Part 16

Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group: Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship. They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's existence. They suppose they are akin--through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then. Their kinship consists in this: the words are each are billiard-balls--and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes. Thus I should call a Tibetan name like _nGamri-srong-btsan_ a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like _T'ang Tai-tsong_ a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know.--The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say 'the horse kicked the man,' _horse agent man kicking completion,_ or words to that effect,--dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words for _horse_ and _man,_ in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as _geegee_ and _equus,_ and _Smith_ and _Jones._ As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._ One says: "Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other, "The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness."

In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, _shih,_ pronounced like the first three letters in the word _shirt_ in English. That vocable may mean: _history,_ or _to employ,_ or _a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house,_ and all such things as that;--I mention a few out of the list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus _Ts'in_ meant one country, and _Tsin_ another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You pronounce _shih_ one tone--you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means _poetry;_ you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes _a corpse:_--as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress on you it really does.--Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of sound-stuff we call letters: _c-a-t_ cat, _d-o-g_ dog, and so on;--but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,--and above all, _musical tones._ Now then, which is the more primitive? Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the spiritual, pole?

* _Encyclopaedia Britannica:_ article, China: Language. -------

More primitive--I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy; when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight, quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

"They prayed, but their worship was only The wonder of nights and of days,"

--when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the poems of the earth was made:--it was song, it was tone, it was music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language: seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps: and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the Glory of God. And then--was it like this?--they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization--its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed--many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America--as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese: highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling;--and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis. And then the Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of the first sub-race;--till you had something in character not intellectual, but spiritual:--Chinese. And meanwhile--I am throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of them;--meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,-- but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to be chanted, and not dully spoken:--and there, when the time came for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixth Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes in _The Secret Doctrine,_ and see how the last ones, the sixth and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and second. Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity: when our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:--until presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole of the Glory of God?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away and ahead of us? Were there first of all billiard-balls; and did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together; this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;--from monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional, complex--Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;--then Pyrenean by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains; and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier pronunciation,--stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing intolerant of changes within itself;--fitting itself to the weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;-- dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds there are;--till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was Chinese? Is it primitive, or ultimate? I am almost certain of this, at any rate: that as a language-type, it stands somewhere midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the proud upward arc of the Fifth? And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,--Fifth certainly? Is this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years, until some time later than 160,000 years ago--the time of the beginning our our sub-race? A pralaya, like sleep, is a period of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits: whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright Immortal Self within. Africa entered such a rest-period from an orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams and sorceries, and her people became what they are. But if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu, the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would have been--it might have been--with a bent not towards intellectual, but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the West. Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all we have at present.--She attained marvelous heights; but they were not the same kind of heights the West has attained. Through her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried whole provinces of Devachan with her. It was while she was falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot herself to give utterance to the unseemly. There is no line in her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score. She worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity only in the impersonal and dispassionate: never mistook for its voice, the voices of the flesh. She sinned much, no doubt; but not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her worship of Art and Poetry. She was faithful to the high Gods there. She never produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares. But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in lyricism--one might name a hundred of them--beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies. Nor have we had any to compare with her masters of landscape-painting: even the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ comes down flat-footed with the statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the world has seen.--And why?--Because it is based on a knowledge of the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.' Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of dynamite. So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather coarse and brutal and materialistic to you.

But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare? No Dante or Homer? No epic--no great drama! Pooh! you say, where is the great creative energy? Where is the sheer brain force?--

It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is the highest possible type. Well; it may be: but the deeper you go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to become as to the absoluteness of standards. The time to award the prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of the differences. Warily let us go to work here!

Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be seen as _energies._ I think, through channels nearer this material plane: nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate.--No: there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in Pope or in Keats? In Pope most emphatically. But off with your head if you say he gave the greater gift.--Or I will leave Pope, and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he devised his philosophy: there was a much longer evolution behind the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the other's titanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of brain energies is concerned, there is no question: Bacon was much the greater man.

So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West incomparably greater in brain energy. And I am not making such a foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the two races. You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the Han, the T'ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean, Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze. In the West, the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more forcefully with the human intellect: had a much more vigorous basis in that, I think, to work in and upon. It has reached lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully-- and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.

We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd. On the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection. Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by religious emotion;--they don't readily gush over a personal god. It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality: have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on planes less material, nearer their spiritual source. It will seem so the more because until very recently China has been constantly misrepresented to us. And yet I think it is pretty much the truth.

