Part 49 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: Chinese ideograms]
If we all knew _what division_ of this mental horse-picture each of these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ the visible language of gesture in much this same manner.
But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention.
But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through s.p.a.ce: a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.
The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters: they are _alive_. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession.
Contrast the Laoc.o.o.n statue with Browning's lines:
”I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he * * * * * *
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.”
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of _time_. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching _things_ work out their own fate.
Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structure of detached Chinese words.
The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great number of these ideographic roots carry in them a _verbal idea of action_. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a _thing_, and that therefore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.
But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes.
For example, the ideograph meaning ”to speak” is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning ”to grow up with difficulty” is gra.s.s with a twisted root. But this concrete _verb_ quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pa.s.s from such simple, original pictures to compounds. In this process of compounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. For example, the ideograph for a ”mess-mate” is a man and a fire.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east.
”Rice-field” plus ”struggle” = male.
”Boat” plus ”water,” boat-water, a ripple.
Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so universally necessary _in all languages_? Why _must_ all possess it, and what is the normal type of it? If it be so universal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.
I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types: one, that a sentence expresses a ”complete thought”; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some natural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought can not be the test of its own completeness. But in nature there is _no_ completeness. On the one hand, practical completeness may be expressed by a mere interjection, as ”Hi! there!”, or ”Scat!”, or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one's meaning more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence really completes a thought. The man who sees and the horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked when the man tried to catch him. The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or pa.s.ses into another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are inter-related; and thus there could be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to p.r.o.nounce.
In the second definition of the sentence, as ”uniting a subject and a predicate,” the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. _We_ do it all; it is a little private juggling between our right and left hands.
The subject is that about which _I_ am going to talk; the predicate is that which _I_ am going to say about it. The sentence according to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.
If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.
Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle ages. According to this logic, thought deals with abstractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the ”qualities”
which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling depended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the ”thing” as a mere ”particular,” or p.a.w.n. It was as if Botany should reason from the leaf-patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches _things move_ under its microscope.
The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the _transference of power_. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It pa.s.ses between two terms, a cloud and the earth.
No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will have this in common, that they redistribute force.
Their unit of process can be represented as: