Note 84 — BOOK II THE MAKING OF MEN (continued 2)

The four characters indicating “Affairs, query, imperative, old,” placed in that order, for example, represent “Why walk in the ancient ways?” The Chinaman gives the bare cores of his meaning; the Englishman gets to it by a bold metaphor. He may be talking of conservatism in cooking or in bookbinding, but he will say: “Why walk in the ancient ways?” Mr. Arthur Waley, in the interesting essay on Chinese thought and poetry which precedes his book, 170 Chinese Poems (Constable, 1918), makes it clear how in these fields Chinese thought is kept practical and restricted by the limitations upon metaphor the linguistic structure of Chinese imposes. See also Hirst, Ancient History of China, ch. vii.