China and the West

Suzanne P. Ogden : The immediate stimulus leading to the invitation to Bertrand Russell for a visit in China may have been the series of lectures given by John Dewey in Beijing in March 1919 on The three great philosophers of our day, James, Bergson, and Russell.

Dewey, John. Transforming the mind of China [ID D28459].
The beginning of the modem age in China dates from that bloody episode, the Boxer Convulsion. Its outbreak signalized the supreme endeavor of old China to have done once for all with the unwelcome intruder, so that it might return untroubled to its self-sufficiency. Its close marked the recognition that the old China was doomed, and that henceforth China must live its life in the presence of the forces of western life, forces intellectual, moral, economic, financial, political. With its usual patience China set out to adapt itself to the inevitable. But in this case, something more than a patient passivity was necessary. China learned in 1900 that she had to adjust herself to the requirements imposed by the activities of western peoples. Every year since then she has been learning that this adjustment can be effected only by a readjustment of her own age-long customs, that she has to change her historic mind and not merely a few of her practices. Twenty years have passed and the drama does not seem to be advancing. China seems to be marking time. As with the drama of the Chinese stage, the main story is apparendy lost in a mass of changing incidents and excitements that lack movement, climax and plot.
But the foreign interpreter comes to the scene with a mind adapted to the quick tempo of the West. He expects to see a drama unfold after the pattern of the movie. He is not used to history enacted on the scale of that of China. When he hastily concludes that nothing is doing, or rather that although something new and unexpected happens every day, everything is moving in an aimless circle, he forgets that twenty years is but a passing moment in a history that has already occupied its four thousand years. How can a civilization that has taken four thousand years to evolve, that has crept about and absorbed every obstacle hitherto encountered, that has countless inner folds of accumulated experience within itself, quickly find itself in new courses? We talk glibly about the importance of the problem of the Pacific, and even the school boy can quote Seward, Hay and Taft. But what do we suppose this problem to be? One that concerns a superficial waste of mobile waters? No, the real problem of the Pacific is the problem of the transformation of the mind of China, of the capacity of the oldest and most complicated civilization of the globe to remake itself into the new forms required by the impact of immense alien forces.
Analogies, especially when they are obvious, are as deceptive in the field of political thinking as they long ago proved in natural science. The tempting comparison of the future of China, in its reaction to western ideas and institutions, to the record of Japan is misleading. The difference of scale between a small island and a vast continental territory makes the correspondence impossible. China emerged from feudalism two thousand years ago, but without at the same time becoming a national state in the sense familiar to us. Japan's emergence coincided with its opening to the West, so that its internal condition and the external pressure from other nations enabled it to take the form of an absolute state (with certain constitutional trimmings) externally similar to states produced in the evolution out of feudalism of modem Europe. The development of a strong centralized state, with unified administration and militaristic protection, was as easy for Japan as it is difficult for China. More fundamental is the difference in national psychology. Something over a thousand years ago Japan took on Chinese civilization via Korea and yet remained essentially Japanese. For the past sixty years it has been taking on western civilization. Yet the writers and thinkers most characteristically Japanese tell you that Japan is not westernized in heart or mind. Though it borrows wholesale western technique in science, industry, administration, war and diplomacy, it borrows them with the deliberate intention of thereby strengthening the resisting power of its own traditional policies. It acknowledges without reserve the superiority of western methods, but these superior methods are to be used to maintain eastern ideals intrinsically superior to the foreign. This may seem to the foreigner an evidence of the conceit often associated with Japan, but the retort is easy: Is the European complacent conviction of superiority anything more than the conceit of prejudice? At all events, this doubleness of Japanese life, its combination of traditional aims and moral ways with the externals of foreign skill and specialized knowledge, accounts for the impression of duplicity which so many carry away from contact with contemporary Japan.
It is to be doubted whether such a dualism, such inconsistency of inner and outer life, can be long kept up. Yet its successful achievement marks the record of Japan in its relations to western civilization. And it is precisely this sort of thing which cannot happen in China. She has evolved, not borrowed, her civilization. She has no great knack at successful borrowing. Her problem is one of transformation, of making over from within. Educated Chinese will already tell you that if you wish intact survivals of old China, you must go to Japan—and Japanese tell you much the same thing, though with quite a different accent and import. The visitor is struck by the fact that it is in the public buildings and schools of Japan, not of China, that the eye everywhere sees the old Confucianist mottoes, especially those of the reactionary and authoritative type. China with all its backwardness and its confusion and weakness is more permeated today with western contemporary thought than is Japan. There is some significance in the fact that while the circulation of President Wilson's war speeches was legally forbidden in Japan, they have furnished for the past two years China's best seller. There will be many to say that Japan's retention of the ideas that she took from China in the best days of the latter's history, and then protected against deterioration, is the cause of Japan's strength, and that China's decay is precisely because she has permitted the infiltration of ideals and ideas that are foreign and consequently destructive. This may be true. I am not here concerned to deny it. In any case, it illustrates our proposition: China must run a course radically different from that of Japan.
There will either be decay and disintegration, or thoroughgoing inner transformation. There will not be adoption of western external methods for immediate practical ends, because the Chinese genius does not lie in that direction.
Japan's influence upon China has been enormous. The westerner who has not studied the situation is quite unaware of the extent to which China after the Russo-Japanese war in particular took over Japanese administrative and educational methods. But it is already obvious that they are not working here as they worked in Japan. A large part of the present intellectual and moral crisis in China is due to reaction against this factor in Chinese life. Doubtless it is artificially strengthened just now by immediate political causes. But beneath this surface there is a general intellectual ferment, and a belief that China must resort not to Japanese copies of western forms, but to the original sources of western moral and intellectual inspiration. And the recourse is not for the sake of getting models to pattern herself after, but to get ideas, intellectual capital, with which to renovate her own institutions.
National conceit, national vanity, is a sealed book to the outsider. We are sure that our own is only just pride and self-respect, and that the foreigner's is either ridiculous or a mark of offensive contempt and dangerous hostility to our own cherished ways of life. But dubious as is generalization on such matters, one is struck by certain differences in the group self-consciousness of Japan and China. Its quality is perhaps suggested in certain comments which they pass not infrequendy upon each other. A Japanese will tell you that the Chinese do not care what other persons think of them. A Chinese says that Japan has no sense of its 'face'. The two criticisms are enough alike to be intriguing. But it may be suggested in explanation that Chinese complacency is the deeper seated and hence is not so acute. It is fundamental and taken for granted. It does not need to be asserted in special instances. As long as the Chinese retain unimpaired their own judgment of themselves, their own reputation with themselves, their face is saved, and what others think is negligible. On the other hand, it is humiliating to them to borrow as Japan does. It would be a confession of absence of inner resources. When Japan engages foreign experts, she is interested in results, and so gives them a free hand till she has learned what they have to give. China engages the foreign expert—and then courteously shelves him. The difference is typical of a difference in attitude toward western life. It is a large part of the cause of Japan's rapid progress and of China's backwardness. The Japanese naturally places himself in the stead of the western spectator and is acutely conscious of the criticisms the beholder might pass upon what he sees. He tries to make over the spectacle to satisfy the demands of the western onlooker. He reserves his deeper pride for his national ideals. The Chinese scarcely cares what the foreigner may think of what he sees. He even brings the skeletons in his closet cheerfully forward for the visitor to gaze at. The complacency or conceit involved in this attitude has enormously retarded the advance of China. It has made for a conservative hugging of old traditions, and a belief in the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization in all respects to that of foreign barbarians. But it has also engendered a power of objective criticism and self-analysis which is rarely met in Japan. The educated Chinese who dissects the institutions and customs of his own country does it with a calm objectivity which is unsurpassable. And the basic reason, I think, is the same national pride. His institutions may not stand the criticism very well, but the people who produced these institutions are intrinsically invulnerable. They produced them, and when they get around to it they will create some new ones better adapted to the conditions of present life. The faith of the Chinese in the final outcome of their country, no matter what the despair about the current state of things, reminds an American of a similar faith abounding in his own country.
We are brought around to our main contention. China's slack¬ness with respect to borrowing the technique of the West in civil administration, public sanitation, taxation, education, manufacturing, etc., is quite compatible with an effort on her part to bring about a thoroughgoing transformation of her institutions through contact with western civilization. In this remaking she will appropriate rather than borrow. She will attempt to penetrate to the principles, the ideas, the intelligence, from which western progress has emanated, and to work out her own salvation through the use of her own renewed and quickened national mind. The task is an enormous one. Time is of the essence of the performance. Just because the task is to effect an inner modification rather than an outward adjustment, its execution will take a long time. Will the forces that are playing upon China from without, forces that have contemplated its territorial disintegration, that are desirous of dominating its policies and exploiting in their own behalf its natural resources, permit a normal evolution? Will they stand by to assist, or will they invade and irritate and deflect and thwart till there is a final climax of no one knows what tragic catastrophe? These are some of the elements in the great drama now enacting.
