by Will Durant
The art developed slowly, for neither the church nor the state would support it. For the most part it was practised by strolling players, who set up a platform in some vacant field and performed before a village audience standing under the open sky. Occasionally mandarins engaged actors to perform at private dinner-parties, and sometimes a guild would produce a play. Theatres became more numerous during the nineteenth century, but even at its close there were only two in the large city of Nanking.78 The drama was a mixture of history, poetry and music; usually some episode from an historical romance was the center of the plot; or scenes might be played from different dramas on the same evening. There was no limit to the length of the performance; it might be brief, or last several days; ordinarily it took six or seven hours, as with the best of contemporary American plays. There was much swashbuckling and oratory, much violence of blood and speech; but the dénouement did its best to atone for reality by making virtue triumph in the end. The drama became an educational and ethical instrument, teaching the people something about their history, and inculcating the Confucian virtues—above all, filial piety—with a demoralizing regularity.
The stage had little furnishing or scenery, and no exits; all the actors in the cast, along with their supernumeraries, sat on the stage throughout the play, rising when their rôles demanded; occasionally attendants served them tea. Other functionaries passed about among the audience selling tobacco, tea and refreshments, and providing hot towels for the wiping of faces during summer evenings; drinking, eating and conversation were now and then interrupted by some exceptionally fine or loud acting on the stage. The actors had often to shout in order to be heard; and they wore masks in order that their rôles might be readily understood. As the result of Ch’ien Lung’s prohibition of woman players, female parts were acted by men, and so well that when women were in our time again admitted to the stage, they had to imitate their imitators in order to succeed. The actors were required to be experts in acrobatics and the dance, for their parts often called for skilful manipulation of the limbs, and almost every action had to be performed according to some ritual of grace in harmony with the music that accompanied the stage. Gestures were symbolic, and had to be precise and true to old conventions; in such accomplished actors as Mei Lan-fang the artistry of hands and body constituted half the poetry of the play. It was not completely theatre, not quite opera, not predominantly dance; it was a mixture almost medieval in quality, but as perfect in its kind as Palestrina’s music, or stained glass.79
Music was seldom an independent art, but belonged as a handmaiden to religion and the stage. Tradition ascribed its origin, like so much else, to the legendary emperor Fu Hsi. The Li-Chi, or “Book of Rites,” dating from before Confucius, contained or recorded several treatises on music; and the Tso-chuan, a century after Confucius, described eloquently the music to which the odes of Wei were sung. Already, by Kung-fu-tze’s time, musical standards were ancient, and innovations were disturbing quiet souls; the sage complained of the lascivious airs that were in his day supplanting the supposedly moral tunes of the past.80 Greco-Bactrian and Mongolian influences entered, and left their mark upon the simple Chinese scale. The Chinese knew of the division of the octave into twelve semi-tones, but they preferred to write their music in a pentatonic scale, corresponding roughly to our F, G, A, C, and D; to these whole tones they gave the names “Emperor,” “Prime Minister,” “Subject People,” “State Affairs,” and “Picture of the Universe.” Harmony was understood, but was seldom used except for tuning instruments. The latter included such wind instruments as flutes, trumpets, oboes, whistles and gourds; such string instruments as viols and lutes; and such percussion instruments as tambourines and drums, bells and gongs, cymbals and castanets, and musical plates of agate or jade.81 The effects were as weird and startling to an Occidental ear as the Sonata Appassionata might seem to the Chinese; nevertheless they lifted Confucius to a vegetarian ecstasy, and brought to many hearers that escape from the strife of wills and ideas which comes with the surrender to music well composed. The sages, said Han Yü, “taught man music in order to dissipate the melancholy of his soul.”82 They agreed with Nietzsche that life without music would be a mistake.
CHAPTER XXV
The Age of the Artists
I. THE SUNG RENAISSANCE
1. The Socialism of Wang An-shih
The Sung Dynasty—A radical premier—His cure for unemployment—The regulation of industry—Codes of wages and prices—The nationalization of commerce—State insurance against unemployment, poverty and old age—Examinations for public office—The defeat of Wang An-shih
THE T’ang Dynasty never recovered from the revolution of An Lu-shan. The emperors who followed Ming Huang were unable to restore the imperial authority throughout the Empire; and after a century of senile debility the dynasty came to an end. Five dynasties followed in fifty-three years, but they were as feeble as they were brief. As always in such cases a strong and brutal hand was needed to reëstablish order. One soldier emerged above the chaos, and set up the Sung Dynasty, with himself as its first emperor under the name of T’ai Tsu. The bureaucracy of Confucian officials was renewed, examinations for office were resumed, and an attempt was made by an imperial councillor to solve the problems of exploitation and poverty by an almost socialist control over the nation’s economic life.
