A) but, yes!
(B) ah, no!
(A) ah, yes?
(B) but, no?
(A) but, yes!
(B) ah, no!
Notice that the second interlocutor always tries to counter the first, while the first
always takes up the thread of the second in its first unit (the "ahs" and "buts") but
varies the second unit. The exclamation and question marks merely serve to indicate
that there are two different kinds of "yeses" and "noes." Notice that with the exception
of the second unit of the first couplet all the units are properly balanced in tone.
But we are more interested in the inner technique and spirit of Chinese poetry than in
its prosody. By what inner technique did it enter that magic realm of beauty? How did
it throw a veil of charm and atmosphere over an ordinary landscape and, with a few
words, paint a striking picture of reality, surcharged with the poet's emotion? How did
the poet select and eliminate his material and how did he inform it with his own spirit
and make it glow with rhythmic vitality? In what way was the technique of Chinese
poetry and Chinese painting really one? And why is it that Chinese poets are painters,
and painters, poets?
The striking thing about Chinese poetry is its plastic imagination and its kinship in
technique with painting. This is most evident in the handling of perspective. Here the
analogy between Chinese poetry and painting is almost complete. Let us begin with
perspective. Why is it that when we read the lines of Li Po (701-762)?
Above the man's face arise the hills;
Beside the horse's head emerge the clouds,
we are presented with a picture in bold outline of a man travelling on horseback on a
high mountain path? The words, short and sharp and meaningless at first sight, will be
found, with a moment's use of the imagination, to give us a picture as a painter would
paint it on his canvas, and conceal a trick of perspective by using some objects in the
foreground ("the man's face55 and "the horse's head") to set off the distant view.
Entirely apart from the poetic feeling that the man is so high up in the mountains, one
realizes that the scenery was looked at by the poet as if it were a piece of painting on a
flat surface. The reader would then see, as he actually sees in paintings or snapshots,
that hilltops seem to rise from the man's face and the clouds nestling somewhere in
the distance form a line broken by the horse's head. This clearly was not possible if
the poet was not on horseback and the clouds were not lying on a lower level in the
distance. In the end, the reader has to imagine himself on horseback on a high
