Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/153

 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 education developesdevelops [sic] 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 modern 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: