72 FIR-FLOWER TABLETS 



exciting of intellectual pleasure by means of vivid, imagina- 

 tive, passionate and inspiriting language"; but at the same 

 time one who has been familiar with the beautiful rhythmic 

 flow and striking imagery of the original Chinese receives 

 a distinct shock from which it takes some effort to recover. 

 Eecovery is only complete when one remembers how few 

 are those of our English-speaking race who have ever had 

 the opportunity of feeling the thrill of emotion produced by 

 these lines in the form in which they were written by Li 

 T' ai-po. 



It must be predicated again that there is real poetry 

 in the Chinese language — poetry that will endure the severest 

 tests ever set up by Western critics, just as the world has 

 come to realize that there is real art in Chinese sculpture 

 and painting. Mr. Daniel French once said to me after we 

 had spent half a day together looking over Chinese paintings : 

 "This is not Chinese art; this is art." The references in 

 Chinese poetry or art may be to alien places and unknown 

 events but the appeal is equally effective in "the exciting 

 of intellectual pleasure." One may know nothing of the 

 Heaped Jade Mountain or the Green Jasper Terrace, but 

 one's imaginative instincts are aroused by such musical 

 names especially when they are in close conjunction with 

 a beautiful line : — 



" Flowers make me think of her face." (p. 16.) 



There is true poetry — English poetry, in "the music of 

 silence" (p. 103) but no truer than Tu Fu's original, hsii 

 lai, which suggests the harmonious tranquility of a soul at 

 peace with itself. 



John Barrow wrote in his "Travels in China" more than 

 a century ago that the Chinese language "is much better 

 adapted to the concise style of ethics than the sublime 

 flights of poetry" and remarked upon the absence of the 

 passion of love "to which poetry owes some of its greatest 

 charms." He gave a literal translation of the T'ao Yao Ode 

 in the Shih King (Legge, Part 1, Bk. 1, Ode VLI) as 

 follows : — 



1 2 3 IS 



" The peach-tree, how fair, how graceful, its leaves, how 



t; 7 8 n ] o 1 1 



blooming, how pleasant ; such is a bride, when she enters her 



12 13 14 15 



bridegroom's house, and attends to her own family." 



Barrow explains that this is a fair translation, "since 

 no more expletives are inserted than such as were necessary 



