Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/30

 difficulty in the comprehension and use of the written language for anything beyond the simplest purposes lies in the fact that it abounds in metaphor and allusion. The elegant writer loves to display his erudition by the employment of quotations from the books, canonical and historical, the study of which is a necessary part of his education. If he wishes to express a thought out of the common, or a complex idea, he dives into his store of recollection and quotes a word or two from the sayings of some ancient sage which are suggestive rather than perspicuous. If he wanted to speak, for instance, of the "uses of adversity" in an English composition, he would refer to a "toad's jewel," and pre-suppose the reader to be fully acquainted with the passage in Shakespeare that compares adversity to the precious jewel in the head of the toad. It is this that makes it impossible for the ordinary foreigner to do more than spell his way through a modern official document, or to understand anything but an ordinary note. In fact, it may safely be said that the average educated Chinese is incapable of expressing himself elegantly in his own language. He can understand what he reads, but he cannot write a polished letter, or turn out a finished despatch. The ancient forms of Chinese verse, or the writings of Confucius or Mencius, are child's play compared with the works of later authors, while an elegant essay, composed for an examination for example, would be almost unintelligible to an ordinary individual without the aid of a dictionary of reference or the explanations of a well-read scholar who had history at his fingers' ends, and could supply the context from which the numerous quotations are taken. In almost all Chinese composition, again, measured periods, not unlike blank verse, abound, and are esteemed by the scholar as a capital beauty of the language. Ideas, it may be said, often form the secondary object of consideration, the mode in which they are expressed claiming first attention. Thought also is stereotyped, and all the ideas which the Chinese wish to cherish or indicate are contained, as stated above, in those records which have come down to them from the sages of antiquity. 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,