CHAPTER XXIV
The Age of the Poets

I. CHINA’S BISMARCK

The Period of Contending States—The suicide of Ch’u P’ing—Shih Huang-ti unifies China—The Great Wall—The “Burning of the Books”—The failure of Shih Huang-ti

PRESUMABLY Confucius died an unhappy man, for philosophers love unity, and the nation that he had sought to unite under some powerful dynasty persisted in chaos, corruption and division. When the great unifier finally appeared, and succeeded, by his military and administrative genius, in welding the states of China into one, he ordered that all existing copies of Confucius’ books should be burned.

We may judge the atmosphere of this “Period of the Contending States” from the story of Ch’u P’ing. Having risen to promise as a poet and to high place as an official, he found himself suddenly dismissed. He retired to the countryside, and contemplated life and death beside a quiet brook. Tell me, he asked an oracle,

He dodged the dilemma by drowning himself (ca. 350 B.C.); and until our own day the Chinese people celebrated his fame annually in the Dragonboat Festival, during which they searched for his body in every stream.

The man who unified China had the most disreputable origin that the Chinese historians could devise. Shih Huang-ti,’ we are informed, was the illegitimate son of the Queen of Ch’in (one of the western states) by the noble minister Lü, who was wont to hang a thousand pieces of gold at his gate as a reward to any man who should better his compositions by so much as a single word.² (His son did not inherit these literary tastes.) Shih, reports Szuma Ch’ien, forced his father to suicide, persecuted his mother, and ascended the ducal throne when he was twelve years of age. When he was twenty-five he began to conquer and annex the petty states into which China had so long been divided. In 230 B.C. he conquered Han; in 228, Chao; in 225, Wei; in 223, Ch’u; in 222, Yen; finally, in 221, the important state of Ch’i. For the first time in many centuries, perhaps for the first time in history, China was under one rule. The conqueror took the title of Shih Huang-ti, and turned to the task of giving the new empire a lasting constitution.

“A man with a very prominent nose, with large eyes, with the chest of a bird of prey, with the voice of a jackal, without beneficence, and with the heart of a tiger or a wolf”—this is the only description that the Chinese historians have left us of their favorite enemy.³ He was a robust and obstinate soul, recognizing no god but himself, and pledged, like some Nietzschean Bismarck, to unify his country by blood and iron. Having forged and mounted the throne of China, one of his first acts was to protect the country from the barbarians on the north by piecing together and completing the walls already existing along the frontier; and he found the multitude of his domestic opponents a convenient source of recruits for this heroic symbol of Chinese grandeur and patience. The Great Wall, 1500 miles long, and adorned at intervals with massive gateways in the Assyrian style, is the largest structure ever reared by man; beside it, said Voltaire, “the pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses.”⁴ It took ten years and countless men; “it was the ruin of one generation,” say the Chinese, “and the salvation of many.” It did not quite keep out the barbarians, as we shall see; but it delayed and reduced their attacks. The Huns, barred for a time from Chinese soil, moved west into Europe and down into Italy; Rome fell because China built a wall.

Meanwhile Shih Huang-ti, like Napoleon, turned with pleasure from war to administration, and created the outlines of the future Chinese state. He accepted the advice of his Legalist prime minister, Li Ssü, and resolved to base Chinese society not, as heretofore, upon custom and local autonomy, but upon explicit law and a powerful central government. He broke the power of the feudal barons, replaced them with a nobility of functionaries appointed by the national ministry, placed in each district a military force independent of the civil governor, introduced uniform laws and regulations, simplified official ceremonies, issued a state coinage, divided most of the feudal estates, prepared for the prosperity of China by establishing peasant proprietorship of the soil, and paved the way for a completer unity by building great highways in every direction from his capital at Hien-yang. He embellished this city with many palaces, and persuaded the 120,000 richest and most powerful families of the empire to live under his observant eye. Traveling in disguise and unarmed, he made note of abuses and disorders, and then issued unmistakable orders for their correction. He encouraged science and discouraged letters.⁵

For the men of letters—the poets, the critics, the philosophers, above all the Confucian scholars—were his sworn foes. They fretted under his dictatorial authority, and saw in the establishment of one supreme government an end to that variety and liberty of thought and life which had made literature flourish amid the wars and divisions of the Chou Dynasty. When they protested to Shih Huang-ti against his ignoring of ancient ceremonies, he sent them curtly about their business.⁶ A commission of mandarins, or official scholars, brought to him their unanimous suggestion that he should restore the feudal system by giving fiefs to his relatives; and they added: “For a person, in any matter, not to model himself on antiquity, and yet to achieve duration—that, to our knowledge, has never happened.”⁷ The prime minister, Li Ssü, who was at that time engaged in reforming the Chinese script, and establishing it approximately in the form which it retained till our own time, met these criticisms with an historic speech that did no service to Chinese letters:

The Emperor liked the idea considerably, and issued the order; the books of the historians were everywhere brought to the flames, so that the weight of the past should be removed from the present, and the history of China might begin with Shih Huang-ti. Scientific books, and the works of Mencius, seem to have been excepted from the conflagration, and many of the forbidden books were preserved in the Imperial Library, where they might be consulted by such students as had obtained official permission.⁹ Since books were then written on strips of bamboo fastened with swivel pins, and a volume might be of some weight, the scholars who sought to evade the order were put to many difficulties. A number of them were detected; tradition says that many of them were sent to labor on the Great Wall, and that four hundred and sixty were put to death.¹⁰ Nevertheless some of the literati memorized the complete works of Confucius, and passed them on by word of mouth to equal memories. Soon after the Emperor’s death these volumes were freely circulated again, though many errors, presumably, had crept into their texts. The only permanent result was to lend an aroma of sanctity to the proscribed literature, and to make Shih Huang-ti unpopular with the Chinese historians. For generations the people expressed their judgment of him by befouling his grave.¹¹

The destruction of powerful families, and of freedom in writing and speech, left Shih almost friendless in his declining years. Attempts were made to assassinate him; he discovered them in time, and slew the assailants with his own hand.¹² He sat on his throne with a sword across his knees, and let no man know in what room of his many palaces he would sleep.¹³ Like Alexander he sought to strengthen his dynasty by spreading the notion that he was a god; but as the comparison limped, he, like Alexander, failed. He decreed that his dynastic successors should number themselves from him as “First Emperor,” down to the ten thousandth of their line; but the line ended with his son. In his old age, if we credit the historians who hated him, he became superstitious, and went to much expense to find an elixir of immortality. When he died, his body was brought back secretly to his capital; and to conceal its smell it was convoyed by a caravan of decaying fish. Several hundred maidens (we are told) were buried alive to keep him company; and his successor, grateful for his death, lavished art and money upon the tomb. The roof was studded with constellations, and a map of the empire was traced in quicksilver on the floor of bronze. Machines were erected in the vault for the automatic slaughter of intruders; and huge candles were lit in the hope that they would for an indefinite period illuminate the doings of the dead emperor and his queens. The workmen who brought the coffin into the tomb were buried alive with their burden, lest they should live to reveal the secret passage to the grave.¹⁴

II. EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIALISM

Chaos and poverty—The Han Dynasty—The reforms of Wu Ti—The income tax—The planned economy of Wang Mang—Its overthrow—The Tatar invasion

Disorder followed his death, as it has followed the passing of almost every dictator in history; only an immortal can wisely take all power into his hands. The people revolted against his son, killed him soon after he had killed Li Ssü, and put an end to the Ch’in Dynasty within five years after its founder’s death. Rival princes established rival kingdoms, and disorder ruled again. Then a clever condottiere, Kao-tsu, seized the throne and founded the Han Dynasty, which, with some interruptions and a change of capital,* lasted four hundred years. Wen Ti (179-57 B.C.) restored freedom of speech and writing, revoked the edict by which Shih Huang-ti had forbidden criticism of the government, pursued a policy of peace, and inaugurated the Chinese custom of defeating a hostile general with gifts.¹⁵