The baffling and 'mysterious' character of China to the West is genuine enough. But it does not seem to be due to any peculiarly dark and subtle psychology. Human nature as one meets it in China seems to be unusually human, if one may say so. There is more of it in quantity and it is open to view, not secreted. But the social mind, the political mind, has been subjected for centuries to institutions which are not only foreign to present western customs, but which have no historic precedent. Neither our political science nor our history supplies any system of classification for understanding the most characteristic phenomena of Chinese institutions. This is the fact which makes the workings of the Chinese mind inscrutable to the uninitiated foreigner, and which makes it necessary to describe so many things in contradictory linguistic terms. The civilization itself is not contradictory, but in its own self-consistency it includes things which in western life have been sharply opposed. Then there are intermediate forms, political missing links, which to our grasp must prove elusive; they are vague because we have no comparable forms by which to define and interpret them. Yet the Chinese mind thinks, of course, as naturally in terms of its customs and conventions as we think in ours. We merely forget that we think in terms of customs and traditions which habituation has engrained; we fancy that we think in terms of mind, pure and simple. Taking our mental habits as the norm of mind, we find the ways of thinking that do not conform to it abnormal, mysterious and tricky. We can get the key to mental operations only by studying social antecedents and environment, and this truth holds pre-eminendy in an old civilization like the Chinese. We have to understand beliefs and traditions to understand acts, and we have to understand historic institutions to understand beliefs.
It is clear enough that the Korean question is quite pivotal in many of the most urgent external political questions of Asia. Yet Mr. Holcombe has told how the question was complicated in earlier days by the misconceptions which formed the basis of dealing with it by western nations. They knew that there was something of a relation of dependency of Korea upon China. They assumed the kind of relationship with which the West was acquainted, that of suzerain and vassal. When China declined to bear the responsibility of enforcing certain demands upon Korea as being out of her authority, the western nations thought that China was either insincere or else disclaimed all political jurisdiction. That there should be a genuine relationship of dependency, but of an advisory, homiletic, grandfatherly type, was beyond the scope of western precedent and understanding. The early relations of western diplomacy with the Imperial Court at Peking are a record of simi¬lar misunderstandings. There were all the insignia of royalty over China, extending even to despotic power. In relation to happenings in the provinces, therefore, it was natural to endow the 'Government' at Peking with all the attributes of sovereignty as that is constituted in Europe. That the central government (beyond certain well-established relations of taxation and appointment of civil service) sustained mainly a ceremonial and hortatory connection with a large part of China was beyond conception. These grosser misunderstandings could be multiplied in considering almost every detail of Chinese institutional life. It has to be understood in terms of itself, not translated over into the classifications of an alien political morphology.
The story of the difficulties that had to be overcome in the introduction of railways into China is perhaps the best known of Chinese incidents. But it bears retelling because it affords a typical illustration of the fact that the chief obstacle in the effective contact of West and East is intellectual and moral. Opposition to railways was not a matter of routine conservatism, blind sluggish opposition to the new just because it was new. The Chinese have the normal amount of curiosity, and perhaps even more than the normal amount of practical sense of the advantage to be gained by a novelty which does not conflict with traditional beliefs. A difficulty presented itself in getting a clear right of way for railways, on account of the graves, which, from the western standpoint, are scattered at random. But from the Chinese standpoint, they are located with the utmost science, and to disturb them is to throw out of balance the whole system of environmental influences that affect health and good crops. Moreover, the graves are the centre of the system of ancestral worship, and that is the centre of civic organization. The tale might have been invented to show how completely the forces to be reckoned with are intellectual and moral, and how completely they are bound up with the structure of life. Without a change of national mind it is hopeless to suppose that China can go forward prosperously because of intercourse with the West.
It is a rash enterprise to form a generalization about the factors of the Chinese popular psychology that count most, whether positively or negatively, in the task of regenerating China. But the strong points of a people, as of individual character, lie close to its weak ones. So perhaps it is safe to say that the promise of China's rebirth into full membership in the modem world is found in its democratic habits of life and thought, provided we add to the statement another: the peculiar quality of this democracy also forms the strongest obstacle to the making over of China in its confrontation by a waiting, resdess and greedy world. For while China is morally and intellectually a democracy of a paternalistic type, she lacks the specific organs by which alone a democracy can effectively sustain itself either internally or internationally. China is in a dilemma whose seriousness can hardly be exaggerated. Her habitual decentralization, her centrifugal localisms, operate against her becoming a nationalistic entity with the institutions of public revenue, unitary public order, defence, legislation and diplomacy that are imperatively needed. Yet her deepest traditions, her most established ways of feeling and thinking, her essential democracy, cluster about the local units, the village and its neighbors. The superimposition of a national state, without corresponding transformation of local institutions (or better without an evolution of the spirit of local democracies into national scope) gives us just what we now have in China: A nominal republic governed by a military clique, maintained in part by foreign loans made in response to a bartering away of national property and power, and in part by bargainings with provincial leaders whose power rests upon their control of an army and the ability this control gives them to levy on industry and wealth. In fact, we have a state which, if it were taken statically, if it were frozen, would reproduce the evils of the old despotism with new ones added, and which can be saved only because it has released popular forces that make for something better. But it remains to organize these popular forces, to give them play, to build for them regular channels of operation.
Up to the present western thought has confined itself to the more obvious, the more structural, factors of the problem. These are naturally the problems most familiar in occidental political life. They are such things as the adjustment of the power and authority of the central government to that of local and regional governments; the problem of the relations of the executive and legislative forces in the government; the revision of legal procedure and law to eliminate arbitrariness and personal discretion. But after all, such matters are symptoms, effects. To try to reorganize China by beginning with them is like solving an engineering problem by skilful juggling. The real problem is how the democratic spirit historically manifest in the absence of classes, the prevalence of social and civil equality, the control of individuals and groups by moral rather than physical force—that is, by instruction, advice and public opinion rather than definitive legal methods—can find an organized expression of itself. And the problem, I repeat, is unusually difficult because traditionally, in the habits of beliefs as well as of action, these forces out of which the transformation of China must grow are opposed to organization on a nation-wide scale. Take a conspicuous example. To maintain itself as a nation among other nations of the contemporary world, China needs a system of national finance, of national taxation and revenues. But the effort to institute such a system does not merely meet a void. It has to meet deeply entrenched local customs, so firmly established that to interfere with them may mean the overthrow of all central government. To put another system of taxation into force requires the operation of the very national organs which depend upon a national system of public revenues. This is a fair example of the vicious circles that circumscribe all short-cut systems of reform in China. It is another evidence that the development must be a transforming growth from within, rather than either an external superimposition or a borrowing from foreign sources.
There are many, including a rather surprising number of Chinese as well as foreigners, who think that China can get set on her feet and become able to move for herself only by undergoing a period of foreign guardianship or trusteeship. The feeling is sedulously fostered by some persons in a neighboring island, and there is some undoubted response in China, though much less than there would be had the point of view not been unduly identified with the point of a bayonet. There are others who look to some western democracy or to the League of Nations to exercise the needed guardianship. We may waive the question whether at the present time there exists in the world a sufficient amount of disinterested intelligence to perform such a job of trusteeship. We stay on safe ground if we confine ourselves to saying that to be successful such a guardian would have to confine his efforts to stimulating, encouraging and expediting the democratic forces acting from within. And since such a task is almost entirely intellectual and moral, the guardianship is not necessary provided that China can be guaranteed time of growth protected from external attempts at disintegration. All that is necessary is a sufficient international decency and sufficient enlightened selfishness to give China the ad interim protection. She may have to sink deeper yet into the slough of confusion before she can get upon firm ground and move about freely. There is only harm in underestimating the seriousness of the task.
The evolution of Japan, as I have already said, offers no fair precedent. The problem is even more perplexing than that of the change of feudal into modem Europe. For medieval Europe was not civilized in the sense in which old China is civilized. There was not the inertia and weight of institutions wrapped up in the deepest feelings and most profound thoughts of the people that is found in China. Moreover, the European transition could take its own time to work itself out. That of China has to be accomplished in the face of the impatient, mobile western world, which, if it brings aid, also brings a voracious appetite. To the outward eye roaming in search of the romantic and picturesque, China is likely to prove a disappointment. To the eye of the mind it presents the most enthralling drama now anywhere enacting.

Hu, Shih [Hu, Shi]. Introductory note. [Dewey, John. Lectures in China, 1919-1920]. Nov. 1919.
Dr. John Dewey has recently completed two series of lectures in Peking, one on “Social and Political Philosophy,” the other on “A Philosophy of Education.” Dr. Dewey’s philosophy of education is so well known that no introduction to it is required; but I do wish to make a few remarks about his lectures on “Social and Political Philosophy.”
The philosophy of pragmatism, with which Dr. Dewey's name is iden¬tified, has been the subject of a number of systematic statements, among them the work of William James in psychology, the work of Dewey him¬self and of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller in logic, the work of Dewey and James Hayden Tufts in ethics, and, of course, Dewey’s own monu-mental work in education.
Only in the field of political philosophy has there not yet appeared any single systematic work which treats the subject from the viewpoint of pragmatism. It is true that the political theory of Graham Wallas and Harold Laski in England, and of Walter Lippmann in the United States of America, strongly reflects the influence of pragmatism; but, until now, a formal, coherent statement of a pragmatic philosophy of politics has been lacking.
It was for this reason that I suggested to Dr. Dewey, earlier this year when he and I were discussing his forthcoming lecture series in China, that this might be an appropriate opportunity for him to formulate a coherent statement of a social and political philosophy based in pragmatism, elements of which have been suggested in his writings increasingly during the last decade.
Dr. Dewey thought that my suggestion was a good one, and the result is this series of sixteen lectures. I hope that those who were in the audi¬ences when these lectures were delivered, as well as the readers of the printed version of the lectures herewith presented, are cognizant of their rare good fortune in sharing in Dr. Dewey's initial formal statement of his social and political philosophy.
As Dr. Dewey delivered his lectures in English I interpreted them sen¬tence by sentence into Chinese for the benefit of members of his audiences who did not understand English. My Chinese interpretation was recorded by my friend, I-han Kao. Dr. Dewey intends to revise and expand his original lecture notes for publication in book form. When his manuscript is complete, I hope to translate it into Chinese, so that both English and Chinese versions can be published at the same time.
It is inevitable that in material so complex as these lectures on-the-spot oral interpretation and simultaneous recording should result in certain inaccuracies and inadequacies. For such errors and omissions Professor I-han Kao and I offer our apologies, both to Dr. Dewey and to the read¬ing public.

Shu, Xincheng. Jin dai Zhongguo jiao yu shi liao [ID D28674].
"Chinese educational aims were reconsidered in the light of Dewey's thought. The first Conference for Educational Investigation, held in April 1919, was attended by sixty outstanding education leaders, including Cai Yuanpei and Chiang Monlin [Jiang Menglin], all of whom were appointed by the Ministry of Education. Dissatisfied with the old educational aims which had been promulgated in 1912, and which had emphasized military education, the conference suggested that the aim and spirit of American education should be adopted. The new aim was to be 'the cultivation of perfect personality and the development of democratic spirit. The fifth annual meeting of the Federation of Educational Associations endorsed the new educational direction in the same year, and even went a step further in following literally Dewey's admonition that 'education has no ends beyond itself ; it is its own end', by advocating the abolition of all educational aims, and their replacements by a statement of the nature of education instead."

While lecturing at the Imperial University in Tokyo, John Dewey received a joint invitation from five Chinese academic institutions to lecture in Beijing, Nanjing, and other cities in China. This invitation was prompted by three of his former students : Hu Shi, P.W. Kuo (President of the National Nanjing Teachers College) and Chiang Monlin [Jiang Menlin] (Ed. of New Education magazine).

Hu, Shi. Shi yan zhu yi. [ID D28586]. [Experimentalismus].
Hu Shi zitiert John Dewey in leicht gekürzter Form In fünf Punkten : 1) Die Vertreter der früheren Strömungen gehen davon aus, dass Erfahrung durch und durch Erkennen ist. 2) Früher vertrat man die Meinung, dass die Erfahrung etwas Psychisches und völlig 'Subjektives' sei. 3) Früher erkannte man über die gegenwärtige Situation hinaus nur eine Vergangenheit an und vertrat die Position, dass die Erfahrung letztlich aus Erinnertem besteht. 4) Die Erfahrung in ihrer früheren Form war partikular. 5) Traditionell betrachtete man die Erfahrung und das Denken als absolute Gegensätze.
Er schreibt : "Die grundlegende Vorstellung der Philosophie Dewey besagt : 'Erfahrung ist Leben, Leben ist Auseinandersetzung mit der Umgebung', aber hinsichtlich der Auseinandersetzung (ying fu) mit der Umgebung gibt es unterschiedliche Niveaus… Der Mensch ist ein Lebewesen, das Wissen besitzt und denken kann ; wenn er den Weg verliert, klettert er weder nervös noch hektisch den Baum hinauf, er nimmt das Fernglas oder sucht den Bach und findet dem Wasser folgend den Weg hinaus. Das Leben des Menschen ist achtenswert, weil der Mensch die Denkfähigkeit besitzt, sich mit seiner Umgebung auf höchster Stufe auseinanderzusetzen. Deshalb ist die grundlegend Vorstellung der Philosophie Dewey : 'Das reflektierende Denken (zhi shi si xiang) ist das Werkzeug, mit dem der Mensch sich mit einer Umgebung auseinandersetzt'. Das reflektierende Denken ist ein täglich benötigtes, unentbehrliches Werkzeug des menschlichen Lebens, und keineswegs Spielzeug und Luxusartikel der Philosophen.
Das Denken, von dem Dewey spricht, hat die Funktion, ausgehend von bereits Bekanntem auf andere Dinge, Angelegenheiten oder Wahrheiten zu schliessen. Diese Funktion wird in der Logik 'Schlussfolgerung' (inference) genannt. Schlussfolgerung bedeutet lediglich von bereits Bekanntem auf noch Unbekanntes schliessen…"
Hu Shi folgt in der Darstellung der fünf Stufen des 'analytischen Denkens bei Dewey den Vorgaben seines Lehrers :
a) Als Ausgangspunkt benötigt man eine verwirrende, schwierige Situation. b) Durch Überlegen und Sondieren versucht man neue Dinge oder neue Erkenntnisse herauszufinden, um diese verwirrende Schwierigkeit zu lösen.
1) Der Ausgangspunkt des Denkens ist eine schwierige Situation. 2) Festlegen, worin die Schwierigkeit tatsächlich liegt. 3) Verschiedene hypothetische Lösungsmethoden darlegen. 4) Eine Hypothese als geeignete Lösung bestimmen. 6) Der Beweis.
Hu Shi concretely analyzed and explained the five steps in the ideological methodology of John Dewey : 1) knotty circumstances ; 2) pointing out exactly where the knotty points are ; 3) imagining the methods for resolving various knotty points ; 4) imagining the results of each such method to see which one can resolve the difficulties ; 5) proving this kind of solution is believable, or proving this kind of solution is wrong and unbelievable.

Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and romanticism [ID D28808].
Introduction
…Now the ethical experience of the Far East may be summed up for practical purposes in the teachings and influence of two men, Confucius and Buddha (I should perhaps say that in the case of Buddha I have been able to consult the original Pali documents. In the case of Confucius and the Chinese I have had to depend on translations). To know the Buddhistic and Confucian teachings in their true spirit is to know what is best and most representative in the ethical experience of about half the human race for over seventy generations. A study of Buddha and Confucius suggests, as does a study of the great teachers of the Occident, that under its bewildering surface variety human experience falls after all into a few main categories. I myself am fond of distinguishing three levels on which a man may experience life — the naturalistic, the humanistic, and the religious. Tested by its fruits Buddhism at its best confirms Christianity. Submitted to the same test Confucianism falls in with the teaching of Aristotle and in general with that of all those who from the Greeks down have proclaimed decorum and the law of measure. This is so obviously true that Confucius has been called the Aristotle of the East. Not only has the Far East had in Buddhism a great religious movement and in Confucianism a great humanistic movement, it has also had in early Taoism a movement that in its attempts to work out naturalistic equivalents of humanistic or religious insight, offers almost starting analogies to the movement I am here studying.
Thus both East and West have not only had great religious and humanistic disciplines which when tested by their fruits confirm one another, bearing witness to the element of oneness, the constant element in human experience, but these disciplines have at times been conceived in a very positive spirit. Confucius indeed, though a moral realist, can scarcely be called a positivist; he aimed rather to attach men to the past by links of steel. He reminds us in this as in some other ways of the last of the great Tories in the Occident, Dr. Johnson. Buddha on the other hand was an individualist. He wished men to rest their belief neither on his authority nor on that of tradition…

Appendix
Chinese primitivism
[Quelle : Wieger, Léon. Les pères du système taoïste ID D1861].
Perhaps the closest approach in the past to the movement of which Rousseau is the most important single figure is the early Taoist movement in China. Taoism, especially in its poplar aspects, became later something very different, and what I say is meant to apply above all to the period from about 550 to 200 B.C. The material for the Taoism of this period will be found in convenient form in the volume of Léon Wieger (1913) – Les pères du système taoïste (Chinese texts with French translations of Lao-tzu, Lieh-tzu and Chuang-tzu). The Tao Te King of Lao-tzu is a somewhat enigmatical document of only a few thousand words, but plainly primitivistic in its general trend. The phrase that best sums up its general spirit is that of Wordsworth – a 'wise passiveness'. The unity at which it aims is clearly of the pantheistic variety, the unity that is obtained by breaking down discrimination and affirming the 'identity of contradictories', and that encourages a reversion to origins, to the state of nature and the simple life. According to the Taoist the Chinese fell from the simple life into artificiality about the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti (27th century B.C.). The individual also should look back to beginnings and seek to be once more like the new-born child or, according to Chuang-tzu, like the new-born calf. It is in Chuang-tzu indeed that the doctrine develops its full naturalistic and primitivistic implications. Few writers in either East or West have set forth more entertainingly what one may term the Bohemian attitude towards life. He heaps ridicule upon Confucius and in the name of spontaneity attacks his doctrine of humanistic imitation. He sings the praises of the unconscious, even when obtained through intoxication, and extols the morality of the beautiful soul. He traces the fall of mankind from nature into artifice in a fashion that anticipates very completely both Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and that on the Origin of Inequality. See also the amusing passage in which the brigand Chi, child of nature and champion of the weak against the oppressions of government, paints a highly Rousseauistic picture of man's fall from his primitive felicity. Among the things that are contrary to nature and purely conventional, according to Chuang-tzu and the Taoists, are, not only the sciences and arts and attempts to discriminate between good and bad taste, but likewise government and statecraft, virtue and moral standards. To the artificial music of the Confucians, the Taoists oppose a natural music that offers startling analogies to the most recent programmatic and descriptive tendencies of Occidental music. See especially Chuang-tzu's programme for a cosmic symphony in three movements — the Pipes of Pan as one is tempted to call it. This music that is supposed to reflect in all its mystery and magic the infinite creative processes of nature is very close to the primitivistic music (L'arbre vu du côté des racines) with which Hugo's satyr strikes panic into the breasts of the Olympians.
The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its stoical or epicurean form. From the references in Chuang-tzu and elsewhere to various sects and schools we see that Taoism was only a part of a great stream of naturalistic and primitivistic tendency. China abounded at that time in pacifists in apostles of brotherly love, and as we should say nowadays Tolstoyans. A true opposite to the egoistic Yang-chu was the preacher of pure altruism and indiscriminate sympathy, Mei-ti. Mencius said that if the ideas of either of these extremists prevailed the time would come, not only when wolves would devour men, but men would devour one another. In opposing discrimination and ethical standards to the naturalists, Mencius and the Confucian humanists were fighting for civilization. Unfortunately there is some truth in the Taoist charge that the standards of the Confucians are too literal, that in their defence of the principle of imitation they did not allow sufficiently for the element of flux and relativity and illusion in things — an element for which the Taoists had so keen a sense that they even went to the point of suppressing the difference between sleeping and waking and life and death. To reply properly to the Taoist relativist the Confucians would have needed to work out a sound conception of the role of the imagination — the universal key to human nature — and this they do not seem to have done. One is inclined to ask whether this is the reason for China's failure to achieve a great ethical art like that of the drama and the epic of the Occident at their best. The Taoists were richly imaginative but along romantic lines. We should not fail to note the Taoist influence upon Li Po and other Bohemian and bibulous poets of the Tang dynasty, or the relation of Taoism to the rise of a great school of landscape painting at about the same time. We should note also the Taoist element in 'Ch'an' Buddhism (the 'Zen' Buddhism of Japan), some knowledge of which is needed for an understanding of whole periods of Japanese and Chinese art.
In these later stages, however, the issues are less clear-cut than in the original struggle between Taoists and Comfucians. The total impression one has of early Taoism is that it is a main manifestation of an age of somewhat sophistical individualism. Ancient Chinese individualism ended like that of Greece : at about the same time in disaster. After a period of terrible convulsions (the era of the 'Fighting State'), the inevitable man on horseback appeared from the most barbaric of these states and 'put the lid' on everybody. Shi Hwang-ti, the new emperor, had many of the scholars put to death and issued an edict that the writings of the past, especially the Confucian writings, should be destroyed (213 B.C.). Though the emperor behaved like a man who took literally the Taoist views as to the blessings of ignorance, it is not clear from our chief authority, the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, that he acted entirely or indeed mainly under Taoist influence.
It is proper to add that though Lao-tzu proclaims that the soft is superior to the hard, a doctrine that should appeal to the Occidental sentimentalist, one does not find in him or in the other Taoists the equivalent of the extreme emotional expansiveness of the Rousseauist. There are passages, especially in Lao-tzu, that in their emphasis on concentration and calm are in line with the ordinary wisdom of the East; and even where the doctrine is unmistakably primitivistic the emotional quality is often different from that of the corresponding movement in the West.

Lin Yutang attended the classes of Irving Babbitt at Harvard University.

Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. (1)
[This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences].
We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in new Western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such.
He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between Eastern and Western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renaissance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 I have not had to change the allusions to Western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories. E.P. 1918.]
This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.
The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it.
It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Oriental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly assumed that Chinese history affords no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the essential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed with their ideals as if they were no better than comic songs in an opera 'bouffe'.
The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. 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 practical 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.
I feel that I should perhaps apologize [The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and therefore transcribe his words. E.P.] 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 professional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cultivation.
Now my own impression has been so radically and diametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer enthusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share with other Occidentals my newly discovered joy. 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 the poetry of China. I submit my causes of joy.
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 expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese characters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been perforce content with pro¬vincial standards of English rhyming. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal definitions 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 somewhat 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, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japanese today represent a stage of culture roughly corresponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a private pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is probably the greatest living authority on Chinese poetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial University 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 character, it is necessary to inquire how these universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment.
In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hieroglyphics, 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 with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semipictorial appeals to the eye.
Contrast, for example, Gray's line :
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day with the Chinese line :
月耀如晴雪
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. [Style, what is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric. E.P.]
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 focused 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:
人 見 馬
Man Sees Horse
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 Laocoön statue with Browning's lines :
"I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, 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 (vide Plates 2 and 4). 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 com¬pounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. For example, the ideograph for a 'messmate' is a man and a fire (vide Plate 2, col. 2).
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, snapshots. 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. [Axe striking something : dog attending man = dogs him. Vide Plate2, col. 3].
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east (vide Plate 2).
'Rice-field' plus 'struggle' = male (vide Plate 2, col. 3).
'Boat' plus 'water' = boat-water, a ripple (vide Plate 2, col. 1).
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 ever so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are interrelated; and thus there could be no complete sen-tence (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 repre¬sented as:
term transference term
from of to
which force which
If we regard this transference as the conscious or uncon¬scious 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 uni¬versal 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 generalised, 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 recognised 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 generalised 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 generalising all intransitive words into one. As 'live', 'see', 'walk', 'breathe', are generalised 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 some¬thing even more concrete, namely 'to snatch from the moon with the hand.
有
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 indi-vidual 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. [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 grammatising or categorising passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion. E.P.] 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 realise 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 gram¬mar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japan¬ese, 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. To get a tolerably con¬crete 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 nounising 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. [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 Professor Fenollosa’s contention. E.P.]
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, nor 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 recognise 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, today, 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. [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.].
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 generalised 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 generalised sense. These verbs are often used in their special 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 unanalysable 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 ego¬istic 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. [Cf. principle of Primary apparition, 'Spirit of Romance', E.P.] 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. [Compare Aristotle's Poetics : 'Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius'. E.P.]
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 aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. The misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval 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 [Vide also an article on 'Vorticism' in the Fortnightly Review for September 1914. 'The language of exploration' now in my Gaudier-Brzeska'. E.P.] 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. [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.] 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 con¬creteness 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 work 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 today 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 con¬tent 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 anaemia of modem 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 mean¬ings. 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 accumulation of meaning which a phonetic language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideographs are like bloodstained 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 mediaeval logic. According to this European logic thought is a kind of brickyard.
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 for ever 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 attenua¬tion, 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 are 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 word accumulated this sort of energy in itself.
Should we pass formally to the study of Chinese poetry, we should warn ourselves against logicianised pitfalls. We should be ware of modern narrow utilitarian meanings ascribed to the words in commercial dictionaries. We should try to preserve the metaphoric overtones. We should be ware 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.
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 characterisations 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. [Compare Dante's definition of 'rectitudo' as the direction of the will]. We catch the Demi-urge in the act. I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare's English was so im¬measurably 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 gradu¬ally, 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. Foreign words sometimes recalled Chinese ideograms associated with vaguely similar sound? 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.
[Professor Fenollosa is borne out by chance evidence. Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room before he went off to war. He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleasure. He was 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, for all their learning discern the pictorial values which were to him perfectly obvious and apparent. A few weeks later Edmond Dulac, who is of a totally different tradi¬tion, 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 lifetime, what had required centuries of development in China. E.P.].
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. Sen¬tences 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 up-blaze of fountains. The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature, they sang out her pro¬cesses 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 sen¬tences 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 are based on the overtones. In this sense poetry seems a more difficult art.
How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighbouring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor. We can find the concord or harmonising at its in tensest, 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.
日 昇 東
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.
Terminal Note. E.P., 1935. Whatever a few of us learned from Fenollosa twenty years ago, the whole Occident is still in crass ignorance of the Chinese art of verbal sonority. I now doubt if it was inferior to the Greek. Our poets being slovenly, ignorant of music, and earless, it is useless to blame professors for squalor.

Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound. [ID D22141]. (2)
Plates
月耀如晴雪 [yue yao ru qing xue]
梅花似照晃 [mei hua si zhao huang]
可憐金鏡轉 [ke lian jin jing zhuan]
庭上玉芳馨 [ting shang yu fang xin]
[Fenollosa left the notes unfinished ; I am proceeding in ignorance and by conjecture. The primitive pictures were 'squared' at a certain time. E.P.]
MOON : sun disc with the moon's horns.
RAYS : bright + feathers flying. Bright, vide note on p. 42. Upper right, abbreviated picture of wings ; lower, bird = to fly. Both F. and Morrison note that it is short tailed bird.
LIKE : woman mouth.
PURE : sun + azure sky. Sky possibly containing tent idea. Author has dodged a 'pure' containing sun + broom.
SNOW : rain + broom ; cloud roof or cloth over falling drops. Sweeping motion of snow ; broom-like appearance of snow.
PLUM : Tree + crooked female breat.
FLOWERS : man + spoon under plants abbreviation, probably actual representation of blossoms. Flowers at height of man's head. Two forms of character in F. 's two copies.
RESEMBLE : man + try = does what it can toward.
BRIGHT : sun +knife mouth fire.
STARS : sun bright. Bright here going to origin : fire over moving legs of a man.
CAN : mouth hook. I suppose it might even be fish-pole or sheltered corner.
ADMIRE : (be in love with fire) ; heart + girl + descending through two.
GOLD : Present from resembles king and gem ; but archaic might be balance and melting-pots.
DISC : to erect ; gold + sun, legs (running).
TURN : carriage + carriage, tenth of cubit (?). Bent knuckle or bent object revolving round pivot.
GARDEN : to blend + pace, in midst of court.
HIGH ABOVE
JEWEL : king and dot. Note : Plain man + dot = dog.
WEEDS : plants cover knife. I.E. growing things that must be destroyed.
FRAGRANT : Specifically given in Morrison as fragrance from a distance. M. and F. seem to differ as to significance of sun under growing tree (cause of fragrance).

NOTE ON PLATE 1
The component 'bright' in the second ideogram is resolvable into fire above a man (walking). The picture is abbreviated to the light and the moving legs. I should say it might have started as the sun god moving below the horizon, at any rate it is the upper part of the fire sign. This also applies in line 2, fifth ideogram, where the legs are clearer. The rain sign (developed in snow sign) might suggest the cloths of heaven, tent roof.
The large base of the last composite sign (Fragrant) Morrison considers as merely a buried sun.
Starting at top left, we have scholar over something like a corpse (a sign I find only in compounds : (?) a wounded corpse). This pair alone form 'a vulgar form of sign', or an abbreviation of the full sign for 'voice, notes of music, sound, any noise', also abbreviation for noise of a blow; to the right of it 'weapons like spears or flails' ; this compound = enemy; and our total, sun under tree under enemy.
PARAPHRASE
"The moon's snow falls on the plum tree;
Its boughs are full of bright stars.
We can admire the bright turning disc;
The garden high above there, casts its pearls to our weeds."
Loss in interaction being apparent on study of the ideograms, their inter-relation, and the repetition or echo of components, not only those used but those suggested or avoided.
A poem of moonlight; the sun element is contained five times: once in three lines, and twice in the second.
You have not understood the poem until you have seen the tremendous antithesis from the first line to the last; from the first character, diagonal, to the last tremendous affirmative, sun under tree under enemies.
Ideograms Line 1, No. 2; Line 2, No. 2; and Line 4, No. 5 — almost every alternate sign — are such compendiums as should make clear to us the estimate courtiers put upon single characters written by the old Empress Dowager, after the age-old custom. Line 3, No. 2, Fenollosa had translated admire, then changed to love; I have taken back to admire, for the sake of Latin admiror and to absorb some of Morrison's 'implement used to reflect', though I do not imagine this will reach many readers.
When you have comprehended the visual significance, you will not have finished. There is still the other dimension. We will remain bestially ignorant of Chinese poetry so long as we insist on reading and speaking their short words instead of taking time to sing them with observance of the sequence of vowels.
If Chinese 'tone ' is a forbidden district, an incomprehensible mystery, vowel leadings exist for anyone who can listen.
If our universities had been worth half a peck of horse-dung, something would have been done during the last quarter of a century to carry on Fenollosa's work. Millions have been spent in stultifying education. There is no reason, apart from usury and the hatred of letters, for keeping at least a few hundred poems and the Ta Hio out of bilingual edition, such as I am here giving for this quatrain. The infamy of the present monetary system does not stop with the mal¬nutrition of the masses; it extends upward into every cranny of the intellectual life, even where cowards think themselves safest, and though men of low vitality feel sure boredom can never kill.
The state of Chinese studies in the Occident is revoltingly squalid, and one has to read Frobenius in his own language? Because English and American professors are moles.
Confucius 'statement', 'A man's character is apparent in every brushstroke': the high value set by the Chinese on calligraphy is appreciable when you think that if the writer does not do his ideogram well, the suggestion of the picture does not carry. If he does not know the meaning of the elements, his ignorance leaks through every ink-mark.

Plate 2
舟 伙 石 [zhou huo shi]
洀 洄 男 [zhou hui nan]
舳 灰 古 [zhu hui gu]
訰 旦 伏 [zhun dan fu]
峯 担 東 [feng dan dong]

NOTE ON PLATE 2
COLUMN 1
1. A boat (? scow), probably people riding in the boat.
2. Water by boat = ripple.
3. Boat+, I should think, actual picture of the rudder. Morrison gives this second element as development of field sign, something just adjacent to, or coming out of, field. (The field supposed to repre¬sent grain in orderly rows.) With primitive sign, the shoot com¬ing from field would contain idea of causation. The element means 'by', 'from' ; the whole sign = rudder.
4. Speech + grass growing with difficulty (i.e. twisted root and obstacle above it) = appearance of speaking in a confused manner.
5. To follow, over branching horns (together meaning to fight like two bulls), above this a mountain = peak of a hill going perpendicular toward heaven and ending in a point.
6. Morrison gives an ideogram with the mountain sign a little lower, and says it is same as the preceding, but possibly misses the point. F. gives this ideogram with the mountain in odd position as = a peak that clashes with heaven.

