With green leaves the peach-trees are loaded, The breeze blows gently along the stream, Willows shade the winding path, Darting orioles collect in groups.

Eagerly I press forward As the reality grows upon me. . . .

'Tis the eternal theme, Which, though old, is ever new.*

Here is reality emerging from the unreal, spring renewing, love and beauty triumphant over death and decay. The girl is the central type and symbol.

From her laughing eyes a thousand dead women look out once more on spring, through her poets find their inspiration. Beauty is the key that unlocks the secrets of the frozen world, and brings the dead to life again.

-- * 'History of Chinese Literature', by Professor Herbert Giles, p. 180.

The Symbol of Decay!

The Symbol of Immortality!

It is perhaps both. There are times when the grave words of the Dhammapada fall like shadows along the path: "What is life but the flower or the fruit which falls when ripe, yet ever fears the untimely frost? Once born, there is naught but sorrow; for who is there can escape death?

From the first moment of life, the result of pa.s.sionate love and desire, there is nought but the bodily form transitional as the lightning flash."

Yet apart from all transitory pa.s.sions and the ephemeral results of mortal love, the song of the Taoist lover soars unstained, untrammelled.

Man attains not by himself, nor woman by herself, but, like the one-winged birds of the Chinese legend, they must rise together.

To be a great lover is to be a great mystic, since in the highest conception of mortal beauty that the mind can form there lies always the unattainable, the unpossessed, suggesting the world of beauty and finality beyond our mortal reach. It is in this power of suggestion that the Chinese poets excel. Asked to differentiate between European and Chinese poetry, some critics would perhaps insist upon their particular colour sense, instancing the curious fact that where we see blue to them it often appears green, and vice versa, or the tone theories that make their poems so difficult to understand; in fact, a learned treatise would be written on these lines, to prove that the Chinese poets were not human beings as we understand humanity at all.

It is, however, not by this method that we can begin to trace the difference between the poets of East and West, but in the two aspects of life which no amount of comparison can reconcile.

To the Chinese such commonplace things as marriage, friends.h.i.+p, and home have an infinitely deeper meaning than can be attached to them by civilisation which practically lives abroad, in the hotels and restaurants and open houses of others, where there is no sanct.i.ty of the life within, no shrine set apart for the hidden family re-union, and the cult of the ancestral spirit. To the Western world, life, save for the conventional hour or so set aside on the seventh day, is a thing profane. In the far East the head of every family is a high-priest in the calling of daily life. It is for this reason that a quietism is to be found in Chinese poetry ill appealing to the unrest of our day, and as dissimilar to our ideals of existence as the life of the planets is to that of the dark bodies whirling aimlessly through s.p.a.ce.

The Odes of Confucius

1765-585 B.C.

Collected by Confucius about 500 B.C.

Sadness

The sun is ever full and bright, The pale moon waneth night by night.

Why should this be?

My heart that once was full of light Is but a dying moon to-night.

But when I dream of thee apart, I would the dawn might lift my heart, O sun, to thee.

Trysting Time

I

A pretty girl at time o' gloaming Hath whispered me to go and meet her Without the city gate.

I love her, but she tarries coming.

Shall I return, or stay and greet her?

I burn, and wait.

II

Truly she charmeth all beholders, 'Tis she hath given me this jewel, The jade of my delight; But this red jewel-jade that smoulders, To my desire doth add more fuel, New charms to-night.

III

She has gathered with her lily fingers A lily fair and rare to see.

Oh! sweeter still the fragrance lingers From the warm hand that gave it me.

The Soldier

I climbed the barren mountain, And my gaze swept far and wide For the red-lit eaves of my father's home, And I fancied that he sighed: My son has gone for a soldier, For a soldier night and day; But my son is wise, and may yet return, When the drums have died away.

I climbed the gra.s.s-clad mountain, And my gaze swept far and wide For the rosy lights of a little room, Where I thought my mother sighed: My boy has gone for a soldier, He sleeps not day and night; But my boy is wise, and may yet return, Though the dead lie far from sight.

I climbed the topmost summit, And my gaze swept far and wide For the garden roof where my brother stood, And I fancied that he sighed: My brother serves as a soldier With his comrades night and day; But my brother is wise, and may yet return, Though the dead lie far away.

Ch'u Yuan

Fourth Century, B.C.