The greatest of the Han emperors was Wu Ti. In a reign of over half a century (140-87 B.C.) he pushed back the invading barbarians, and extended the rule of China over Korea, Manchuria, Annam, Indo-China and Turkestan; now for the first time China acquired those vast dimensions which we have been wont to associate with her name. Wu Ti experimented with socialism by establishing national ownership of natural resources, to prevent private individuals from “reserving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and from putting the lower classes into subjection to themselves.”¹⁶ The production of salt and iron, and the manufacture and sale of fermented drinks, were made state monopolies. To break the power of middlemen and speculators—“those who buy on credit and make loans, those who buy to heap up in the towns, those who accumulate all sorts of commodities” as the contemporary historian, Szuma Ch’ien expressed it—Wu Ti established a national system of transport and exchange, and sought to control trade in such a way as to prevent sudden variations in price. State workingmen made all the means of transportation and delivery in the empire. The state stored surplus goods, selling them when prices were rising too rapidly, buying them when prices were falling; in this way, says Szuma Ch’ien, “the rich merchants and large shop-keepers would be prevented from making big profits, . . . and prices would be regulated throughout the empire.”¹⁷ All incomes had to be registered with the government, and had to pay an annual tax of five per cent. In order to facilitate the purchase and consumption of commodities the Emperor enlarged the supply of currency by issuing coins of silver alloyed with tin. Great public works were undertaken in order to provide employment for the millions whom private industry had failed to maintain; bridges were flung across China’s streams, and innumerable canals were cut to bind the rivers and irrigate the fields.¹⁸*

For a time the new system flourished. Trade grew in amount, variety and extent, and bound China even with the distant nations of the Near East.²⁰ The capital, Lo-yang, increased in population and wealth, and the coffers of the government were swollen with revenue. Scholarship flourished, poetry abounded, and Chinese pottery began to be beautiful. In the Imperial Library there were 3,123 volumes on the classics, 2,705 on philosophy, 1,318 on poetry, 2,568 on mathematics, 868 on medicine, 790 on war.²¹ Only those who had passed the state examinations were eligible to public office, and these examinations were open to all. China had never prospered so before.

A combination of natural misfortunes with human deviltry put an end to this brave experiment. Floods alternated with droughts, and raised prices beyond control. Harassed by the high cost of food and clothing, the people began to clamor for a return to the good old days of an idealized past, and proposed that the inventor of the new system should be boiled alive. Business men protested that state control had diminished healthy initiative and competition, and they objected to paying, for the support of these experiments, the high taxes levied upon them by the government.²² Women entered the court, acquired a secret influence over important functionaries, and became an element in a wave of official corruption that spread far and wide after the death of the Emperor.²³ Counterfeiters imitated the new currency so successfully that it had to be withdrawn. The business of exploiting the weak was resumed under a new management, and for a century the reforms of Wu Ti were forgotten or reviled.

At the beginning of our era—eighty-four years after Wu Ti’s death—another reformer ascended the throne of China, first as regent, and then as emperor. Wang Mang was of the highest type of Chinese gentleman.* Though rich, he lived temperately, even frugally, and scattered his income among his friends and the poor. Absorbed in the vital struggle to reõrganize the economic and political life of his country, he found time nevertheless not only to patronize literature and scholarship, but to become an accomplished scholar himself. On his accession to power he surrounded himself not with the usual politicians, but with men trained in letters and philosophy; to these men his enemies attributed his failure, and his friends attributed his success.

Shocked by the development of slavery on the large estates of China, Wang Mang, at the very outset of his reign, abolished both the slavery and the estates by nationalizing the land. He divided the soil into equal tracts and distributed it among the peasants; and, to prevent the renewed concentration of wealth, he forbade the sale or purchase of land.²⁵ He continued the state monopolies of salt and iron, and added to them state ownership of mines and state control of the traffic in wine. Like Wu Ti he tried to protect the cultivator and the consumer against the merchant by fixing the prices of commodities. The state bought agricultural surpluses in time of plenty, and sold them in time of dearth. Loans were made by the government, at low rates of interest, for any productive enterprise.²⁶

Wang had conceived his policies in economic terms, and had forgotten the nature of man. He worked long hours, day and night, to devise schemes that would make the nation rich and happy; and he was heart broken to find that social disorder mounted during his reign. Natural calamities like drought and flood continued to disrupt his planned economy, and all the groups whose greed had been clipped by his reforms united to plot his fall. Revolts broke out, apparently among the people, but probably financed from above; and while Wang, bewildered by such ingratitude, struggled to control these insurrections, subject peoples weakened his prestige by throwing off the Chinese yoke, and the Hsiung-nu barbarians overran the northern provinces. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a general rebellion, captured Chang-an, slew Wang Mang, and annulled his reforms. Everything was as before.

