Part 3 (1/2)
Impersonality first fas.h.i.+oned the nouns, and then the nouns, by their very impersonality, helped keep impersonal the thought and fettered fancy. All those temptings to poesy which to the Aryan imagination lie latent in the s.e.x with which his forefathers humanized their words, never stir the Tartar nor the Chinese soul. They feel the poetry of nature as much as, indeed much more than, we; but it is a poetry una.s.sociated with man. And this, too, curiously enough, in spite of the fact that to explain the cosmos the Chinamen invented, or perhaps only adapted, a singularly s.e.xual philosophy. For possibly, like some other portions of their intellectual wealth, they stole it from India. The Chinese conception of the origin of the world is based on the idea of s.e.x. According to their notions the earth was begotten. It is true that with them the cosmos started in an abstract something, which self-produced two great principles; but this pair once obtained, matters proceeded after the a.n.a.logy of mankind. The two principles at work were themselves abstract enough to have satisfied the most unimpa.s.sioned of philosophers. They were simply a positive essence and a negative one, correlated to suns.h.i.+ne and shadow, but also correlated to male and female forces. Through their mutual action were born the earth and the air and the water; from these, in turn, was begotten man. The cosmical modus operandi was not creative nor evolutionary, but s.e.xual. The whole scheme suggests an attempt to wed abstract philosophy with primitive concrete mythology.
The same s.e.xuality distinguishes the j.a.panese demonology. Here the physical replaces the philosophical; instead of principles we find allegorical personages, but they show just the same pleasing propensity to appear in pairs.
This attributing of s.e.xes to the cosmos is not in the least incompatible with an uninterested disregard of s.e.x where it really exists. It is one thing to admit the fact as a general law of the universe, and quite another to dwell upon it as an important factor in every-day affairs.
How slight is the Tartar tendency to personification can be seen from a glance at these same j.a.panese G.o.ds. They are a combination of defunct ancestors and deified natural phenomena. The evolving of the first half required little imagination, for fate furnished the material ready made; while in conjuring up the second moiety, the spirit-evokers showed even less originality. Their results were neither winsome nor sublime. The G.o.ds whom they created they invested with very ordinary humanity, the usual endowment of aboriginal deity, together with the customary superhuman strength. If these demiG.o.ds differed from others of their cla.s.s, it was only in being more commonplace, and in not meddling much with man. Even such personification of natural forces, simple enough to be self-suggested, quickly disappeared. The various awe-compelling phenomena soon ceased to have any connection with the anthropomorphic noumena they had begotten. For instance, the sun-G.o.ddess, we are informed, was one day lured out of a cavern, where she was sulking in consequence of the provoking behavior of her younger brother, by her curiosity at the sight of her own face in a mirror, ingeniously placed before the entrance for the purpose. But no j.a.panese would dream now of casting any such reflections, however flattering, upon the face of the orb of day. The sun has become not only quite s.e.xless to him, but as devoid of personality as it is to any Western materialist. Lesser deities suffered a like unsubstantial transformation. The thunder-G.o.d, with his belt of drums, upon which he beats a devil's tattoo until he is black in the face, is no longer even indirectly a.s.sociated with the storm. As for dryads and nymphs, the beautiful creatures never inhabited Eastern Asia. Anthropoid foxes and racc.o.o.ns, wholly lacking in those engaging qualities that beget love, and through love remembrance, take their place. Even Benten, the naturalized Venus, who, like her h.e.l.lenic sister, is said to have risen from the sea, is a person quite incapable of inspiring a reckless infatuation.
Utterly unlike was this pantheon to the pantheon of the Greeks, the personifying tendency of whose Aryan mind was forever peopling nature with half-human inhabitants. Under its quickening fancy the very clods grew sentient. Dumb earth awoke at the call of its desire, and the beings its own poesy had begotten made merry companions.h.i.+p for man. Then a change crept over the face of things. Faith began to flicker, for want of facts to feed its flame. Little by little the fires of devotion burnt themselves out. At last great Pan died. The body of the old belief was consumed. But though it perished, its ashes preserved its form, an unsubstantial presentment of the past, to crumble in a twinkling at the touch of science, but keeping yet to the poet's eye the lifelike semblance of what once had been. The dead G.o.ds still live in our language and our art. Even to-day the earth about us seems semiconscious to the soul, for the memories they have left.
