China and the West

Ayscough, Florence. Written pictures [ID D32312].
Of late years, considerable attention has been attracted to Chinese poetry and to Chinese painting; but as yet the art peculiar to the Far East, the art considered by the Chinese as the most perfect medium by which "man can express himself, can record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in" has entirely escaped notice. I refer to the Tzu Hua—"written pictures" or "hanging-on-the-wall poems."
It is of course quite natural that this should be the case; general knowledge of the Far East, of its customs, its art, its theory of life, its reactions to its environment, has been, is, and must be for some time to come, superficial. While a knowledge of its language, without which real comprehen-sion is impossible, has been attained by comparatively few Occidentals. It seems likely, therefore, that the Tzu Hua will remain unnoticed and unappreciated until a much closer understanding is established with the Far East.
Yet what art could be more subtle, more refined, more truly aesthetic! A beautiful thought perpetuated in beautiful hand-writing and hung upon the wall to suggest a mental picture—does not the possession of such a medium rouse the envy of Occidental imagists, who are indeed the spiritual descendants of the East?
In China, the arts of poetry and calligraphy have their common root in the ideographs which form the written language; these wonderful ideographs and the art of cal-ligraphy are vividly described by Lafcadio Hearn in his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.
No rigid convention fetters the fancy of the calligraphist; each strives to make his character more beautiful than any others, and generation upon generation of artists have been toiling from, time immemorial with the like emulation so that through centuries of tireless effort and study the primitive ideograph has been evolved into a thing of beauty indescribable. It consists only of a certain number of brush strokes, but in each stroke there is an indescribable secret art of grace, proportion, imperceptible curve, which makes it seem alive, and bears witness that even in the lightning moment of its creation the artist felt for its ideal shape equally along its entire length.
In writing thus, however, Hearn refers only to form, he does not mention what constitutes the soul of the character, which is its composition. These marvelous collections of brush strokes which we call Chinese characters are really separate pictographic representations of complete thoughts. Complex characters are composed not of strokes, but of more simple characters, each having its own peculiar meaning and usage; thus, when used in combination, each plays its part in modifying either the sense or the sound of the complex; it is therefore impossible to seize a poet’s complete meaning unless each character is analyzed and broken up into its component parts; this can only be done by a careful study of the ideograph in its original form. Many have been so altered during the centuries which have passed since they were first traced, as to be almost unrecognizable.
About 200 A. D., realizing that this alteration was taking place, a scholar named Hsü Shih wrote the dictionary known as the Shuo Wen Chieh Tzü or the Speech and Writing— Characters Untied, containing about ten thousand characters in their primitive and final forms. This work is on the desk of every scholar in the Far East and is studied with the greatest reverence. Many editions have appeared since it was written, and by its aid one can trace the genealogy of characters in the most complete manner. While .translators are apt to ignore this important matter of "genealogy," if one may so call it, of the characters, it is ever present in the mind of the Chinese poet or scholar who is familiar with the original form, indeed he may be said to find his overtones in the actual composition of the character he is using.
In a recent review of a volume of Chinese poetry, a critic in the London Times writes:
The difference seems to be that the Chinese poet hardly knows he is one. The great poets of Europe, in their themes and their language, insist that they are poets—what they do is accompanied with a magnificent gesture; but the Chinese poet starts talking in the most ordinary language and voice of the most ordinary things, and his poetry seems to happen suddenly out of the commonplace as if it were some beautiful action happening in the routine of actual life.
This critic can have no knowledge of the Chinese language, as nothing can be further from the truth than his remark. It is true that the Oriental poet finds his themes in the most ordinary affairs of every-day life, but he describes them in a very special, carefully chosen medium. The simplest child's primer is written in a language never used in speaking, while the most highly educated scholar would never dream of using the same phrases in conversation which he would use were he writing an essay, a poem, or a state document; nor would he use the same written style for these three productions. For instance, in speaking of "sunset" one would probably say, in Chinese, quite simply "sun down"; in writing a poet would, however, employ a character which means "the sun disappearing in the grass at the hotizon"; a character which in its primitive form was an actual picture of the sun vanishing in long grass. Each language—the spoken, the poetic, the literary, the documentary—has its own construction, its own class of characters, and its own symbolism. A translator must therefore make a special study of whichever he wishes to render.
Although several great sinologues have written on the subject of Chinese poetry, none, so far as I am aware, has devoted his exclusive attention to the poetic style, nor has any translator availed himself of the assistance, so essential to success, of a poet, that is, one trained in the art of seizing the poetic value in shades of meaning; while, on the other hand, such poets as have been moved to make beautiful renditions of Chinese originals, have been hampered by inadequate translations. In a word, English translations of Chinese poetry, have not, as yet, been the result of collaboration between a sinologue and a poet. We have therefore but a faint conception of its possibilities.
It is time that a knowledge of Chinese art should come from a direct study of native sources. Although we are deeply indebted to the Japanese for all that they have done to make the whole subject comprehensible, we must never forget that in accepting their opinions and their renditions we are accepting those of a people alien' to the Chinese, a people who differ widely in their philosophy, their temperament, and their ideals; a people who, although they have borrowed the ideographs of the Chinesse have, in many cases, modified and altered the original meanings. For this reason, Chinese poems translated from Japanese transcriptions cannot fail to lose some of their native flavor and allusion, indeed it is not possible that they come very near the originals.
It is impossible to do more than hint at a few of the points which further study of Chinese poetry will bring out clearly ; we have, for instance, not mentioned the characteristic method of reading poems in a modulated chant, which is well described by Mrs. Tietjens in POETRY for October, 1916. She confines her remarks to the Classics; they apply, however, to a much wider field.
The poems which appear in the current issue are taken from a collection of Tzu Hua once in the possession of a Chinese gentleman of keenly aesthetic taste, and are excel-lent examples of an art universally popular in China.
It is a thousand pities that the readers of POETRY cannot realize how extremely literal Miss Lowell's arrangements are. Her remarkable gift, first shown in Six French Poets, for seizing the essence of the allusion which a poet wishes to convey, has enabled her to render in a phrase the different parts of a complicated character in using which the poet expresses a complete thought.
It is only by digging until the very roots of the character are laid bare that Chinese poetry can be really understood.