Landscape Poetry in China and Europe

HE ABILITY to savor fine scenery is a very rare cultural phenomenon indeed, commonplace as it may seem to most of us. Only three civilizations out of the twenty-six or so listed by Arnold Toynbee have ever attained to a real understanding of landscape. One of these, the Indian, attained at the best only a relatively limited appreciation of nature.1 This leaves supreme the Far Western (our own) and the Far Eastern (Chinese) cultures, which developing at opposite ends of the oikoumene yet arrived at the same goal. As a little reflection will show, there is nothing "natural" about the appreciation of landscape. It is as much an acquired taste as a liking for art or music. Children and primitive people are unmoved by even the most spectacular landscape. The wilder the country, the more feared it is. The Chinese and the West are almost unique then in their feeling for natural beauty. But, whereas Western society did not really begin to appreciate landscape until the middle of the seventeenth century or so, the Chinese had attained a similar level of understanding some fifteen hundred years earlier. I stress this because in not one of the standard works which has appeared on the subject of the development of man's love of landscape has there been any indication that the author realized the primacy of the Chinese in this field. The works of Van Tieghem, Biese, Moore, Elizabeth Manwaring, E. T. McLaughlin, Katharine Chorley, and others, all ignore the Chinese contribution.2