Note 10 — CHAPTER TWO Formal Development—Yuan Dynasty, 1206-1368
Reading edition
The difficulty in acquiring a reading knowledge of the classical Chinese (Wen Li) does not consist chiefly in learning to read five thousand or more ideograms—that is only a minor trouble—but in the retention in the memory of the texts of the classics to which constant allusion is made in a manner to confuse utterly the uninitiated. “The dragon has gone down to the sea” means “the emperor has died.” Or to translate the idea into English; the Bible says, “The words of the wise are as goads” (Ecclesiastes xii, II) and Shakespeare (Hamlet V, I). “There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners”; therefore the reader would have to know that “goads” stands for the words of the wise and “ancient gentlemen” for gardeners. But connoisseurs regard this classical language as the greatest monument of China, far finer than Sung pottery or the Temple of Heaven. Said a friend to me one day, picking up a copy of Omar at the verse:
O Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And didst with Paradise devise the snake, For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened, man’s forgiveness give and take.
“Such is this wonderfully rich, poetic Wen Li, while in Pai Hua (the vernacular) this same thought would cover pages of dull, colorless prose.” Of course, the spoken language is still as poor a vehicle for poetic thought as Italian was before Dante, but its advocates hope for its growth and development.