by Will Durant
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dawn of day;
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us. . . .
What folly to spend one’s life like a dropped leaf
Snared under the dust of streets!
But for thirteen years it was so I lived. . . .
For a long time I have lived in a cage;
Now I have returned.
For one must return
To fulfil one’s nature.57
Po Chü-i took the other road, choosing public office and life in the capital; he rose from place to place until he was governor of the great city of Hangchow, and President of the Board of War. Nevertheless he lived to the age of seventy-two, wrote four thousand poems, and tasted Nature to his heart’s content in interludes of exile.58 He knew the secret of mingling solitude with crowds, and repose with an active life. He made not too many friends, being, as he said, of middling accomplishment in “calligraphy, painting, chess and gambling, which tend to bring men together in pleasurable intercourse.”59 He liked to talk with simple people, and story has it that he would read his poems to an old peasant woman, and simplify anything that she could not understand. Hence he became the best-loved of the Chinese poets among the common people; his poetry was inscribed everywhere, on the walls of schools and temples, and the cabins of ships. “You must not think,” said a “sing-song” girl to a captain whom she was entertaining, “that I am an ordinary dancing girl; I can recite Master Po’s “Everlasting Wrong.”60*
We have kept for the last the profound and lovable Tu Fu. “English writers on Chinese literature,” says Arthur Waley, “are fond of announcing that Li T’ai-po is China’s greatest poet; the Chinese themselves, however, award this place to Tu Fu.”61 We first hear of him at Chang-an; he had come up to take the examinations for office, and had failed. He was not dismayed, even though his failure had been specifically in the subject of poetry; he announced to the public that his poems were a good cure for malarial fever, and seems to have tried the cure himself.62 Ming Huang read some of his verses, gave him, personally, another examination, marked him successful, and appointed him secretary to General Tsoa. Emboldened, and forgetting for a moment his wife and children in their distant village, Tu Fu settled down in the capital, exchanged songs with Li Po, and studied the taverns, paying for his wine with poetry. He writes of Li:
I love my Lord as younger brother loves elder brother,
In autumn, exhilarated by wine, we sleep under a single quilt;
Hand in hand, we daily walk together.63
Those were the days of the love of Ming for Yang Kwei-fei. Tu celebrated it like the other poets; but when revolution burst forth, and rival ambitions drenched China in blood, he turned his muse to sadder themes, and pictured the human side of war:
Last night a government order came
To enlist boys who had reached eighteen.
They must help defend the capital. . . .
O Mother! O Children, do not weep so!
Shedding such tears will injure you.
When tears stop flowing then bones come through,
Nor Heaven nor Earth has compassion then. . . .
Do you know that in Shantung there are two hundred counties turned to the desert forlorn,
Thousands of villages, farms, covered only with bushes, the thorn?
Men are slain like dogs, women driven like hens along. . . .
If I had only known how bad is the fate of boys
I would have had my children all girls. . . .
Boys are only born to be buried beneath tall grass.
Still the bones of the war-dead of long ago are beside the Blue Sea when you pass.
They are wildly white and they lie exposed on the sand,
Both the little young ghosts and the old ghosts gather here to cry in a band.
When the rains sweep down, and the autumn, and winds that chill,
Their voices are loud, so loud that I learn how grief can kill. . . .
Birds make love in their dreams while they drift on the tide,
For the dusk’s path the fireflies must make their own light.
Why should man kill man just in order to live?
In vain I sigh in the passing night.64
For two years, during the revolutionary interlude, he wandered about China, sharing his destitution with his wife and children, so poor that he begged for bread, and so humbled that he knelt to pray for blessings upon the man who took his family in and fed them for a while.65 He was saved by the kindly general Yen Wu, who made him his secretary, put up with his moods and pranks, established him in a cottage by Washing Flower Stream, and required nothing more of him than that he should write poetry.* He was happy now, and sang blissfully of rain and flowers, mountains and the moon.
