Chapter 26 chapter 26

But revenons a. nos moutons. Is then written Chinese a difficult language? My answer again is, yes and no. I say, written Chinese, even what I have called the full court dress Chinese, the classica major Chinese, is not difficult, because, like the spoken or colloquial Chinese, it is extremely simple. Allow me to show you by an average specimen taken at random how extremely simple, written Chinese even when dressed in full court dress uniform, is. The specimen I take is a poem of four lines from the poetry of the Tang dynasty describing what sacrifices the Chinese people had to make in order to protect their civilization against the wild half civilized fierce Huns from the North. The words of the poem in Chinese are:

which translated into English word for word mean: Swear sweep the Huns not care self, Five thousand embryo sable perish desert dust; Alas! Wuting riverside bones, Still are Spring chambers dream inside men! A free English version of the poem is something like this:_ They vowed to sweep the heathen hordes From off their native soil or die: Five thousand taselled knights, sable-clad, All dead now on the desert lie. Alas the white bones that bleach cold Far off along the Wuting stream, Still come and go as living men Home somewhere in the loved one s dream . Now, if you will compare it with my poor clumsy English version, you will see how plain in words and style, how simple in ideas, the original Chinese is. How plain and simple in words, style and ideas: and yet how deep in thought, how deep in feeling it is.

In order to have an idea of ​​this kind of Chinese literature, _deep thought and deep feeling in extremely simple language, _you will have to read the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is one of the deepest books in all the literature of the world and yet how plain and simple in language. Take this passage for instance:" How is this faithful city become a harlot! Thy men in the highest places are disloyal traitors and companions of thieves; every one loveth gifts and fol-loweth after rewards; they judge not the fatherless neither doth the cause of the widow come before them. "(Is. I -), or this other passage from the same prophet:_"I will make children to be their high officials and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed. The child shall behave himself proudly against the old man and the base against the honorable! " What a picture! The picture of the awful state of a nation or people. Do you see the picture before you now? In fact, if you want to have literature whi ch can transmute men, can civilize mankind, you will have to go to the literature of the Hebrew people or of the Greeks or to Chinese literature. But Hebrew and Greek are now become dead languages, whereas Chinese is a living language_the language of four hundred million people still living to-day.

But now to sum up what I want to say on the Chinese language. Spoken as well as written Chinese is, in one sense, a very difficult language. It is difficult, not because it is complex. Many European languages ​​such as Latin and French are difficult because they are complex and have many rules. Chinese is difficult not because it is complex, but because it is deep. It is difficult because it is a language for expressing deep feeling in simple language. That is the secret of the difficulty of the Chinese language. In fact, as I have said else where, Chinese is a language of the heart: a poetical language. That is the reason why even a simple letter in prose written in classical Chinese reads like poetry. In order to understand written Chinese, especially

what I call full court dress Chinese, you must have your full nature, _the heart and the head, the soul and the intellect equally developed. It is for this reason that for people with modern European education, Chinese is especially difficult, because modern European e-ducation develops principally only one part of a man's nature_his intellect. In other words, Chinese is difficult to a man with modern European education , because Chinese is a deep language and modem European education, which aims more at quantity than quality, is apt to make a man shallow. Finally for half educated people, even the spoken language, as I have said, is difficult. For half educated people it may be said of them as was once said of rich men, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for them to understand high classical Chinese and for this reason: written Chinese is a language only for the use of really educated people. In short, written Chinese, classical Chinese is difficult because it is the language of really educated people and real education is a difficult thing but as the Greek proverb says, "all beautiful things are difficult."