COLUMN 2
1. Man + fire = messmate.
2. Water + revolve within a circle = eddy.
3. Hand + fire = fire that can be taken in the hand = cinder, ashes.
4. Sun above line of horizon = dawn.
5. Earth (sign not very well drawn — left lower stroke should be at bottom) + the foregoing — level plain, wide horizon.
6. One who binds three planes: heaven, earth and man = ruler, to rule.

COLUMN 3
1. A lump of matter under a cliff (in primitive sign the lump was further removed) = a detached stone.
2. Rice-field over struggle = MALE.
3. Ten over mouth = old, what has come down through ten genera¬tions, ten mouths of tradition.
4. Man + dog (dot beside man) = dog lying at man's feet or crawling to man's feet; hence, to lie down.
5. Sun rising, showing through tree's branches = the east.
6. Spring season, hilarity, wantonness. Looks like sun under man and tree, but the early forms all show sun under growing branches, profuse branches and grass.

去 [qu]
法 [fa]
信 [xin]
盍 [he]
闔 [he]

SECTION 1 SECTION 2
PLATE 3

NOTE ON PLATE 3
SECTION 1
Compare these last inventions to the twenty-two pages double
column of Morrison devoted to HORSE.
Self-effacement, to put away evil, earth over self (crooked elbow (?)).
Water + the foregoing, water level, universal usage, law (Buddhist term).
Self-effacement over sacrificial dish = many persons uniting eagerly together = to unite.
Idem, whom closed doors includes = family.
SECTION 2
Man and word, man standing by his word, man of his word, truth, sincere, unwavering.
The word sign is radical supposedly from combination of tongue and above: ? mouth with tongue coming out it.

ㄙ 主 凡
言 出 八
支 屯 丨

PLATE 4
NOTE ON PLATE 4
COLUMN 1
Self, crooked. Ancient form is loop-like, but the form now used sug¬gests bent elbow, mighty biceps idea familiar in Armstrong and Strongi'th'arm insignia. The use of this sign for emphasis is certainly not discordant with this suggestion, which can at any rate serve as mnemonic.
Mouth with 'two words and flame emerging' (acc. F.) = to speak, words. Branch, radical.
COLUMN 2
Flame in midst of lamp, extended to mean lord, master, to govern.
(?) Morrison's form slightly different, plant growing but not detached from earth; the radical is now bud.
Plant with twisted root=to grow with difficulty; note also obstacle top left.
COLUMN 3
Table, bench or stool with dot under it = every, common, vulgar. I suppose 'any old thing', what one throws under table.
To be divided.
To begin, to appear as one. The significance of these two rudimentary signs as given by F. is extremely important.
The student who hurries over the simple radicals or fundamentals will lose a great deal of time; he will also find much greater difficulty in remembering the combinations of such fundamentals which serve as radicals in the dictionary.

德人無累
大鈞播物

PLATE 5
NOTE ON PLATE 5
TOP LINE
1. VIRTUE or virtu, to pace (two men or man in two places; or seen near and at little distance) + heart under sacrificial dish under ten.
2. MAN (radical).
3. NOT POSSESSING. Morrison says: 'Etymology not clear. It is certainly fire under what looks like a fence, but primitive sign does not look like fire but like bird. At wild guess I should say primitive sign looks like 'birdie has flown' (off with the branch). F. gives it as 'lost in a forest'.
4. This sign is clearly a FIELD over SILK THREAD (though I can not find it in Morrison), indicating that the whole source of the man's existence is balanced on next to nothingness.
M. gives silk beside field = petty, trifling, attenuated, subtle.
SECOND LINE
1. GREAT (man with ample arms).
2. Gold + equally blended. (The gold sign = also metal, thence the metal.) (M. gives Keun, similar but not identical sign, weight of 90 catties. His dots are a little different.)
3. A measure + divide (radical 165, claws) over field.
4. A measure + banner (rally banner).
I have not found the last three characters in Morrison, but one can make sense from the radicals contained in them thus:
Virtue, man not possessing = a man without virtue; all his basis (his source of being and action) is balanced on a weak silk thread; the entire man has the even blending of metals (at his command) and knoweth measure in dividing and in bringing together. Knows how and when to divide a field with justice, and when (and in what degree) to unite (to rally men, concentrate them for action).

Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. Ed. by Ezra Pound [ID D22141]. (3)
Sekundärliteratur
1958
George A. Kennedy : Fenollosa's essay is a small mass of confusion. Within the limits of forty-four pages he gallops determinedly in various directions, tilting at the unoffending windmills. Fenollosa was not clear whether the grammarian was one who describe how a language operated or one who prescribed how it should operate. He was fighting to protect poetry from what he viewed as the stifling palm of a grammarian's commandment, one may sympathize full-heartedly with him. No linguist or grammarian elects himself a dictator, nor is he antagonistic to poets. Fenollosa claims the sentence form to be 'forced upon primitive men by nature itself'. This form 'consists of three necessary words', the agent, the act, and the receiver. Since nature is not static, but in constant flux, its movement is an unending transfer of power from one point to another. After settling the natural form of the sentence, Fenollosa discusses parts of speech, and introduces the topic with two brilliant sentences that place him still in this particular regard ahead of our time. His statement is : 'Every written Chinese word is properly and underlying word…'

1970
Akiko Miyake : Pound found in Fenollosa's essay three factors that would reinforce his own theory and justify his practice most assertively. First, Fenollosa justified his belief that the unreality of the ideal, the sole theme in his early poetry, can be presented with solid, definite images. Struggling with hard technical problems of poetry, Pound probably appreciated even the riddle-like assertion of Fenollosa, "The cherry tree is all that it doesAkiko Miyake. Second, Fenollosa justified Pound's partial disagreement with Plato. Supported by Fenollosa, Pound eventually could go beyond his own Occidental tradition. Third, Fenollosa's theory on ideograms suggests the possibility of presenting some definite conception through juxtaposing images. Pound's Imagist works are usually short, one-image poems, because in Pound's definition of the image, the poet reaches the radiating center in his vision only for a breif moment by attaining a sudden release of time-limits and space-limits. If Fenollosa's theory on ideograms that enabled Pound to combine these one-image poems into his magnum opus by giving to these juxtapositions of images conceptual meanings.

1976
Monika Motsch : Ezra Pound übernimmt die Grundidee Fenollosas, dass Sprache, sei es naturwissenschaftlich beschreibende, philosophische oder poetische Sprache, niemals den organischen Zusammenhang mit den natürlichen Prozessen verlieren dürfe, weil sie sonst unwahr und subjektiv wird. Fenollosa bestärkt Pound in seiner Abneigung gegen sterile Abstraktionen und Rhetorik und in seiner Vorliebe für das dynamische Bild. Dies entsprach den Grundsätzen des imagistischen Kreises. Nachdem sich Pound von den Imagisten getrennt hat, entwickelte er seine 'ideogrammatische Methode'. Sie wird häufig mit der Zerlegung der chinesischen Diagramme in ihre Bildkomponenten gleichgesetzt, jedoch ist das nur ein unwichtiger Teilaspekt einer langen, sprunghaften und weitreichenden Entwicklung.

1980
William Tay : The Fenollosa essay had played a very significant role in the formation of Pound's poetics and practice. One of Fenollosa's arguments is that the Chinese language is the closest to nature since its construction is based on pictorial representation. Anyone with some knowledge of the Chinese language knows that this is a most misleading half-truth. To the advocate of a new poetry promoting concreteness in language, this discovery is happily adopted. The Fenollosa essay, with its investigation of an entirely foreign language and culture, evidently affords a resounding, shocking effect which Pound could not possibly get from Dante, the Greek epigram or the Anglo-Saxon poem. I am not trying to discredit some of Fenollosa's insights and contribution, but to draw the attention to Pound's urgent need to instigate and stimulate. Another assertion by Fenollosa is that the radicals of many Chinese words are 'short-hand pictures' of action or process of actions. By combining several pictorial elements to intimate an idea, the ideogram as Fenollosa sees it demands a conscious involvement in the reconstruction of the whole process. If the method is compared with rhetorical techniques, it can be described as, in Fenollosa's words 'a more compressed or elliptical expression of metaphorical perception'. In an ideogram, one certainly does not find any linguistic connectives ; but in poetry, the compression and ellipsis will result in Pound's juxtaposition experiments or the so-called 'unique mode of presentation' of some Chinese poems. The ideogrammic method or the metonymic mode is not limited to Pound's poetry ; it is also employed in some of his prose discourse. Besides the ideogrammic method, Pound has also resorted to other less sophisticated means to arouse his reader's attention. There are even more eye-catching elements for the reader : the parading of Greek tags, the astonishing appearance of a musical score, the striking spatial arrangement of syntax, and the occasional punctuation of the Chinese pictograms.

1993
Cai Zong-qi : The bulk of the Fenollosa-Pound essay is devoted to an analysis of how the Chinese character evokes the dynamic force of nature as a result of its ideogrammic, morphological, and syntactical organization. When they examine 'primitive Chinese characters' (simple pictograms or ideograms), they seek to represent them as 'shorthand pictures of actions and processes'. When they discuss complex Chinese characters (composite ideograms), they argue that two or more ideograms 'added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them.
According to them, Chinese nouns are superior to their counterparts in Western languages because their ideogrammic forms are virtually 'meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots'. They regard Chinese verbs as an ideal embodiment of natural force because they contain no passive voice or copula which might diminish the directness and intensity of natural force. Chinese adjectives are lauded because they are derived from and, in many cases, are interchangeable with verbs. Chinese prepositions and conjunctions are worthy of praise because 'they usually serve to mediate actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves actions'.
In focusing their attention on dynamic force, Fenollosa and Pound capture the quintessential quality of the Chinese character in terms of both its etymological evolution and its attendant calligraphic styles. The ability of Chinese characters to preserve and augment the dynamic force latent in its etymological root. This argument has the unintended effect of illuminating how an aesthetic system evolved out of the dynamic force embodied in the Chinese character. The discovery of dynamic force in the Chinese character was truly a revelation to Pound, as it 'seemed to confirm and justify his theories of the poetic image'. Before his discovery, Pound had already been searching for ways to reinvent modern poetry by energizing the phanopoetic tradition in Western poetry. Fenollosa and Pound are aware of the fundamental difference of the dynamic force they saw in the Chinese character and the dynamic force they seek to evoke in their own poetry. When they observe Chinese characters, they stress that the force is natural rather than subjective.
If from the Chinese side one looks for a correct presentation of the Chinese language, one may deplore Pound's 'metaphorization' as a misconception that seems to undo his otherwise insightful understanding of the dynamic beautc of the Chinese character in its formation and calligraphy. If one looks at the same problem from the Western side, one may hail it as a fortunate misconception. Through such a misconception, Pound does not merely render the dynamic beauty of the Chinese character intelligible and relevant to Western poetics but actually makes it a source of inspiration for a wide range of attempts at reinventing modern poetry, extending from his own ideogrammic methods to typographical experiments and to the more radical deconstruction of individual words by concrete poets.

2002
Cai Zong-qi : To correct Fenollosa and Pound's overstatements about the pictorial quality of the Chinese language is a justifiable and necessary task in the teaching of Chinese. It would be a deplorable mistake to dismiss Fenollosa's essay merely because it perpetuates the pictorial myth about Chinese characters. To grasp the literary values of this essay, we must dismiss the overly harsh charge against Fenollosa for his perpetuation of the pictorial myth. Fenollosa cites Chinese characters and comments on 'their semi-pictorial effects' only a few times. Even when doing so, he stresses that Chinese characters are 'based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature ' and that 'their ideographic roots carry in them a verbal idea of action.
The greatest importance of Fenollosa's essay lies in the role it has played in the reinvention of modern Western poetry, a role achieved through the editing and publication by Ezra Pound. The discovery of dynamic force in the Chinese character was truly a revelation to Pound, as it 'seemed to confirm and to justify his theories of the poetic Image'. Prior to this discovery, Pound had already been searching for ways to reinvent modern poetry by energizing the phanopoetic tradition in Western poetry.
To Pound, the essay most eloquently articulated the revolutionary principles of modernist poetry he himself wished to establish. Although he had already formed his Imagist-Vorticist ideals before he read Fenollosa's essay, he sincerely and enthusiastically praised the essay as 'a study of the fundaments of all aesthetics' and credited Fenollosa with ushering in 'many modes of thought since fruitful in new Western painting and poetry. Fenollosa and Pound are aware of the fundamental difference between the dynamic force they see in Chinese characters and the dynamic force they seek to evoke in their own poetry.
In the eyes of Jacques Derrida, Fenollosa and Pound's poetics of dynamic force represents the first major challenge to the entrenched tradition of Western poetics. "[Pound's] irreducibly graphic poetics", writes Derrida, "was with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance". In foregrounding Pound's fascination with the Chinese written character, Derrida intends not merely to show the gensis of Pound's modernist poetics. He also attempts to reappropriate the Chinese written character as the other, against which he can pit Western phonocentrism and logocentrism. While Pound identifies the Chinese written character as an ancient antecedent of his imagist-Vorticist poetics, Derrida sees it as convincing proof of the invalidity of all phonocentric claims upon which Western ontotheologies rest. In comparing the Chinese written character to algebra, Derrida reveals a profound ignorance of it. Fanciful though it is, his reapropriation of the Chinese written character reflects a broad trajectory from modernist to postmodernist challenges to the Western literary, intellectual, and cultural traditions. Derrida's view of the Chinese written character, like Fenollosa and Pound's, has been the subject of intense debates. Some critics focus on criticizing Derrida's misconceptions of the Chinese language, especially his problematic assuption of its nonphonetic nature.

2008
James Liu : It is responsible for the fallacy 'common among Western readers outside sinological circles, namely, that all Chinese characters are pictograms or ideograms'.

2010
Xin Ning : By metaphor Fenollosa does not mean merely the figure of speech, which is only another arbitrary subjective process. His concept of metaphor is connected with his theory of the origin of language. The primitive language is the metaphor of nature, which means not only the accumulation of separate, visible objects, but also the unseen truth behind and within all these objects. The pictorial Chinese language transmits the unseen truth to the audience. What needs to be pointed out about this unseen truth is that it is not something intangible at the end of the chain of the abstraction, detached from the world of visible things. Fenollosa openly condemns this kind of pursuit of truth as 'mediaeval logic' which can never be stopped until it reaches the apex 'being'. This truth is deeply rooted in things themselves, and the primitive language, as well as science, makes us reach the thing-as-itself and the unseen truth simultaneously. Modern linguists are entitled to make a strong and well-founded accusation against Fenollosa's emphasis on the pictorial nature of Chinese written characters. Fenollosa actually was fully aware of the fact that 'the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs cannot now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value'. Fenollosa seems unable to accept the fact that picto-phonetic characters play such an important role in Chinese and insisted on the primacy of pictorial elements.
Fenollosa's theory on Chinese written characters not only provided inspirations to Pound's poetic writing and translation, but also to his political philosophy and overall vision of ancient China. Pound developed from Fenollosa's linguistic theory a general approach known to him as 'ideogramic thinking' and introduced it both to his poetic writing and to his English renditions of Chinese texts. This method taught him to rely on concrete and vivid images as well as their free associations in his compositions of poems, and it enabled him to break both the restraints of the formal requirement of conventional poetry and the literal affinity to the original text in the practice of translation to achieve an ideal combination of authenticity and creativity at a higher level.

Letter from Ezra Pound to Homer Pound ; Febr. 2, 1919.
"Confucianism has, I think, never made martyrs, and has stolen no man's land on the pretence that it was doing her good."

