Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/532

520 But to return. If Japanese writing is (to us) a mountain of difficulty, it is unapproachably beautiful. Japanese art has been called calligraphic. Japanese calligraphy is artistic. Above all, it is bold, because it comes from the shoulder instead of merely from the wrist. A little experience will convince any one that, in comparison with it, the freest, boldest English hand is little better than the cramped scribble of some rheumatic crone. One consequence of this exceeding difficulty and beauty is that calligraphy ranks high in Japan among the arts. Another is that the Japanese very easily acquire our simpler system. To copy the handwriting of a European is mere child's play to them. In fact, it is usual for clerks and students to imitate the hand writing of their employer or master so closely that he himself often cannot tell the difference. It seems odd, considering the high esteem in which writing is held in Japan, that the signature should not occupy the same important place in this country as it does in the West. The seal alone has legal force, the impression being made, not with sealing-wax, but with vermilion ink.

The influence of writing on speech—never entirely absent in any country possessing letters—is particularly strong under the Chinese system. We mean that the writing here does not merely serve to transcribe existing words:—it actually originates new ones, the slave in fact becoming the master. This is chiefly brought about through the exceptional amount of homophony in Chinese, that is, the existence of an extraordinarily large number of words sounding alike, but differing in signification. In the colloquial these are either not used, or are made intelligible by the context or by recourse to periphrasis. But the writer, possessing as he does a separate symbol for each, can wield them all at will, and create new compounds ad infinitum. Almost all the technical terms invented to designate objects, ideas, appliances, and institutions recently borrowed from Europe belong to this category. Some of these new compounds pass from books into common speech; but many remain exclusively attached to the