Translations from the Chinese/A Letter of Ballast
A Letter of Ballast
Dear Pearsall Smith:
All things, however minute, have their origin; and these fragments, now dedicated to you without your knowledge or permission, were in genesis both hazardous and humble. They were born in a rolltop desk. In 1918, as you know, I was working on the Philadelphia Evening Ledger—where I had charge of a column whose most genuine source of pride was that it first gave printers' ink to some of your prose butterflies now framed and mounted as More Trivia. At that time I used to write what I called Synthetic Poems, which began as a mild burlesque of the vers libre epidemic. But I also had a feeling that free verse, then mainly employed as the vehicle of a rather gaudy impressionism or of mere eccentricity, might prove a viable medium for humorous, ironic and satiric brevities. I experimented by including a few of the Synthetic Poems in a book which was in general of quite a different kind. (To gratify the publisher I will mention its title, The Rocking Horse.) I must admit that no one noticed them.
About the same time there arose an access of interest in Oriental poem-forms. You yourself sent me from London a volume of Arthur Waley's delightful Chinese translations. Miss Amy Lowell and others were busy with Japanese echoes. To paraphrase the old English song, it was "Loud sing Hokku" all across the map. So instead of Synthetic Poems I began to call my broodings Translations from the Chinese; and, for some unknown reason, printed them over the bogus signature of "John Cavendish." To my surprise, and even to my embarrassment, letters soon arrived from earnest literates. Who was John Cavendish? they asked. What about these translations? they exclaimed. Where can one learn more about Chinese poetry? And they enclosed stamped addressed envelopes. Once more was testified the beautiful human faculty for taking seriously whatever appears in print. I went ahead, conscientiously, to satisfy the demand. In a little book (again I catch the publisher's eye) called Hide and Seek I included a large section of Chinese translations, with biographical notes upon the Oriental authors—done in such a vein that not even the gravest follower of the spurious Cavendish could mistake the intention.
But here is the gist of this unimportant matter. Little by little my Chinese sages began to coalesce and assume a voice of their own. I became not their creator but their stenographer. I began to feel a certain respect and affection for the "Old Mandarin" who was dimly emerging as their Oriental spokesman. I began to realize that the mind speaks many languages, and some of its sudden intuitions and exclamations are truly as enigmatic to us as Chinese writing. We all like to imagine that somewhere, in some far-away Orient of our spirit, there is a philosophy and a Way (as Lao-Tse would say) that views with smiling bland composure the sad antics of men under the pressure of conflicting desires. In all hearts there is this lurking minified Mandarin whose mockery is more potent because it is serene and hopeless. My own particular Mandarin was born, as I say, in a rolltop desk; by which I mean in a newspaper office. It is a favorable place for such cheerfully wistful wraiths to arise, for nowhere so instantly as in a newspaper office does one necessarily scrutinize the gallant frenzy of the race.
So my Mandarin gradually became a very real Familiar, and sometimes I see him peering out of a pigeon-hole, mocking me in his suave fashion. The odd thing is that his scoffing frequently changes into moods of pity or ecstasy that are even more disconcerting. In spite of his great age and his disillusion, he has moments that are truly boyish. We all like to say, of a man we admire greatly, that he "has the heart of a child." Certainly there is a naif appealing youthfulness in some of my Mandarin's simplicities. Occasionally, late in a winter afternoon, when I have been (after a whole day of random interruptions) trying to get a few hurried paragraphs written for the newspaper, I have quietly become aware of him standing by the window at my elbow. He looks out at that astounding vista of great buildings, terraced in golden tiers, one above another into the transparent dusk. "Why don't you get some of that into your writing?" he says to me, waving his hand toward the view. But I don't have leisure to answer him, for that is the time when I am hurrying to catch the 5:27 train.
Of course he can be very annoying. It is maddening to hear him contradict and ridicule the compromises and precious makeshifts which we build for self-respect. I tell him that he is an irresponsible doctrinaire: he has never had to earn a living, to carry on a daily job, or concern himself with anything but pure rationalism. Also, he has the foreigner's awkward way of taking our idiom literally. I said to him once, trying to explain a dilemma in which I found myself, "I am between the Devil and the Deep Sea." He smiled that provoking, sallow, tilt-eyed smile of his. "Surely your choice is easy," he said, "for you pretend to be fond of the Sea." I have tried, in this small book, to translate more or less accurately some of his disturbing comments; but there are many more that I have not been able to render intelligible. His dialect is often of a sort not found in the glossaries within my reach; and his principles of judgment are so opposite to those on which most of us establish our daily conduct that, as I have told him, I should need a contradictionary to interpret him properly.
So I may, here and there, have made him responsible for sentiments and implications that are my own rather than his. I wish I could tell you how strangely wise and happy he seems, in those rare moments when I am able to give ear to him. In spite of his skepticisms, he apparently sees so much more meaning in the human panorama than most of us do. And he has the queerest illusions. I have seen him throw down a newspaper in distress because, as he said, he found no word of Beauty in it. And when I explained to him, patiently, that that particular newspaper was not published with any such intention, he said "Then why publish it at all?"
Some of my friends, to whom I have talked about this unsettling phantom, have complained that he is too elderly to be a really helpful companion; that his politics were formed under a Bad Old Dynasty; that he is too flippant and volatile to be congenial to Young Intellectuals in whom unorthodoxy has become severe, surly, and compulsory. But I am not one of those who believe that because a man is elderly he is necessarily shallow. Everyone doubtless considers himself to be wiser, riper, more tolerant, now, than he was one year, five years, ten years ago. And if we think that to be so of ourselves, why may we not credit it as a fact in others? When I meet and talk with some of the youngest and most scathing of the rising Intellectuals, I amuse myself by imagining them as they will be, say thirty years hence. As I listen politely, I can see their faces change and wither. Those candid young foreheads a little corrugated; those jovial thunderbolts of opinion a little less detonative in effect; those busy superlatives grown a trifle grizzled with service. No—I have known so many older heads who really are wiser and wittier than ourselves that I cannot help concluding Time may be a tonic rather than a sedative. And so I sincerely elect to Stand Up for the Senior Generation. (And then also, when I myself am a Senior, perhaps the Grandchildren will Stand Up for me.)
I don't know just why I should be saying all this to you, dear Pearsall Smith—except that you seem to have been singularly skilful in carrying on into what one may without offence call Maturity the very spirit and virtue of Youth. I take it that you were perhaps a little elderly in your twenties, which makes you adorably sprightly in your fifties; so much so that you have served in many ways as the Perfect Ambassador from the Men of the Nineties to the men of the Teens. In you we see how the irreverent humor and hilarious gusto we associate with youth may not merely perdure unabated into the rich urbanity of Middle Age: nay, that they are increased and quick ened. Uncanonical as it may seem, Youth is the time to be docile and acceptive; not until the Fifth Decade has the mind any real right to begin laughing. Skepticism is meaningless until it emerges from a complete and experienced knowledge of all possible beliefs. Longfellow (I can hear some of my contemporaries titter)—Longfellow wrote an admirable potent little satire in his rhymed description of "What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist." For that is exactly what the hearts of healthy-minded young men do say, and should say. It is a delicious picture of that heavenly earnestness of adolescence. The skepticism of sophomores is only an extroverted form of the same too easy credulity. No Young Revolutionist is dangerous: it is the Elderly Revolutionist who really makes things revolve. In the young, skepticism is mere biology and demiurge: in the mature it is intellectual. And as for matters of theology (in which you have betrayed much acute interest), the study of divinity is usually placed at the wrong end of life. Surely no man should be allowed unanswerably to pulpiteer the Future Life until he is himself near enough to it to make it a reality to his spirit. But if parsons must be ordained in youth, then they should begin as Bishops, and work downward to the really vital office of curate. For the Bishop is respectfully hearkened to for his dignity and his scarlet hood; but the curate is listened to (if at all) only for what he says.
It seems too bad, I suddenly realize, to make you the victim of this grotesquely irrelevant pronouncement. But it must stand as your misfortune, since you who write so exquisitely and think with such delicate humorous honesty have shown yourself unwittingly as the ideal liaison officer between the generations. Those who would try absurdly to persuade us that there is some deep-seated and inevitable hostility between the Young Men and their Elders can never stir up more than a sham battle while we see you pacing pensively between the opposing trenches. After all, the one paramount virtue, not peculiar to any age, is sincerity.
Which of course suggests the delicious problem as to how far a man may be insincere quite innocently and unconsciously. That indeed is too perilous to discuss. But truly I sometimes wonder if some of the embattled youths of the Younger Set, who so fiercely defy and reject the wiles of the Foundering Fathers, have ever really seen or known an Older Man? Moreover one is tempted to think that those who are so certain that Intellect and everything really interesting began about the year 1919 are insecurely rooted in the great soil of life itself. Considering that every essential joy and agony of the human spirit was already Old Stuff when Lucretius wrote, that view seems to show a disrespect to Life itself—a serious disability in any artist.
Alas, I have now far overshot my mark, and after these heroics I fear my darling Old Mandarin will seem rather tame. You yourself, dear Pearsall Smith, with your keen excisive sense, could have intimated all this in one glittering page.
New York,
March, 1922.