Wang An-shih (1021-86) is one of the many fascinating individuals who enliven the lengthy annals of Chinese history. It is part of the bathos of distance that our long removal from alien scenes obscures variety in places and men, and submerges the most diverse personalities in a dull uniformity of appearance and character. But even in the judgment of his enemies—whose very number distinguished him—Wang stood out as a man different from the rest, absorbed conscientiously in the enterprise of government, devoted recklessly to the welfare of the people, leaving himself no time for the care of his person or his clothes, rivaling the great scholars of his age in learning and style, and fighting with mad courage the rich and powerful conservatives of his age. By a trick of chance the only great figure in the records of his country who resembled him was his namesake Wang Mang; already the turbid stream of history had traveled a thousand years since China’s last outstanding experiment with socialist ideas.
On receiving the highest office in the command of the Emperor, Wang An-shih laid it down as a general principle that the government must hold itself responsible for the welfare of all its citizens. “The state,” he said, “should take the entire management of commerce, industry and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich.”1 He began by abolishing the forced labor that had from time immemorial been exacted from the Chinese people by the government, and had often taken men from the fields at the very time when the sowing or the harvesting needed them; and nevertheless he carried out great engineering works for the prevention of floods. He rescued the peasants from the money-lenders who had enslaved them, and lent them, at what were then low rates of interest, funds for the planting of their crops. To the unemployed he gave free seed and other aid in setting up homesteads, on condition that they would repay the state out of the yield of their land. Boards were appointed in every district to regulate the wages of labor and the prices of the necessaries of life. Commerce was nationalized; the produce of each locality was bought by the government, part of it was stored for future local needs, and the rest was transported to be sold in state depots throughout the realm. A budget system was established, a budget commission submitted proposals and estimates of expenditure, and these estimates were so strictly adhered to in administration that the state was saved considerable sums which had previously fallen into those secret and spacious pockets that cross the path of every governmental dollar. Pensions were provided for the aged, the unemployed and the poor. Education and the examination system were reformed; the tests were devised to reveal acquaintance with facts rather than with words, a
nd to shift the emphasis from literary style to the application of Confucian principles to current tasks; the rôle of formalism and rote memory in the training of children was reduced, and for a time, says a Chinese historian, “even the pupils at village schools threw away their text-books of rhetoric and began to study primers of history, geography, and political economy.”2
Why did this noble experiment fail? First, perhaps, because of certain elements in it that were more practical than Utopian. Though most of the taxes were taken from the incomes of the rich, part of the heavy revenue needed for the enlarged expenses of the state was secured by appropriating a portion of the produce of every field. Soon the poor joined with the rich in complaining that taxes were too high; men are always readier to extend governmental functions than to pay for them. Further, Wang An-shih had reduced the standing army as a drain on the resources of the people, but had, as a means of replacing it, decreed the universal liability of every family of more than one male to provide a soldier in time of war. He had presented many families with horses and fodder, but on condition that the animals should be properly cared for, and be placed at the service of the government in its military need. When it turned out that invasion and revolution were multiplying the occasions of war, these measures brought Wang An-shih’s popularity to a rapid end. Again, he had found it difficult to secure honest men to administer his measures; corruption spread throughout the mammoth bureaucracy, and China, like many nations since, saw itself faced with the ancient and bitter choice between private plunder and public “graft.”
Conservatives, led by Wang’s own brother and by the historian Szuma Kuang, denounced the experiment as inherently unsound; they argued that human corruptibility and incompetence made governmental control of industry impracticable, and that the best form of government was a laissez-faire which would rely on the natural economic impulses of men for the production of services and goods. The rich, stung by the high taxation of their fortunes and the monopoly of commerce by the government, poured out their resources in the resolve to discredit the measures of Wang An-shih, to obstruct their enforcement, and to bring them to a disgraceful end. The opposition, well organized, exerted pressure on the Emperor; and when a succession of floods and droughts was capped by the appearance of a terrifying comet in the sky, the Son of Heaven dismissed Wang from office, revoked his decrees, and called his enemies to power. Once again everything was as before.3
2. The Revival of Learning
The growth of scholarship—Paper and ink in China—Steps in the invention of printing—The oldest book—Paper money—Movable type—Anthologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias
Meanwhile, through all wars and revolutions, through all administrations and experiments, the life of the Chinese people flowed evenly on, not much disturbed by events too distant to be heard of until long since past. The Sung rule was overthrown in the north, but reestablished itself in the south; the capital was moved from Pien Liang (now K’aifeng) to Lin-an (now Hangchow); in the new capital, as in the old, luxury and refinement grew, and traders came from many parts of the world to buy the unmatched products of Chinese industry and art. Emperor Hui Tsung (1101-25) set the fashion at Pien Liang by being an artist first and a ruler afterward: he painted pictures while the barbarians marched upon his capital, and founded an art academy that stimulated with exhibitions and prizes the arts that were to be the chief claim of the Sung era to the remembrance of mankind. Inspiring collections were made of Chinese bronzes, paintings, manuscripts and jades; great libraries were collected, and some of them survived the glories of war. Scholars and artists crowded the northern and southern capitals.