In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but through the more subtle perceptions and emotions that lie behind. It gives us, if we are at all gifted or educated to see, pure vistas of Itself. Compare Michelangelo's Moses with the Dai Butsu at Kamakura:--as I think Dr. Siren does in one of his lectures. The former is a thing of titanic, even majestic energies; but they are energies physical and mental: a grand triumph on what is called in Sanskrit philosophy the Rajasic plane. The second suggests, not energy and struggle, but repose and infinite calm. In the Moses, we sense warfare, with victory, to attain and to hold its attainment; in the Dai Butsu, something that has passed through all that aeons ago. In which is the greater sum of energies included? In the Dai Butsu certainly; wherein we see no sign of what we commonly call energies at all. The one is human struggling up towards Godhood; the other, Godhood looking down with calm limitless compassion upon man. Such need no engines and dynamics to remove the mountains: they bid them rise up, and be cast into the sea; and are obeyed.

Or take a great Chinese landscape and a great Western one: a Ma Yuan, say, and a--whom you please. To the uninstructed it seems ridiculous to compare them. This took a whole year to paint; it is large; there is an enormous amount of hard work in it; huge creative effort, force, exertion, went to make it. That--it was done perhaps in an hour. That mountain is but a flick of the brush; yonder lake but a wash and a ripple. It is painted on a little trumpery fan--a mere square foot of silk. Yes; but on that square foot, by the grace of the Everlasting Spirit, are 'a thousand miles of space': much more--there is Infinity itself. Watch; and that faint gray or sepia shall become the boundless blue; and you shall see dim dragons wandering: you shall see Eternal Mystery brooding within her own limitless home. Far, far more than in the western work, there is an open window into the Infinite: that which shall remind us that we are not the poor clay and dying embers we seem, but a pat of the infinite Mystery. The Spirit is here; not involved in human flesh and intellection, but impersonal and universal. What do you want:--to be a great towering personality; or to remember that you are a flame of the Fire which is God? Oh, out upon these personal deities, and most ungodly personalities of the West! I thank China for reminding me that they are cheap and nasty nothingnesses at the best!

We rather demand of our art, at its highest, that it shall be a stimulant, and call to our minds the warfare in which we are engaged: the hopeless-heroic gay and ever mournful warfare of the soul against the senses. Well; that battle has to be fought; there is nothing better than fighting it--until it is won. Let us by all means hear the snarling of the trumpets; let us heed the battle-cries of the Soul. But let us not forget that somewhere also the Spirit is at peace: let us remember that there is Peace, beyond the victory. In Chinese art and poetry we do not hear the war-shouts and the trumpets: broken, there, are the arrow and the bow; the shield, the sword, the sword and the battle.--But--_the Day-Spring from on high hath visited us._

What element from the Divine is in it, does not concern itself with this earth-life; tells you nothing in criticism of life. There is naught in it of the Soul as Thinker, nor of the Soul as Warrior. But surely it is something for us, immersed here in these turbid Rajasika regions, to be reminded sometimes that the Sattvic planes exist; it is something for us to be given glimpses of the pure quietudes of the Spirit in its own place. I am the better, if I have been shown for an instant the delicate imperishable beauty of the Eternal.

"We are tired who follow after Truth, a phantasy that flies; You with only look and laughter Stain our hearts with richest dyes."--

They do indeed; with look and laughter--or it may be tears.

Now, what does it all mean? Simply this, I think: that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit. We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough Chinaman, 'merely beautiful.'

I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary instincts will rise with a brief for the West. But the truth is that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and does this through the one, that through the other. When I read _Hamlet,_ I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that ever lived. When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang. I forget the Voice that cried 'Sleep no more!' and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid: she seems to me to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike detachment and wonder as this:

"The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since; but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle. He and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never grow weary of gazing";

--the 'lonely cloud' being, of course, Li Po himself. He has shown me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him. The mountains can speak for themselves.

He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the Hills of T'ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr. Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in _feng_ and _ya,_--by which we may understand, for present purposes, much what Matthew Arnold meant by 'criticism of life.' But does it not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten: that we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we have lost? Li Po died a child at sixty: a magical child: always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts, especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay for our naughtiness,--exile from the wonder-world, and submersion in these intolerable personalities. You read Milton, and are cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the Spirit beating through. You read Li Po-type of hundreds of others his compatriots--and you are also cleaned of your personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried up out of it into the diamond ether. It seems to me that both affirmed the Divine Spirit. Milton waged grand warfare in his affirmation. Li Po merely said what he saw.

So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream, but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression. A great drama or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working in a human mind. A great lyric comes of the escape of the consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit. The West has produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in these forms. Very likely the West is right; but I shall not think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k'ung T'u--or Keats.