XXI

KWANG-TZE

I

THE idea may or may not be original with me: that doesn't matter. In any case, I have had it for a long time, and what is more, I believe it to be true.

I believe that the so-called Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had the discovery of classic culture as one of its causes and one of its effects, will ultimately prove to be but a slight affair in comparison with the Renaissance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which will be due to the discovery of oriental culture.

This new Renaissance will bring not a complete overturn the human spirit is not an omeletbut an eager change in the direction of European and American thought and life.

We talk of a universal society of nations-and we have not yet formed a universal society of intelligence. It has been attempted now and then during the last hundred years, but the pre

paratory work has never been done, and without that work no man, though he be a Titan, can improvise the results.

When once we have finished sampling and can really proceed to assimilate the four or five civilizations of the unknown East, there will ensue profound changes in our ideas about the world and about life, and in the range of our imagination and sensibility.

Just one type of oriental culture, the Hebraic, is really known to the Western world. That culture, in its religious forms, and particularly in its Christian form, was assimilated by Europe in the days of the Roman Empire. And our moral life still centers about a collection of Palestinian writings.

But as yet we have hardly glanced at the other oriental cultures. We stand only in the vestibule. The immense storehouses of Asiatic nurture are scarcely opened. All we have done is to taste a few sips, a few morsels.

Just as in the two centuries that preceded our own Renaissance there were teachers and poets who found the Greeks and Romans for themselves without waiting for the humanists, so for the last two centuries there has been in Europe a considerable importation of oriental thought and art. Translations, contributions, studies, histories. Here and there the light has shone through. Some marvels have become almost fa

miliar: Arabian fancy in the Thousand and One Nights; Persian lyric in the Rubaiyat; Indian thought in the Upanishads and in Buddha; Japanese painting.

But with respect to the whole, these importations are but the slightest of promises. And they have been limited to a few hundred specialists and a few thousand lovers of poetic, pictorial, and metaphysical curiosities.

The work of the future must be two-fold; to select the best from the entire mass, and to bring that best to universal knowledge. There are marvels of poetry to be found, prodigies of painting and of sculpture, triumphs of invention, depths of wisdom. There is enough in the East to change our opinions as to the very nature of the most essential realities, and to double the keyboard of our sentiments.

II

In this coming Renaissance a major part will fall to China, which now lies prostrate. We are better acquainted with the Arabs, who are nearer neighbors, and with the Indians, through a sense of philological affinity, and because India is a European possession.

China, far greater, but more distant, more enclosed, more heterogeneous, and more timid,

is for us less familiar and less adored. It was once the fashion to exalt China: the Chinese, it was claimed, had invented everything. But reaction led to mockery. And now we talk of Mandarinism, of immobility, of petrifaction. But even supposing that a civilization that has lasted for some dozens of centuries has come to a stop (and who can say that it has stopped indeed?), it remains true that before it stopped it had progressed for a long, long time. And of this living past there remain thousands of works in millions of volumes. What do we know of these works? We know the King, translated but seldom read and little understood; the Tao Teh King, often translated and none the less obscure; a few romances; a few brief poems. The Sinologues do not like to translate. What is more, they make their own selections. And on what basis do they choose? They know the Chinese characters and bibliographies and historical systems, but how much taste have they for poetry? Consider, for instance, the translations of poems of the Tang dynasty by Hervey de Saint Denis. Alas! The good man confesses that he has selected for translation those poems which seem to him most significant as historical documents. What a treatment for poetry! The Tang poems are like the dust on a butterfly's wing, and those which have most lyric beauty are still untranslated.

So it goes. China has a marvelous and limitless literature-drama, philosophy, history, romance. No genre is missing. One may draw in one's nets heavy-laden, as in a lake where no one has fished before. Who in Europe is really familiar with the poets Li-po, Tu-fu, Wen-kiun, Wang-wei, Po-kin-i, Su-kung-tu? Or the dramatists Wang-chi-fu, Ma-li-yuen, Pe-gen-fu? Or the philosophers Lieh-tze, Yang-min, Kwangtze, Yang-chu? These are the first names that occur to me out of many that I have seen or heard. They are but a handful drawn from a full granary. And no one of these men is inferior in art or in profundity to the most famous writers of Europe. Yet in Europe there are scarcely fifty people who could read them in the original, and five thousand at the most who may have read some fragments or pronounced their

names.

In Italy it is worse yet. The very first Sinologues were Italians-Ricci and Desideri-and there have been others since. But they have either translated little or have translated in verse. Andreozzi has rendered The Tooth of Buddha of Shenai-ghan (the one Chinese romance that has come to be fairly well known, thanks to a popular edition); Severini has translated several poems, but more from the Japanese than from

"The translator assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of the Chinese names cited incidentally in this essay.