The Han line ended in a succession of weak emperors, and was followed by a chaos of petty dynasties and divided states. Despite the Great Wall the Tatars poured down into China, and conquered large areas of the north. And as the Huns broke down the organization of the Roman Empire, and helped to plunge Europe into a Dark Age for a hundred years, so the inroads of these kindred Tatars disordered the life of China, and put an end for a while to the growth of civilization. We may judge the strength of the Chinese stock, character and culture from the fact that this disturbance was much briefer and less profound than that which ruined Rome. After an interlude of war and chaos, and racial mixture with the invaders, Chinese civilization recovered, and enjoyed a brilliant resurrection. The very blood of the Tatars served, perhaps, to reinvigorate a nation already old. The Chinese accepted the conquerors, married them, civilized them, and advanced to the zenith of their history.

III. THE GLORY OF T’ANG

The new dynasty—T’ai Tsung’s method of reducing crime—An age of prosperity—The “Brilliant Emperor”—The romance of Yang Kwei-fei—The rebellion of An Lu-shan

The great age of China owed its coming partly to this new biological mixture,* partly to the spiritual stimulation derived from the advent of Buddhism, partly to the genius of one of China’s greatest emperors, T’ai Tsung (627-50 A.D.) At the age of twenty-one he was raised to the throne by the abdication of his father, a second Kao-tsu, who had established the T’ang Dynasty nine years before. He began unprepossessingly by murdering the brothers who threatened to displace him; and then he exercised his military abilities by pushing back the invading barbarians into their native haunts, and reconquering those neighboring territories which had thrown off Chinese rule after the fall of the Han. Suddenly he grew tired of war, and returning to his capital, Ch’ang-an, gave himself to the ways of peace. He read and re-read the works of Confucius, and had them published in a resplendent format, saying: “By using a mirror of brass you may see to adjust your cap; by using antiquity as a mirror you may learn to foresee the rise and fall of empires.” He refused all luxuries, and sent away the three thousand ladies who had been chosen to entertain him. When his ministers recommended severe laws for the repression of crime, he told them: “If I diminish expenses, lighten the taxes, employ only honest officials, so that the people have clothing enough, this will do more to abolish robbery than the employment of the severest punishments.”²⁷

One day he visited the jails of Ch’ang-an, and saw two hundred and ninety men who had been condemned to die. He sent them out to till the fields, relying solely on their word of honor that they would return. Every man came back; and T’ai Tsung was so well pleased that he set them all free. He laid it down then that no emperor should ratify a death sentence until he had fasted three days. He made his capital so beautiful that tourists flocked to it from India and Europe. Buddhist monks arrived in great numbers from India, and Chinese Buddhists, like Yuan Chwang, traveled freely to India to study the new religion of China at its source. Missionaries came to Ch’ang-an to preach Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity; the Emperor, like Akbar, welcomed them, gave them protection and freedom, and exempted their temples from taxation, at a time when Europe was sunk in poverty, intellectual darkness, and theological strife. He himself remained, without dogma or prejudice, a simple Confucian. “When he died,” says a brilliant historian, “the grief of the people knew no bounds, and even the foreign envoys cut themselves with knives and lancets and sprinkled the dead emperor’s bier with their self-shed blood.”²⁸

He had paved the way for China’s most creative age. Rich with fifty years of comparative peace and stable government, she began to export her surplus of rice, corn, silk, and spices, and spent her profits on unparalleled luxury. Her lakes were filled with carved and painted pleasure-boats; her rivers and canals were picturesque with commerce, and from her harbors ships sailed to distant ports on the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Never before had China known such wealth; never had she enjoyed such abundant food, such comfortable houses, such exquisite clothing.²⁹ While silk was selling in Europe for its weight in gold,³⁰ it was a routine article of dress for half the population of the larger cities of China, and fur coats were more frequent in eighth-century Ch’ang-an than in twentieth-century New York. One village near the capital had silk factories employing a hundred thousand men.³¹ “What hospitality!” exclaimed Li Po, “what squandering of money! Red jade cups and rare dainty food on tables inlaid with green gems!”³² Statues were carved out of rubies, and pretentious corpses were buried on beds of pearl.³³ The great race was suddenly enamored of beauty, and lavished honors on those who could create it. “At this age,” says a Chinese critic, “whoever was a man was a poet.”³⁴ Emperors promoted poets and painters to high office, and “Sir John Manville”* would have it that no one dared to address the Emperor save “it be mynstrelles that singen and tellen gestes.”³⁵ In the eighteenth century of our era Manchu emperors ordered an anthology to be prepared of the T’ang poets; the result was thirty volumes, containing 48,900 poems by 2,300 poets; so much had survived the criticism of time. The Imperial Library had grown to 54,000 volumes. “At this time,” says Murdoch, “China undoubtedly stood in the very forefront of civilization. She was then the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best-governed, empire on the face of the globe.³⁶ “It was the most polished epoch that the world had ever seen.”†

