Instigations Part 51

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chinese ideograms. 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 h.o.m.ology; 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.

[1] The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and I therefore transcribe his words.--E.P.

[2] Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric.--E.P.

[3] 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 grammatizing or categorizing pa.s.sion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion.--E.P.

[4] A good writer would use "shine" (i.e., to shine), shining, and "the shine" or "sheen", possibly thinking of the German "_schone_" and "_Schonheit_"; but this does not invalidate Prof. Fenollosa's next contention.--E.P.

[5] 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 subst.i.tute, for them, vague verbs with prepositional directors, or riders.--E.P.

[6] _Cf_. principle of Primary apparition, "Spirit of Romance".--E.P.

[7] Compare Aristotle's _Poetics_.--E.P.

[8] Vide also an article on "Vorticism" in the _Fortnightly Review_ for September, 1914. "The language of exploration" now in my "Gaudier-Brzeska."--E.P.

[9] 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.

[10] These precautions should be broadly conceived. It is not so much their letter, as the underlying feeling of objectification and activity, that matters.--E.P.

[11] Compare Dante's definition of "rect.i.tudo" as the direction of the will, probably taken from Aquinas.--E.P.

[12] Professor Fenollosa is well borne out by chance evidence. The vorticist sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room before he went off to the war. He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleasure. He was of course, 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 discern for all their learning the pictorial values which were to him perfectly obvious and apparent. Curiously enough, a few weeks later Edmond Dulac, who is of a totally different tradition, 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 life-time, what had required centuries of development in China.--E.P.