But with the Far Oriental the exorcising feeling was fear. He never fell in love with his own mythological creations, and so he never embalmed their memories. They were to him but explanations of facts, and had no claims upon his fancy. His ideal world remained as utterly impersonal as if it had never been born.
The same impersonality reappears in the matter of number. Grammatically, number with them is unrecognized. There exist no such things as plural forms. This singularity would be only too welcome to the foreign student, were it not that in avoiding the frying-pan the Tartars fell into the fire. For what they invented in place of a plural was quite as difficult to memorize, and even more c.u.mbrous to express. Instead of inflecting the noun and then prefixing a number, they keep the noun unchanged and add two numerals; thus at times actually employing more words to express the objects than there are objects to express. One of these numerals is a simple number; the other is what is known as an auxiliary numeral, a word as singular in form as in function. Thus, for instance, ”two men” become amplified verbally into ”man two individual,”
or, as the Chinaman puts it, in pidgin English, ”two piecey man.” For in this respect Chinese resembles j.a.panese, though in very little else, and pidgin English is nothing but the literal translation of the Chinese idiom into Anglo-Saxon words. The necessity for such elaborate qualification arises from the excessive simplicity of the j.a.panese nouns. As we have seen, the noun is so indefinite a generality that simply to multiply it by a number cannot possibly produce any definite result. No exact counterpart of these nouns exists in English, but some idea of the impossibility of the process may be got from our word ”cattle,” which, prolific though it may prove in fact, remains obstinately incapable of verbal multiplication. All j.a.panese nouns being of this indefinite description, all require auxiliary numerals. But as each one has its own appropriate numeral, about which a mistake is unpardonable, it takes some little study merely to master the etiquette of these handles to the names of things.
Nouns are not inflected, their cases being expressed by postpositions, which, as the name implies, follow, in becoming j.a.panese inversion, instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions.
There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two last being conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses, to say nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed on another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its original length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb, or verb, according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does not exist in j.a.panese. In spite of the shock to the prejudices of the old school of logicians, it must be confessed that the Tartars get on very well without any such couplings to their trains of thought. But then we should remember that in their sentences the cart is always put before the horse, and so needs only to be pushed, not pulled along.
The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition with the noun.
That the j.a.panese word which is commonly translated ”is” is in no sense a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A j.a.panese does not say, ”The scenery is fine,” but simply, ”Scenery, fine.” Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not ”She is beautiful,” but ”She exists beautifully,” would be the j.a.panese way of expressing his admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula turns out to be merely an impersonal intransitive verb.
A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just as a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct contradiction in terms. No matter how negative the idea to be given, it must be conveyed by a positive expression. Even a void is grammatically quite full of meaning, although unhappily empty in fact. So much is common to all tongues, but j.a.panese carries its positivism yet further.
Not only has it no negative nouns, it has not even any negative p.r.o.nouns nor p.r.o.nominal adjectives,--those convenient keepers of places for the absent. ”None” and ”nothing” are unknown words in its vocabulary, because the ideas they represent are not founded on observed facts, but upon metaphysical abstractions. Such terms are human-born, not earth-begotten concepts, and so to the Far Oriental, who looks at things from the point of view of nature, not of man, negation takes another form. Usually it is introduced by the verbs, because the verbs, for the most part, relate to human actions, and it is man, not nature, who is responsible for the omission in question. After all, it does seem more fitting to say, ”I am ignorant of everything,” than ”I know nothing.” It is indeed you who are wanting, not the thing.
The question of verbs leads us to another matter bearing on the subject of impersonality; namely, the arrangement of the words in a j.a.panese sentence. The Tartar mode of grammatical construction is very nearly the inverse of our own. The fundamental rule of j.a.panese syntax is, that qualifying words precede the words they qualify; that is, an idea is elaborately modified before it is so much as expressed. This practice places the hearer at some awkward preliminary disadvantage, inasmuch as the story is nearly over before he has any notion what it is all about; but really it puts the speaker to much more trouble, for he is obliged to fas.h.i.+on his whole sentence complete in his brain before he starts to speak. This is largely in consequence of two omissions in Tartar etymology. There are in j.a.panese no relative p.r.o.nouns and no temporal conjunctions; conjunctions, that is, for connecting consecutive events.
The want of these words precludes the admission of afterthoughts.