Walt Whitman and China : general.
1955
Achilles Fang : The Imagism-inspired literary revolution of 1917 tolled the bell for the traditional poetry of China ; but it failed to ring in its substitute, probably because it was not even Imagistic. Whitmanism, which propelled literary malcontents toward revolutionary literature, has not succeeded in producing great poetry in China, in spite of the fact that it has been the dominant trait of the new poetry. The search for a workable poetics, a poetics that honestly and earnestly faces the problem of the artist versus society, must go on.
1980
Mark Cohen : Whitman reflected the rise of American capitalism as well as the spirit of democracy. Although Whitman was politically somewhat progressive, as a poet he was often not economical in his diction, too abstract in his ideas, and too confused in his thinking.
1986
Li Xilao : The May Fourth student movement in 1919 is the starting point of modern Chinese literature. Walt Whiman's poetry seemed to be especially commensurate with the spirit of the time. Since Chinese new poets considered themselves to be part of the world new poetry movement pioneered by Whitman, they, and a great number of their readers, turned to him for inspiration. In the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, Whitman seemed to be enjoying a warm welcome by all the major societies : he was held in great esteem by the Creation Society, appreciated by the Crescent Society, and introduced favorably by the Literary Study Society.
1995
Huang Guiyou : Whitman's reception has reached three peaks : the first was during the 1920s and 1930s when China was undergoing a literary revolution characterized by vernacular literature.
The second was during the 1940s and mid-1950s, a period notable for the founding of the People's Republic ; Whitman became a source of inspiration and a symbol of freedom as China was plundered by Japan ; translators concentrated on Whitman's poems that displayed a militant spirit, and the sole purpose of these translations was to call on the Chinese people to stand up heroically against Japanese invaders.
The third was during the open door policy since the late 1970s, and important phase in modern Chinese history, when a great demand for democracy and freedom and an increasing desire to know the outside world burst open the heavy Chinese door.
1995
Li Yeguang : In the thirty years before the founding of the People's Republic, those who appreciated and introduced Whitman to China were mainly poets, and most of them advocated and persisted in writing free verse, while some worked for the creation of new metrical patterns for many years and still others became famous for their classical poetic compositions. Their perspectives on Whitman varied, but they all respected him and benefited from his works in differing ways. Since the May Fourth movement, the task confronting the Chinese literature revolution has been one of opposing imperialistic and traditional feudalistic cultures with democratic and scientific spirit in order to build a new national democratic literature. Whitman's completely new democratic ideas and his urgent demand for an independent national literature for the New World aim in the same direction. The advocates of Chinese new poetry eagerly aspire to create a free verse or a new metrical poetry to keep pace with the new era, and Whitman, as the radical revolutionist in poetic patterns and the true creator of free verse in the world history, meets the needs of all schools of new poetry in China. Throughout the democratic revolution in China, under the new condition when writers were exploring and creating in the field of poetic art, Whitman became all the more valuable to them. Whitman's influence is felt in the spirit, in the force, and in the style.
In socialist China, the study of Whitman has been more and more widely undertaken by younger translators and scholars. Nevertheless, Whitman's influence on Chinese poets continues to grow, and his poetry – which sings of democracy, freedom, modern civilization, and love of mankind – along with his incessant exploration in the ideological field and his bold creation and experience in poetic art are still gaining popularity and depth, still inspiring and encouraging.
2002
Wang Ning : If we read Whitman's poetry next to some contemporary American experimentalist poets, we can undoubtedly find the inherent connections between him and postmodernism. That is perhaps one of the reasons why he is still read and discussed today not only in the West but in China. Another obvious reason Why Chinese scholars discuss Whitman in regard to modern Chinese literature is the unique role he played in the process of China's political and cultural modernity as well as in the Chinese literary modernist movement. During the May 4th period Whitman was one of the very few American poets who had a strong influence on revolutionary Chinese poets. Because the critical and creative reception of Whitman's poetry was absolutely relevant to the Chinese social revolution and to Chinese literary innovation, he as for a long time classified in the tradition of nineteenth-century romanticism. Whitman is now viewed more as a pioneering figure of literary modernism than merely as a romantic poet, for his appearance in the nineteenth century actually anticipated the rise of modernist poetry in the twentieth century, and many of his prophetic and insightful ideas paved the way for the process of modernism in Western culture and Western thought. Compared with what has been achieved in the Western academic circles, Whitman studies in China have a very different orientation : in China, he has always been introduced and studied as a merely romanticist or, as a revolutionary romanticist with his poems of social change highlighted and his symbolic poems virtually neglected. Although the mysterious and symbolic elements in his poems are sometimes mentioned, they are usually dealt with in a cursory way.

Guo, Moruo. Fei tu. [Hymne an die Banditen].
Among the 'bandits' just alluded to, he also ranked Cromwell, Washington and José Rizal as political revolutionaries. Buddha, Mozi and Luther as religious revolutionaires. Copernicus, Darwin and Nietzsche as revolutionaries in the realm of science and scholarship. Rodin, Whitman and Tolstoy as revolutionaries in the field of art and literature. Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Tagore as revolutionaries in the domain of pedagogy.

Tian, Han. Ping min shi ren Huiteman bai nian ji [ID D29796].
Li Xilao : Arguing that the greatness of Walt Whiman lay in the fact that he was 'but an ordinary man, an American of the new world and a child of Adam', Tian equates Whitman's Americanism with democracy and humanism. He was equally impressed by Whitman's originality in creating free verse : 'He never knows what art poetique is nor diction for the sake of rhyme'. Thus, from the spirit to the form of expression, Whitman offered what the iconoclastic noew poets had been looking for. Tian went so far as to liken the Chinese new poetry to Leaves of grass, claiming both to be a 'barbaric yawp', a 'drunk's songs'. He concluded his article : "Once Whitman's ship of democracy navigated into the Pacific, she startled the so-called dragon king of the East sea, stirring up countless demons and stormy waves alike. Now the Pacific knows no peace any more. Can the ship ever reach our East Asian continent ? That's a question. However, fellows ! Fellows of the Young china ! This ship is bound to carry us Asian people – let alone Chinese compatriots – with her. Those of us already aboard should 'steer then with good strong hand and wary eye, O! ' Long live Walt Whitman ! Long live the Young China !"
Wang Ning : Tian not only introduced Whitman's life and work but places particular emphasis on his democratic thought and aesthetic ideals. Obviously, for Tian and other Chinese intellectuals and writers at the time, the greatest significance of Whitman to modern China as well as its literature lies not merely in his forman innovations, necessary as they are, but, more important, in the democratic thought inherent in his poetry, which becomes one of the two most stimulating factors.
Huang Guiyou : Tian's analysis spread throughout China. Guo Moruo worte, that he had read and admired the article. Tian and Guo read and translated Whitman and began to greatly value his work.

Yeats, W.F. If I were four-and-twenty. In : Irish Statesman ; 23 August (1919).
"I have no doubt that the idleness, let us say, of a man devoted to his collection of Chinese paintings affects the mind even of men who do physical labour without spoken or written word, and all the more because physical labour increases mental pursuits."

Yeats, W.B. Appendix 2 (typescript, 1919-1920 ?)
"It may be even that certain abundant soul, souls whom the most exact Chinese system of competitive examination could never discover, need leisure from all, even from all self imposed work, because as a certain seventeenth-century Latin author says of the Unicorn, they cannot serve."

Wallace Stevens purchased from a Boston bookstore a copy of Rev. Samuel Beal's Buddhism in China. At the end of the book's index is his notation : 'The Awakened 83'. The passage deals with the Chan Buddhist ideal of 'The Awakened'.

Letter from Marianne Moore to John Warner Moore ; Nov. 2, 1919.
Yamanaka's had enormous lengths of silk, a red one, a white one, and a blue one hanging in the window and then to fill in the space, a venetian red one which made the whole thing kook neither American nor Chinese.

W. Somerset Maugham and China.
W. Somerset Maugham and his partner Gerald Haxton were leaving England for New York and Chicago in September 1919, took a ship north from Saigon, via Haiphong. January 1919 they arrived in Hong Kong ; and continuing up the East coast from Shanghai to Tianjin and inland to Beijing. In Beijing Maugham meets Gu Hongming. After seeing the Great Wall and exploring northern China to the edge of Mongolia, they returned to Shanghai and from there went up the Yangzi River to Chongqing by a rough sampan. By January 3, 1920, Maugham was back in Shanghai and they returned to Hong Kong on January 12. They stayed in Hong Kong until March 1920.

Zhang Yanping : The fruits of the trip include a travel book On a Chinese screen (1922), a Peking-based play East of Suez (1922) and a popular novel set in Hong Kong, The Painted Veil (1925). Maugham's works about China are tightly and intensively engaged with his dominant concerns in his life and writings : his covert aesthetic leaning, repressed homosexual desire, and both of them point directly toward his ultimate concern — the quest for freedom. For Maugham, China is a place where he could release his transgressive desires at home — his aesthetic urges and homosexual tendencies, without suffering from moral censure and his quest for freedom. Through his encounter with China, Maugham achieves not only aesthetic renewal and cultural liberation, but also moral freedom. Like many other men of his generation, Maugham found China a haven for homosexuals. For him, China signifies a different sexual mode ; it is a land where homosexual practices are regarded as natural. As a trope for sexual freedom in Maugham's writings, China serves to legitimate his homosexual desire and render him morally inculpable.
China is a place where Maugham played a double role : both as a queer and as a gentleman. Writing about China, Maugham strategically writes out his transgressive desire ; denying China, he artfully aligns himself with the dominant gentleman culture. China offers him a double moral freedom : it relieves him of the guiltiness about his homosecual desire and allows him to release the illicit desire without suffering from moral censure.