Of what use is a phrase or a fine stanza?
Before me but mountains, deep forests, too black.
I think I shall sell my art objects, my books,
And drink just of nature when pure at the source. . . .
When a place is so lovely
I walk slow. I long to let loveliness drown in my soul.
I like to touch bird-feathers.
I blow deep into them to find the soft hairs beneath.
I like to count stamens, too,
And even weigh their pollen-gold.
The grass is a delight to sit on.
I do not need wine here because the flowers intoxicate me so. . . .
To the deep of my bones I love old trees, and the jade-blue waves of the sea.66
The good general liked him so that he disturbed his peace, raising him to high office as a Censor in Ch’ang-an. Then suddenly the general died, war raged around the poet, and, left only with his genius, he soon found himself penniless again. His children, savage with hunger, sneered at him for his helplessness. He passed into a bitter and lonely old age, “an ugly thing now to the eye”; the roof of his cabin was torn away by the wind, and urchins robbed him of the straw of his bed while he looked on, too physically weak to resist.67 Worst of all, he lost his taste for wine, and could no longer solve the problems of life in the fashion of Li Po. At last he turned to religion, and sought solace in Buddhism. Prematurely senile at fifty-nine, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Huen Mountain to visit a famous temple. There he was discovered by a magistrate who had read his poetry. The official took the poet home, and ordered a banquet to be served in his honor; hot beef smoked, and sweet wine abounded; Tu Fu had not for many years seen such a feast. He ate hungrily. Then at his host’s request, he tried to compose and sing; but he fell down exhausted. The next day he died.68
VII. PROSE
The abundance of Chinese literature—Romances—History—Szuma Ch’ien—Essays—Han Yü on the bone of Buddha
The T’ang poets are but a part of Chinese poetry, and poetry is a small part of China’s literature. It is hard for us to realize the age and abundance of this literature, or its wide circulation among the people. Lack of copyright laws helped other factors to make printing cheap; and it was nothing unusual, before the advent of western ideas, to find bound sets of twenty volumes selling new at one dollar, encyclopedias in twenty volumes selling new at four dollars, and all the Chinese Classics together obtainable for two.69 It is harder still for us to appreciate this literature, for the Chinese value form and style far above contents in judging a book, and form and style are betrayed by every translation. The Chinese pardonably consider their literature superior to any other than that of Greece; and perhaps the exception is due to Oriental courtesy.
Fiction, through which Occidental authors most readly rise to fame, is not ranked as literature by the Chinese. It hardly existed in China before the Mongols brought it in;70 and even today the best of Chinese novels are classed by the litera
ti as popular amusements unworthy of mention in a history of Chinese letters. The simple folk of the cities do not mind these distinctions, but turn without prejudice from the songs of Po Chü-i and Li Po to the anonymous interminable romances that, like the theatre, use the colloquial dialects of the people, and bring back to them vividly the dramatic events of their historic past. For almost all the famous novels of China take the form of historical fiction; few of them aim at realism, and fewer still attempt such psychological or social analysis as lift The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain, War and Peace and Les Miserables, to the level of great literature. One pf the earliest Chinese novels is the Shui Hu Chuan, or “Tale of the Water Margins,” composed by a bevy of authors in the fourteenth century;* one of the vastest is the Hung Lou Men (ca. 1650), a twenty-four-volume “Dream of the Red Chamber”; one of the best is the Liao Chai Chih I (ca. 1660), or “Strange Stories,” much honored for the beauty and terseness of its style; the most famous is the San Kuo Chih Yen I, or “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” a twelve-hundred-page embellishment, by Lo Kuan-chung (1260-1341), of the wars and intrigues that followed the fall of the Han.† These expansive stories correspond to the picaresque novels of eighteenth-century Europe; often (if one may report mere hearsay in these matters) they combine the jolly portrayal of character of Tom Jones with the lively narrative of Gil Bias. They are recommended to the reader’s leisurely old age.
