LITERATURE.
Scope and quality.
THE enthusiasm of Sir William Jones, when the treasures of the Sanscrit began to reveal themselves a hundred years ago, was more than equalled by that with which Abel Remusat, fifty years later, opened the critical study of the still more remote literature of China. His glowing description of this immense product of forty centuries, "this eloquence and poetry, enriched by the beauty of a picturesque language, which preserves to imagination all its colors," has in one respect certainly failed to be sustained by later research. Chinese literature appeals to the imagination by its amount, but makes little use of this faculty in its constructions. A defective sense of the infinite excludes it from the sphere of sublimity. Such mental attitudes as depend on personal isolation, and on that sustained self-abandonment to awe and wonder which routine and prescription forbid, are here scarcely possible. The Chinese eye is too close to concrete things to get perspective or background of space. This brain is too absorbed in details to confront the vast problems of the free reason, or to dwell in mysteries insoluble by the practical understanding. This distinction of the Yellow Race from the Aryan and the Shemite is the more wonderful, when we consider what it has accomplished in spite of its inferior contemplative power. The practical achievements found packed in these stiff, isolated signs, in this apparently stammering speech, make a marvel as startling as any enchantment of an Arabian tale.
