Chinese literature

“ The highest conventional refinement, of a certain kind, is apparent in all that belongs to the Chinese. The inviolability of custom has not made their life heavy, but shaped it to the utmost adroitness for their own purposes. We are now somewhat familiar with their literature, and we see pervading it a poetry subtle and aromatic, like the odors of their appropriate beverage. Like that, too, it is all domestic,—never wild. The social genius, fluttering on the wings of compliment, pervades every thing Chinese. ”

“ Those who wish to assure themselves that they will lose nothing by ignoring Chinese literature, often ask the question: "Have the Chinese a Homer, an Aeschylus, a Shakespeare or Tolstoy?" The answer must be that China has no epic and no dramatic literature of importance. ”

“ The poetry which is representative of the period between the death of Confucius and the 2nd century B.C. is a thing apart. There is nothing like it in the whole range of Chinese literature. It illumines many a native pronouncement on the poetic art, the drift of which would otherwise remain obscure. For poetry has been defined by the Chinese as “emotion expressed in words,” a definition perhaps not more inadequate than Wordsworth’s “impassioned expression.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ This was admittedly the Elizabethan age of Chinese literature. More great writers in all branches flourished under this than under any other dynasty before or since. Their styles are massive and grand, without grammatical flaw, exquisitely cadenced, and thrilling the reader with an inexpressible thrill. They exhibit to perfection what the Rev. Arthur Smith, a most accurate writer on Chinese topics, calls "an indescribable loftiness of style, which resembles expression in music."
The poetry of the age is second only to that of the T'angs. ”

“ The Concordance.—Considering the long unbroken series of years during which Chinese literature has always, in spite of many losses, been steadily gaining in bulk, it is not astonishing to find that classical, historical, mythological and other allusions to personages or events of past times have also grown out of all proportion to the brain capacity even of the most brilliant student. ”

“ Chinese literature appeals to the imagination by its amount, but makes little use of this faculty in its constructions. A defective sense of the infinite excludes it from the sphere of sublimity. Such mental attitudes as depend on personal isolation, and on that sustained self-abandonment to awe and wonder which routine and prescription forbid, are here scarcely possible. The Chinese eye is too close to concrete things to get perspective or background of space. ”

“ Excellence in composition, therefore, consists in arranging anew orthodox phrases which are to be found in the ancient classics or in the formidable list of historical or poetical works that the scholar delights to study. Each branch, moreover, of Chinese literature possesses a peculiar style of its own. Any one who could read official Chinese, of which the Peking Gazette may be taken as a typical exemplar, would not necessarily be able to understand an historical work, while books on philosophy, on Buddhism or on Taoism would be almost unintelligible without a special study of their style. ”

“ The Chinese are fond of historical and moral romances, which, however, are founded on reason and not on imagination, as are the Hindu and Persian tales. Their subjects are not submarine abysses, enchanted palaces, giants and genii, but man as he is in his actual life, as he lives with his fellow-men, with all his virtues and vices, sufferings and joys. But the Chinese novelists show more skill in the details than in the conception of their works ”

“ It is quite true that there are no epic poems in Chinese literature. This form of poetry has not been introduced in China, but I differ with your statement, Sir, that Chinese poetry lacks imagination. (Applause.) I could give you many instances to the contrary, though not from memory. The last speaker’s remark that the present China is different from what China is in Chinese poetry may be true, but I may well retort that the England as represented in Shakespeare is very different from the England of to-day. ”

“ Imagination began to come more freely into play, and the language to flow more easily and more musically, as though responsive to the demands of art. A Chinese poem is at best a hard nut to crack, expressed as it usually is in lines of five or seven monosyllabic root-ideas, without inflection, agglutination, or grammatical indication of any kind, the connection between which has to be inferred by the reader from the logic, from the context, and least perhaps of all from the syntactical arrangement of the words. Then, again, the poet is hampered not only by rhyme but also by tone. ”

“ Whether the cause is to be found in the unsuitableness of the Chinese language for a long poem, or in conditions of social life in China, or in both, nothing resembling an epic has been discovered in Chinese literature by European scholars. ”

“ A string of a few nouns with no verbs or with no connectives is often sufficient to express a complex thought. Chinese literature is naturally full of trenchant epigrams and pregnant aphorisms. The words are unwieldy and disconnected: when they are put together, they are like so many pieces of rock with nothing cementing them to one another. ”

“ Of high-class Chinese literature, it is not possible to give even the faintest idea in the space at disposal. It must suffice to say that all branches are adequately represented, histories, biographies, philosophy, poetry and essays on all manner of subjects, offering a wide field even to the most insatiate reader. ”

“ Brevity is indeed the soul of a Chinese poem, which is valued not so much for what it says as for what it suggests. As in painting, so in poetry suggestion is the end and aim of the artist, who in each case may be styled an impressionist. The ideal length is twelve lines, and this is the limit set to candidates at the great public examinations at the present day, the Chinese holding that if a poet cannot say within such compass what he has to say it may very well be left unsaid. ”