It was in this dynasty that printing entered like an imperceptibly completed revolution into the literary life of the Chinese. It had grown step by step through many centuries; now it was ready in both its phases-blocks to print whale pages, and movable type cast of metal in matrices—as a thoroughly Chinese invention,4 the greatest, after writing, in the history of our race.
The first step in the development had to be the discovery of some more convenient writing material than the silk or bamboo that had contented the ancient Chinese. Silk was expensive, and bamboo was heavy; Mo Ti needed three carts to carry with him, in his travels, the bamboo books that were his chief possession; and Shih Huang-ti had to go over one hundred and twenty pounds of state documents every day.5 About 105 A.D. one Ts’ai Lun informed the Emperor that he had invented a cheaper and lighter writing material, made of tree bark, hemp, rags and fish-nets. Ts’ai was given a high title and office by the Emperor, was involved in an intrigue with the Empress, was detected, “went home, took a bath, combed his hair, put on his best robes, and drank poison.”6 The new art spread rapidly and far, for the oldest existing paper, found by Sir Aurel Stein in a spur of the Great Wall, is in the form of state documents pertaining to occurrences in the years 21-137 A.D., and apparently contemporary with the latest of those events; it is dated, therefore, about 150 A.D., only half a century after Ts’ai Lun’s report of his invention.7 These early papers were of pure rag, essentially like the paper used in our own day when durability is desired. The Chinese developed paper almost to perfection by using a “sizing” of glue or gelatin, and a base of starchy paste, to strengthen the fibres and accelerate their absorption of ink. When the art was taught by the Chinese to the Arabs in the eighth century, and by the Arabs to Europe in the thirteenth, it was already complete.
Ink, too, came from the East; for though the Egyptian had made both ink and paper in what might be called the most ancient antiquity, it was from China that Europe learned the trick of mixing it out of lamp black; “India ink” was originally Chinese.8 Red ink, made of sulphide of mercury, had been used in China as far back as the Han Dynasty; black ink appeared there in the fourth century, and henceforth the use of red ink was made an imperial privilege. Black ink encouraged printing, for it was especially adapted for use on wooden blocks, and enjoyed almost complete indelibility. Blocks of paper have been found, in Central Asia, which had lain under water so long as to become petrified; but the writing, in ink, could still be clearly read.9
The use of seals in signatures was the unconscious origin of print; the Chinese word for print is still the same as the word for seal. At first these seals, as in the Near East, were impressed upon clay; about the fifth century they were moistened with ink. Meanwhile, in the second century, the text of the Classics had been cut in stone; and soon thereafter the custom arose of making inked rubbings from these inscriptions. In the sixth century we find large wooden seals used by the Taoists to print charms; a century later the Buddhist missionaries experimented with various methods of duplication, through seals, rubbings, stencils, and textile prints—the last an art of Indian derivation. The earliest extant block prints are a million charms printed in Japan about 770 A.D., in the Sanskrit language and the Chinese character—an excellent instance of cultural interaction in Asia. Many block prints were made during the T’ang Dynasty, but they were apparently destroyed or lost in the chaos of revolution that followed Ming Huang.10
In 1907 Sir Aurel Stein persuaded the Taoist priests of Chinese Turkestan to let him examine the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” at Tun-huang. In one of these chambers, which had apparently been walled up about the year 1035 A.D. and not opened again until 1900, lay 1130 bundles, each containing a dozen or more manuscript rolls; the whole formed a library of 15,000 books, written on paper, and as well preserved as if they had been inscribed the day before their modern discovery. It was among these manuscripts that the world’s oldest printed book was found—the “Diamond Sutra”—a roll ending with these words: “Printed on (the equivalent of) May 11, 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution, in order in deep reverence to perpetuate the memory of his parents.”11 Three other printed books were found in the mass of manuscripts; one of them marked a new development, for it was not a roll, like the “Diamond Sutra,” but a tiny folded book, the first known of its now multitudinous kind. As in late medie
val Europe and among primitive peoples in recent times, the first stimulus to printing came from religion, which sought to spread its doctrines by sight as well as sound, and to put its charms and prayers and legends into every hand. Almost as old as these pious forms of print, however, are playing cards—which appeared in China in 969 or sooner, and were introduced from China into Europe near the end of the fourteenth century12
These early volumes had been printed with wooden blocks. In a Chinese letter written about 870 A.D. we find the oldest known mention of such work: “Once when I was in Szechuan I examined in a bookshop a school-book printed from wood.”13 Already, it seems, the art of printing had been developed; and it is interesting to observe that this development seems to have come first in western provinces like Szechuan and Turkestan, which had been prodded on to civilization by Buddhist missionaries from India, and had for a time enjoyed a culture independent of the eastern capitals. Block-printing was introduced to eastern China early in the tenth century when a prime minister, Feng Tao, persuaded the Emperor to provide funds for the printing of the Chinese Classics. The work took twenty years and filled one hundred and thirty volumes, for it included not only the texts but the most famous commentaries. When it was completed it gave the Classics a circulation that contributed vigorously to the revival of learning and the strengthening of Confucianism under the Sung kings.