is a vice in another. Latin and Eskimo, with
their highly inflected forms, lend themselves to an elaborately periodic
structure that would be boring in English. English allows, even demands,
a looseness that would be insipid in Chinese. And Chinese, with its
unmodified words and rigid sequences, has a compactness of phrase, a
terse parallelism, and a silent suggestiveness that would be too tart,
too mathematical, for the English genius. While we cannot assimilate the
luxurious periods of Latin nor the pointilliste style of the Chinese
classics, we can enter sympathetically into the spirit of these alien
techniques.

I believe that any English poet of to-day would be thankful for the
concision that a Chinese poetaster attains without effort. Here is an
example:[200]

[Footnote 200: Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional
verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when he left Shanghai
for Canada.]

Wu-river[201] stream mouth evening sun sink,
North look Liao-Tung,[202] not see home.
Steam whistle several noise, sky-earth boundless,
Float float one reed out Middle-Kingdom.

[Footnote 201: The old name of the country about the mouth of the
Yangtsze.]

[Footnote 202: A province of Manchuria.]

These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted: "At the mouth
of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is about to sink, I look north toward
Liao-Tung but do not see my home. The steam-whistle shrills several
times on the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth. The steamer,
floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of the Middle
Kingdom."[203] But we must not envy Chinese its terseness unduly. Our
more sprawling mode of expression is capable of its own beauties, and
the more compact luxuriance of Latin style has its loveliness too.
There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style as there are
languages. Most of these are merely potential, awaiting the hand of
artists who will never come. And yet in the recorded texts of primitive
tradition and song there are many passages of unique vigor and beauty.
The structure of the language often forces an assemblage of concepts
that impresses us as a stylistic discovery. Single Algonkin words are
like tiny imagist poems. We must be careful not to exaggerate a
freshness of content that is at least half due to our freshness of
approach, but the possibility is indicated none the less of utterly
alien literary styles, each distinctive with its dis