But revenons a. nos moutons. Is then written ese a difficult language? My answer again is, yes and no. I say, written ese, even what I have called the full court dress ese, the classica majora ese, is not difficult, because, like the spoken or colloquial
ese, it is extremely simple. Allow me to show you by an average spe taken at random how extremely simple, written ese even when dressed in full court dress uniform, is. The spe I take is a poem of four lines from the poetry of the Tang dynasty describing what sacrifices the ese people had to make in order to protect their civilisation against the wild half civilised fierce Huns from the North. The words of the poem in ese are:
which translated into English word for word mean:
Swear sweep the Huns not care self,
Five thousand embroidery sable perish desert dust;
Alas! Wuting riverside bones, Still are Spring chambers dream inside men!
A free English version of the poem is something like this:_
They vowed to sweep the heathen hordes From off their native soil or die:
Five thousand taselled knights, sable-clad,
All dead now on the desert lie.
Alas the white bohat bleach cold
Far off along the Wuting stream,
Still e and go as living men
Home somewhere in the loved one s dream .
Now, if you will pare it with my poor clumsy English version, you will see how plain in words and style, how simple in ideas, the inal ese is. How plain and simple in words, style and ideas: a how deep in thought, how deep in feeling it is.
In order to have an idea of this kind of ese literature, _deep thought and deep feeling iremely simple language, _you will have to read the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is one of the deepest books in all the literature of the world a how plain and simple in language. Take this passage for instance:" How is this faithful city bee a harlot! Thy men in the highest places are disloyal traitors and panions of thieves; every one loveth gifts and fol-loweth after rewards; they judge not the fatherless her doth the cause of the widow e before them. "(Is. I -), or this other passage from the same prophet:_"I will make children to be their high officials and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed. The child shall behave himself proudly against the old man and the base against the honourable! " What a picture! The picture of the awful state of a nation or people. Do you see the picture before you now? In fact, if you want to have literature which transmute men, civilise mankind, you will have to go to the literature of the Hebrew people or of the Greeks or to ese literature. But Hebrew and Greek are now bee dead languages, whereas ese is a living language_the language of four hundred million people still living to-day.
But now to sum up what I want to say on the ese language. Spoken as well as written ese is, in one sense, a very difficult language. It is difficult, not because it is plex. Many European languages such as Latin and French are difficult because they are plex and have many rules. ese is difficult not because it is plex, but because it is deep. It is difficult because it is a language for expressing deep feeling in simple language. That is the secret of the difficulty of the ese language. In fact, as I have said else where, ese is a language of the heart: a poetical language. That is the reason why even a simple letter in prose written in classical ese