At the head and height of it was Ming Huang—i.e., “The Brilliant Emperor”—who ruled China, with certain intermissions, for some forty years (713-56 A.D.). He was a man full of human contradictions: he wrote poetry and made war upon distant lands, exacting tribute from Turkey, Persia and Samarkand; he abolished capital punishment and reformed the administration of prisons and courts; he levied taxes mercilessly, suffered poets, artists and scholars gladly, and established a college of music in his “Pear Tree Garden.” He began his reign like a Puritan, closing the silk factories and forbidding the ladies of the palace to wear jewelry or embroidery; he ended it like an epicurean, enjoying every art and every luxury, and at last sacrificing his throne for the smiles of Yang Kwei-fei.

When he met her he was sixty and she was twenty-seven; for ten years she had been the concubine of his eighteenth son. She was corpulent and wore false hair, but the Emperor loved her because she was obstinate, capricious, domineering and insolent. She accepted his admiration graciously, introduced him to five families of her relatives, and permitted him to find sinecures for them at the court. Ming called his lady “The Great Pure One,” and learned from her the gentle art of dissipation. The Son of Heaven thought little now of the state and its affairs; he placed all the powers of government in the hands of the Pure One’s brother, the corrupt and incapable Yang Kuo-chung; and while destruction gathered under him he reveled through the days and nights.

An Lu-shan, a Tatar courtier, also loved Yang Kwei-fei. He won the confidence of the Emperor, who promoted him to the post of provincial governor in the north, and placed under his command the finest armies in the realm. Suddenly An Lu-shan proclaimed himself emperor, and turned his armies toward Ch’ang-an. The long-neglected defenses fell, and Ming deserted his capital. The soldiers who escorted him rebelled, slew Yang Kuo-chung and all the five families, and, snatching Yang Kwei-fei from the monarch’s hands, killed her before his eyes. Old and beaten, the Emperor abdicated. An Lu-shan’s barbaric hordes sacked Ch’ang-an, and slaughtered the population indiscriminately.* Thirty-six million people are said to have lost their lives in the rebellion.³⁹ In the end it failed; An Lu-shan was killed by his son, who was killed by a general, who was killed by his son. By the year 762 A.D. the turmoil had worn itself out, and Ming Huang returned, heart-broken, to his ruined capital. There, a few months later, he died. In this framework of romance and tragedy the poetry of China flourished as never before.

IV. THE BANISHED ANGEL

An anecdote of Li Po—His youth, prowess and loves—On the imperial barge—The gospel of the grape—War—The Wanderings of Li Po—In prison—’Deathless Poetry”

One day, at the height of his reign, Ming Huang received ambassadors from Korea, who brought him important messages written in a dialect which none of his ministers could understand. “What!” exclaimed the Emperor, “among so many magistrates, so many scholars and warriors, cannot there be found a single one who knows enough to relieve us of vexation in this affair? If in three days no one is able to decipher this letter, every one of your appointments shall be suspended.”

For a day the ministers consulted and fretted, fearing for their offices and their heads. Then Minister Ho Chi-chang approached the throne and said: “Your subject presumes to announce to your Majesty that there is a poet of great merit, called Li, at his house, who is profoundly acquainted with more than one science; command him to read this letter, for there is nothing of which he is not capable.” The Emperor ordered Li to present himself at court immediately. But Li refused to come, saying that he could not possibly be worthy of the task assigned him, since his essay had been rejected by the mandarins at the last examination for public office. The Emperor soothed him by conferring upon him the title and robes of doctor of the first rank. Li came, found his examiners among the ministers, forced them to take off his boots, and then translated the document, which announced that Korea proposed to make war for the recovery of its freedom. Having read the message, Li dictated a learned and terrifying reply, which the Emperor signed without hesitation, almost believing what Ho whispered to him—that Li was an angel banished from heaven for some impish deviltry.⁴⁰* The Koreans sent apologies and tribute, and the Emperor sent part of the tribute to Li. Li gave it to the innkeeper, for he loved wine.

