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A Lute of Jade : selections from the classical poets of China by L. (Launcelot) Cranmer-Byng
page 24 of 116 (20%)
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, friendship, 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 sanctity 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
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