Postscripts in speech are impossible. The functions of relatives are performed by position, explanatory or continuative clauses being made to precede directly the word they affect. Ludicrous anachronisms, not unlike those experienced by Alice in her looking-gla.s.s journey, are occasioned by this practice. For example, ”The merry monarch who ended by falling a victim to profound melancholia” becomes ”To profound melancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch,” and the sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, when chronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite.
A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence of temporal conjunctions. In j.a.panese, though nouns can be added, actions cannot; you can say ”hat and coat,” but not ”dressed and came.”
Conjunctions are used only for s.p.a.ce, never for time. Objects that exist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus to connect consecutive events. ”Having dressed, came” is the j.a.panese idiom. To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a j.a.panese sentence is a single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts loosely tied together. It is as much a unit in its composition as a novel or a drama is with us. Such artistic periods, however, are anything but convenient. In their nicely contrived involution they strikingly resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, where entire sh.e.l.ls lie closely packed one within another,--a very marvel of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must be antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea entertains us.
On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence, and are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence is that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that they not infrequently get left out altogether. For the j.a.panese are much given to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to adopt. Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action, as considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this precedence accorded the impersonal element in language over the personal, we observe again the comparative importance a.s.signed the two.
In j.a.panese estimation, the first place belongs to nature, the second only to man.
As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays in their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a common practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea, isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle ”wa” (which means ”as to,” the French ”quant a”), the word thus singled out for distinction is far more likely to be the object of the sentence than its subject. The habit is a.n.a.logous to the use of our phrase ”speaking of,”--that is, simply an emphatic mode of introducing a fresh thought; only that with them, the practice being the rule and not the exception, no correspondingly abrupt effect is produced by it. Ousted thus from the post of honor, the subject is not even permitted the second place.
Indeed, it usually fails to put in an appearance anywhere. You may search through sentence after sentence without meeting with the slightest suggestion of such a thing. When so unusual an anomaly as a motive cause is directly adduced, it owes its mention, not to the fact of being the subject, but because for other reasons it happens to be the important word of the thought. The truth is, the j.a.panese conception of events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish conceptions. For the j.a.panese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language reflects the fact. The few abstract ideas these people now possess are not represented, for the most part, by pure j.a.panese, but by imported Chinese expressions. The islanders got such general notions from their foreign education, and they imported idea and word at the same time.
Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of j.a.panese speech, the word for ”man,” ”hito,” is identical with, and probably originally the same word as ”hito,” the numeral ”one;” a noun and a numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal p.r.o.noun they possess. On the one hand, we have the German ”mann;” on the other, the French ”on”. While as if to give the official seal to the oneness of man with the universe, the word mono, thing, is applied, without the faintest implication of insult, to men.
Such, then, is the mould into which, as children, these people learn to cast their thought. What an influence it must exert upon their subsequent views of life we have but to ask of our own memories to know.
With each one of us, if we are to advance beyond the steps of the last generation, there comes a time when our growing ideas refuse any longer to fit the childish grooves in which we were taught to let them run. How great the wrench is when this supreme moment arrives we have all felt too keenly ever to forget. We hesitate, we delay, to abandon the beliefs which, dating from the dawn of our being, seem to us even as a part of our very selves. From the religion of our mother to the birth of our boyish first love, all our early a.s.sociations send down roots so deep that long after our minds have outgrown them our hearts refuse to give them up. Even when reason conquers at last, sentiment still throbs at the voids they necessarily have left.
In the Far East, this fondness for the old is further consecrated by religion. The wors.h.i.+p of ancestors sets its seal upon the traditions of the past, to break which were impious as well as sad. The golden age, that time when each man himself was young, has lingered on in the lands where it is always morning, and where man has never pa.s.sed to his prosaic noon. Befitting the place is the mind we find there. As its language so clearly shows, it still is in that early impersonal state to which we all awake first before we become aware of that something we later know so well as self.
Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a reason that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is their own.
Among the ma.s.s of foreign thought the j.a.panese imitativeness has caused the nation to adopt, here is one thing which is indigenous. Half of the present speech, it is true, is of Chinese importation, but conservatism has kept the other half pure. From what it reveals we can see how each man starts to-day with the same impersonal outlook upon life the race had reached centuries ago, and which it has since kept unchanged. The man's mind has done likewise.
[1] Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain: The j.a.panese Language.
Chapter 5. Nature and Art.