The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition

Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II.

126 This process of devitalizing language1 we have already seen to be only partially accomplished in the case of Chinese. Practically all words are verbs, and all retain some transitive meaning, and we saw the little parasites of prepositions, adjectives , intransitives & passives, even negatives, only beginning to grow up. It is we who mistranslate them Chinese words into our modern weak vocabularies. Fallingback,then,uponthecertaintythatthetransitivesentenceisnaturaland primitive, we can easily see how, in grammar, more complex forms of sentences grow out of it. The germ of this is the fact that one act in nature leads to another. Thus the agent and object themselves may be acts. “Reading promotes writing,” and this would be a perfectly normal Chinese sentence consisting of three verbs. Of course it is a condensation of three sentences or clauses, and there are many looser ways in which clauses can be united. Here however the dominance of the verb, and its power to obliterate all other parts of speech, gives us the model of terse, fine style. Let it be remembered that nouns are only arbitrary starting points for verbs, and should therefore be supplanted by verbs wherever possible. Adjectives are only abstract, or “dried” verbs so to speak, carrying all their values and the active power that lie behind, and should therefore only be used to prevent monotony. Conjunctions and prepositions are only channels of force to connect two forces; therefore they are verbs themselves, as Chinese well shows. Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II. E r n e s t F e n o l l o s a (1903) Chinese and Japanese Poetry 127 Even pronouns are only what they do, and therefore remotely verbs. All relative words are themselves only verbal connections forms of verbal mediation. I have seldom seen even one rhetorician dwell on the fact that the great strength of our language lies in its splendid full list, derived both from Saxon and from Latin sources, of transitive verbs, which gives us the most individual characterizations of force. But who learns them? The power of these verbs lies in the fact that they recognize nature to be 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, we catch the Master, the Demiurge, in the very act. Example. I discovered for myself why Shakespeare’s English was so immeasurably superior to all other. It is in his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of thousands of transitive verbs. It is rarely that you will find an is in his sentences. And Is weakly lends itself to the uses of our poetry, in unaccented syllables. Yet he sternly discards it. I should say that a study of Shakespeare’s use of verbs ought to underlie all exercises in style. Example. Butitalmostequallycharacterizesotherstrongwritersthattheydiscardthecopula forthetransitiveverb,andfight shy of adjectives. Stevensonfurnishes one example. It would be constitute perhaps the finest training for a young writer to compose a page that contained no single use of the copula. Example from Stevenson. But now in Chinese we find this power and wealth of the transitive verb carried to a pitch that almost transcends the resources even of English. This fact comes from its vivid combination into a single word of minutely different attributes. Thus the number of variants upon a central idea would swell to enormous proportions a Chinese Thesaurus. It is true that the pictorial clue of many of these cannot now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers are prone to admit that combinations frequently constitute only a phonetic value. But it is incredible that such minute subdivisions of the idea could ever have existed as abstract sound without the concrete characters. Neither is it likely that they were made up all at once in an artificial list. Therefore we may believe that the phonetic theory is in large part unsound, and that in many cases where we cannot now trace the metaphor, it once existed.2 But even though we cannot trace the metaphor, the individuality of the visible symbol holds the constituent parts of the idea together. Examples of the incredible richness in transitive verbs must now be given. Examples of rich Chinese words not only of verbs. all words are in great variety to refine smallest shades of meaning. This wealth is almost neglected by translators. One example of its neglect is the so-called compound. Another...