On the night of the poet’s birth his mother—of the family of Li—had dreamed of Tai-po Hsing, the Great White Star, which in the West is called Venus. So the child was named Li, meaning plum, and sur-named Tai-po, which is to say, The White Star. At ten he had mastered all the books of Confucius, and was composing immortal poetry. At twelve he went to live like a philosopher in the mountains, and stayed there for many years. He grew in health and strength, practised swordsmanship, and then announced his abilities to the world: “Though less than seven (Chinese) feet in height, I am strong enough to meet ten thousand men.”⁴¹ (“Ten thousand” is Chinese for many.) Then he wandered leisurely about the earth, drinking the lore of love from varied lips. He sang a song to the “Maid of Wu”:

He married, but earned so little money that his wife left him, taking the children with her. Was it to her, or to some less-wonted flame, that he wrote his wistful lines?—

He consoled himself with wine, and became one of the “Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove,” who took life without haste, and let their songs and poems earn their uncertain bread. Hearing the wine of Niauchung highly commended, Li set out at once for that city, three hundred miles away.⁴⁴ In his wanderings he met Tu Fu, who was to be his rival for China’s poetic crown; they exchanged lyrics, went hand in hand like brothers, and slept under the same coverlet until fame divided them. Everybody loved them, for they were as harmless as saints, and spoke with the same pride and friendliness to paupers and kings. Finally they entered Ch’ang-an; and the jolly minister Ho loved Li’s poetry so well that he sold gold ornaments to buy him drinks. Tu Fu describes him:

Those were merry days when the Emperor befriended him, and showered him with gifts for singing the praises of the Pure One, Yang Kwei-fei. Once Ming held a royal Feast of the Peonies in the Pavilion of Aloes, and sent for Li Po to come and make verses in honor of his mistress. Li came, but too drunk for poetry; court attendants threw cold water upon his amiable face, and soon the poet burst into song, celebrating the rivalry of the peonies with Lady Yang:

Who would not have been pleased to be the object of such song? And yet the Lady Yang was persuaded that the poet had subtly satirized her; and from that moment she bred suspicion of him in the heart of the King. He presented Li Po with a purse, and let him go. Once again the poet took to the open road, and consoled himself with wine. He joined those “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” whose drinkings were the talk of Ch’ang-an. He accepted the view of Liu Ling, who desired always to be followed by two servants, one with wine, the other with a spade to bury him where he fell; for, said Liu, “the affairs of this world are no more than duckweed in the river.”⁴⁶ The poets of China were resolved to atone for the Puritanism of Chinese philosophy. “To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,” said Li Po, “we drained a hundred jugs of wine.”⁴⁷ And he intones like Omar the gospel of the grape:

What were these sorrows? The agony of despised love? Hardly; for though the Chinese take love as much to heart as we do, their poets do not so frequently intone its pains. It was war and exile, An Lu-shan and the taking of the capital, the flight of the Emperor and the death of Yang, the return of Ming Huang to his desolated halls, that gave Li the taste of human tragedy. “There is no end to war!” he mourns; and then his heart goes out to the women who have lost their husbands to Mars.

We picture him now wandering from city to city, from state to state, much as Tsui Tsung-chi described him: “A knapsack on your back filled with books, you go a thousand miles and more, a pilgrim. Under your sleeves there is a dagger, and in your pocket a collection of poems.”⁵⁰ In these long wanderings his old friendship with nature gave him solace and an unnamable peace; and through his lines we see his land of flowers, and feel that urban civilization already lay heavy on the Chinese soul:

Or again:

Now, as his hair grew white, his heart was flooded with longing for the scenes of his youth. How many times, in the artificial life of the capital, he had pined for the natural simplicity of parentage and home!

His last years were bitter, for he had never stooped to make money, and in the chaos of war and revolution he found no king to keep him from starvation. Gladly he accepted the offer of Li-ling, Prince of Yung, to join his staff; but Li-ling revolted against the successor of Ming Huang, and when the revolt was suppressed, Li Po found himself in jail, condemned to death as a traitor to the state. Then Kuo Tsi-i, the general who had put down the rebellion of An Lu-shan, begged that Li Po’s life might be ransomed by the forfeit of his own rank and title. The Emperor commuted the sentence to perpetual banishment. Soon thereafter a general amnesty was declared, and the poet turned his faltering steps homeward. Three years later he sickened and died; and legend, discontent with an ordinary end for so rare a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting, in hilarious intoxication, to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.

