tyle of script, and when the mechanical means of writing had
been simplified, it may be supposed that literary diction also became
freer and more expansive. This did happen to some extent, but the
classics were held in such veneration as to exercise the profoundest
influence over all succeeding schools of writers, and the divorce
between literature and pooular speech became permanent and
irreconcilable. The book language absorbed all the interest and energy
of scholars, and it was inevitable that this elevation of the written
should be accompanied by a corresponding degradation of the spoken word.
This must largely account for the somewhat remarkable fact that the art
of oratory and public speaking has never been deemed worthy of
cultivation in China, while the comparatively low position occupied by
the drama may also be referred to the same cause. At the same time, the
term "book language," in its widest sense, covers a multitude of styles,
some of which differ from each other nearly as much as from ordinary
speech. The department of fiction (see _Literature_), which the lettered
Chinaman affects to despise and will not readily admit within the
charmed circle of "literature," really constitutes a bridge spanning the
gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an
elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others
in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that
no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily
intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read
aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged to
translate, so to speak, into the colloquial of his audience as he goes
along. There is no inherent reason why the conversation of everyday life
should not be rendered into characters, as is done in foreign handbooks
for teaching elementary Chinese; one can only say that the Chinese do
not think it worth while. There are a few words, indeed, which, though
common enough in the mouths of genteel and vulgar alike, have positively
no characters to represent them. On the other hand, there is a vast
store of purely book words which would never be used or understood in
conversation.

The book language is not only nice in its choice of words, it also has
to obey special rules of construction. Of these, perhaps the most
apparent is the carefully marked antithesis between characters in
different clauses of a s