“ But we must have due regard for them, for they only miss greatness by a little, and remind us of the faint threnodies that stir in the throats of bird musicians upon the dawn.
— * Giles, `Chinese Literature', p. 130. —
The Poets of the T`ang Dynasty
At last the golden age of Chinese poetry is at hand. Call the roll of these three hundred eventful years, and all the great masters of song will answer you. This is an age of professional poets, whom emperors and statesmen delight to honour. With the Chinese, verse-making has always been a second nature. ”

“ There are works which record the purely political events of each reign, as well as those on chronology, rites and music, jurisprudence, political economy, state sacrifices, astronomy, geography, and records of the neighboring countries. On drawing, painting, and medicine much has been written. Poems, novels, and romances, dramas, and books written in the colloquialcolloquial style, are frequent in the Chinese literature. There is no more pleasant reading than some of their historical romances, and some of the best novels have been translated into European languages. ”

“ The proverbial philosophy of the Chinese is on a scale commensurate in every way with other branches of their voluminous literature. Most Western proverbs, maxims, household words, etc., are to be found embedded therein; sometimes expressed in strictly identical terms, at other times differing only in point of local colour. Thus the Chinese say (e.g.) ―
One actor does not make a play. ”

“ Hence the artists of the fourteenth-century renaissance, and their followers in almost every era, chose Chinese motives for their pictures, and instead of drawing inspiration direct from the exquisite scenery of their own country and the noble acts of their own countrymen and countrywomen, were content to copy Chinese ideals of landscape, and to devote themselves to illustrating Chinese traditions. ”

“ All the elements of form which make for beauty in Chinese composition are there in overwhelming force. Terseness is pushed to its extreme limits; each particle that can be safely dispensed with is scrupulously eliminated, and every here and there some new and original combination invests perhaps a single word with a force it could never have possessed except under the hands of a perfect master of his art. ”

“ Literature and Learning in China.—The Chinese are a reading people, and the number of their published works is very considerable. In the departments of morals, history, biography, the drama, poetry, and romance, there is no lack of writings, such as they are. The Chinese materia medica comprises forty octavo volumes; of statistical works the number is very large. Their novels are said to be excellent pictures of the national manners. China is full of books. New authors are continually spring up; the press is active, and the traffic in books is a lucrative and most honorable branch of trade. ”

“ Native scholars, with their endless critiques and appreciations of individual works, do not seem ever to have contemplated anything of the kind, realising, no doubt, the utter hopelessness, from a Chinese point of view, of achieving even comparative success in a general historical survey of the subject. The voluminous character of a literature which was already in existence some six centuries before the Christian era, and has run on uninterruptedly until the present date, may well have given pause to writers aiming at completeness. ”

“ As to the origin of the written language of China, invention is altogether out of the question. It seems probable that in prehistoric ages, the Chinese, like other peoples, began to make rude pictures of the sun, moon, and stars, of man himself, of trees, of fire, of rain, and they appear to have followed these up by ideograms of various kinds. How far they went in this direction we can only surmise. There are comparatively few obviously pictorial characters and ideograms to be found even in the script of two thousand years ago ”

“ There have been, and are now, foreigners possessing a much wider knowledge of Chinese literature than many natives of education, but, strange to say, such translations as have hitherto been given to the world have been chiefly confined to plays and novels! ”

“ What foreign students have achieved in the department of Chinese literature from the sixteenth century down to quite recent times is well exhibited in the three large volumes which form the Bibliotheca Sinica, or Dictionnaire Bibliographique des Outrages rélatifs à l'Empire chinois, by Henri Cordier: Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1878; with Supplément, 1895. This work is carried out with a fulness and accuracy which leave nothing to be desired, and is essential to all systematic workers in the Chinese field. ”

“ Turning now to the literature of China, we cannot but be astonished at the mass of novels which are one and all of the same tendency; in fact, not only throughout the entire stratum of Chinese fiction, but even in that of the gravest philosophical speculations, has the miraculous been introduced as a natural and necessary element. ”

“ Collections of wit and humour of the Joe Miller type are often to be seen in the hands of Chinese readers, and may be bought at any bookstall. Like many novels of the cheap and worthless class, not to be mentioned with the masterpieces of fiction described in this volume, [433] these collections are largely unfit for translation. All literature in China is pure. Novels and stories are not classed as literature ”

“ The Chinese are entitled to the honour of having invented the domestic and historical novel several centuries before they were introduced in Europe. Fables, tales of supernatural events, and epic poems, belong to the infancy of nations; but the real novel is the product of a later period in the progress of society, when men are led to reflect upon the incidents of domestic life, the movement of the passions, the analysis of sentiment, and the conflicts of adverse interests and opinions. —Preface to a French Translation of a Chinese Novel. ”

“ Works of fiction par excellence are not admitted by the Chinese to form a part of their national literature. Those who have imbibed European ideas on the subject, however, will feel that the novels and romances are too important as a class to be overlooked. ”

“ Several dictionaries of importance were issued by various scholars during the Sung dynasty, not to mention many philological works of more or less value. The Chinese have always been students of their own language, partly, no doubt, because they have so far never condescended to look at any other. They delight in going back to days when correspondence was carried on by pictures pure and simple; and the fact that there is little evidence forthcoming that such a system ever prevailed has only resulted in stimulating invention and forgery. ”