All in all, the thirty volumes of delicate and kindly verse which he left behind him warrant his reputation as the greatest poet of China. “He is the lofty peak of Tai,” exclaims a Chinese critic, “towering above the thousand mountains and hills; he is the sun in whose presence a million stars of heaven lose their scintillating brilliance.”⁵⁴ Ming Huang and Lady Yang are dead, but Li Po still sings.

V. SOME QUALITIES OF CHINESE POETRY

“Free verse”—“Imagism”—“Every poem a picture and every picture a poem”—Sentimentality—Perfection of form

It is impossible to judge Chinese poetry from Li alone; to feel it (which is better than judging) one must surrender himself unhurriedly to many Chinese poets, and to the unique methods of their poetry. Certain subtle qualities of it are hidden from us in translation: we do not see the picturesque written characters, each a monosyllable, and yet expressing a complex idea; we do not see the lines, running from top to bottom and from right to left; we do not catch the meter and the rhyme, which adhere with proud rigidity to ancient precedents and laws; we do not hear the tones—the flats and sharps—that give a beat to Chinese verse; at least half the art of the Far Eastern poet is lost when he is read by what we should call a “foreigner.” In the original a Chinese poem at its best is a form as polished and precious as a hawthorn vase; to us it is only a bit of deceptively “free” or “imagist” verse, half caught and weakly rendered by some earnest but alien mind.

What we do see is, above all, brevity. We are apt to think these poems too slight, and feel an unreal disappointment at missing the majesty and boredom of Milton and Homer. But the Chinese believe that all poetry must be brief; that a long poem is a contradiction in terms—since poetry, to them, is a moment’s ecstasy, and dies when dragged out in epic reams. Its mission is to see and paint a picture with a stroke, and write a philosophy in a dozen lines; its ideal is infinite meaning in a little rhythm. Since pictures are of the essence of poetry, and the essence of Chinese writing is pictography, the written language of China is spontaneously poetic; it lends itself to writing in pictures, and shuns abstractions that cannot be phrased as things seen. Since abstractions multiply with civilization, the Chinese language, in its written form, has become a secret code of subtle suggestions; and in like manner, and perhaps for a like reason, Chinese poetry combines suggestion with concentration, and aims to reveal, through the picture it draws, some deeper thing invisible. It does not discuss, it intimates; it leaves out more than it says; and only an Oriental can fill it in. “The men of old,” say the Chinese, “reckoned it the highest excellence in poetry that the meaning should be beyond the words, and that the reader should have to think it out for himself.”⁵⁶ Like Chinese manners and art, Chinese poetry is a matter of infinite grace concealed in a placid simplicity. It foregoes metaphor, comparison and allusion, but relies on showing the thing itself, with a hint of its implications. It avoids exaggeration and passion, but appeals to the mature mind by understatement and restraint; it is seldom romantically excited in form, but knows how to express intense feeling in its own quietly classic way.

We may tire, at times, of a certain sentimentality in these poems, a vainly wistful mood of regret that time will not stop in its flight and let men and states be young forever. We perceive that the civilization of China was already old and weary in the days of Ming Huang, and that its poets, like the artists of the Orient in general, were fond of repeating old themes, and of spending their artistry on flawless form. But there is nothing quite like this poetry elsewhere, nothing to match it in delicacy of expression, in tenderness and yet moderation of feeling, in simplicity and brevity of phrase clothing the most considered thought. We are told that the poetry written under the T’ang emperors plays a large part in the training of every Chinese youth, and that one cannot meet an intelligent Chinese who does not know much of that poetry by heart. If this is so, then Li Po and Tu Fu are part of the answer that we must give to the question why almost every educated Chinese is an artist and a philosopher.

VI. TU FU

T’ao Ch’ien—Po Chü-i—Poems for malaria—Tu Fu and Li Po—A vision of war—Prosperous days—Destitution—Death

Li Po is the Keats of China, but there are other singers almost as fondly cherished by his countrymen. There is the simple and stoic T’ao Ch’ien, who left a government position because, as he said, he was unable any longer to “crook the hinges of his back for five pecks of rice a day”—that is, kow-tow* for his salary. Like many another public man disgusted with the commercialism of official life, he went to live in the woods, seeking there “length of years and depth of wine,” and finding the same solace and delight in the streams and mountains of China that her painters would later express on silk.

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:

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:

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.

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 literati 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:

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:

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

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.