Instigations Part 48

Talis erat tunc in aedibus Eris viri domitrix aerumna."

Clytemnestra:

"Nequaquam mortis sortem exopta 1470 Hisce gravatus; Neque in Helenam iram convertas, Tanquam viriperdam, ac si una multorum Virorum animas Graecorum perdens, Intolerabilem dolorem effecerit."

Clytemnestra:

"Mortem haud indignam arbitrar 1530 Huic contigisse: Neque enim ille insidiosam cladem Aedibus intulit; sed meum ex ipso Germen sublatum, multum defletam Iphigeniam c.u.m indigne affecerit, Digna pa.s.sus est, nihil in inferno Glorietur, gladio inflicta Morte luens quae prior perpetravit."

"Death not unearned, nor yet a novelty in this house; Let him make talk in h.e.l.l concerning Iphigenia."

(If we allow the last as ironic equivalent of the literal "let him not boast in h.e.l.l.")

"He gets but a thrust once given (by him) Back-pay, for Iphigenia."

One can further condense the English but at the cost of obscurity.

Morshead is bearable in Clytemnestra's description the beacons.

"From Ida's top Hephaestos, Lord of fire, Sent forth his sign, and on, and ever on, Beacon to beacon sped tjie courier-flame From Ida to the crag, that Hermes loves On Lemnos; thence into the steep sublime Of Athos, throne of Zeus, the broad blaze flared.

Thence, raised aloft to shoot across the sea The moving light, rejoicing in its strength Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way, In golden glory, like some strange new sun, Onward and reached Macistus' watching heights."

[1] Milton, of course, whom my detractors say I condemn without due circ.u.mspection.

[2] _I.e._ Clark is "correct," but the words shade differently. _??a_ means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of "little by little."-_Submisse_ means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of modesty, humbly.

[3] Later continued by l'Abbe de St. Cherroi.

[4] My impression is that I saw an Iliad by Andreas Divus on the Quais in Paris, at the time I found his version of the Odyssey, but an impression of this sort is, after eight years, untrustworthy, it may have been only a Latin Iliad in similar binding.

[5] Reading _????f???s??_, variant _????????s??_, offered in footnote.

In any case _argentea_ is closer than _candida_.

[6] "H.D.'s" translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here or in connection with "The New Poetry"; she has obtained beautiful strophes for First Chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis, 1-4 and 9, and for the first of the second chorus. Elsewhere she retains certain needless locutions, and her versification permits too many dead stops in its current.

IX

THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY

BY ERNEST FENOLLOSA

[_This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repet.i.tions 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 j.a.pan 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 have not had to change the allusions to western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories_.--EZRA POUND.]

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 j.a.panese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly a.s.sumed 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[1] 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 j.a.panese poetry are hardly more than an amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 provincial 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan in all its original freshness. The j.a.panese to-day 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 those universal elements of form which const.i.tute 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 a.s.similate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye. Contrast, for example, Gray's line:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day

with the Chinese line:

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chinese ideograms. 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 const.i.tute natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order.[2]

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 focussed 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: