1. Su Dongpo's literary background and his poems
SU TUNG-PO'S LITERARY BACKGROUND AND HIS PROSE-POETRY by Qian Zhongshu
(Primarily written as a foreword to “Su Tung-Po's Prose-poems” translated into English With Notes and Commentaries by C. D. Le Gros Clark, this is published here by kind permission of Mr. Le Gros Clark. Those who are interested in textual criticism may consult Mr. Wu Shih-ch'ang's review in Chinese which appeared in The Crescent Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 3. –Ed.)
Of the Sung dynasty, it may be said, as Hazlitt said of himself, that it is nothing if not critical. The Chinese people dropped something of their usual wise passivity during the Sung dynasty, and “pondered, searched, probed, vexed, and criticized”. This intellectual activity, however, is not to be compared with that of the Pre-Chin period, the heyday of Chinese philosophy. The men of the Sung dynasty were inquisitive rather than speculative, filled more with a sense of curiosity than with a sense of mystery. Hence, there is no sweep, no daring, no roominess or margin in their intellectualism. A prosaic and stuffy thing theirs is, on the whole. This critical spirit revealed itself in many directions, particularly in the full flourish of literary criticism and the rise of the tao-hsüeh (道学), that mélange adultere of metaphysics, psychology, ethics and casuistry.
Literary criticism in China is an unduly belated art. Apart from a handful of obiter dicta scattered here and there, Liu Hsieh's Literary Mind (李勰文心diaolong) and Lo Chi's A Prose-poem on Literature (Lu Ji Wen Fu) are the critical writings that count up to the Sung dynasty. There is Chung Yung's Classification of Poets (Zhong Rong Shi Pin) of course. But Chung Yung is a literary genealogist rather than a critic, and his method of simply dividing poets into sheep and goats and dispensing praise or dispraise where he thought due, is the reverse of critical, let alone his fanciful attempts to trace literary parentages(1). Ssu-Kung Tu's Characterisations of Poetry Ssu-Kung Tu seeks to convey purely with imagery the impressions registered by a sensitive mind of twenty four different kinds of poetry: “pure, ornate, grotesque,” ??etc. His is perhaps the earliest piece of “impressionistic” or “creative criticism” ever written if any language, so quietly ecstatic and so autonomous and self-sufficient, as it were, in its being but it fails on that very account to become sober and proper criticism. It is not until the Sung dynasty that criticism begins to be practiced in earnest. Numerous “causeries on poetry” are written and principles of literature are canvassed by way of commentaries on individual poets. Henceforth, causeries on poetry become established as the vehicle for Chinese criticism. One must note in passing that there do not appear professional critics with the rise of criticism. In those good old days of China criticism is always the prerogative of artists themselves. The division of labor between critics and artists in the West is something that the old Chinese literati would scoff at. The criticism of Sung dynasty, like all Chinese criticismsbefore the “New Literature Movement” with the possible exception of Hsieh's Literary Mind, is apt to fasten upon particulars and be given too much to the study of best words in best places. But it is symptomatic of the critical spirit, and there is an end of it.
The Chinese common reader often regards the men of the Sung dynasty as prigs. Their high seriousness and intellectual and moral squeamishness are at once irritating and amusing to the ordinary easy-going Chinese temperament. There is something paralyzing and devitalizing in their wire-drawn casuistry which induces hostile critics to attribute the collapse of the Sung dynasty to its philosophers. There is also a disingenuousness in their attempts at what may be called for want of a better name, philosophical masquerade: to dress up Taoism of Buddhism as orthodox Confucianism. One need but look into Sketches in a Villa and Causeries on Poetry in a Garden to see what a good laugh these two coxcombs of letters, Chi Yuen and Yuan Mei have had at the expense of the Sung philosophers and critics respectively. Nevertheless ofe is compelled to admit that the Sung philosophers are unequalled in the study of mental chemistry. Never has human nature been subject to a more rigorous scrutiny before or since in the history of Chinese thought. For what strikes one most in the tao-hsüeh is the emphasis on self-knowledge. This constant preying upon itself of the mind is quite in the spirit of the age. The Sung philosophers are morbidly introspective, always feeling their moral pulses and floundering in their own streams of consciousness. To them, their mind verily “ a kingdom is”. They analyze and pulverize human nature. But for that moral bias which Nietzsche thinks to be also the bane of German philosophy, their vivisection of human soul would have contributed a good deal to what Santayna calls literary psychology.
The poetry of the sung dynasty is also a case in point. It is a critical commonplace that the Sung poetry furnishes a striking contract to the T'ang poetry. Chinese poetry, hitherto ethereal and delicate, seems in the Sung dynasty to take on flesh and becomes a solid, full-blooded thing. It is more weighted with the burden of thought. Of course, it still looks light and slight enough by the side of Western poetry. But the lightness of the Sung poetry is that of an aeroplane describing graceful curves, and no longer that of a moth fluttering in the mellow twilight. In the Sung poetry one finds very little of that suggestiveness, that charm of a beautiful thing imperfectly beheld, which foreigners think characteristic of Chinese poetry in general . Instead, one meets with a great deal of naked thinking and outright speaking. It may be called “sentimental” in contrastinction to the T'ang poetry which is on the whole “na?ve”, to adopt Schiller's useful antithesis. The Sung poets, however, make up for their loss in lisping naivete and lyric glow by a finesse in feeling and observation. In their descriptive poetry, they have the knack of taking the thing to be described sur le vif: witness Lo Yu (鲁游) and Yang Wan-li. They have also a better perception of the nuances of emotion than the T'ang poets, as can be seen particularly in their Ts'u, a species of song for which the Sung dynasty is justly famous(3). Small wonder that they are deliberate artists, considering the fact that they all have been critics in the off hours of their inspiration. The most annoying thing about them is perhaps their erudition and allusiveness which makes the enjoyment of them to a large extent the luxury of the initiated even among the Chinese. (3000 words)
There is also an article on identity struggle in a doll’s house (6000 words) and an article on Martin Luther King’s “I Have a "Dream" Stylistic Analysis (10,000 words)
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