The most respectable form of literature in China is history; and of all the accepted forms it is also the most popular. No other nation has had so many historians, certainly no other nation has written such extensive histories. Even the early courts had their official scribes, who chronicled the achievements of their sovereigns and the portents of the time; and this office of court historian, carried down to our own generation, has raised up in China a mass of historical literature unequaled in length or dullness anywhere else on the earth. The twenty-four official “Dynastic Histories” published in 1747 ran to 219 large volumes.71 From the Shu-Ching, or “Book of History,” so edifyingly bowdlerized by Confucius, and the Tso-chuan, a commentary written a century later to illustrate and vivify the book of the Master, and the Annals of the Bamboo Books, found in the tomb of a king of Wei, historiography advanced rapidly in China until, in the second century before Christ, it produced a chef-d’œuvre in the Historical Record painstakingly put together by Szuma Ch’ien.
Succeeding to his father as court astrologer, Szuma first reformed the calendar, and then devoted his life to a task which his father had begun, of narrating the history of China from the first mythical dynasty to his own day. He had no penchant for beauty of style, but aimed merely to make his record complete. He divided his book into five parts: (1) Annals of the Emperors; (2) Chronological Tables; (3) Eight chapters on rites, music, the pitch-pipes, the calendar, astrology, imperial sacrifices, water courses, and political economy; (4) Annals of the Feudal Nobles; and (5) Biographies of Eminent Men. The whole covered a period of nearly three thousand years, and took the form of 526,000 Chinese characters patiently scratched upon bamboo tablets with a style.72 Then Szuma Ch’ien, having given his life to his book, sent his volumes to his emperor and the world with this modest preface:
Your servant’s physical strength is now relaxed; his eyes are shortsighted and dim; of his teeth but a few remain. His memory is so impaired that the events of the moment are forgotten as he turns away from them, his energies having been wholly exhausted in production of this book. He therefore hopes that your Majesty may pardon his vain attempt for the sake of his loyal intention, and in moments of leisure will deign to cast a sacred glance over this work, so as to learn from the rise and fall of former dynasties the secret of the successes and failures of the present hour. Then if such knowledge shall be applied for the advantage of the Empire, even though your servant may lay his bones in the Yellow Springs, the aim and ambition of his life will be fulfilled.73
We shall find none of the brilliance of Taine in the pages of Szuma Ch’ien, no charming gossip and anecdotes in the style of Herodotus, no sober concatenation of cause and effect as in Thucydides, no continental vision pictured in music as in Gibbon; for history seldom rises, in China, from an industry to an art. From Szuma Ch’ien to his namesake Szuma Kuang, who, eleven hundred years later, attempted again a universal history of China, the Chinese historians have labored to record faithfully—sometimes at the cost of their income or their lives—the events of a dynasty or a reign; they have spent their energies upon truth, and have left nothing for beauty. Perhaps they were right, and history should be a science rather than an art; perhaps the facts of the past are obscured when they come to us in the purple of Gibbon or the sermons of Carlyle. But we, too, have dull historians, and can match any nation in volumes dedicated to record—and gather—dust.
