Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/40

22 Chinese do not read books of a high-class character aloud to an audience. One could not imagine, for instance, a public reading of the poems of a Chinese Milton, Browning or Tennyson, or of Macaulay's Essays, for the simple reason that they would not be understood if they had not been studied beforehand by the audience, letting alone the fact that half the so-called beauties of Chinese composition gain nothing by recitation. The only instance of recitation in book language is to be found on the stage. There, historical plays are presented in which the actors talk like books, but as the audience have either read the books or know all about the incidents represented, they can follow the dialogue and understand the plot. It is quite possible to write down colloquial Chinese, but it is never so written except in a few novels or in the minutes of evidence taken in a court of Law. If a Chinese were called upon to record a conversation he would inevitably transpose it into literary form.

From what has been said above it will be realized that the popular estimate of the supreme difficulty of the Chinese language is not far wide of the mark. Fluency in speaking, as has been shown, is attainable by most people who will devote the necessary labour to its acquisition, and translation of written Chinese into a foreign language is not beyond the capacity of any diligent student, but it may safely be asserted that there is no living European who can reverse the process and turn out unaided an original Chinese composition of sufficient elegance to command the respect of a Chinese scholar. Proficiency in this direction would necessitate a life-long devotion to the study of Chinese literature to the exclusion of everything else. The late M. Stanislas Julien might, perhaps, alone of Chinese students have laid claim to this distinction, and he, curiously enough, was unable to speak intelligibly, had never been in China in his life, and was entirely self-taught.