Livelier is the Chinese essay; for here art is not forbidden, and eloquence has loose rein. Famous beyond the rest in this field is the great Han Yü, whose books are so valued that tradition requires the reader to wash his hands in rose-water before touching them. Born among the humblest, Han Yü reached to the highest ranks in the service of the state, and fell from grace only because he protested too intelligibly against the imperial concessions to Buddhism. To Han the new religion was merely a Hindu superstition; and it offended him to his Confucian soul that the Emperor should lend his sanction to the intoxication of his people with this enervating dream. Therefore he submitted (803 A.D.) a memorial to the Emperor, from which these lines may serve as an example of Chinese prose discolored even by honest translation:
Your servant has now heard that instructions have been issued to the priestly community to proceed to Feng-hsiang and receive a bone of Buddha, and that from a high tower your Majesty will view its introduction into the Imperial Palace; also that orders have been sent to the various temples, commanding that the relic be received with the proper ceremonies. Now, foolish though your servant may be, he is well aware that your Majesty does not do this in the vain hope of deriving advantages therefrom; but that in the fulness of our present plenty, and in the joy which reigns in the heart of all, there is a desire to fall in with the wishes of the people in the celebration at the capital of this delusive mummery. For how could the wisdom of your Majesty stoop to participate in such ridiculous beliefs? Still the people are slow of perception and easily beguiled; and should they behold your Majesty thus earnestly worshiping at the feet of Buddha, they would cry out, “See! the Son of Heaven, the All-Wise, is a fervent believer; who are we, his people, that we should spare our bodies?” Then would ensue a scorching of heads and burning of fingers; crowds would collect together, and tearing off their clothes and scattering their money, would spend their time from morn to eve in imitation of your Majesty’s example. The result would be that by and by young and old, seized with the same enthusiasm, would totally neglect the business of their lives; and should your Majesty not prohibit it, they would be found flocking to the temples, ready to cut off an arm or slice their bodies as an offering to the god. Thus would our traditions and customs be seriously injured, and ourselves become a laughing-stock on the face of the earth. . . .
Therefore your servant, overwhelmed with shame for the Censors,* implores your Majesty that these bones be handed over for destruction by fire and water, whereby the root of this great evil may be exterminated for all time, and the people know how much the wisdom of your Majesty surpasses that of ordinary men. The glory of such a deed will be beyond all praise. And should the Lord Buddha have power to avenge this insult by the infliction of some misfortune, then let the vials of his wrath be poured out upon the person of your servant, who now calls Heaven to witness that he will not repent him of his oath.74
In a conflict between superstition and philosophy one may safely wager on the victory of superstition, for the world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom. Han was exiled to a village in Kuang-tung, where the people were still simple barbarians. He did not complain, but set himself, after the teaching of Confucius, to
civilize them with his example; and he succeeded so well that his picture today often bears the legend: “Wherever he passed, he purified.”75 He was finally recalled to the capital, served his state well, and died loaded with honors. His memorial tablet was placed in the Temple of Confucius—a place usually reserved for the disciples or greatest exponents of the Master—because he had defended the doctrines of Confucianism so recklessly against the invasion of a once noble but now corrupted faith.
VIII. THE STAGE
Its low repute in China—Origins—The play—The audience—The actors—Music
It is difficult to classify Chinese drama, for it is not recognized by China as either literature or art. Like many other elements of human life, its repute is not proportioned to its popularity. The names of the dramatists are seldom heard; and the actors, though they may give a lifetime to preparation and accomplishment, and rise to a hectic fame, are looked upon as members of an inferior order. Something of this odor, no doubt, attached to actors in every civilization, above all in those medieval days when drama was rebelliously differentiating itself from the religious pantomimes that had given it birth.
A similar origin is assigned to the Chinese theatre. Under the Chou Dynasty religious ritual included certain dances performed with wands. Tradition says that these dances were later forbidden, on the score that they had become licentious; and it was apparently from this cleavage that secular drama began.76 Ming Huang, patron of so many arts, helped the development of an independent drama by gathering about him a company of male and female actors whom he called “The Young Folk of the Pear Garden”; but it was not till the reign of Kublai Khan that the Chinese theatre took on the scope of a national institution. In the year 1031 K’ung Tao-fu, a descendant of Confucius, was sent as Chinese envoy to the Mongol Kitans, and was welcomed with a celebration that included a play. The buffoon, however, represented Confucius. K’ung Tao-fu walked out in a huff, but when he and other Chinese travelers among the Mongols returned to China they brought reports of a form of drama more advanced than any that China had yet known. When the Mongols conquered China they introduced to it both the novel and the theatre; and the classic examples of Chinese drama are still the plays that were written under the Mongol sway.77